Читать книгу Fortress of Solitude: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5

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It was still not too late, had Doc Savage known of John Sunlight. Doc Savage had the finest planes, and knowledge and courage and scientific skill. And he could have reached this arctic rock in time.

Doc Savage, combination of mental wizard, scientific genius, muscular phenomena, would not have been too late—yet.

For John Sunlight could find no way into the weird blue half ball. He looked first at the base of the thing, but the glasslike blue walls seemed to continue on down into the solid rock.

John Sunlight clawed at the glazed blue. It felt as hard and cold as steel. He put his face against it and tried to see through the blue substance, whatever it was. It seemed that he should be able to peer through it—the stuff had a certain transparent aspect. But he could see nothing.

Next, John Sunlight made a complete circle of the thing. He found no door, no window, no break of any kind.

The blue dome was not made of bricks, or even great blocks. It appeared to be one solid substance of a nature unknown. Not glass, and yet not metal either. Something mysterious.

It took a long time to satisfy John Sunlight that he could find no door.

He went back to the others.

“Get sledge hammers off the wrecked ice-breaker,” he said coldly.

The sledge hammers were brought him. Titania and Giantia alone had the strength to fetch them.

John Sunlight took the heaviest sledge.

“Stay here.” His eyes smoldered in the almost-black cups which his eye sockets had become. “Stay here.”

He stood and gave each of them hypnotic attention in turn.

“None of you must ever go near that blue dome,” he said with stark intensity.

He did not say what would happen if they disobeyed; did not voice a single threat. It was not his way to give physical threats; no one had ever heard him do so. Because it is easy to threaten a man’s body, but difficult to explain how a terrible thing can happen to a mind. That kind of a threat would not sound convincing, or even anything but silly.

But they knew when they heard him. And he knew, too, that not one of them would go near the Strange Blue Dome. He had not exerted his hideous sway over them for months for nothing.

It took a longer time for John Sunlight to make his way back to the vast blue thing. He planted his feet wide, and raised the sledge hammer, and gathered all his great strength—his strength was more incredible than anyone could have imagined, even starved as he was—and hit the blue dome.

There was a single clear ringing note, as if a great bell had been tapped once, and the sound doubtless carried for miles, although it did not seem loud.

John Sunlight lowered the sledge hammer, examined the place where he had struck. He made his growling. It was a low and beastly growl, almost the only emotional sound he ever made. Too, the bestial growl was almost the only meaty, physical thing he ever did. Otherwise he seemed to be composed entirely of a frightful mind.

His sledge blow had not even nicked the mysterious blue substance of which the dome was composed.

John Sunlight hit again, again, and again——

He was still hitting when the Eskimo said something guttural.

It was a sinister indication of John Sunlight’s mental control that he did not show surprise when the Eskimo grunted. He did not know what the Eskimo had said. He did not speak the Eskimo tongue. And an Eskimo was one of the last things he had expected to appear.

Particularly a well-fed, round butterball of an Eskimo with a happy smile, holding a large, frozen chunk of walrus meat.

John Sunlight smiled. He could smile when he wished.

“How, Eskimo,” he said. “You fella savvy us fella plenty happy see you fella.”

The Eskimo smiled from ear to ear.

Then he spoke in the best of English.

“How do you do,” he said. “One of my brothers reported sighting you landing from a wrecked ship, and stated that he believed you were without food, so I brought you some walrus meat.”

John Sunlight’s bony, dark face did not change a particle. He was not a man who showed what he thought.

“You live close?” John Sunlight asked.

The Eskimo nodded and pointed.

“Over there, a few hundred yards,” he said.

“How many Eskimos are in your camp?” inquired John Sunlight.

“An even dozen, including myself,” replied the Eskimo.

John Sunlight leveled a rigid arm at the Strange Blue Dome.

“What is it?” he asked.

The Eskimo stared straight at the blue dome, and looked faintly puzzled.

“I do not see anything,” he said.

John Sunlight gave a violent start—in spite of the fact that he rarely showed emotion. This was different. Insanity was the one thing he feared. Insanity—that would take away the incredible thing that was his mind.

He thought, for a horrible instant, that he was imagining all this; that no blue dome was there.

“You do not see a great blue dome?” John Sunlight asked tensely.

The Eskimo shook his head elaborately.

“I see nothing of the kind,” he said.

John Sunlight took hold of his lip with teeth that were unnaturally huge and white, and gave him the aspect of a grinning skull when he showed them.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“Only snow,” said the Eskimo calmly.

John Sunlight moved quickly then. He seized the Eskimo. The Eskimo was round and strong and well-fed, but he was no match for John Sunlight’s mad strength.

John Sunlight hurled the Eskimo against the side of the blue dome. The Eskimo moaned and fell back to the snow, unconscious.

“That must have felt pretty hard, for something you couldn’t see,” John Sunlight snarled.

He then dragged the Eskimo back to the others, along with the large chunk of walrus meat. There was not enough walrus meat for everyone, so John Sunlight divided it among—not the weakest, this time—but the strongest. He wanted to make them stronger, so they could overcome the colony of Eskimos. They cooked up the walrus meat, and the weak sat back in shaking silence and watched the strong eat, although they were starving.

John Sunlight did not eat any himself. He was a strange man.

Meantime, the Eskimo regained consciousness. He rolled his little black grape eyes and said nothing.

He still had said nothing, even after John Sunlight had kicked in half of his ribs. He only lay silent, coughing a little scarlet when he could not help it.

The Eskimo had not even admitted that he could see the Strange Blue Dome.

They had saved rifles off the ice-breaker. They took those and went to capture the rest of the Eskimos.

