The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker (2 page)

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.

At thirty thousand feet, a big plane lanced along a beautifully deft straight line from New York toward Chicago.

The ship was much like the new army bombers, the flying fortresses. But it was a private plane, and it had new features that even the bombers don’t possess. For one thing, the cabin was hermetically sealed, and there was an oxygen-manufacturing machine behind the instrument panel that was better than any oxygen-making apparatus seen before. This enabled the plane to fly high in the stratosphere.

For another thing, the motors had not only the last word in superchargers, but also had variable-control cooling systems, so that in the subzero temperatures of great altitude some of the cooling surfaces could be cut out and the cylinders kept hot.

Finally, the plane was equipped with special, four-bladed, variable-pitch propellers designed by one of the world’s great experts in aerodynamics, Richard Henry Benson.

Dick Benson was at the controls of the flying marvel now.

Even seated, the man called The Avenger was an impressive figure. He had lost his beloved wife and small daughter in the callous machinations of a criminal ring—which loss had impelled him to dedicate his life and his great fortune to the fighting of the underworld. The tragedy had turned his coal-black hair dead white. Also, the nerve shock had paralyzed his facial muscles in some curious way which made the dead flesh like wax; it could not move at the command of his nerves, but when his fingers moved it, it stayed in whatever place it was prodded. Thus he became a man of a thousand faces, for he could mold the obedient plastic of his countenance into the shape of the faces of others, and pass as them.

From the dead-white, immobile face under the snow-white hair, pale-gray eyes flamed forth. They were awe-inspiring, those pallid, deadly eyes. They were as cold as ice in a polar dawn and as menacing as the steel of dagger blades. They were the almost colorless orbs of an infallible marksman and of a person without pity for enemies.

They were, in a phrase, the eyes of a machine rather than a human being.

Benson got up from the controls, and went back into the hermetically sealed cabin, allowing the ship to fly itself. It could do so very easily, such were the automatic devices standing ready to take over stabilization and course charted.

The man with the dead face and the silver-white hair went back to where the others in the plane sat in a group. These others, associates of his, were as remarkable in their way as he was in his.

There was Smitty, fully named Algernon Heathcote Smith and hating it. Smitty was colossal—six feet nine inches tall, weighing just short of three hundred pounds.

The vast barrel of his chest was so muscled that his arms wouldn’t hang straight at his sides, but were crooked like those of a gorilla. With china-blue eyes beaming from a moon-face, he looked as harmless as he was huge; but appearances in his case were very deceptive indeed.

There was Fergus MacMurdie, a dour Scot with bitter blue eyes and sandy-red hair and great dim freckles that could be seen under the surface of his reddish skin. He had the biggest feet and the biggest and most formidable fists in captivity. MacMurdie had been set up in business in New York’s strangest drugstore by Benson. But when a battle against crooks loomed near, Mac left the store in a hurry. He had suffered from criminals as much as his chief, and he was as grimly glad to fight them as Benson was.

Finally, there was a figure looking as dainty and fragile as a Dresden doll when seen next to the tremendous bulk of Smitty and the gangling length of MacMurdie. This was Nellie Gray, whose kindly professor father had been murdered by the underworld, and who had become one with this small band of bitter crime fighters. She was just a shade over five feet in height and just a little over a hundred pounds in weight, and she was pink-and-white and helpless-appearing.

But men have been known to lay hands on her and get a sudden impression that they had grasped a stick of dynamite.

Smitty and Nellie were staring out the double windows and down at a world bathed in nine-o’clock darkness. It was still dusk at thirty thousand feet.

MacMurdie was looking at a news report that had come to Benson at seven o’clock. The Avenger was on the cable and wire list of every news-gathering agency on earth. Their reports went to newspapers, state department—and Benson.

“I’ve never seen ye make up your mind to move so fast as ye did tonight, Muster Benson,” Mac said in his thick Scotch burr. “Ye seem very sure something big and deadly hangs over Chicago.”

Benson sat down in the seat next to him. Though not a large man, Benson gave an impression of tremendous power. He moved like a gray cougar; and when he relaxed, he seemed to sink into a dynamic repose that could be shattered with violent action in a fraction of a second.

“I’m sure of it, Mac,” he said. His voice was vibrant and compelling. “Here is a brand-new steel structure. It is only two stories in height, so there is no great stress on it. It is designed to hold several hundred people, and it collapses under the weight of only a few dozen. The report is that the girders were faulty. But steel girders couldn’t possibly be as faulty as that.”

“Do you think the weird noise from the sky has something to do with it?” asked Nellie, in her sweet, soft voice.

Benson’s eyes were pale, cold flames.

“The sound was odd and unexplainable. The collapse of the pavilion was odd and unexplainable. The two things occurred only a short time apart. The inference is that they were tied in together. The inference also is that the two things were cold-bloodedly planned. And seventeen are now dead because of it! So we’re on our way to look around and possibly prevent the deaths of seventeen—or seventy—more—”

At Chicago police headquarters a maniac was trying to see the commissioner.

He was a little man with a big head and bifocal glasses so powerful that they made his black eyes seem to bulge out till they could have been knocked off with a stick. He had thin gray hair and no hat. He didn’t have a coat on, either, and a chemical-stained vest was his only protection against the fall-night coolness.

“I tell you I’ve got to see him!” the little man cried to the sergeant barring his way in the first-floor hall. “If he’s at home at this hour, I’ll go there—”

“He’s not at home; he’s here,” the sergeant admitted. “But he’s too busy to see anybody. He’s got some city engineers and a brace of steel men up in his office. He’s workin’ on that pavilion collapse.”

“But it’s about that that I must see him!” the little man shrilled. “That, and the noise in the sky. I can tell him things about both that he must know.”

“You know something about them,” said the sergeant. It was not unnatural that his voice and face were suspicious. So many cranks come to a big-city police headquarters. Let a notorious murder be done, and a dozen crackpots rush in to tell all about it. Many of them even confess to it—only the psychologists know why.

“I know all about them,” said the little man. “They are inventions. But I must see the commissioner. He’s the man who should know these things.”

“I tell you—” the sergeant began doggedly.

The little man’s hair was standing on end. He passed a frenzied hand through it, further increasing its wild disorder.

“But this can’t wait! No matter what he’s doing—he must drop it and listen to me! There may be more tragedies if he doesn’t!”

“Who are you, anyway?” the sergeant growled.

“I’m Maximus R. Gant, inventor. I live with Robert Gant, my brother. He’s an inventor, too.”

The sergeant rasped at his jaw with an uncertain hand.

“You’re meanin’ to say that some invention was what made the noise in the sky? And it made the pavilion collapse?”

“Yes!”

“And you and your brother have something to do with the inventions?”

“We have everything to do with them. And I’ll tell the commissioner all about it if you’ll just get me into his office.”

The sergeant sighed. “So help me, if this isn’t as important as you say, it’ll be my head. But I’ll interrupt him on the chance—”

The door swung. From the main hall the sergeant could see a white car outside. It was like a small truck, but it had windows, and the windows had heavy grating over them.

The door had opened to admit two men who had come from the white car. The men were in white, too. They looked like internes from a hospital, but they had on white caps. They were muscular men with hard faces.

“Uh-huh,” one said. “There he is. I thought he’d break for headquarters.”

“We’re going to have to keep him in a strait jacket if he doesn’t stop escaping,” the other said. “He’s a clever one, all right.”