Cover Date: January 1942
Volume 18 # 5
Copyright Date: Friday, December 19, 1941
Author: Alan Hathway
Editor: John Nanovic
Story Length: 36,740 words
Cover: Emery Clarke
WHMC: There is no material in the collection for this story.
Recurring Characters. The entire Iron Crew are all present in this story.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
“The Rustling Death” by Kenneth Robeson
“The Eye of the Cobra” by George L. Eaton

Doc Savage Club
Letters From Readers
Editor’s Page

Doc Savage and his aids stumble into a deadly conspiracy when Ham Brooks, in Washington on legal business, witnesses a strange “rustling” sound—like silk and crinoline—that kills a policeman and leaves the inventor Jan Vanderlee’s laboratory wrecked. The weapon produces a brain-numbing ultrasonic effect, intense heat, and the ability to disintegrate metal and flesh. It is controlled by a mysterious figure known as Krag, who is negotiating its sale to a foreign power.
Vanderlee’s assistant, Tester Lyons, and Senator J. Wyndham Weatherton’s niece, Nada Morrell, become entangled in the case. Krag issues demands that Weatherton and Congressman King Cortlandt push a list of seemingly minor bills through Congress—actually a scheme to control a Southwestern power-dam site hiding an underground river of enormous value. Demonstrations of the rustling death destroy planes, including an Army bomber, and claim victims such as Ward Hiller and later Cortlandt himself.

Doc and his men (Monk, Ham, Renny, Johnny, and Long Tom) are repeatedly captured, exposed to the ray, and pursued. They track the equipment to a camouflaged Diesel-powered installation in a desert coulee. There, Krag—revealed as Tester Lyons, who has improved Vanderlee’s original ultrasonic remote-control research into a full death ray using an ultraviolet carrier beam, electrons, and ultrasound—meets the foreign agent Flathead Simpson to sell the device for millions.

In the climax, Doc, temporarily mind-affected by the ray, recovers and uses a vapor screen that filters ultraviolet light to neutralize the beam. Flathead is killed by his own weapon; Lyons and Fox Strang die in the ensuing fight. The real Jan Vanderlee is freed and cleared, the foreign plot is stopped, and Doc’s surviving prisoners are sent to his “college.” The rustling death is destroyed, and a scheduled mail plane is spared.

My impression is that Alan Hathway is working off a checklist of things to include in the story: Gold flake eyes, Gas, Supermachine pistols, Crime college, Hidalgo Trading company.  I find it a bit of a hot mess.  This is fourth and final Doc Savage story.  One of the issues I find wrong with the story is the Washington, DC scene where Ham coincidentally strolls to the lab by chance. Then we find out the assistant, Tester Lyons, had called Doc Savage’s office. Shouldn’t that have been the reason Ham showed up rather than some implausible coincident.  Instead, Hathway created a highly implausible scenario.

Flathead Jones is an interesting character.  He could well be the inspiration of the Flattop character who appeared in the Dick Tracy comic strip 24 months later.

Flathead Jones: “He had a flat head that looked as though he had grown up with a flatiron weighting down his skull.”

Dick Tracy, December 30, 1943

Gimmicks & Gadgets
The Rustling Death
– A directional death ray combining an ultraviolet carrier beam, an electronic charge, and ultrasonic effects.
– Produces a rustling “silk and crinoline” sound, intense heat, brain-numbing/mind-scrambling effects, and can disintegrate metal and flesh.
– Generated by a large cabinet (portable version) or a fixed installation of Diesels, dynamos, transformers, ultraviolet apparatus, and a cyclotron.
– Controlled by a rheostat and a directional aiming device similar to a radio-beam director.
– Can be scaled from a light “touch” to full destructive power.

Doc’s and his men’s equipment
– Each man in Doc’s crew has a ring that is thermally activated. A similar device was used in “The Bride of Fu Manchu” by Sax Rohmer.
– Ham’s sword cane: Spring-steel blade tipped with a fast-acting anesthetic drug.
– Superfirers: Compact machine pistols that can fire anesthetic pellets or other loads.
– Throat microphones and compact two-way short-wave sets.
– Automatic seat-parachute system: In Doc’s planes, the chairs eject with parachutes if the ship drops below roughly 3,000 feet while the safety belts are fastened.
– Mirror direction scrambler / false-altitude mirrors: A system of mirrors Doc deploys so the rustling death is aimed at the wrong height.
– Induction pick-up: A small coil + earphone setup that lets Doc listen in on a telephone line from up to about 50 feet away.
– Infrared film and fast-processing aerial camera: Doc uses infrared film (which does not register real chlorophyll) plus a rapid-developing movie camera and projector to spot artificial camouflage from the air.
– UV-filtering vapor spray: A portable sprayer that releases a tinted gas/vapor cloud which absorbs the ultraviolet carrier beam and thereby stops the rustling death.
– Bulletproof undergarments: Worn by Doc’s men; they stop ordinary pistol bullets but not head shots.
– Anesthetic gas capsules/bombs: Small glass or “marble” charges that release knockout gas; also used in larger form.
– Chemical tracking sheen: A substance Monk leaves on a surface (or shoes) that fluoresces under infrared so a trail can be followed.
– Fingerprint television transmitter: A unit that sends developed fingerprints to another location for identification.
– Robot/automatic controls on Doc’s aircraft.
– Special parachutes for the pets Habeas Corpus and Chemistry.
– Doc’s equipment vest: The usual assortment of small tools, keys, and gadgets he carries.
– Spring-actuated flashlight.

Other devices and gimmicks
– Portable short-wave transmitters and receivers used by the gang and Flathead Simpson.
– Gas-release system in a limousine that knocks out Renny and Johnny.
– Steel drop-plates and gas traps inside the Indian burial mound hideout.
– Camouflage of artificial trees and foliage over the desert power installation.
– The foreign agents’ two-motored bomber (unmarked, carrying machine guns and later the payment).
– Plastic face mask / make-up used by Tester Lyons when posing as Jan Vanderlee (Krag).

The Decline: The stress on his mental system from the exposure to the beam weapon could be one of the factors affecting Doc’s abilities in later stories.  After his immediate exposure, Monk finds Doc after his exposure he is walking around and acting like an idiot.  Doc Savage does recover but the cumulative impact of this has to take a toll.