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

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.



Chapter 2

A MAN'S BLACK GHOST