Burnished Bronze 001 - Chapter 1

Chapter I

THE SINISTER ONE


THERE was death afoot in the darkness.


It crept furtively along a steel girder.  Hundreds of feet below yawned glass-and-brick-walled cracks—New York streets.  Down there, late night workers scurried homeward.  Clapboard newspaper stands were shuttered, but an enterprising vendor or two were still hawking the latest rumors of F.D.R’s treaty with Cuba and the trouble brewing in the Indian sub-continent.  Most of the huddled figures carried umbrellas, and did not glance upward.


Even had they looked, they probably would have noticed nothing.  The night was black as a cave bat.  Rain threshed down monotonously.  The clammy sky was like an oppressive shroud draped over the needle tipped skyscrapers.

One towering building was under construction.  It had been completed to the eightieth floor.  Only a scattering of offices were in use at this hour.

Above the eightieth floor, an ornamental observation tower jutted up a full hundred and fifty feet towards the invisible skies.  The metal work of this was in place, but no masonry had been laid.  Girders were like tendons supporting a gigantic steel skeleton.  The naked beams were a sinister forest.

It was in this forest that Death prowled.

Death was a man.

He seemed to have the adroitness of a cat finding its way in the dark.  Upward, he crept.  The girders were slick with rain, treacherous.  The man's progress was remorseless in its vile purpose.

From time to time, he muttered strange, clucking words.  A gibberish of hate.  The evil chant was spat into the darkness and did not return.

A master of languages would have been baffled trying to name the tongue the man spoke.  A linguistical prodigy might have identified the dialect.  The knowledge would be hard to believe, for the words were of a lost race, the language of a civilization long vanished.

"He must die!" the man chanted hoarsely in his strange lingo.  "It is decreed by the Son of the Feathered Serpent! Tonight! Tonight death shall strike!"  Sudden gusts of wind moaned through the steel structure causing the thick beams and cables to throb like a possessed harp played by a mad seven-fingered god.  The pulsing notes provided a sick counterpoint to the muffled litany of death.

Each time he raved his paean of hate, the man hugged an object he carried closer to his chest.

This object was a box, black, leather-covered.  It was about four inches deep and four feet long.

"This shall bring death to him!" the man clucked, caressing the black case with clammy hands.  The storm bleached colors from the skeletal tower, leaving the bars grey as lifeless stone.  Likewise, the man’s fingers were corpselike yet seemingly animated by the dark chant.

The rain  beat  against him.   Steel-fanged space gaped below.  One slip would mean his death.  Without hesitation he climbed upward yard after yard.  His pathway was lined with domed blisters, rivets which had been hammered into the girder.  Warty nodules of iron ready to catch an unwary step.  Any stumble would have been punished instantly with a plunge into the outer darkness, where gnashing teeth would be silenced with abrupt finality on the pavement below.


Most of the chimneys, which New Yorkers call office buildings, had been emptied of their daily toilers.  There were only occasional pale eyes of light gleaming from their sides.

The labyrinth of girders baffled the skulker a moment.  He poked a flashlight beam inquisitively.  The glow lasted a bare instant, but it disclosed a remarkable thing about the man's hands.

His fingertips were a brilliant red. They might have been dipped to the first knuckle in steaming gore.

The red-fingered man scuttled onto a workmen's platform.  The planks were thick.  The platform was near the outside of the wilderness of steel.  He leaned against a thick post, his steaming breath whipping away into the void.

The man lowered his black case.  His inner pocket disgorged a compact yet powerful set of binoculars.



ON the bottom floor of a skyscraper many blocks distant, the crimson-fingered man focused his glasses.  He started counting stories upward.

The building was one of the tallest in New York.  A gleaming spike of steel and brick, it rammed upward nearly a hundred stories.

At the eighty-sixth floor, the sinister man ceased to count.  His glasses moved right and left until they found a lighted window.  This was at the west corner of the building.

Only slightly blurred by the rain, the powerful binoculars disclosed what was in the room.

The broad, polished top of a massive and exquisitely inlaid table stood directly before the window.

Beyond it was the bronze figure.  The lurking shadow shuddered as though gripped in a sudden palsy.  A chance observer would have mistaken the tremor as the result of the blowing rain, or the frost grimed steel cage against which the man knelt.  But neither of these rational things caused the man’s fingers to grip the binoculars tightly until his fists were like rain-slick knobs of ivory.

The figure in the window looked like the head and shoulders of a man sculpted in hard bronze.  It was a startling sight, that bronze bust.  The lines of the features, the unusually high forehead, the mobile and muscular, but not too-full mouth, the lean cheeks, denoted a power of character seldom seen.

