The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker (9 page)

The office door opened under the careless hand of a man from the shop in the basement. Equally indifferent to visitors in the boss’s office, the man came forward with business that usually took precedence over everything else. Proofs of the next edition.

“Get out of here!” squalled the managing editor. “I’m busy! Can’t you see that?”

“But—” began the man, in wonder. “These gotta be back down right away or—”

“Beat it, I said! And take that stuff with you!”

But the boss was a little too late. Benson’s hand, with its long, steely fingers, was out in an imperative gesture. The pressman found himself handing over the proof sheets without quite knowing why.

Both the reporter and the editor tried to grab them from Benson’s hand. But he had already read the screaming headline:

LOOP BUILDING FALLS!

Benson snatched up a phone and got headquarters. He turned from a few brief words, and his eyes were flames as they flared at the editor.

“No Loop building has fallen, yet. But you get out this extra! That means that you have reason to believe a skyscraper will fall very soon. About the time this paper can get to the streets. What reason have you to believe such a thing?”

Both were still, like frightened animals in the face of the glare from the deadly, colorless eyes. Benson’s hand went out. It got the reporter’s collar. He hauled the man to him as if he had been a child, though the reporter was a bigger man.

“Tell me—or be indicted for murder that you might have prevented! For if a building falls—with your knowledge of it in advance—people will die.”

“There was nothing I could do!” bleated the reporter. “The guy told me a building would fall at about six thirty, to prove his story.” He straightened, and there was a certain dignity about him for a moment. He worked for a paper that was a bad smell among news mediums, but there were things he would not do.

“I was going to turn him over to the cops,” he said. “I swear it! But I guess he’d figured that out in advance. Anyhow, he belted me one with a sap or something. Knocked me out. When I came to, he was gone. Look.”

He pushed back hat and hair and showed a livid blue bruise above his right temple.

“What was I to do after that? If I told the cops, all the papers in town would have the story in ten minutes from the police blotter, and there’d go my scoop. Anyhow, the cops won’t be able to do anything, because the attack is coming from the air.”

“So you did nothing,” Benson said, voice brittle.

Again, for an instant, the reporter was not without dignity.

“I got in touch with Fort Sheridan. At any minute now, all the planes up there will be in the air, to circle over Chicago all night, if necessary, and keep the thing from happening—”

“They won’t be able to prevent it—as you’re very sure right now, or you wouldn’t have gotten out this extra,” Benson said. “Turn every effort to tracking down the man who calls himself Carlisle. Understand? Report to me at the Wheeler Hotel.”

He went out, not seeming to exert himself but moving with a speed that strained the eye to keep up with it.

Benson went to the hotel, to his topfloor headquarters. And there he learned for the first time that Nellie Gray had gone out with a man named Carlisle. Mac, who had come to the hotel before Benson, had already heard and was wild with anxiety.

Benson heard from Josh of the ruse that had been pulled. He, Benson, had supposedly sent word for her to bring concentrated sulphuric acid to the railroad station, so he could conduct a rough test on a rail. It was a simple, clever story that might have taken anyone in.

But Benson dared not take time to try to find her now.

“Mac,” he said, “go to the yacht club and get the plane from her moorings. Have her warmed up and ready for instant use.”

Mac went out. Benson took from one of the trunks, that formed a compact traveling laboratory, a small but beautifully complete recording device, equipped with radio amplifier, that would have amazed any of the big electrical-research laboratories.

The Avenger believed implicitly in the terrible prediction that a Loop skyscraper was to fall. He believed it would occur at about the specified hour, six thirty. It was now twenty after. In the ten minutes remaining time, it would be impossible to set a guard on every tall building in Chicago’s downtown section, or to find out what building was doomed.

Benson could do things beyond the powers of ordinary men. But even Benson could do nothing, now, to save the structure, whichever it might be.

But he might learn something vital from the impending tragedy.

