Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 068 - Fortress of Solitude

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FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I. THE STRANGE BLUE DOME
? Chapter II. A MAN’S BLACK GHOST
? Chapter III. IS A DIPLOMAT DEAD?
? Chapter IV. BRONZE MAN ATTACKED
? Chapter V. THE UNWILLING IDOL
? Chapter VI. THE GRIM BLACK WORLD
? Chapter VII. BIG WOMEN
? Chapter VIII. QUEST FOR FIFI
? Chapter IX. LOST WOMEN
? Chapter X. WAR LORDS
? Chapter XI. ARCTIC RENDEZVOUS
? Chapter XII. ISLAND RAID
? Chapter XIII. ADONIS AND BEAUTY
? Chapter XIV. SPOT IN THE ARCTIC
? Chapter XV. HALF A BLUE BALL
? Chapter XVI. SNOW TRICKS
? Chapter XVII. DELILAH
? Chapter XVIII. THE POISONED SEAL
? Chapter XIX. DEMONSTRATION
? Chapter XX. MAD HOUR
? Chapter XXI. WILL TERROR COME?
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I. 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 equivalent 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.
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.
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 II. A MAN’S BLACK GHOST
IT was still not too late, had Doc Savage known of John Sunlight. Doc Savage had the finest planes, and
knowledge and courage and scientific skill. And he could have reached this arctic rock in time.
Doc Savage, combination of mental wizard, scientific genius, muscular phenomena, would not have been
too late—yet.
For John Sunlight could find no way into the weird blue half ball. He looked first at the base of the thing,
but the glasslike blue walls seemed to continue on down into the solid rock.
John Sunlight clawed at the glazed blue. It felt as hard and cold as steel. He put his face against it and
tried to see through the blue substance, whatever it was. It seemed that he should be able to peer through
it—the stuff had a certain transparent aspect. But he could see nothing.
Next, John Sunlight made a complete circle of the thing. He found no door, no window, no break of any
kind.
The blue dome was not made of bricks, or even great blocks. It appeared to be one solid substance of a
nature unknown. Not glass, and yet not metal either. Something mysterious.
It took a long time to satisfy John Sunlight that he could find no door.
He went back to the others.
"Get sledge hammers off the wrecked ice-breaker," he said coldly.
The sledge hammers were brought him. Titania and Giantia alone had the strength to fetch them.
John Sunlight took the heaviest sledge.
"Stay here." His eyes smoldered in the almost-black cups which his eye sockets had become. "Stay
here."
He stood and gave each of them hypnotic attention in turn.
"None of you must ever go near that blue dome,"
he said with stark intensity.
He did not say what would happen if they disobeyed; did not voice a single threat. It was not his way to
give physical threats; no one had ever heard him do so. Because it is easy to threaten a man’s body, but
difficult to explain how a terrible thing can happen to a mind. That kind of a threat would not sound
convincing, or even anything but silly.
But they knew when they heard him. And he knew, too, that not one of them would go near the Strange
Blue Dome. He had not exerted his hideous sway over them for months for nothing.
It took a longer time for John Sunlight to make his way back to the vast blue thing. He planted his feet
wide, and raised the sledge hammer, and gathered all his great strength—his strength was more incredible
than anyone could have imagined, even starved as he was—and hit the blue dome.
There was a single clear ringing note, as if a great bell had been tapped once, and the sound doubtless
carried for miles, although it did not seem loud.
John Sunlight lowered the sledge hammer, examined the place where he had struck. He made his
growling. It was a low and beastly growl, almost the only emotional sound he ever made. Too, the bestial
growl was almost the only meaty, physical thing he ever did. Otherwise he seemed to be composed
entirely of a frightful mind.
His sledge blow had not even nicked the mysterious blue substance of which the dome was composed.
John Sunlight hit again, again, and again—
He was still hitting when the Eskimo said something guttural.
IT was a sinister indication of John Sunlight’s mental control that he did not show surprise when the
Eskimo grunted. He did not know what the Eskimo had said. He did not speak the Eskimo tongue. And
an Eskimo was one of the last things he had expected to appear.
Particularly a well-fed, round butterball of an Eskimo with a happy smile, holding a large, frozen chunk of
walrus meat.
John Sunlight smiled. He could smile when he wished.
"How,
Eskimo," he said. "You fella savvy us fella plenty happy see you fella."