The bronze of the hair was a little darker than the bronze of the features.  The hair was straight, and lay down tightly as a metal skullcap.  An artist who cast such a figure would have instantly been hailed as a genius.

Most marvelous of all were the eyes.  They glittered like a storm of flake gold when the light from the table lamp played on them.  Even from that distance they seemed to exert a hypnotic influence through the powerful binocular lenses, a quality that would cause the most rash individual to hesitate.



The man with the scarlet-tipped fingers flinched, as though feeling a hand from the airy darkness suddenly placed on the nape of his neck.

"Death!" he croaked, as if seeking to overcome the unnerving quality of those strange, golden eyes.  "The Son of the Feathered Serpent has commanded.  It shall be death!"  The haunted harp of the tower groaned in reply.  Motivated by the omen, the shadow fell to his knees as if in prayer.

He opened the black box.  Faint metallic clicks sounded as he fitted together parts of the thing it held.  After that, he ran his fingers lovingly over the object.

"The tool of the Son of the Feathered Serpent!" he chortled.  "It shall deliver death!"

Once more, he pressed the binoculars to his eyes and focused them on the amazing bronze statue.

The bronze figure opened its mouth, yawned.  At this the rain soaked man froze as though the two men had exchanged their former states of animation and statuesque immobility.



THE bronze man showed wide, very strong-looking teeth, in yawning.  Seated there by the immense desk, he did not seem to be a large man.  An onlooker would have doubted his six feet height and would have been astounded to learn he weighed every ounce of two hundred pounds.

The big bronze man was so well put together that the impression was not of size, but of power.  The bulk of his great body was forgotten in the smooth symmetry of a build incredibly powerful.

This man was Clark Savage, Jr.

Doc Savage! The man whose name was becoming a byword in the odd corners of the world.

No apparent sound had entered the room but the big bronze man cocked his head and left his chair.  He went to the door.  The hand he opened the door with was long-fingered, supple.  Yet its enormous tendons were like cables under a thin film of bronze lacquer.

Doc Savage's keenness of hearing was vindicated.  Five men were getting out of an elevator cage, which had come up silently at the end of the long hall.

These men came toward Doc.  There was wild delight in their manner that comes from men who have undergone great ordeals together and emerged battered but victorious.  But for some reason, they did not shout boisterous greetings.  It was as though Doc bore a great grief, and they sympathized deeply with him, but didn't know what to say.



The first of the five men was a giant who towered four inches over six feet.  He weighed fully two fifty.  His face was severe, his mouth thin and grim, and compressed tightly, as though he had just finished uttering a disapproving, "Tsk tsk!" sound.  His features had a most puritanical look.

This was "Renny," or Colonel John Renwick.  His arms were enormous, his fists bony monstrosities.  His favorite act was to slam his great fists through the solid panel of a heavy door, the earsplitting crack of splintering wood usually accompanied by gasps of disbelief.  On more than one occasion, accompanied by groans from an innkeeper or hapless landlord.  Despite this, his greater fame was attained through intellectual might.  He was known throughout the world for his engineering accomplishments, and mechanical insights.

Behind Renny came William Harper Littlejohn.  Very tall, very gaunt.  Johnny wore glasses with a peculiarly thick lens over the left eye.  He looked like a half-starved, studious scientist.  He was probably one of the greatest living experts on geology and archaeology.

Next was Major Thomas J.  Roberts, dubbed "Long Tom".  Long Tom was the physical weakling of the crowd, thin, not very tall, and with none-too- healthy-looking skin.  He was a wizard with electricity.

"Ham" trailed Long Tom.  "Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks," Ham was designated on formal occasions.  Slender, waspy, quick-moving, Ham looked what he was; a quick thinker and possibly the most astute lawyer Harvard ever turned out.  He carried a plain black cane; almost never went anywhere without it.  This was, among other things, a sword cane which in his nimble fingers doubled as an equally deadly cudgel when sheathed.

Bringing up the rear of the motley assortment loped the most remarkable character of all.  Only a few inches over five feet tall, he weighed better than two hundred and sixty pounds.  He had the build of a gorilla, arms six inches longer than his legs, a chest thicker than it was wide.  His eyes were so surrounded by gristle as to resemble pleasant stars twinkling in pits.  He grinned with a mouth so wide it looked like an accident.

"Monk!" No other name could fit him!

He was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, but he heard the full name so seldom he had about forgotten what it sounded like.



THE men entered the sumptuously furnished reception room of the office suite.

