Читать книгу Fortress of Solitude: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 3
ОглавлениеTHE STRANGE BLUE DOME
It was unfortunate that Doc Savage had never heard of John Sunlight. Doc Savage’s life work was dedicated to attending to such men as John Sunlight, preferably before they managed to get too near their goal. But Doc Savage did not hear of John Sunlight in time.
It was also too bad that John Sunlight was destined to be the man who found the Strange Blue Dome.
It seemed from the first that John Sunlight had been put on this earth so that men could be afraid of him.
Russia was the first government to become afraid of him. It just happened that Russia was the first—John Sunlight wasn’t a Russian. No one knew what he was, exactly. They did know that he was something horrible with a human body.
Serge Mafnoff wanted to give John Sunlight to a firing squad. Serge Mafnoff was the Russian official who captured John Sunlight and prosecuted him before the Soviet equivalent of a court.
“This thing known as John Sunlight,” Serge Mafnoff said earnestly, “is incredible and shocking. We owe it to humanity to see that he is shot.”
Serge Mafnoff was an honest, earnest, idealistic man. About John Sunlight, he was right.
John Sunlight took a silent vow to some day take revenge on Serge Mafnoff.
But the jury was soft. John Sunlight was accused of using blackmail on his superior officers in the army to force them to advance him in rank, and that might be only misdirected ambition. Serge Mafnoff knew it was more grim than that.
Anyway, John Sunlight didn’t look the part. Not when he didn’t wish, at least. He resembled a gentle poet, with his great shock of dark hair, his remarkably high forehead, his hollow burning eyes set in a starved face. His body was very long, very thin. His fingers, particularly, were so long and thin—the longest fingers being almost the length of an ordinary man’s whole hand.
The jury didn’t believe Serge Mafnoff when he told them that John Sunlight had the strength to seize any two of them and throttle them to death. And would, too, if he could thereby get the power to dominate a score of men’s souls.
John Sunlight went to a Siberian prison camp.
He had never, as yet, heard of the Strange Blue Dome. But he was determined some day to pay off Serge Mafnoff.
The prison camp was located on the utter northern Siberian coast. Hundreds of miles of impassable ice and tundra lay south; to the north was the Arctic Ocean and the North Pole. Once each year, an ice-breaker rammed through to the prison colony with food and more prisoners.
No one had ever escaped the camp.
The ice-breaker took John Sunlight to the Siberian camp one August. It came back.
The next August, a year later, the ice-breaker sailed for the camp again. This time, it did not come back.
It was two months before the Soviets became excited and sent planes to see what had happened. They might have saved the gasoline the plane engines burned. For they found some piles of ashes where the prison camp had been, and nothing else.
They didn’t even find an ash pile to hint what had become of convicts, ice-breaker, and ice-breaker crew.
Seven months later, John Sunlight stepped out on the bridge of the ice-breaker, and forty-six persons sank to their knees in craven terror. This pleased John Sunlight. He liked to break souls to do his bidding.
No one had been killed yet. The forty-six included the crew of the ice-breaker, and the convicts. For one of the queerest quirks of John Sunlight’s weird nature was that he preferred to control a mind, rather than detach it from the owner’s body with a bullet or a knife.
The ice-breaker had now been fast in the ice for four months.
It looked very much as if they were all going to die.
None of them yet knew that the Strange Blue Dome existed.
Civan was John Sunlight’s chief aid. Civan had helped in the prison camp break. It was he who emptied the powder from the guards’ cartridges, working secretly over a period of days. Civan had fired the camp. Civan had a streak of sadism in his nature—he liked to destroy things. He had wanted to destroy the Soviet government. But he hadn’t been in the prison camp for that. He had been there for destroying a man whose wife and money he coveted.
Civan was a bestial black ox to look at, but he did have a certain amount of brains. He had, however, absolutely no conscience. And so that strange and terrible thing, John Sunlight, had picked Civan to be his lieutenant.
Queerly, too, Civan feared John Sunlight infinitely more than anyone else. John Sunlight saw to that. Terror was the rope that John Sunlight kept around men’s necks.
The ice-breaker drifted, trapped in the arctic ice. They shot a seal now and then. But they slowly starved, too.
