Free The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker by Kenneth Robeson Page A

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.

CHAPTER IX

The Bears’ Den!
    In the abandoned ferry, Smitty’s first task was to make sure there weren’t spying eyes around, and guns pointed at his back, before he started making the investigation ordered by Benson.
    With his flash lighting a narrow path before him, he made the rounds of the hull.
    A car ferry, designed to take a dozen heavily loaded freight cars on its flat, ugly top, is a tremendous thing. They’re as big as a ship and loom high from the water when empty. There is ample room in their vast interiors for an excellent hangar, though this was probably the first case on record in which one had been put to such a use.
    It took Smitty a long time to search around the thing. But finally he had the rough outlines in his mind.
    The interior of the hull was about eighty or ninety feet by a hundred and fifty feet. Underneath were good, sound timbers—not beach sand. The ferry might be abandoned, but it was still amazingly whole. Smitty had an idea the thing could be floated again, with only a little pumping required to take care of the leakage around the almost watertight hangar door.
    It was amazingly well equipped, too. There was a small diesel motor that could generate enough power to supply light for electric bulbs studded around the hull. There were many drums of aviation gasoline and oil. There was a fairly complete machine shop in a corner.
    In the other corner was a lot of stuff that puzzled Smitty very much. He was an electrical engineer of extraordinary ability; but this seemed to verge somehow into the range of practical chemistry, and it had him baffled.
    In this other corner were several tanks at least forty feet long and ten feet deep. They looked like swimming pools, but with the lake right outside to be used for a pool, it was unlikely they were used as such.
    Over the great tanks were light cranes, with ratio pulley blocks showing that they were operated by hand. The cranes were obviously designed to lower large objects into the tanks.
    “But what,” mused Smitty, “do they dunk into these big vats, and why?”
    He wet his hand from the colorless fluid in the tanks and smelled his fingers. No smell. The stuff looked like clear water. So he