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

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.