The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker (13 page)

“Why, you young—” the colonel choked. “You’re insinuating that I had something to do with those things that have taken several dozen lives—just to increase the market for Catawbi ore? Get out of here before I throw you out, old as I am.”

It was a fine exhibition of honest rage. Benson faced it with his dead face as immobile as wax, and with his cold, pale eyes unmoved.

Meanwhile, those inexorable eyes were ranging the old office.

There was an iron rack in a corner. A water-cooler stood next to a screen which surrounded a washbasin. Several chairs were placed around the walls. Near the window was the great mahogany desk at which Ringset was seated in a heavy, old-fashioned swivel chair.

Benson’s purpose was to see if there was any filing cabinet or other hiding place of business papers in here. There was none. All were in the outer office where Smitty soundlessly searched. No telling, of course, what was in the furious old man’s desk; but that was the only place in the room where documents could be concealed.

The colonel’s eyes had grown almost as cold as Benson’s own, though in their depths could be seen a lurking, growing fear of the man with the dead face.

“I won’t ask you by what authority you come here and say such things,” he barked. “I assume you have such authority or you wouldn’t dare such a thing. But I do say this: no matter if you’re from the mayor’s office, or from the police commissioner—or whoever is backing you—you’ll find, if you don’t get out of here, that I can swing enough influence to break you.”

Benson paid no attention at all to the angry words. His deadly pale eyes bored into Ringset’s.

“Skywalker,” he said.

The colonel blinked.

“What?” he mumbled, looking bewildered.

“The man who walks the sky,” said Benson. “The sound from the sky. These things are the secret of the tragedies—which will make you rich.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Skywalker! No man can walk in thin air. Or isn’t that what you mean?”

The perplexity on the colonel’s face seemed genuine. Then it faded into wrath again.

“But no matter. It isn’t important what’s in your mind, behind your raving. I’ve told you to get out! And if you don’t—”

He reached for his desk phone.

Benson had done what he came to do. All he’d wanted was to anger the colonel to the point where slight noise of a search in the next room would not be apt to be heard. He had succeeded in that. And Smitty must be through by now.

“All right, I’ll go,” said Benson, continuing to play the part of a blundering regular investigator behind whose bluster was no real information. “But I’ll be back—if there are any more failures of competing steel with more lives lost.”

He went out, leaving Ringset utterly speechless with justified outrage.

Smitty was in the hall. They went to the rickety old elevator together. Benson glanced at the giant, question in his eyes.

“No record of any contact whatever with the Warwick Corporation,” Smitty said. “Nothing else that seemed the least bit incriminating, either.”

The elevator door clanged open. They stepped into the cage.

“Down,” Benson said, tone absent, pale and deadly eyes absorbed.

The cage groaned and shivered, started down—

The aged elevator operator screamed suddenly, high and shrill like a trapped animal.

Now and then a man is molded whose coordination of eye and body, brain and sensory perception and muscles, is so perfect and instantaneous that he seems able to make the movements of all other men seem like slow motion. Dick Benson was such a man.

His mind was intensely occupied with things having no connection whatever with an old elevator cage. Just the same, in a fraction of a second his brain caught the deathly significance of a sudden lurch that was more abrupt and extreme than any previous jerk of the elevator had been. He divined the meaning of it even before the old operator, who had been running elevators so long that he could fairly feel something the matter almost before it could happen.

But whereas the operator simply screamed in horror when he felt the parting of the cable that held up the cage, Benson moved.

The man had started the cage downward before he had quite closed the ninth-floor doors, as most operators do. The doors were open six inches or so when the elevator gave that sickening lurch in its worn slides. Benson got his hands in that opening, with steely fingers clamping down on the metal sill of the sliding doors.

The cage fell eight inches, and stopped. It stopped because the top of it banged on Benson’s head and shoulders, and those shoulders and head were held by Benson’s vicelike grip on the ninth floor sill.

The cable had parted above the cage. Only one thing kept it from falling ninety or a hundred feet to the bottom of the shaft. That one thing was Benson’s tormented grasp. Benson hung by little more than his fingertips. The elevator, with two other men in it, hung on Benson.

“Smitty—” the white-haired man gasped, his paralyzed features remaining expressionless.

The giant, face white with realization of how Benson must have been dazed by the sag of the elevator on head and shoulders, reached to open the elevator doors a little more and get his own great hands through.

“Move . . . very . . . gently—” said Benson, in a ghost of a whisper.

The giant was across the elevator as smoothly as a ballet dancer. The operator stayed at the useless controls, not daring to breathe.

Smitty got the sliding doors open another foot, and took on Benson’s inhuman burden, just in time. The white, strained fingers slipped, with the long drop to the bottom of the shaft seeming to reach up and drag the car.

Now Smitty hung like Atlas, with the cage-top pressing down on his vast bowed shoulders, and with only the grip of his two hands thwarting the deadly fall.

Benson took several great breaths, then was at the giant’s side. Together they heaved up a little.

No other two men in the city—perhaps in the entire country—could have done it: could have raised the unsupported cage with only the straining muscles of their arms alone. But these two did.

They got the cage up so that instead of a three-inch crack between its top and the ninth-floor sill, there was an eighteen-inch opening.

