Free The Man of Bronze by Kenneth Robeson Page B

came up. They were both so big the breed looked like a little brown boy between them.
    “What do we do with his nibs?” Monk asked, shaking the breed.
    Doc replied without hesitation: “Free him.”
    The swarthy breed nearly broke down with gratitude. Tears stood in his eyes. He blubbered profuse thanks. And before he would depart, he came close to Doc and murmured an earnest question. The others could not hear the breed’s words.
    “What did he ask you?” Monk inquired after the breed had departed, with a strange new confidence in his walk.
    “Believe it or not,” Doc smiled, “he wanted to know how one went about entering a monastery. I think there is one chap who will walk the straight and narrow in the future.”
    “We better catch a shark and take him along if a close look at one reforms our enemies like that!” Monk laughed.
    With ropes from a local warehouse, and long, thin palms which Doc hired willing natives to cut, the plane was snaked to dry land.
    The news was bad. The floats were badly torn. They didn’t have material for patching. Nor was there any in Belize. To save a great deal of work. Doc radioed to Miami for a fresh set. A transport plane brought the pontoons down.
    Altogether, four days were lost before they got in shape for the air again.

    NOT a morning did Doc miss his exercises. From his youth, he had not neglected the two-hour routine a single time. He did them, although he might have been on the go for many hours previously.
    His muscular exercises were similar to ordinary setting-up movements, but infinitely harder, more violent. He took them without apparatus. For instance, he would make certain muscles attempt to lift his arm, while the other muscles strove to hold it down. That way he furthered not only muscular tissue, but control over individual muscles as well. Every part of his great, bronzed body he exercised in this manner.
    From the case which held his equipment, Doc took a pad and pencil and wrote a number of several figures. Eyes closed, he extracted the square and cube root of this number in his head, carrying the figures to many decimal places. He multiplied and divided and subtracted the number with various figures. Next he did the same thing with a number of an even dozen figures. This disciplined him in concentration.
    Out of the case came an apparatus which made sound waves of all tones, some of a wave length so short or so long as to be inaudible to the normal ear. For several minutes Doc strained to detect these waves inaudible to ordinary people. Years of this had enabled him to hear many of these customarily unheard sounds.
    His eyes shut, Doc rapidly identified by the sense of smell several score of different odors, all very vague, each contained in a small vial racked in the case.
    The full two hours Doc worked at these and other more intricate exercises.

    THE morning of the fifth day after arriving in Belize, they took the air for Blanco Grande, capital of Hidalgo.
    It was jungle country they flew over, luxuriant, unhealthily rank trees in near solid masses. Lianas and grotesque aerial roots tied these into a solid carpet.
    Confident of his motors, Doc flew low enough that they could see tiny parakeets and pairs of yellow-headed parrots feeding off chichem berries that grew in abundance.
    Some hours later they were over the border of Hidalgo. It was a typical country of the southern republics. Wedged in between two mighty mountains, traversed in its own right by a half dozen smaller but even more rugged ranges, it was a perfect spot for those whose minds run to revolutions and banditry.
    In such localities governments are unstable not so much because of their own lack of equilibrium, but more because of the opportunities offered others, to gather in revolt.
    Half of the little valleys of Hidalgo were lost even to the bandits and revolutionists who were most familiar with the terrain. The interior was inhabited by fierce tribes, remnants of once powerful nations,