Women are supposed to be more hardy than men.
So the two giantesses, Titania and Giantia—these were their vaudeville names—did not waste away. Their great muscles retained the strength to open horseshoes and bend silver rubles double. Giantia and Titania—their other name was Jeeves. They were Americans. They were great women, very blond. They were amazing women. They were a little queer, maybe, because all their lives men had been scared of them. They were such amazons.
They had gone to Russia with a vaudeville act, and had been accused of dabbling in a bit of profitable spy work on the side. They were quite guilty, so the United States government looked the other way when they were sent to Siberia.
Titania and Giantia were afraid of John Sunlight. They had never been scared of any other man. But they did not worry about John Sunlight.
Fifi—they worried more about Fifi, Titania and Giantia did. Fifi was their little sister, their tiny, cute, exquisitely beautiful sister. Fifi had been left in New York. Fifi was such a nitwitted little sweetykins, and they were bothered all the time they were in Siberian exile about how she would get along in big wicked New York. And they were still worrying about it.
It did look, though, as if they had troubles enough of their own.
Two months more, and they had surrendered themselves to all being dead in another month. But they didn’t die.
Because they saw the Strange Blue Dome.
There was a fog, a low fog no more than twenty feet deep, and they could stand on the ice-breaker upperdeck and look out over it. So they first saw only the top of the Strange Blue Dome.
“Blue whale off the bow!” the lookout squalled weakly.
Titania and Giantia galloped to the upperdeck as if rushing on a vaudeville stage to bend iron bars and do handstands before an audience. Some of the others had to crawl—ten couldn’t make it at all. John Sunlight came walking with slow, cold ominousness, like a devil in black, or a Frankenstein, or a Dracula. They shrank away from him, and did not forget to sink to their knees.
They looked at the Strange Blue Dome for a long time. And they became very puzzled. It was no whale, blue or otherwise.
It was no rock, either.
It was like nothing that should be. Its height must be all of a hundred feet, and there was a shimmering luminance to it that was eerie, even if they had not seen it standing, as if completely disembodied, above a gray carpet of fog. Generally, it resembled the perfectly spherical half of an opaque blue crystal ball—of incredible size, of course.
They stood and stared, breathing only when they had to.
The crushing of the ice-breaker brought them out of their awed trance. The ice-breaker hull caved in. Suddenly. There was no warning, just a great grinding and screaming of collapsing metal, a popping of pulled rivets, the feeble screams of the men who had been too weak to come on deck and were trapped.
“Get those men out!” John Sunlight ordered.
He did not want men to die. A man dead was a man he could not dominate.
Ten had been below decks. They got six out, but four had been crushed to death.
“Get the bodies out,” John Sunlight directed, a spark of awful determination in the eyes that now burned like sparks in the hollows of his dark, poetic face.
They did it, shuddering all the while, for they knew what he meant. There had been no food for days and days, not even boiled shoes.
The ice was piling up against a stone island, and this had caused the ice-breaker to be crushed. They found that out soon.
The rocky island was as smooth as a great boulder, with no speck of soil anywhere, no chance of anything green growing. They crawled upon it in the fog, and it was more bleak and cold and inhospitable than they had believed anything could ever be, even after what they had been through.
They wanted to die, except for John Sunlight.
“Rest,” he ordered. “Wait and rest.”
He walked toward the Strange Blue Dome. It was now lost in the fog. John Sunlight went slowly, seeming to select and plan each step with care, for he was weaker than the others. He had taken less food than any of them, from the first, and the reason was that he did not want them to die. They were his, his toys, his tools, and he prized them as a carpenter values his best planes and saws, only infinitely more.
So he had given them most of his share of the food, to keep them alive, that he might dominate them. He was sustained now only by the power of the awful thing that was his mind.
This John Sunlight was a weird, terrible being.
At the outer edge of the bleak stone island—it seemed to be one great mass of solid gray rock—the wind had swept all snow away. But farther in, there was snow that got deeper, and was almost impassable to a man without snowshoes.
It was doubtful if a strong man of courage, well-fed, could have struggled through the snow to the side of the Strange Blue Dome.
But John Sunlight did so, and stood beside the fantastic thing and made a low growling sound.