The capture was easy enough. They merely walked in and presented the rifle snouts for the Eskimos’ inspection, and the Eskimos, after first laughing heartily as if they thought it was one huge joke, realized it wasn’t, and became silent and beady-eyed with wonder.

There were four igloos, very large and fashioned with picture-book perfection from blocks of frozen snow. Each igloo had a long tunnel for an entrance, and along these tunnels were smaller igloos used to store food. There were also other very small igloos scattered around, in which the dogs slept. There were not many dogs.

“What is that blue dome?” John Sunlight asked.

They stared at him wonderingly. “What blue dome?”

“Don’t you see it?”

“No.”

The Eskimos all talked like that, and it made John Sunlight more gaunt and grim, until finally, to satisfy himself of his own rationality, he broke down his order that no white person but himself should go near the Strange Blue Dome. He took Civan and Giantia and Titania and some of the others to the dome and made them feel of it, made them kick the sledge hammer out of the snow, pick it up and each strike a great ringing blow on the mysterious sides of the dome.

“You see it?” John Sunlight asked. “You feel it?”

“Dah, soodar,” Civan said.

“Yes, sir,” said Titania and Giantia, which was the same thing, only in English, not Russian.

John Sunlight thereafter felt much better, although there was no visible change in him. He knew now that he wasn’t demented, or seeing something that wasn’t there.

Two things were now possible: One, the Eskimos were lying for a reason; two, they were hypnotized. John Sunlight knew something of hypnotism, knew more than it was good for any man of his kind to know, and he soon satisfied himself the Eskimos were not hypnotized.

So the Eskimos were lying. Not lying—just not admitting anything. John Sunlight began breaking them, and he found that breaking an Eskimo was not as easy as doing the same thing to a white man or woman. The Eskimos had lived amid physical peril all their lives; their minds did not get afraid easily.

The Eskimos got no more food. Fuel for their blubber lamps was taken from them. So was their clothing, except for bearskin pants. Naturally, John Sunlight seized their weapons.

Six weeks passed. John Sunlight, all those off the ice-breaker, fared well, grew fat.

The Eskimos kept fat, too.

That was mysterious. It worried John Sunlight. The Eskimos got nothing to eat and thrived on it.

It was a human impossibility, and John Sunlight did not believe in magic. He wondered about it, and watched the Eskimos secretly, watched them a lot more than anyone imagined.

His spare time John Sunlight spent trying to get into the Strange Blue Dome. He swung the sledge hammer against the blue stuff for hours, and bored away with steel drills off the ice-breaker, and shot a lot of steel-jacketed, high-powered rifle bullets against the mysterious material. The results—well, he would have had better luck with a bank vault.

The Strange Blue Dome became a fabulously absorbing mystery to John Sunlight. He kept on, with almost demoniac persistence, trying to get into the thing.

If it had not been for the Eskimos staying so fat, he might never have succeeded.

One night an Eskimo crawled out of an igloo and faded away in the darkness. It was not really dark all the time, this being the six-month arctic night, but they called it night anyway, because it was the time when they slept.

The Eskimos had been making a fool of John Sunlight.

He had watched them days and days. They were eating; they must get food somewhere. He had not seen them get it, and the reason was simple—a long robe of white arctic rabbit. When an Eskimo crawled away, the white rabbit robe made him unnoticeable against the snow.

This time, the Eskimo accidentally got a brown hand out of the robe.

John Sunlight followed the Eskimo.

He watched the Eskimo go to the Strange Blue Dome, stand close beside it; saw a great portal swing open in the dome and watched the Eskimo step inside, to come out later with an armload of something. The blue portal closed behind the Eskimo.

John Sunlight caught the Eskimo, clubbed him senseless. The stuff the Eskimo was carrying looked like sassafras bark—food. Compressed, dehydrated food, no doubt of that. But strange food, such as John Sunlight had never heard of upon this earth.

John Sunlight stood thinking for a long time. He took the Eskimo’s white rabbit-skin robe. He put it on. He stood against the blue dome where the Eskimo had stood.

And the portal opened.

John Sunlight walked into the mysterious Blue Dome.

It was now almost too late for Doc Savage, even had he known of John Sunlight, to prevent what was written on the pages of the book of fate.

John Sunlight vanished.

For a day, two days, a week, he was not heard of. Not for two weeks.

On the second week, he was still not heard of; but something incredible happened. Titania, Giantia, Civan, and some of the others saw an Eskimo turn into a black ghost.

The Eskimo who became a black ghost was the one who had vanished when John Sunlight disappeared and had not been seen or heard from, either.

It was night. That is, it was darker night, because there were clouds. Titania, Giantia, Civan and the others were wondering what they would do for food now that the supply taken from the Eskimo was running low, and they were standing on a small drift and discussing it, when they saw the Eskimo running toward them.

Screaming made them notice the Eskimo. He was shrieking—screeching and running. He came toward them.

Suddenly, the Eskimo stopped. He stood facing them, his arms fixed rigidly in a reaching-out-toward-them gesture. His mouth gaped a hole. Incredibly still, he stood. He might have been an old copper statue which was greased.

The next instant, he might have been made of black soot. The change occurred instantaneously. One instant, a copper man; the next, a black one.

Then smoke. Black smoke. Flying. Coming apart, swirling away in cold arctic wind; spreading, fading, going mysteriously into nothingness.

There was no question about it. The Eskimo had turned into a black smoke ghost, and the smoke had blown away.

Now it was too late for Doc Savage. And John Sunlight had not forgotten the score he had to settle with Serge Mafnoff.