The Sky Walker

CHAPTER XVIII Backfire!

Fifteen minutes later, one of the men threw the switch that opened the hangar doors cut into the end of the ferry’s hull. The little motor moaned and the doors slowly opened. The man stopped the diesel motor, and the lights went out.

Through the big doorway came bright moonlight. This was the first time the strange plane had soared the skies save in sunny daylight. But so bright was the moon that the effect would be the same. You’d hear the weird droning sound in the sky — made by a motor a little higher speed than most and hence emitting an angrier, shriller snarl. You’d hear an eerie whistling — made by wind shrieking over wing surfaces when the planes motor was cut and she drifted down. You’d look up into a sky so moonlit that even a bird could be seen at a thousand yards.

And you’d see nothing.

There’d be half a dozen men, instead of just a pilot, to see, this time, along with the motor. But at a couple of miles you wouldn’t be able to pick them out.

Darcey got into the plane first. He seated himself, seeming to sit on moonbeams and nothing else. The rest of the men followed him. Carlisle was last.

Carlisle took a final look around, struck a match, and lit the end of the soaked rope. The other end dipped down into one of the several dozen gasoline drums. The improvised fuse sputtered a little, then took hold.

Only it burned faster than any candle wick.

Carlisle waved to the bound Avenger and his aides.

“So long,” he said. “How do you like your toasting? Brown, or black?”

The half-inch rope smoldered steadily, with the flame traveling toward the gas drum. The drum would act like a big bomb when the flame got inside. It would scatter burning gasoline to the farthest ends of the ferry.

“The one thing I couldn’t be sure of,” came a voice, “was that Darcey would get into the plane, too. But his anxiety to be sure the plane was later destroyed would guarantee that, of course. That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Chief!” Smitty fairly yelled. “I thought you were still out. I was even afraid you were dead, after those clouts they gave you with their gun barrels.”

Benson stirred in his bonds and managed to sit straighter against the timbers. The dim light from the moon outside showed his set, dead face as a white blotch. The cold, colorless eyes in that face, like ice in a polar dawn, seemed to generate their own pale light. He was bound. Death seemed near — and inescapable! Yet never had he seemed more invincible, more awe inspiring. His paralyzed, emotionless face was like the grim, unyielding countenance of fate.

“You can roll to a blow so that you almost avoid it entirely and yet seem to take it,” he said, “if you’re expecting to be knocked out. And wanting to be.”

“You…. wanted to be knocked out?” gasped the giant.

“Yes,” said Benson, voice as cold and calm as his paralyzed face. “Nellie, can you make it?”

“In a little while,” came Nellie Gray’s voice.

“Whoosh!” cut in Mac. “What’s this all about? Ye didn’t really want to be captured, Muster Benson?”

“After I got here and saw how things were working out, yes,” said Benson. “Because it is up to us to make Darcey destroy himself, since legal justice can never reach him. He was making no idle boast when he said there were no loose ends to incriminate him in a court of law. That’s true. In all the things he has done, he has left no clue against himself.”

“But ye don’t know all the things he’s done—”

“We can guess them all save for a few details,” said The Avenger quietly.

“The Gant brothers discovered that Glassite would become as utterly transparent as glass when dipped in water filmed with barium stearate. They conceived the plane idea, to be used in wartime. An invisible plane would be handy. They also discovered some sort of vibrator, probably an oscillator-type with amplifier, that, when tuned to the exact chemical analysis of a substance, would destroy that substance. The blueprints Darcey was so kind as to leave in the car outside will give us the more precise details. But the disintegrator, set on steel, for example, would so disarrange the molecular structure that the steel would almost fall apart, like rotten punk. That would make buildings fall. If kept directed at steel long enough it would rearrange the molecules into the simplest of all forms, which is that of hydrogen. Thus solid steel would pass off as a gas — which is what happened to the railroad rails, and the nails and screws holding that depot together.

“The Gant brothers must have discovered that their inventions weren’t good for war. The barium stearate treatment was slow, and the microscopic film making the plastic invisible would only last a couple of hours. The treatment was wearing off a little when you and I saw the ‘ghost’ plane, Mac. Also, to destroy something, a bit of that substance had to be obtained beforehand and the vibrator tuned to its exact pitch. Impossible in war conditions.

“But Abel Darcey, friend of the Gants, saw in the two things the answer to an old dream of his. He, through his bank, really owned Catawbi Mines. Not Colonel Ringset. Darcey could foreclose any time he pleased. Now, if a sure market could be arranged for the inexhaustible Catawbi ore, and Darcey took it over, he’d soon become one of the richest men on earth.

“With the invisible plane and the disintegrator, he could enforce a market through fear— How about it, Nellie?”

“Almost,” Nellie’s strained voice.

“Darcey stole the inventions,” Benson went on. “Later, when the brothers tried to tell the police what had really happened when the pavilion collapsed, he decided they’d better die; so he had both brothers murdered. No loose ends there. And no loose ends later. So I went through his papers, impersonating him, and found plenty that proved to me that he was guilty, but nothing fit for a court—”

“How did ye know to impersonate Darcey to begin with?” said Mac.

