The Sky Walker

CHAPTER I The Noise From The Sky!

It was half past three in the afternoon. That is a little early for the cocktail hour, so there weren’t many people in Mike’s Tavern. There were enough to provide plenty of witnesses, however. And all were witnesses, because all saw the crazy thing that happened, that day in Chicago.

Mike’s Tavern is on Belmont Avenue, not far from Lincoln Park. Probably the location was the reason why the thing happened there, because the source of the weird trouble was later disclosed to have been Lincoln Park. At least, that was as close as they could narrow it down.

Four men and a couple of women were sitting on the leather-covered chromium stools along the bar at Mike’s. Five of the six had drinks in front of them. The sixth had finished his and ordered another. A martini. He had already had too many martinis; so when the thing happened the first time, the rest just laughed at him and said he was drunk.

He had the empty cocktail glass in his hand and was twiddling it around by the stem while Mike, the bartender, poured amber fluid into a fresh glass.

And the glass the man held on the bar suddenly went to pieces!

There was a sound from it first. A thin, wailing sound, as if a violin note had been played nearby and the glass was resonating to it. The thin, wailing sound ended in a sharp pinggg, and the glass seemed to explode in his hand.

For a few seconds the rest were surprised into silence. Then the man sitting next to him laughed.

“You’ve had enough,” he said. “Breaking a glass like that. What’d you do — hit it against the bar?”

The man whose glass had broken was staring stupidly at the pieces.

“I didn’t break it,” he said. His eyes were wide and staring, with something like horror in them. “I didn’t hit it against anything. I was just holding it.”

“Then you squeezed it too hard,” his friend taunted. “Boy, you don’t know your own strength.”

“I didn’t squeeze it! I didn’t do anything to it. It just gave a kind of funny sound and broke.”

“Go on — something had to make it break—”

On the shelf behind the bartender was a row of similar glasses. There were eighteen or twenty of them. The man who was speaking had suddenly stopped his words, because the row of glasses had started to sing.

From each of them was coming the thin wail of sound that had preceded the breaking of the glass the man held. It was uncanny; as if the glasses had abruptly come alive. They shrieked like little lost souls, and then broke!

Every last one of them broke, as if each had been hit squarely by a small bullet that shattered it to a thousand pieces.

“Well!” said Mike, the bartender, eyes goggling. “That ain’t the fault of anybody who’s had a few too many!”

They all stared at the fragments. And all felt a chill, creepy sensation as they looked. Glasses don’t just sing, and then break — all by themselves. But these had.

It was at about this time that the seven in the place began to hear the sound from outside. In the sky, it seemed. It was a loud, steady drone, like the snarl of a motor. Like an airplane motor, save that it seemed to be snarling a shade more shrilly than the usual plane motor.

They paid little attention to it. Planes over Chicago are too frequent. Anyway, they were too busy looking at the glasses. A score of empty cocktail glasses, with no human hand near them, that had sung a weird, small dirge and then died in a thousand fragments.

Outside the tavern, people were paying plenty of attention to the sound from the sky. At any rate, they all swore later it had come from the sky. At first, people paid little heed because they, too, had figured it was just the noise of a plane motor, and such noises are common to a big city. But then a few began craning their necks to look up into the sky; then a few more did the same, and pretty soon everyone around was doing it.

Crowds looking into the sky, and then staring at each other, and finally staring back up again. The faces of most of them were a bit pale, and all of them showed perplexity.

There wasn’t anything up there to see!

The droning sound was about like that of a fast-moving plane, much lower down than the transports fly. But there was no plane to be seen in the heavens. It was a cloudless, sunny afternoon, too.

The sound from the sky stayed over Lincoln Park. It seemed to move in a wide circle, since it was loudest first at the north end of the park and then at the south end. It faded a little and gained a little, as if whatever made it came now nearer the ground and now higher.

But all the time there was not one thing in the empty heavens to make the sound.

Down in the news offices of Chicago’s biggest newspaper, the Daily Record, the city editor began to think the whole town was going crazy. That was because of the telephone calls that suddenly began pouring in.

It seemed that Mike wasn’t the only person who had had glasses sing and break. A score of people phoned in similar accounts. A woman had been looking at a picture, and the glass over it had suddenly shivered into bits. A man had been lifting a water tumbler to his lips when it abruptly acted like a bomb and went off in his hand. Several big plate-glass windows shattered. And all these things happened with no human hand near enough to account for the violence.

Each person telephoning the paper and demanding an explanation reported, as an afterthought, hearing the droning noise in the sky.

