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  Title: The Laugh of Death

  Date of first publication: 1942

  Author: Lester Dent (as Kenneth Robeson) (1904-1959)

  Date first posted: Nov. 22, 2020

  Date last updated: Nov. 22, 2020

  Faded Page eBook #20201149

  This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Cindy Beyer & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

  This file was produced from images generously made available by Internet Archive/Lending Library.

  WHO IS DOC SAVAGE

  The bronze giant, who with his five aides became world famous, whose name was as well known in the far regions of China and the jungles of Africa as in the skyscrapers of New York.

  There were stories of Doc Savage’s almost incredible strength; of his amazing scientific discoveries of strange weapons and dangerous exploits.

  Doc had dedicated his life to aiding those faced by dangers with which they could not cope.

  His name brought fear to those who sought to prey upon the unsuspecting. His name was praised by thousands he had saved.

  DOC SAVAGE’S AMAZING CREW

  “Ham,” Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, was never without his ominous, black sword cane.

  “Monk,” Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, just over five feet tall, yet over 260 pounds. His brutish exterior concealed the mind of a great scientist.

  “Renny,” Colonel John Renwick, his favorite sport was pounding his massive fists through heavy, paneled doors.

  “Long Tom,” Major Thomas J. Roberts, was the physical weakling of the crowd, but a genius at electricity.

  “Johnny,” William Harper Littlejohn, the scientist and greatest living expert on geology and archaeology.

  WITH THEIR LEADER, THEY WOULD

  GO ANYWHERE, FIGHT ANYONE,

  DARE EVERYTHING—SEEKING

  EXCITEMENT AND PERILOUS

  ADVENTURE!

  Books by Kenneth Robeson

  20 / 21 THE SECRET IN THE SKY and COLD DEATH

  22 / 23 THE CZAR OF FEAR and FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE

  24 / 25 THE GREEN EAGLE and THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND

  26 / 27 DEATH IN SILVER and MYSTERY UNDER THE SEA

  111 / 112 ONE-EYED MYSTIC and THE MAN WHO FELL UP

  113 / 114 THE TALKING DEVIL and THE TEN-TON SNAKES

  115 / 116 PRIVATE ISLE and THE SPEAKING STONE

  117 / 118 THE GOLDEN MAN and PERIL IN THE NORTH

  119 / 120 THE LAUGH OF DEATH and THE KING OF TERROR

  THE LAUGH OF DEATH

  Kenneth Robeson

  PRINTING HISTORY

  The Laugh of Death was originally published in Doc Savage magazine.

  October 1942. Copyright 1942 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  THE LAUGH OF DEATH

  Contents

  I MAN IN SOLITUDE 5

  II A SECRET AND A VAULT 10

  III AFFAIR IN WASHINGTON 19

  IV DEATH SITTING UP 22

  V THE WILD GOOSE 28

  VI THE GOOSE HUNTER 33

  VII WHILE THE GOOSE FLEW 38

  VIII A STICKING OF PINS 44

  IX MARTIN 50

  X ASBESTOS SUIT 56

  XI THE UNEXPECTED 62

  XII THE OPERATION 69

  XIII MANFRED MATHIS 75

  XIV THE SECRET 83

  XV THE CREEPER 87

  XVI TWENTY-FOUR CARAT 94

  XVII THE LAUGHING MATTER 101

  XVIII LAST LAUGH 106

  Chapter I

  MAN IN SOLITUDE

  Doc Savage had stepped out into the night to look at the thermometer. The mercury had sunk a little below the sixty mark. That was sixty below zero. The sky was clear and a very deep blue, almost black, and all the stars were crisp and bright. For two months, since the coming of the complete night, there had been no storm of consequence, and that was remarkable. But it had been intensely cold, terribly cold even for this spot south of the pole. All points are south of the north pole, but this one was south in the direction of Beaufort Sea, into which the Mackenzie River of Canada empties. Not far south, however.

  Doc stretched his arms and clapped his hands and began to jump around in the snow.

  He was, at first glance, quite naked. He was also a giant among men, larger than almost any man in height, and with a physique equally as unusual. His muscles and sinews, as he leaped and skipped and turned handsprings on the snow in the sixty-below cold of the arctic night, bunched and coiled monstrously. His obvious strength, nakedly displayed that way, was a little frightening. Men should not really have such strength. It was as if he had spent a lifetime of doing nothing except putting strength in his body. He hadn’t put in a lifetime doing this, however—only part of it.

  His face was a handsome face with no prettiness—firm lips, straight nose, chin square but not jaw heavy.

  The jumping around in the snow made him sweat, and this sweat gathered between his skins.

