Lord of Atlantis. John Russell Fearn
Читать онлайн книгу.
him with an interstellar canvas, thus ensuring that the series would remain ahead of reality.
Fearn’s strategy was a great success, and the Amazon novels retained their popularity, ending only with his tragically early death in 1960. By then he had written a further twenty Amazon novels, and made preliminary notes for his next (which would later be written by Fearn’s biographer, Philip Harbottle).
Long after Fearn’s death, his entire Amazon series would eventually see print from the pioneering US small press Gryphon Books in limited paperback editions, and later by the Canadian Battered Silicon Dispatch Box small press in their hardcover Omnibus series.
This new Borgo paperback series will be the first trade edition of all twenty-one of these later novels by Fearn, beginning with the seventh novel in the original series. First published in 1949 as Conquest of the Amazon, I have edited it slightly as World Beneath Ice (The Golden Amazon Saga, Book One) so that it can be read and enjoyed by new readers who may be totally unfamiliar with what had gone before. Subsequent novels have also been slightly edited for modern readers.
The publishers hope that this new series may create many more “fans of the Amazon.” Meanwhile, any reader interested in seeking out the earlier six Golden Amazon novels will find that they are readily available on the internet, and in numerous earlier paperback and hardcover editions.
* * * *
To date, readers can enjoy the following new Borgo editions:
Book One: World Beneath Ice
In destroying the threat of an alien invasion, the Golden Amazon had inadvertently caused a decline in the sun’s heat, encasing Earth in an ice sheet that threatens to eliminate humanity. The Amazon encounters Abna, a descendant of Atlantis, stronger and even more scientifically advanced than she, and the ruler of an Atlantean colony still surviving in a protected environment on Jupiter. She refuses his offer of marriage, but agrees to form an alliance in order to restore the sun and save the Earth. One thing that Abna has not told the Amazon is that all the females of his race have been wiped out by a bacilli infection....
CHAPTER ONE
UPHEAVAL
Commander Ronald Clifton, chief navigator of the space-liner Atom Cloud, stood gazing out of the big observation window of the bridge. He was looking at something he could not quite understand, something that did not fit into his years of experience in the spaceways between Earth and Mars. Presently he turned, speaking in his clipped voice.
“Have you a moment, Mr. Claxton?” The second navigator glanced up from studying his instruments and moved to his superior’s side. The commander motioned through the window. “What the blazes do you imagine that is?” he asked.
Claxton gazed steadily. Here in the utter depths of space, some millions of miles from Earth—from which the liner was heading in the direction of Mars—a most unusual spacecraft was visible. In these sheer distances where no air intervened, where the sun blazed with relentless, blinding glory, it was hard to estimate mileage.
The object at which both men were staring was probably 3,000 miles away—an enormous wheel, it seemed.
“Not the least idea, sir,” Claxton said. “Looks a bit like one of those alien spacecraft we had trouble with some time ago.”
“Can’t be that; they were all destroyed by the Golden Amazon. Anyway, that thing is much bigger. Get the reflector set up, Mr. Claxton.”
“Right, sir.” The second navigator turned to the powerful telescopic apparatus and adjusted its light-trapping devices and screens so that it was prismatically reflecting the distant object onto a broad viewing screen. The Commander gazed at it and gave a long whistle of surprise.
“Not a disc, sir, as we thought,” Claxton said. “It’s a globe of some sort with glass circles all around it.”
“Yes—if that’s what they are,” the Commander said. “They might even be lenses of great size. Sixteen of them circling that ball like a necklace. There seems to be windows in the ball, too. I certainly never saw anything like it before. Apparently it’s heading in the direction of Earth.”
“Might be dangerous,” Claxton suggested. “Do you think we ought to warn them back home? They’re in no shape for meeting any possible menace while rebuilding everything from the great glacier catastrophe.”
“It’s not our job to issue warnings, Mr. Claxton. That’s a panic action. We’ll report what we have seen and leave it at that. Attend to it, will you?”
“Immediately, sir.” The Commander returned his attention to the big window. It was his responsibility to get this huge liner safely to Mars, not conjecture on the meaning of a strange spacecraft. Nevertheless, he did wonder quite a lot about it as he watched its glittering circle slowly sink into the abyss in the direction of far-flung Earth.
On Earth itself the information concerning the weird craft did not excite undue attention, chiefly because those in charge of world affairs had more than enough on their minds in restoring order after chaos. Only a few months had passed since the whole world had been encased in a cocoon of ice—the Great Glacier, as it had been called—created by the near death of the Sun. That the Sun now blazed again upon the world and surrounding planets, as hot and friendly as of yore, was entirely owing to the combined sciences of Violet Ray Brant—the Golden Amazon—and Abna, a descendant of the lost city of Atlantis, whose home now lay beneath the distant Red Spot of Jupiter. The Amazon herself, acclaimed at last throughout the world for her stupendous feat in rekindling the orb of day, had virtually become dictatress of Earthly policy. Since she had always taken a leading part in world affairs, especially when scientific problems arose, her rise to absolute power really signified but little. She was pleased—and nothing more—that the Earth’s inhabitants had at last decided to elect her of their own volition; otherwise nothing was changed.
Day by day she sat in the headquarters of central London, from where came all the world’s orders, discussing plans with engineers and architects for rebuilding, arranging new social levels, planning endlessly to bring an ordered, beautiful world out of the chaos left by the glacier. Parts of London were already rebuilt. The Dodd Space Line to other worlds was operating again, chiefly so that reconstruction could begin on other planets as well, they also having suffered severely from the sun’s near-extinction.
When the news of the strange craft reached the Amazon, she sat studying its details outlined in the report, oblivious for the moment of the helpers on either side of her.
There was Chris Wilson, Chief Executive of the Dodd Space Line—a fleshy, pink-faced man verging on late middle age. Next to him, musing over a new social outline for the youth of the world, was his daughter Ethel, close on thirty, black-haired, blue-eyed, intensely vital and alert. Farther along the conference table sat Beatrice Wilson, mellow and middle-aged, Ethel’s mother; and opposite her were Commander and Ruth Kerrigan, formerly Dodd, the owners of the space line.
The Amazon handed the report to Wilson without comment. The passing years, so marked now in the elderly members present, did not exist for her, She still looked about twenty-five, graceful as a tigress, amber-skinned, her beautiful face unmarred by a single line. The scarlet in which she was dressed emphasized the flowing gold of her shoulder-length hair and the deep purple of her eyes. Even had her attractiveness been that of beauty alone, it would have been fascinating—but this was her least vital gift. Her power lay in her superhuman strength and uncanny scientific knowledge, both gifts wished on her by the skill of a long dead surgeon during her infancy. Chris Wilson, handing the report to his neighbour, said: “We’ve nothing like that in the spaceways.”
“No, we haven’t.” The Amazon sat musing, her gaze fixed absently through the vast window onto the girders and skeletal buildings of reviving London. “And we also know that the colonists on the Moon and Mars have not. Mercury is dead, Venus is completely uninhabitable. So this craft is either from some unknown spot in the void and contains explorers—or, more likely, it has come from Jupiter.”
Ethel Wilson gave a start. “Aunt Vi, you mean it might be Abna,