He opened one of the windows wide, and set the recording device on the broad sill. He put on a soft-wax disk, and started it going. The disk wore itself out with nothing to record, but he had barely got the second in place when the sound commenced.

A faint, monotonous droning in the sky, like the noise of an airplane motor, but with an angrier, shriller snarl. You’d have sworn there was a plane up there.

But you could look your eyes out in the clear dusk and still not see a plane.

The noise from the sky grew louder, settled on one penetrating pitch. The recording plate steadily picked up the tone. And beside it, the cold-eyed man stared into the high heavens with eyes like ice pools in hell as he imagined the thing that must be happening not far away.

For just an instant his telescopic, colorless eyes picked up something. A little dot in the sky. No—two little dots. Even his eyes couldn’t make it out exactly. But it looked like a man walking up there.

A man walking, high in the sky, taking great strides, pushing something ahead of him—

Then the twin dots were gone in the face of the dying sun.

Benson’s recorder whirled on, getting the sound from heaven.

In the downtown lunchroom, the man with the gold tooth paid his check preparatory to going out. At that hour, after business had closed for the day, the building was almost deserted.

Up on the tenth floor, an office manager had two girls helping him get out a belated financial report to be used first thing in the morning. On the top floor, three scrubwomen were starting their cleaning task early. In the sub-basement, the assistant engineer had taken over for the night.

All told, there were probably twenty souls in the old structure.

The man with the gold tooth waved good night to the lunchroom proprietor, went to the sidewalk—then ducked back inside in a hurry.

“Hey!” he said. “Didn’t the papers say something about a noise in the sky yesterday that nobody could explain?”

“Yeah!” said the proprietor. “Why?”

“There’s a noise in the sky now,” said the man with the gold tooth. “Sounds a little like a plane. Only there’s no plane around that I can see.”

“It’s easy to miss a plane downtown, here,” said the proprietor, not very interested. “The buildings all around stick up so far you can only see a small piece of the sky at a time.”

But he stepped to the door and looked up, as others on the street everywhere were beginning to look up. He, too, heard the weird, sourceless droning sound sifting down from the empty heavens.

The sound was abruptly swelled and then blotted out by the roar of many plane motors. Eight planes, bearing the army insignia, swept over the city. They were the planes from Fort Sheridan.

“There,” the proprietor said. “That’s what you heard: the sound of those planes in the distance— Say,
what’s the matter with the building?
”

The massive skyscraper on whose ground floor he had his lunchroom had seemed to tremble, then to sway.

The proprietor suddenly screamed like a trapped beast and turned to run down the street. But he didn’t have a chance.

It seemed to take many seconds. Actually only three or four were consumed.

The skyscraper suddenly collapsed a story or two in the middle, like an accordion! Sections of facing that looked small compared with the rest of the structure but were actually tons in weight crumbled off and fell. Then the building did that dreadful accordion act again, lower down—and after that the whole thing toppled, like a tall man with his feet swept out from under him.

The building was eighteen stories tall. The thunder of its fall was like the end of the world; it was heard for miles. All over town, people listened—and then started running.

But none of that would do any good for the tiny mites of humans buried in the huge collapse.

The fire engines swept up. Squad cars came. In some of the squad cars, cases of gas masks had been placed. In everyone’s mind, now, were the headlines suggesting that an enemy invasion was in the making. This building had no doubt been blasted by an aerial bomb, and perhaps gas was to follow.

But when men began to dig in the dust-clouded debris, the bomb theory was swiftly discarded, and once again mouths took on a trim line and eyes were appalled and outraged.

The steel girders—what of them were left intact enough for examination—looked like rotten cheese. They were crumbled and flawed like punk that has been stepped on. Enemy invasion? To hell with that idea! The building had fallen because, years ago, poor steel had been used in its construction, and that steel had at last given away.

The Avenger was not among the investigators.

By the time the awful rumble of the catastrophe rolled from center to rim of the city in a tidal wave of sound, Benson was at the yacht harbor basin at the controls of his personal flying fortress.