  This was a literal fact, not a fantasy, for he did have two skins. One of them was his own deeply bronzed hide, and the other one, the outer one covering his body, was made of a transparent plastic in which he had dunked himself from head to toes. The plastic was a special one, and only he himself knew how he had concocted it. There was nothing else like it on earth. And yet he was not satisfied.

  He was, in fact, far from satisfied, because after he had bounced around in the cold, then stood motionless until the stuff cooled off, then bounced around some more, the plastic began to crack. It would not stand the combination of cold, perspiration and flexing. Something was wrong.

  He stood there in his disgust, the cold through the cracks that had opened in the plastic cutting at him like knives. It was not perfect, and he was disappointed. Everything had been going so well.

  America had raw material to make the plastic in large quantities; it was harmless to the skin; it could be applied to the body with a brush, or a man could merely jump into a vat of it, and it would coat his body and harden at once; it could be removed almost instantaneously and harmlessly with another chemical application. All of this he had worked out. But now it was cracking.

  The acids or salines in body perspiration might have something to do with the failure, he reflected.

  The plastic had one other quality: it was almost a complete insulator against heat or cold. Soldiers in tanks and pilots in fighting planes need have no fear of fire if he could perfect the stuff. The plastic would not wear well and he knew it could never be made to wear well enough to make suits of it, hence the idea of coating the skin with it. These coatings could be renewed either on garments or on the skin. The United States fighting forces needed such a thing.

  He turned and walked back to his Fortress of Solitude, intent on continuing the experiments.

  He had lately changed the outside appearance of his Fortress of Solitude, somewhat. The place, in the beginning, had been a dome affair, lik
e an igloo, but of enormous size. Now, since the change, it was more rugged and completely resembled a chunk of ice protruding from the arctic ice pack, there not even being a sign that it actually stood on an island. The change was one he had considered necessary because of the increased number of planes flying over what had hitherto been unexplored waste.

  The Fortress of Solitude was a secret from the world.

  Not, in the strict sense, from the world. There were the Eskimos whom he had trained, and who had done the original construction and recently the remodeling. They lived here and took care of the place during his long periods of absence. He had trained the Eskimos and knew he could completely trust them, which was something he could say of only five other men and one woman in the civilized world.

  The Eskimos were gone now. They never remained here while he was working. They took their hunting trips then.

  He entered the Fortress. There were three doors for strength and insulation against the terrific outer cold. Inside, one could look up and see the stars at many points, because the dome was of a plastic material so polarized that it would pass light in only one direction, a substance that was not a secret.[1]

  * * *

  [1] The peculiar association of light and plastic materials has probably been called to the attention of almost everyone. There is, for instance, the plastic material of transparent type through rods of which light can be piped, around corners, much as water is conducted through a pipe.

  * * *

  Inside, there was his equipment, the rare and complex scientific apparatus he had brought here or had created himself. Here he conducted his experiments, experiments so advanced and complicated that he had to have complete solitude.

  “Conversation enriches the understanding,

  But solitude is the school of genius.”

  —Gibbon.

  That quotation had been put before him by his father, and it was one of the first things he could remember of his father. He could not remember his mother at all except as a vague pleasure out of forgetfulness. But the quotation was like his father, who had been a genius in his way, too, and a strange man.

  He had been told that his father was a queer man, but he did not accept that, although more than one of the scientists who had trained him at his father’s request had obviously been convinced of the older man’s queerness. Not queer and maybe not strange. Rather, a man with a grim resolve and a knowledge of what scientific training begun at childhood and continued until early manhood, with no pause and no time out, could accomplish.

  At any rate the son had been made into a scientific product who was an amazing combination of physical strength, mental genius and encyclopedic knowledge.

  Not one of the five associates with whom he worked knew where he was, although they had come to realize that the times that he left them, most likely he went into seclusion in his Fortress of Solitude, the one place where he insisted on being undisturbed. Only once had his men come anywhere near it, and that was long ago.

  However, he kept track of them each day.

  They did not know this.

  There were five assistants: Monk, Ham, Long Tom, Johnny and Renny. These names were their nicknames only, and their full names together with their degrees and their accomplishments take too much time in the telling. Each was a very famous man in his field.

  There was also Patricia Savage, who was Doc Savage’s cousin, and who operated one of those beauty salons on Park Avenue which are robbers’ roosts of the first order, although they rob only those who are actually so rich they need to be. Pat liked excitement the way a church mouse likes cheese; she gobbled it up, and she did not believe she got enough of it.

  Daily reports were made in this fashion: Ham or Renny or Patricia—whoever happened to be reporting—merely took down a telephone and dialed or called an unlisted number, whereupon a mechanical recording contrivance came on the wire and took down whatever the assistant had to say. That was all there was to it, for all the group knew. What they did not know was that an automatic gadget promptly, at the hours of noon and midnight, put the reports on a radio transmitter, beam type. The beam of this transmitter was aimed at Doc Savage’s Fortress of Solitude in the arctic.

