The Sky Walker

CHAPTER VIII Cold Extra!

In Chicago, people were still chuckling over the sensational newspaper’s foreign-invasion hoax. An unnamed enemy ready secretly to invade the United States in the vicinity of Chicago? Hooey!

In a lunchroom downtown, several men were laughing about it to the proprietor. One, a big fellow with a gold front tooth, gesticulated.

“I guess if anybody did invade this country, it wouldn’t be secret. And I guess we’d know in advance who the enemy’d be. Besides, how could anybody invade us, and us not know it until after the damage was done?”

“Well, there was that pavilion in Lincoln Park,” the other man said. “Kind of funny how that fell down.”

“Aw, it didn’t have anything to do with an enemy invasion. The girders were rotten, that’s all. The city engineers said so.”

“The whole business is nutty,” said the proprietor of the lunchroom. “Wonder where the paper got that crazy story, anyhow?”

Someone else was wondering that. And that person was a lithe, powerful figure of a man with icily flaming gray eyes. The Avenger.

Benson was in the office of the managing editor of the sensational sheet now. Benson, who knew an amazing number of people in all walks of life, was acquainted with the owner of the paper. The owner didn’t like Benson much, but he was afraid of the pale-eyed man. And when Benson had quietly demanded authority to question the reporter of the paper who was responsible for the invasion yarn, the owner granted it.

Benson was probing the fellow now.

The reporter, a not-too-clean man of forty-five or so, stood like an uneasy schoolboy before Benson in the managing editor’s office.

“Your superior,” Benson said quietly, “disclaims all knowledge of the source of that story. He says it isn’t up to him to question news sources. He gets stories from his reporters, and passes them if they look interesting. He got this yarn from you, decided it would sell out the issue, and printed it. But he insists he doesn’t know where you got hold of it.”

“That’s right,” said the managing editor quickly.

“So now you can tell me where you picked it up,” said Benson.

“It was a source of information that can’t be divulged,” the reporter began, sweating under the gaze of the icy, pale eyes.

“It will be divulged in this case,” Benson said. The reporter knew that the dead-white face, with its awesome lack of expression, was going to follow him around in nightmares.

“I… I don’t know the name of the m-man who told me,” he stuttered.

“You don’t know the name of the man who gave you a story like that?”

“No! I got it in a bar, from this guy—”

The managing editor broke in, voice weary and daunted.

“This man”—he jerked his head toward Benson—“seems to be a buddy with everybody from the President of the United States down. Apparently he can call out the United States army if he wants to. Open up!”

The reporter cleared his throat.

“I really did get the story from a guy in a bar,” he said. “But I have an idea the man was there because I usually hit that bar at that hour, and he knew it. He was a young fellow, smooth-looking. Said his name was Carlisle. He spilled the foreign-invasion stuff, and it sounded like a circulation getter to me.”

Benson’s eyes, cold as ice in a polar sea, went from the reporter to his boss.

“All right! You got the story. It sounded like a circulation getter. But you wouldn’t have printed a thing like that without some sort of confirmation. What was it?”

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:

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.