The Eskimo smiled from ear to ear.
Then he spoke in the best of English.
"How do you do," he said. "One of my brothers reported sighting you landing from a wrecked ship, and
stated that he believed you were without food, so I brought you some walrus meat."
John Sunlight’s bony, dark face did not change a particle. He was not a man who showed what he
thought.
"You live close?" John Sunlight asked.
The Eskimo nodded and pointed.
"Over there, a few hundred yards," he said.
"How many Eskimos are in your camp?" inquired John Sunlight.
"An even dozen, including myself," replied the Eskimo.
John Sunlight leveled a rigid arm at the Strange Blue Dome.
"What is it?" he asked.
The Eskimo stared straight at the blue dome, and looked faintly puzzled.
"I do not see anything," he said.
John Sunlight gave a violent start—in spite of the fact that he rarely showed emotion. This was different.
Insanity was the one thing he feared. Insanity—that would take away the incredible thing that was his
mind.
He thought, for a horrible instant, that he was imagining all this; that no blue dome was there.
"You do not see a great blue dome?" John Sunlight asked tensely.
The Eskimo shook his head elaborately.
"I see nothing of the kind," he said.
John Sunlight took hold of his lip with teeth that were unnaturally huge and white, and gave him the aspect
of a grinning skull when he showed them.
"What do you see?" he asked.
"Only snow," said the Eskimo calmly.
John Sunlight moved quickly then. He seized the Eskimo. The Eskimo was round and strong and
well-fed, but he was no match for John Sunlight’s mad strength.
John Sunlight hurled the Eskimo against the side of the blue dome. The Eskimo moaned and fell back to
the snow, unconscious.
"That must have felt pretty hard, for something you couldn’t see," John Sunlight snarled.
He then dragged the Eskimo back to the others, along with the large chunk of walrus meat. There was
not enough walrus meat for everyone, so John Sunlight divided it among—not the weakest, this
time—but the strongest. He wanted to make them stronger, so they could overcome the colony of
Eskimos. They cooked up the walrus meat, and the weak sat back in shaking silence and watched the
strong eat, although they were starving.
John Sunlight did not eat any himself. He was a strange man.
Meantime, the Eskimo regained consciousness. He rolled his little black grape eyes and said nothing.
He still had said nothing, even after John Sunlight had kicked in half of his ribs. He only lay silent,
coughing a little scarlet when he could not help it.
The Eskimo had not even admitted that he could see the Strange Blue Dome.
They had saved rifles off the ice-breaker. They took those and went to capture the rest of the Eskimos.
THE capture was easy enough. They merely walked in and presented the rifle snouts for the Eskimos’
inspection, and the Eskimos, after first laughing heartily as if they thought it was one huge joke, realized it
wasn’t, and became silent and beady-eyed with wonder.
There were four igloos, very large and fashioned with picture-book perfection from blocks of frozen
snow. Each igloo had a long tunnel for an entrance, and along these tunnels were smaller igloos used to
store food. There were also other very small igloos scattered around, in which the dogs slept. There were
not many dogs.
"What is that blue dome?" John Sunlight asked.
They stared at him wonderingly. "What blue dome?"
"Don’t you see it?"
The Eskimos all talked like that, and it made John Sunlight more gaunt and grim, until finally, to satisfy
himself of his own rationality, he broke down his order that no white person but himself should go near
the Strange Blue Dome. He took Civan and Giantia and Titania and some of the others to the dome and
made them feel of it, made them kick the sledge hammer out of the snow, pick it up and each strike a
great ringing blow on the mysterious sides of the dome.
"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.
If it had not been for the Eskimos staying so fat, he might never have succeeded.
ONE night an Eskimo crawled out of an igloo and faded away in the darkness. It was not really dark all
the time, this being the six-month arctic night, but they called it night anyway, because it was the time
when they slept.
The Eskimos had been making a fool of John Sunlight.
He had watched them days and days. They were eating; they must get food somewhere. He had not seen
them get it, and the reason was simple—a long robe of white arctic rabbit. When an Eskimo crawled
away, the white rabbit robe made him unnoticeable against the snow.
This time, the Eskimo accidentally got a brown hand out of the robe.
John Sunlight followed the Eskimo.
He watched the Eskimo go to the Strange Blue Dome, stand close beside it; saw a great portal swing
open in the dome and watched the Eskimo step inside, to come out later with an armload of something.