“Can you hold it here, just a little while?” said Benson.

“I . . . think . . . so,” panted the giant. His hands were as white as chalk with the strain, and his arms were trembling like great bass-violin strings.

Benson writhed out of the opening onto the floor of the corridor.

Had Smitty’s hold weakened then, his chief would have been sliced in two between car-top and sill. But the giant hung on.

Benson raced to the roof, to the elevator-cable control room. The end of the supporting cable had snapped back up ten feet when it broke. Benson’s deadly eyes flamed like ice under an arctic moon as he saw the broken end.

It had been cut by a hacksaw through nearly three-fourths of its thickness, so that the slightest extra strain—like that of starting the old car down from the ninth floor—would snap the steel strands.

“Smitty—get ready to take just a little more,” Benson called down.

And he dropped lightly on the roof of the cage.

He had won clear, and was safe. Now, by lowering himself to the car’s top he was putting his head into the jaws of death again. But a leader does that kind of thing for the safety of his men, if he deserves the title, chief.

Anyone who has ever tried to tie a knot in steel cable knows what a long-drawn-out, almost impossible task it is. But Benson’s incredibly strong fingers got the broken end of the elevator cable under the top supporting girder, and twisted the woven steel strand into a single pretzel-shaped bow, in about the time it would take an ordinary person to do the same thing with wrapping twine.

“All right, Smitty!”

Benson heard the giant groan; then the cage was dropping as the great hands were withdrawn and the cage was unsupported.

It dropped a foot, jerked to a stop as the loose bow in the tied cable tightened. Steel shrieked on steel as the bow continued to knot in on itself and as the elevator continued the slow sinking downward. Then its passage was stopped. The knot held.

Benson helped the shaky giant out of the cage on the eighth floor. He hauled the operator out bodily; the man had fainted minutes before.

Smitty managed a trembling grin.

“We tell Mac and Nellie to watch out because somebody might trail ’em and try to kill ’em,” he said, “and we get it in the neck ourselves. I wonder how—”

He said no more.

Steel cable is slippery stuff. The large bow Benson had bent in it had been quivering into a smaller and smaller knot under the elevator’s weight with each passing second. Now the sawed end of the cable had slipped at last through the loop of the knot, and let the cage go!

With a squeal against ancient slides, it rocketed downward. And then, far below, it hit! There was a smash that rocked the building, and the wood and steel of the cage became a sort of dreadful porridge of crushed wreckage.

In the center of that porridge there would have been three pulped bodies had it not been for Benson’s superhuman swiftness, and Smitty’s gigantic strength.

You could fairly feel the tensity in the city that afternoon.

The rain clouds had cleared and the sky was bright with sun. The entire city of Chicago seemed to cower under the clearness like a gigantic, frightened beast, and to peer upward in apprehension.

From the sky, on two successive clear days before, had come a droning noise with no visible thing making it. And following that had come disaster. Would a third tragedy come from the clear sky today?

Something moving in the sky. A man “walking” there, according to a few wild accounts. Something trailing over the city and leaving catastrophe in its unseen wake.

Would that happen today?

Up in his temporary headquarters, Benson was integrating the reports of Nellie Gray and Mac, and digesting the knowledge they afforded.

“Vanderhold seems as innocent of any of this as a babe,” the dour Scot had reported. “He was at home, not at his newspaper, when I got him. He was in a flowered dressing gown, eatin’ a breakfast big enough for a gorilla, and lookin’ over his own paper. A big, fat, bald-headed guy with pockets around his eyes. I told him about Catawbi steel bein’ the one that held up. He didn’t seem interested. I asked more about how that reporter of his got advance news of the building collapse. He told me about not knowin’ anything about it for a solid half hour.”

“You saw nothing out of the way?” Benson had asked.

“Well, one thing that
might
have meanin’,” the Scot said doubtfully. “There was a letter near his orange-juice glass; one of a lot that’d come in the mornin’ mail. It was open; so I got a glimpse of it. Somethin’ about the Catawbi Railroad. I couldn’t see who it was from or anythin’, but I got just a couple words before he tumbled that I might be looking at it and folded it shut. I think the letter was something about buying the road.”

“Somebody wanting to buy the Catawbi Railroad?”

“That’s what it looked like. Vanderhold has a share, as a commuter on it, of course. But I don’t see that it means anythin’, Muster Benson.”

Nellie Gray’s report had seemed equally fruitless.

“Abel Darcey is all up in the air about the things that have happened to the railway. I posed as a girl reporter and got him talking about the wreck and the depot collapse. He has no idea what could have caused the two miles of track to disappear, but rather thinks the rails were stolen for their value as scrap—though he admits it would be pretty impossible to have done it. When it comes to the depot falling down, he just gives up. He says he hasn’t the faintest notion why that happened.”

Nellie referred to some shorthand notes she had made.

“He O.K.’d an order for more rails while I was there. And the specification was that they be made of steel from local Catawbi ore.”

Benson merely nodded. His finding at the Missouri Steel Corporation’s laboratory that it had been Catawbi steel which bore up in the collapses, was definitely known around the city, now. Almost any order for steel would have the same specification: made from Catawbi ore.