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

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 upper deck 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.