Fortress of Solitude: A Doc Savage Adventure Read online

  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?”

  “No.”

  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 ice-breaker, 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 3

  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 with the chauffeur’s quarters above.

  The other gate admitted to a walk which led straight to the mansion door. The house itself was generally square; had two stories and an attic, part of which Serge Mafnoff had walled off and air-conditioned for his private study. Behind the house was a sloping park which slanted down, unbroken except for two boulevards, to the wide, teeming Hudson River and the inspiring Palisades beyond.

  Serge Mafnoff screamed in his study.

  Every servant in the great mansion heard the shriek, and each one of them jumped violently.

  The cook cut the forefinger of her left hand to the bone with the butcher knife, so great was her start. The finger leaked a thread of crimson for some time thereafter—which turned out to be important.

  The scream brought all the servants running upstairs. They piled into the study. They stopped. It was impossible to believe their eyes.

  Impossible to comprehend that Serge Mafnoff could have become a black man.

  * * *

  Serge Mafnoff was all black. Not only his skin, his fingernails, his eyes, his teeth—his mouth was open in the most awful kind of a strangling grimace. All black. That evening he had put on pants and vest of a gray suit, and a robe the nationalistic red color of the Soviet: but these were now the hue of drawing ink.

  A jet-black statue, standing.

  The butler moaned. The chauffeur made a croaking noise. The cook’s hand shook, and her cut finger showered red drops over the floor.

  “Comrade Mafnoff!” shrieked the maid, who was a Communist.

  The black statue turned to a writhing black ghost. Or so it seemed to the servants. The whole man—they knew it was Serge Mafnoff, because the features of the all-black statue had been recognizable as his—appeared to turn into a cloud of sepia vapor.

  A black ghost, it was like. It swirled and changed shape a little, then came swaying toward them, a ghostly, disembodied, unreal monstrosity.

  Straight toward them, it floated.

  The cook screeched and threw more crimson over the walls and floor. But the chauffeur snatched a pair of heavy pliers out of his hip pocket and hurled them at the black horror.

  The pliers went through the thing and dented the plaster of the opposite wall.

  Then, suddenly, impossibly, and before their eyes, the black thing silently vanished. It did not spread; it seemed to fade, disintegrate, go into nothingness.

  “I killed it!” the chauffeur screamed.

  Then the only sound in the room, for long moments, was the frightened rattling of the breath in their throats. The cook’s hand dripped.

  They were looking for some trace of Serge Mafnoff. Hurting their eyes with looking. And seeing nothing.

  “I—I couldn’t—have killed him,” the chauffeur croaked.

  “Ugh!” the butler said.

  They were all primed for the next shriek. It came from downstairs, a man’s voice in a long peal of imperative supplication and terror.

  The cook barked out something hoarse, and fainted. She fell directly in the center of the door, just inside the attic den which was Serge Mafnoff’s study.

  The other servants left her lying there and raced downstairs to find out who had given that last scream, and what about.

  There was a second bellow, just about the time all the servants, excepting the unconscious cook, reached the ground floor. This whoop was out in the back yard, and the whole neighborhood heard it.

  Out into the back yard dashed the servants to investigate. They didn’t know what they expected to find. Certainly it wasn’t what they did find. Which was nothing.

  Nothing at all. Only dark, cold night, and the gloomy clumps of shrubbery, which was evergreen and hence unaffected by the fact that the time was winter. Crouching black wads of bushes, and the sounds of the city—honking of automobile horns, a distant elevated, and the bawling of a steamship down on the Hudson.

  They searched and searched.

  Then they told the police about it. The police told the newspapers, who printed a great deal about the affair.

  Doc Savage read the newspapers regularly.

  Chapter 4

  BRONZE MAN ATTACKED

  Not everybody in the world had heard of Doc Savage.

  But too many had. Doc Savage—Clark Savage, Jr.—had of late been trying to evade further publicity, and he had an understanding, finally, with the newspaper press associations, with some of the larger newspapers, and with most of the fact-story magazines extant
. They weren’t to print anything about him. They were to leave his name out of their headlines.

  Now, if anyone heard of Doc Savage, it would be by word-of-mouth only. “Haven’t you heard—Doc Savage has invented a cure for cancer, they say.” The surgical and medical skill of Doc Savage was probably his greatest ability. “I hear that new wrestler from Czechoslovakia is a human Hercules, built something along the lines of Doc Savage.”

  The physical build of Doc Savage got attention wherever he appeared, for he was a giant, although so well proportioned that, seen from a distance, he resembled a man of ordinary proportions.

  Talk, talk—there was always plenty of talk about Doc Savage.

  “I hear the Man of Bronze has invented an atom motor that could drive the Queen Mary across the Atlantic with a spoonful of coal.” They called him the “Man of Bronze” because of the unusually deep-tan hue which tropical suns had given his skin. They—their talk—attributed fantastic inventions to him. Conversation made him a superman, a mental colossus.

  Really, Doc Savage was a normal fellow who had been taken over by scientists as a child and trained until early manhood, so that he was rather unusual but still human enough. He had missed the play-life of normal children, and so he was probably more subdued, conscious that he hadn’t gotten everything out of life.

  Talk, talk—it attributed all kinds of fantastic doings and powers to Doc Savage.

  But it was only talk. Nobody, for instance, listening to it, could find out exactly where Doc Savage was at a given time. No enemy could listen to the gossip and get enough real information to lay a plan to kill the Man of Bronze.

  His enemies were many. They had to be. Because his life work was an unusual one. That was why he had been scientifically trained; he had been prepared from childhood, in every possible way, to follow a career of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers, even in the far corners of the earth.

  A strange career—his father’s idea. His father who was no longer living. His father had located a fabulous source of gold in the Central American mountains, realized such a wealth should do good, and had trained his son, Clark Savage, Jr.—Doc Savage—to use the wealth to do good. Also to use it to right wrongs.