  After the first greeting, they were silent, uncomfortable.  They didn't know what to say.  Doc Savage's father had died since they last saw Doc, the details of which were still far from clear.  The elder Savage had been known throughout the world for his dominant bearing and his good work.  Early in life, he had amassed a tremendous fortune—for one purpose.

That purpose was to go here and there, from one end of the world to the other, looking for excitement and adventure, striving to help those who needed help, punishing those who deserved it.

To that creed he had devoted his life.

His fortune had dwindled to practically nothing.  But as it shrank, his influence had increased.  It was unbelievably wide, spanning oceans and continents, a heritage befitting the man.

Greater even, was the heritage he had given his son.  Not in wealth, but in training to take up his career of adventure and righting of wrongs where it left off.  To lesser men this would have been dismissed as a mania, a laughable delusion which would burn itself out quickly.  But in the firm mental grip of so great a man it became something magnificent.  Like a patient marksman, he had fitted his son like an arrow to strike the heart of the dark forces of the world.


Clark Savage, Jr. had been reared from the cradle to become the supreme adventurer.

Hardly had Doc learned to walk, when his father started him on a strict exercise regimen to which he still adhered.  Two hours each day, Doc exercised intensively all his muscles, senses, and his brain.

As a result of these exercises, Doc possessed strength superhuman.  There was no magic about it, though if it could bottled a salesman could have made a vast pile.  Doc had simply built up muscle intensively all his life.  Each tissue and fiber blended perfectly together, working in concert to perform tasks many would have deemed impossible.

Doc's mental training had started with medicine and surgery.  It had branched out to include all arts and sciences.  Just as Doc could easily overpower the gorillalike Monk in spite of his great strength, so did Doc know more about chemistry.  And the same applied to Renny, the engineer; Long Tom, the electrical wizard; Johnny, the geologist and archaeologist; and Ham, the lawyer.

Doc had been well trained for his work.


Grief lay heavily upon Doc's five friends.  The elder Savage had been close to their hearts.  Like all men who can truly be called great, he had been one to value friendships over awards.  The bonds he forged through loyalty and kindness were cruelly severed by death.  The echoes of their breaking would ring through the hearts of his friends for years to come.

 "Your father's death—was three weeks ago," Renny said at last.

Doc nodded slowly.  "So I learned from the newspapers—when I got back today."

Renny groped for words, saying finally: "We tried to get you in every way.  But you were gone.  It was like you had been off the face of the earth."

Doc looked at the window.  There was grief in his gold eyes.

The entire book can be downloaded here..

The Book of Bronze

A preface from the metallurgist,

If you are the sort of person who ignores the useless author preface portion of a book and plunges right into the story, then don’t let me stop you.  This part is usually self-serving twaddle anyway.  I mean, I’m calling myself ‘the metallurgist’, so that doesn’t bode well for the next few paragraphs.  Does it?

‘Doc Savage’ was created and written by at least 8 people (but mostly Lester Dent) under the pseudonym “Kenneth Robeson”.  The contributors were tireless visionaries, etc. etc. etc.  But here’s the thing.  They perfected a way to crank out a prodigious amount of material when writing what would become the Doc Savage series.  Seriously, they created a formula which allowed a person to knock out a nicely sized book, over and over again, in time for monthly publication.  Impressive.

Impressive, but not perfect.  You see, a person could write a complete and interesting story, but that shouldn’t imply that the story was written exceptionally well.  Doc Savage stories aren’t, in my opinion and the opinion of anyone else who reads above a third grade level, flawlessly written.  Reading them is a comical grind.  They have a weird sort of charm, and unique voice but it’s still a voice that often makes you wince in embarrassment as you turn the page. 

So while making the effort to format the manly Savage for ebook readers, I’m investing the time to burnish that paragon of masculinity.   Hence: Burnished Bronze : Doc Savage – The Man Of Bronze.  Same to you.  Remember what I said earlier about ‘twaddle’.  I warned you.

Before I forget, I’m leaving the action alone.  It’s all here, jammed on each page.  I’m also not touching the, frankly, anglocentric casual racism and general misogyny.  I want to clean up the grammar, not police Doc’s words.  If something in this book offends you, I suggest you take it up directly with Kenneth Robeson himself.

Since you’ve made it this far, there’s nothing left to do than unleash the story at you.  Prepare to grow hair on your chest and walk a little taller, a little prouder, a little more American – knowing that Doc Savage is continuing his tireless life’s work of seeking adventure, helping those who need it and punishing those who deserve it.

Francis Sandow

California 06/17