The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker (19 page)

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—”