He had completed a wax recording of the noise from the sky before the appearance of the army planes drowned it out with their speeding motors, and then had raced for his plane. Now, with the Fort Sheridan ships wheeling through the air in search of something to shoot at, Benson took aloft.

In the abandoned ferry, Smitty’s first task was to make sure there weren’t spying eyes around, and guns pointed at his back, before he started making the investigation ordered by Benson.

With his flash lighting a narrow path before him, he made the rounds of the hull.

A car ferry, designed to take a dozen heavily loaded freight cars on its flat, ugly top, is a tremendous thing. They’re as big as a ship and loom high from the water when empty. There is ample room in their vast interiors for an excellent hangar, though this was probably the first case on record in which one had been put to such a use.

It took Smitty a long time to search around the thing. But finally he had the rough outlines in his mind.

The interior of the hull was about eighty or ninety feet by a hundred and fifty feet. Underneath were good, sound timbers—not beach sand. The ferry might be abandoned, but it was still amazingly whole. Smitty had an idea the thing could be floated again, with only a little pumping required to take care of the leakage around the almost watertight hangar door.

It was amazingly well equipped, too. There was a small diesel motor that could generate enough power to supply light for electric bulbs studded around the hull. There were many drums of aviation gasoline and oil. There was a fairly complete machine shop in a corner.

In the other corner was a lot of stuff that puzzled Smitty very much. He was an electrical engineer of extraordinary ability; but this seemed to verge somehow into the range of practical chemistry, and it had him baffled.

In this other corner were several tanks at least forty feet long and ten feet deep. They looked like swimming pools, but with the lake right outside to be used for a pool, it was unlikely they were used as such.

Over the great tanks were light cranes, with ratio pulley blocks showing that they were operated by hand. The cranes were obviously designed to lower large objects into the tanks.

“But what,” mused Smitty, “do they dunk into these big vats, and why?”

He wet his hand from the colorless fluid in the tanks and smelled his fingers. No smell. The stuff looked like clear water. So he swallowed a sip or two—a highly dangerous thing to do with a doubtful chemical.

However, he got away with it. The stuff
was
water. Just plain water. The same ordinary H
₂
0 as had been in the shallow little pans in the Gant brothers’ laboratory.

So the gang here dipped something carefully into plain water, with the aid of painstakingly erected hand-cranes! It seemed a kind of reasonless thing to do.

Beyond one of the tanks, Smitty saw several drums, about the size of the gasoline drums but set apart from them. He went to them, and saw that the tops were removable. There had been labels painted on the drums, but these had been scratched away.

A few letters on one could faintly be made out. They were: “. . . IUM . . . EARA . . .”

Smitty lifted the top of one of the drums and played his flashlight down into it. The steel cask was half filled with a whitish, fatty-looking stuff not unlike lard. Again Smitty, brilliant in electrical research but no chemist, was baffled.

He took an old envelope from his pocket, put a pinhead dab of the whitish stuff in it, and folded the paper many times around it. Benson would know what it was. The chief, Smitty had long ago decided, knew everything.

The giant wandered over to the machine-shop corner. There he found a short-wave radio transmission set operated by batteries. It wasn’t equipped to handle the special, ultrashort-wave band used by Benson, but Smitty enlarged the transmitter’s scope by a few deft, homemade additions that would have made an ordinary radio engineer’s eyes bulge with admiration.

He called the chief at temporary headquarters, and got no answer. There wasn’t any answer because MacMurdie and the chief were at that moment taking off from Yacht Harbor. And Josh Newton, at headquarters, had not yet been familiarized with the secret radio code. But Smitty didn’t know that.

He put the transmitting set back in the condition in which he had found it, and started toward the broken-plank door.

He stopped just short of it and listened hard.

Out on the lake, somewhere near, was sounding the smooth roar of a marine motor. And about two seconds were enough to tell that it was heading rapidly this way.