“Because of the nails that had disappeared from the rubber heels of his shoes. Nellie reported that. When Darcey’s secretary saw them and took it upon herself to have the shoes repaired, she put the brand of Cain on Darcey’s forehead.”

“But I thought that only indicated his life was in danger — as the Gants’ lives were when the nails were taken from their shoes!”

“Not at all,” said Benson. “I’ve said the vibrator could destroy a given substance only when experiments had been made on a sample. Well, the Gants, in experimenting with the destructor in their laboratory, picked a steel with the same chemical analysis as their shoenails. So the nails were destroyed, too. Incidentally when the vibrator destroyed the pavilion, it hit a pitch for America Steel that also ruined a lot of glass with the same resonating pitch.

“However, Darcey, to destroy competing steel but not Catawbi steel with its trace of chromium, had to experiment with samples, too. He did it in his office late at night. The nails disappeared from his shoes, also. That report of Nellie’s told me instantly and finally who we were after. There was a slight chance that Ringset was also in on the plot, so I sent Josh for a last check-up on him.”

Mac was watching the slow creep of the flame along the rope toward the gas drum. But even that couldn’t kill his curiosity.

“So ye went to Darcey’s headquarters, made up as him, and searched his papers?”

“Yes,” nodded Benson. “And while I was there, some lieutenant phoned a report of Josh’s capture, and the rest of you would be taken soon. I left and started for Ludlow to help. I ran into Darcey on the way, tied him up as he said, and came on. I was going to the ferry, still as Darcey, after I’d found out whether or not the girls were safe at the hotel. But I tangled with you. Then, at the woods lane, I saw from a slight distance that there were armed men hiding. I thought my best way into the ferry would be as the leader who decoyed you to your capture. So I saw to it that we were taken.”

“And we were taken!” said the Scot bitterly. “The skurly succeeds. We’re helpless here, and he’s in the sky on his way to knock over another building.”

“We’re not so helpless, Mac,” said Benson. “Nellie—”

“Finished,” said Nellie, standing up and shedding rope loops. “I’ve hacked my wrists to bits, though.”

The thing that had thudded into the wood between her and Rosabel before Benson’s capture had been The Avenger’s throwing knife, Ike.

Nellie had been sawing awkwardly at her bonds ever since. Now she was free.

She cut the loops from around Benson. The gray fox of a man trod on the burning rope and extinguished the flame, then loosed Smitty and Mac, Rosabel and Josh.

“We’re all right,” said Josh in a troubled tone. “But down in Chicago some unnamed building will fall—”

“No,” said The Avenger. “It won’t.”

They stared at him.

“They have very carefully built up the fear, in Chicago, of invasion from the air by some secret enemy,” Benson explained. “They have gone to great lengths to build up that terror. And in doing so, they have gone to great lengths — to plot their own destruction.” He stood before them, tautly erect, not a big man, yet seeming to fill the place. His death-white face was turned toward the point in the horizon toward the plane had set her nose.

The gang stared out through the invisible cabin walls as the mystery plane soared, at nine thousand feet, over the twinkling lights of South Chicago. It was about ten, now. The lake was a sheet of silver in the moonlight.

The skywalker!

Only there were eight skywalkers, now. Carlisle, and Darcey, and six gunmen. Of the six, one had Mike’s .22 slug in his shoulder and was sweating and swearing with pain. Another was still unconscious from having been so expertly creased by Mike’s little leaden pea.

“Will a man be standing by in the cruiser in the center of the lake to pick us up after we land and sink the plane?” Darcey asked nervously.

“Of course,” said Carlisle.

The sleek young killer was composed. Darcey was not. This was his first time aboard the special craft that had, at his orders, flown and destroyed five times before. He was very nervous. Yet he’d had to stick with the plane till it was finally destroyed, for his own protection.

“What’s the building we get this time?” Carlisle said, as the plane droned over the southern part of Chicago proper, with the tall buildings of the Loop just ahead.

“The Insurance Exchange,” said Darcey, dabbing at his moist forehead. “That’s one of the buildings in which both Catawbi steel and regular steel were used. It will, once more, show the superiority of Catawbi metal.”

“How is it,” said Carlisle curiously, “that this little vibrating dingbat can pick ’em so fine? Steel’s steel, I should think. Why isn’t Catawbi steel disintegrated?”

“I don’t think even the Gant brothers quite knew,” Darcey said. “There is a slight trace of chromium in Catawbi ore, and that seems to make the metal respond to a little different pitch of the vibrator. That’s all they could say about it.”

“Whatever makes the difference, it’s lucky for us—” Carlisle started to say. Then he pointed through the cabin wall. “They’ve heard us down below. Look! Four army planes. That’s a laugh — to see ’em circling around hunting us, and not seeing us — when all the time we’re right under their noses.”

“It may be humorous to you, but I don’t like it,” Darcey said, wiping more moisture from his clammy forehead. “Here! Set the vibrator, direct it as the Insurance Exchange, and let’s get through and away.”