The blue portal closed behind the Eskimo.
John Sunlight caught the Eskimo, clubbed him senseless. The stuff the Eskimo was carrying looked like
sassafras bark—food. Compressed, dehydrated food, no doubt of that. But strange food, such as John
Sunlight had never heard of upon this earth.
John Sunlight stood thinking for a long time. He took the Eskimo’s white rabbit-skin robe. He put it on.
He stood against the blue dome where the Eskimo had stood.
And the portal opened.
John Sunlight walked into the mysterious Blue Dome.
It was now almost too late for Doc Savage, even had he known of John Sunlight, to prevent what was
written on the pages of the book of fate.
JOHN SUNLIGHT vanished.
For a day, two days, a week, he was not heard of. Not for two weeks.
On the second week, he was still not heard of; but something incredible happened. Titania, Giantia,
Civan, and some of the others saw an Eskimo turn into a black ghost.
The Eskimo who became a black ghost was the one who had vanished when John Sunlight disappeared
and had not been seen or heard from, either.
It was night. That is, it was darker night, because there were clouds. Titania, Giantia, Civan and the
others were wondering what they would do for food now that the supply taken from the Eskimo was
running low, and they were standing on a small drift and discussing it, when they saw the Eskimo running
toward them.
Screaming made them notice the Eskimo. He was shrieking—screeching and running. He came toward
them.
Suddenly, the Eskimo stopped. He stood facing them, his arms fixed rigidly in a
reaching-out-toward-them gesture. His mouth gaped a hole. Incredibly still, he stood. He might have
been an old copper statue which was greased.
The next instant, he might have been made of black soot. The change occurred instantaneously. One
instant, a copper man; the next, a black one.
Then smoke. Black smoke. Flying. Coming apart, swirling away in cold arctic wind; spreading, fading,
going mysteriously into nothingness.
There was no question about it. The Eskimo had turned into a black smoke ghost, and the smoke had
blown away.
Now it was too late for Doc Savage. And John Sunlight had not forgotten the score he had to settle with
Serge Mafnoff.
Chapter III. IS A DIPLOMAT DEAD?
SERGE MAFNOFF was an idealistic man, a fine citizen of the Soviet, and ambitious—all of these facts
his superiors in the Russian government recognized. They kept a kindly eye on Serge Mafnoff, and
shortly after he did his fine stroke of work by catching John Sunlight and sending him to Siberia, a reward
was forthcoming.
Serge Mafnoff’s reward was being appointed as an important diplomatic representative to the United
States of America, with headquarters in New York City. It was a pleasant job, one an ambitious man
would like; and Serge Mafnoff enjoyed it, and worked zealously, and his superiors smiled and nodded
and remarked that here was a man who was worth promoting still again. Serge Mafnoff was very happy
in New York City.
Then one evening he ran home in terror.
Actually ran. Dashed madly to the door of his uptown mansion, pitched inside, slammed the door. And
stood with all his weight jammed against the door, as if holding it shut against something that pursued him.
His servants remarked on the way he panted while he was doing that. They told the police, later, how he
had panted with a great sobbing fright.
It was interesting. And Serge Mafnoff had servants who liked to gossip. They gathered in the chauffeur’s
quarters over the garage, the most private place, and discussed it. They were concerned, too. They liked
Serge Mafnoff.
Everyone liked Serge Mafnoff. He was quite a newspaper figure. A fine representative of the type and
character of man the Soviet is trying to create, he was called.
Liking Serge Mafnoff made what happened that night infinitely more horrible to the servants.
The house of Serge Mafnoff in New York City was one long popular with residing diplomats, because it
had an impressive dignity and a fashionable location and other things that were desirable for a diplomat.
It was made of gray stone and sat, unlike most New York houses, in quite a considerable yard of its own
in which there was neatly tended shrubbery. There were two gates. From one gate a driveway led
around to the rear, where there was plenty of lawn and landscaped shrubbery and the two-car garage
摘要：

FORTRESSOFSOLITUDEADocSavageAdventureByKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2001BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI.THESTRANGEBLUEDOME?ChapterII.AMAN’SBLACKGHOST?ChapterIII.ISADIPLOMATDEAD??ChapterIV.BRONZEMANATTACKED?ChapterV.THEUNWILLINGIDOL?ChapterVI.THEGRIMBLACKWORLD?ChapterVII.BIGWOMEN...

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