Benson was probing the fellow now.
The reporter, a not-too-clean man of forty-five or so, stood like an uneasy schoolboy before Benson in the managing editor’s office.
“Your superior,” Benson said quietly, “disclaims all knowledge of the source of that story. He says it isn’t up to him to question news sources. He gets stories from his reporters, and passes them if they look interesting. He got this yarn from you, decided it would sell out the issue, and printed it. But he insists he doesn’t know where you got hold of it.”
“That’s right,” said the managing editor quickly.
“So now you can tell me where you picked it up,” said Benson.
“It was a source of information that can’t be divulged,” the reporter began, sweating under the gaze of the icy, pale eyes.
“It will be divulged in this case,” Benson said. The reporter knew that the dead-white face, with its awesome lack of expression, was going to follow him around in nightmares.
“I… I don’t know the name of the m-man who told me,” he stuttered.
“You don’t know the name of the man who gave you a story like that?”
“No! I got it in a bar, from this guy—”
The managing editor broke in, voice weary and daunted.
“This man”—he jerked his head toward Benson—“seems to be a buddy with everybody from the President of the United States down. Apparently he can call out the United States army if he wants to. Open up!”
The reporter cleared his throat.
“I really did get the story from a guy in a bar,” he said. “But I have an idea the man was there because I usually hit that bar at that hour, and he knew it. He was a young fellow, smooth-looking. Said his name was Carlisle. He spilled the foreign-invasion stuff, and it sounded like a circulation getter to me.”
Benson’s eyes, cold as ice in a polar sea, went from the reporter to his boss.
“All right! You got the story. It sounded like a circulation getter. But you wouldn’t have printed a thing like that without some sort of confirmation. What was it?”
The office door opened under the careless hand of a man from the shop in the basement. Equally indifferent to visitors in the boss’s office, the man came forward with business that usually took precedence over everything else. Proofs of the next edition.
“Get out of here!” squalled the managing editor. “I’m busy! Can’t you see that?”
“But—” began the man, in wonder. “These gotta be back down right away or—”
“Beat it, I said! And take that stuff with you!”
But the boss was a little too late. Benson’s hand, with its long, steely fingers, was out in an imperative gesture. The pressman found himself handing over the proof sheets without quite knowing why.
Both the reporter and the editor tried to grab them from Benson’s hand. But he had already read the screaming headline:
LOOP BUILDING FALLS!
Benson snatched up a phone and got headquarters. He turned from a few brief words, and his eyes were flames as they flared at the editor.
“No Loop building has fallen, yet. But you get out this extra! That means that you have reason to believe a skyscraper will fall very soon. About the time this paper can get to the streets. What reason have you to believe such a thing?”
Both were still, like frightened animals in the face of the glare from the deadly, colorless eyes. Benson’s hand went out. It got the reporter’s collar. He hauled the man to him as if he had been a child, though the reporter was a bigger man.
“Tell me — or be indicted for murder that you might have prevented! For if a building falls — with your knowledge of it in advance — people will die.”
“There was nothing I could do!” bleated the reporter. “The guy told me a building would fall at about six thirty, to prove his story.” He straightened, and there was a certain dignity about him for a moment. He worked for a paper that was a bad smell among news mediums, but there were things he would not do.
“I was going to turn him over to the cops,” he said. “I swear it! But I guess he’d figured that out in advance. Anyhow, he belted me one with a sap or something. Knocked me out. When I came to, he was gone. Look.”
He pushed back hat and hair and showed a livid blue bruise above his right temple.
“What was I to do after that? If I told the cops, all the papers in town would have the story in ten minutes from the police blotter, and there’d go my scoop. Anyhow, the cops won’t be able to do anything, because the attack is coming from the air.”
“So you did nothing,” Benson said, voice brittle.
Again, for an instant, the reporter was not without dignity.
“I got in touch with Fort Sheridan. At any minute now, all the planes up there will be in the air, to circle over Chicago all night, if necessary, and keep the thing from happening—”
“They won’t be able to prevent it — as you’re very sure right now, or you wouldn’t have gotten out this extra,” Benson said. “Turn every effort to tracking down the man who calls himself Carlisle. Understand? Report to me at the Wheeler Hotel.”
He went out, not seeming to exert himself but moving with a speed that strained the eye to keep up with it.
Benson went to the hotel, to his topfloor headquarters. And there he learned for the first time that Nellie Gray had gone out with a man named Carlisle. Mac, who had come to the hotel before Benson, had already heard and was wild with anxiety.
Benson heard from Josh of the ruse that had been pulled. He, Benson, had supposedly sent word for her to bring concentrated sulphuric acid to the railroad station, so he could conduct a rough test on a rail. It was a simple, clever story that might have taken anyone in.
But Benson dared not take time to try to find her now.
“Mac,” he said, “go to the yacht club and get the plane from her moorings. Have her warmed up and ready for instant use.”
Mac went out. Benson took from one of the trunks, that formed a compact traveling laboratory, a small but beautifully complete recording device, equipped with radio amplifier, that would have amazed any of the big electrical-research laboratories.
The Avenger 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.