Free Doc Savage: Glare of the Gorgon (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 19) by Kenneth Robeson, Lester Dent, Will Murray Page A

into the library, and passed on through its spacious expanse into the great laboratory.
    Monk and Ham hastened to follow.
    When they caught up with the bronze giant, Doc was standing before a large cathode-ray tube that dominated a corner of the room. This was a television device that he himself had perfected; it was far more advanced than the old mechanical scanning television devices of only a few years ago.
    “As you know,” he began to say, “of late we have installed television cameras at different points around the building, the better to monitor prowlers and other undesirables. These cameras are connected by special cables to this screen, and a timer causes the different cameras to cut into the screen in rotation, displaying moving images.”
    Ham fingered his well-shaven chin and said, “But what good will that do us without a means to record these images?”
    Doc moved to another device, saying, “Of course it would be virtually impossible to film these images continuously for later viewing—not without several persons taking turns changing the film reels. That is impractical. So I have contrived the next best solution to the problem.”
    The bronze man broke open the back of a bulky contrivance that they realized was a large still camera pointed directly at the televisor screen. From this, he extracted a black container, which he carried over to an enclosed nook that was set aside as a photographic darkroom.
    Monk snapped his fingers. “I get it! You rigged that big camera with a timing mechanism to take pictures of the screen every few minutes.”
    “Exactly,” replied the bronze man. “Once these negatives are developed, we may be fortunate enough to capture what happened outside the garage door in our absence.”
    Disappearing into the darkroom, Doc toiled several minutes, patiently developing the photographic strip.
    When he emerged, the bronze man held the positives in one hand. He laid these upon a work table so the others could examine them.
    The angle of one television camera looked down from above the garage door, and it caught a man in the act of dropping a barrel off the back of an open truck.
    The truck was in the shadow of the great skyscraper, and so the man and his features were not distinct enough to make out and were further obscured by a battered Trilby hat. But the license tag on the truck was.
    Sharp-eyed Ham noticed it first. “Fortunate break! That truck can be traced.”
    “Without a doubt,” agreed Doc. “That will be our first order of business, to locate the truck and its driver.”
    Monk grinned his widest. “Boy, oh boy, when I get my mitts on that bozo, I’m going to shake loose his teeth, loosen his eyeballs and anything else he’s got rattlin’ around in his skull.”
    Going to a telephone, Doc put in a call to no less than the Commissioner of Police for New York, and made his request.
    The commissioner was only too happy to oblige the bronze man. Often in the past, they had worked closely together.
    “I’ll do everything in my power to get you this information,” promised the official, hanging up.
    They were not long in waiting. When the commissioner called back, he related that the tag had been traced to a truck rental agency. “Here is the name of the concern.”
    Doc took the information without writing it down, thanked the official, and hung up.
    “We will pay a visit to the Ajax Rental Company now,” he said.
    As they exited the reception room, they walked past the hideous yellow-green shadow sprawled on the corridor wall.
    Ham remarked, “We still have not figured out how the man who struck down Ned Gamble at our very doorstep managed to get to this floor without detection.”
    “If it was a man,” suggested Doc.
    Ham’s eyes grew cunning. “You think it might have been a woman?”
    “Medusa was a woman,” reminded the bronze man.

Chapter VII
    THE MISTRUSTFUL WOMAN
    LONG TOM ROBERTS had once been a soldier. He did not look it. He was undersized,