Carlisle had handled the little thing before. The second, and most revolutionary, of the Gant brothers’ discoveries.

There was a black metal case, looking about the size of a small portable radio. In one side there was a screened circle, like that which conceals a radio loudspeaker. Inside the case there was a maze of fine antennae and delicate diaphragms, and two amplifying tubes. The contraption was hooked to a small generator geared to the plane motor, and that was all Carlisle could tell you about it. Darcey always set the pitch of the thing before a job, after experimenting with whatever steel was to be knocked to bits.

The disintegrator was all set now. Carlisle aimed a long, narrow cone so that its point was directly on the big Insurance Exchange Building, and snapped the little switch. There was a soft hum, raising rapidly in tone till it tore at the eardrums, then going up beyond the range of audibility.

“Hey!” said one of the men suddenly. “Them Army planes! Looks like they were coming right for us. As if they could see us!”

“Nonsense,” said Darcey, voice shaking but sure. “We are invisible.”

Carlisle said, “We’ll cut the motor for a few minutes, though. After all we can be heard, if not seen.”

They were hearing the drone down in the city. Hundreds of thousands of people were staring skyward. They saw the Army planes, but that was all. And none of them accounted for the eerie droning.

People shook their fists at the sky in agonized but futile rage. The enemy up there! If only it could be seen—

“Boss,” said one of the men, voice uncertain, “those planes are still comin’ right for us, even with the motor cut off—”

“So careful, they were, to build up that horror of an enemy invasion,” Benson was saying as all of them went out of the ferry to the blue sedan so generously left for them by Darcey’s overplayed plotting. “So successful, that under cover, Chicago is almost in a state of military rule. There are nine anti-aircraft guns of the latest type concealed in strategic spots through the city. And there are four of the fastest army battle planes ready to take off the instant detectors hear the droning noise. All training their deadly forces on the sky, waiting for the skywalker.”

“But what good will that do,” said Mac gloomily, “if nobody can see the plane?” The dour Scot, freed from death, was his pessimistic self again, sure that everything would go dead wrong in this worst possible of worlds—

The Glassite plane had wheeled from the strangely purposeful drive of the four fast army ships. The vibrator cone was no longer centered on the doomed building because of the maneuver.

“Swing it back,” ordered Darcey.

“Something’s gone wrong,” retorted Carlisle, eyes narrowed and venomous instead of deceptively calm and sunny. He countermanded Darcey’s order to the pilot. “Beat it! Out over the lake. The hell with the Insurance Exchange.”

“Carlisle — I’m giving the orders around here—”

“Look!” screamed the man with the wounded shoulder suddenly, glaring with horror in his eyes at the cabin wall.

That wall was glistening a little with reflected moonlight.

“That stuff you dipped the plane into!” the man yelled—“something’s gone wrong with it!”

“If the plane couldn’t be seen,” The Avenger replied to Mac, “the guns and army planes would be useless, of course. But Darcey’s plane, you see, isn’t going to remain invisible.”

“The barium stearate—” began Mac.

“The barium stearate,” said Benson, paralyzed lips barely moving in his white, dead face, “is adulterated. There was a small can of aviation gasoline near that drum. Probably to prime the diesel generator when they wanted to start it. I poured it into the barium stearate. It’s highly volatile stuff. It permeated the contents of the drum in a few seconds. This time the coating on that plane will dry and crack off in about a third of the time it usually takes.”

The terrified men in the Glassite plane saw a red spot burst in the city below them, heard a boom an instant later, and then felt the ship bob and twist in a gigantic rush of air.

“They’re shooting at us. They can see us!”

Two more red spots bloomed like angry measles from the city below. The Glassite plane was uncontrollable now.

Every surface was reflecting moonlight. Like a great, sinister jewel, flashing in the sky, it rolled and twisted with the tearing shocks of the close-bursting anti-aircraft shells. There was one more boom. The tail of the ship wavered and dropped off.

Four angry screaming army planes rushed on the two big fragments, diving after them as they fell, with twin machine guns on each ship drilling the “enemy” with a hail of .50 caliber slugs.

The disintegrator fell into the lake, followed shortly by gleaming pieces of Glassite and figures that were as limp and shapeless-looking as scarecrows.

The Avenger was listening, head a little to one side. Anti-aircraft guns make a lot of noise, and noise is transmitted a long way over water. It was seventy miles in an air line to the city, slanting over the lake end.

But Benson heard, faintly, the roaring boom of the opening shot, then two more, then a fourth.

He nodded for Josh and Rosabel and Nellie, Mac and Smitty, to crowd into the blue sedan.

“It’s over! By their own plans, they destroyed themselves.”

The others were too awed by the lambent flame in his colorless eyes to speak. Again The Avenger, playing with shrewd murderers, as if they were chessmen, had maneuvered them into a position where they had brought down vengeance on their own heads.

Face white and dead, unable to express the glacial triumph steadily flaring in his terrible eyes, The Avenger drove back toward a city that had been saved from horror and death.