So many people phoned that, crazy as it all sounded, the editor put a veteran reporter on it. Of such things are interesting items made.

The droning sound, heard loudest over Lincoln Park, had been heard in the Loop, Chicago’s downtown section, too. The reporter assigned to the story had heard it.

“Hell, it’s just a passenger transport,” he said. “Something funny about the pitch of the motor is breaking glass.”

However, no airplane motor had ever had results like that before. And there was always the undeniable fact that there was, after all, no plane in the sky to see.

The reporter phoned Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago. Their radio operator promised to send two army ships to the area and have them investigate. After all, planes must have licenses, and if some mysterious flier was stunting around Chicago, they wanted to know it.

The army ships got down to Lincoln Park within a quarter of an hour. They got down there while the droning noise was still coming from the sky. They flew around the place like excited hens hunting for chicks near a duckpond.

And they saw just what people on the ground saw.

Which was nothing at all. Noise was coming from the sky, but there was nothing in the sky to make the noise.

The veteran reporter phoned Northwestern University, and professors there studied the seismograph in the laboratory. The delicate instrument reported no earth tremors of any sort. The sound, it seemed, was coming from nothing connected with the ground.

Then the noise faded out, as unexplainably as it had faded in. There was no more droning sound, and no more glass around Lincoln Park sang a tortured shrill song and broke.

The reporter kept on doing his job. He got in touch with various city engineers and scientists to get their theories about it all. He was beginning to think the whole business was a great joke by now.

He got a flock of theories.

A prominent engineer said that the upper atmosphere was heavy and dense in spite of the cloudlessness of the sky. It caught the noise of a boiler blowoff out west on Belmont Avenue, resonated and echoed the sound of the escaping steam, and produced the queer droning noise.

A scientist at Northwestern University said that perhaps the sound had been reflected from far away. A plane, perhaps a hundred miles off, was the source of the sound. Then the noise had traveled along under the stratosphere, bounced along like a golf ball on hard pavement, till it was heard in Chicago.

It was, he explained, like the transmission of an image for a hundred miles in a mirage, only in this case a sound and not an image had been transmitted.

The commissioner of parks had the most natural-sounding explanation.

Nearly all of Lincoln Park was torn up with a new boulevard plan. Lots of pneumatic drills and hammers were working. The commissioner thought they’d all joined in in a huge diapason, and the sound had swelled into a drone that seemed to come from the sky.

Nobody came within a million miles of the truth. And no one treated the sound, after it was over, as anything other than a slightly uncanny jest.

The city forgot it in the news of the early evening.

Near the south end of the park, not far from the statue of Lincoln, a new pavilion had been erected in a strategic spot. It was two floors tall, a shell of steel and prefabricated material. The top floor was open, and it was a nice place to sit in the evening. Benches were up there.

A couple of dozen people were sitting there the evening of the day when the noise had been heard. They weren’t moving around much; were doing nothing to shake the pavilion in any way.

But, just the same, the pavilion acted as if they’d somehow strained it beyond capacity. For suddenly the structure collapsed.

There was no warning sound of any kind. There was no preliminary tremor. The pavilion simply collapsed!

There was a growing roar as tons of steel and material began grinding together as it twisted and sank in a heap. The roar had overtones of shrill horror from the humans trapped on the top floor. There was a final crash and a cloud of dust. Then there was terrible silence.

People ran toward it. Police came up on motorcycles and in squad cars. An ambulance clanged there in a hurry, followed by three more. But there was more need for death cars than for ambulances.

Of the people who had been in the pavilion, only six were alive, and they were hideously mangled. The rest, seventeen, were dead, crushed by the girders.

The cops began poking around in the debris.

As they looked, their mouths began to take on a grimmer line, and their eyes grew bleak. It was the way they looked when they investigated the trail of a murderer. And, as far as they could see, that was just what they were doing. Only in this case the murderer seemed not to be a lawless individual, but a highly respected, great corporation.

They were examining the girders, when their faces took on that look. The girders supplied by the corporation.

The heavy, steel I-beams looked as if they had been made out of soft wood that had been riddled by termites. The steel seemed to have a cheesy, granular structure, that was flawed and cracked in countless places.

The metal, supposed to be tough and dense, looked like brittle glass that had been dropped and shattered.

“So that’s the kind of junk the city gets on a big job,” growled one of the cops.

“No wonder it fell down!” another jerked out. “Why, it’s murder, that’s what it is!”

A great tragedy coming close on the heels of a joke. And drowning out all memory of the joke.

A mere noise in the sky couldn’t be expected to hold the news limelight when a pavilion had collapsed and killed seventeen people.