"068 (B023) - Fortress of Solitude (1938-10) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"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 icebreaker, 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.