Free The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker by Kenneth Robeson

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