"Doc Savage Adventure 1938-11 Fortress of Solitude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE

A Doc Savage adventure by Kenneth Robeson


(Originally published in "Doc Savage" magazine for October 1938. Bantam Books reprint April 1968)

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BACK COVER

The deep mysteries of Doc Savage are finally revealed! John Sunlight, poetic genius of evil, gruesome master of a thousand elements of screaming terror, discovers the innermost secrets of The Man of Bronze. Doc Savage finds himself enmeshed in a diabolical web of dark horror as he valiantly battles the appalling machines of destruction he himself has invented!

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Chapter 1

THE 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 equiva lent 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 outer 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.