  The secrecy surrounding the reports, as far as their getting to him was concerned, was simple psychology. He did not want his associates faking some alarming incident in order to draw him back to civilization to attend to some situation which they—not he—had decided needed his attention. He preferred to pick out his own cases, particularly now that there was the war.

  Patricia Savage had only lately taken to making daily reports. It had been necessary to insist that she do this, for she scoffed at the idea that any of Doc Savage’s enemies would strike at him through her, and even seemed to slyly welcome the exciting idea that they might.

  The reports were most satisfactory, and they had come in regularly until the last two days.

  For two days now there had been no reports from his assistants, and Doc Savage, here in his strangely unbelievable Fortress of Solitude, was disturbed.

  Doc Savage glanced at the clock and saw that it was midnight. Midnight here was nothing but an hour on the clock, but it was time for the New York transmitter to come through with any reports made during the day.

  This time there was a report.

  There was also the sound that could have been a laughing.

  Only one report came through, and Patricia Savage made it. It was not completed. Rather, the laughing completed it.

  Pat sounded breathless but not terrified.

  “Pat reporting,” she said—as brought to Doc Savage by the distant radio transmitter. “No reports for two days because of something that happened to me. A man in a green hat came to me. This was two days ago. The man with the green hat came to my Park Avenue place and asked to see me, and I had my secretary let him in after he insisted he was not a salesman. I was glad I did, because he told me an incredibly fantastic story. He was in a greatly worried state, and sat there twisting his green hat in his hands as he talked—”

  That was all of the words Pat spoke, but it was not the last sound she made. However, the laughing came first and grew loud and inexplicable.

  It was certainly not human, and it did not seem animal, so maybe “laughing” was not the word for it. It was a completely unexplainable sound, one that Doc Savage had never heard before and would not mind not hearing again. It had a macabre, chilling quality.

  And yet it was not like Pat to scream because of a sound. But she did scream, and it was a sudden ripping sound that seemed to break off as if it were made of glass.

  That was all from Pat, but the laughing continued for a long time, an interminably long time, at least ten minutes. Then there were voices away from the telephone receiver, one of them saying, “What the hell? Here’s a telephone receiver off the hook.” Then the voice said into the telephone, “Hello! Hello! This is the police. Who are you?” The voice said that again, then complained, “Hell, whoever it was hung up.”

  And that was all.

  Chapter II

  A SECRET AND A VAULT

  It was a hot summer afternoon when Doc Savage put his plane down on a military airport in a restricted area near New York City. The heat was bringing the soft black asphalt up from the expansion joints in the concrete runway and the tires made a rrrrap-rap-rap sound as he landed. Army fliers came out of the hangars to stare in amazement at his plane, which was a strictly experimental model and as strange-looking as a prehistoric pterodactyl in a rookery of modern eagles. There was an outlandish arrangement of wing flaps which would land her at forty miles an hour, then give her nearly a three-hundred-mile-an-hour speed in the air. There were other points that made her an oddity, too.

  Doc Savage used the telephone at once.

  He was not able to raise Monk, Ham, Long Tom, Johnny or Renny.

  He did not get Pat.

  The police said, “No, there hasn’t been any reports of anything having happened to
them.”

  Doc explained about the interrupted telephone call made by Patricia Savage, and the officer wanted to know from what precinct the call had been made. New York is a very large city, and a matter such as a disturbance over a telephone might be a small one which would not reach the central office. Doc said he did not know where the telephone call had been made from, and the officer said then that they would have to make a general check over the teletype and that this would take time.

  Doc Savage went at once to his headquarters on the eighty-sixth floor of a prominent midtown building. He could hear the telephone ringing before he opened the door. He opened the door and entered, then stared in astonishment.

  The place was a wreck. It looked as if a woodpecker had been at work.

  He went to the telephone and said, “Yes?”

  It was the police officer. “The telephone call you were asking about might have come from Jamaica. I think it did, because of something you mentioned about a laughing.”

  The officer’s voice had a queer note, and Doc asked, “Is there something peculiar about the matter?”

  “Yes, something strange as hell,” said the officer. “The precinct station suddenly got a flock of calls from people who were hearing this laughing and who were scared stiff. So we, or, rather, the precinct, sent a prowl car around to see. And sure enough, there was a whole neighborhood so scared it was about to pop its suspenders. Everybody had heard this laughing.”

  “Did any of them describe this laughing?” Doc asked.

  “They all described it. Everyone described it differently. It was a lot of laughing, though, to scare everybody as bad as they seemed to be scared. It was so bad that the cops in the prowl car thought somebody was pulling a gag on them. They still aren’t sure.”