Read Online The Avenger 17 - Nevlo by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online
Authors: Kenneth Robeson
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had stumbled with a warped brain and a distorted body.
There was a blue hole here.
It was a most peculiar hole. It was perfectly concave, about two and a half feet across and five feet deep. Two deep, regular indentations encircled the hole at about the center. A certain similarity of shapes was instantly plain.
The hole looked like the shell of a standard oil drum, two and a half by five feet, with two bracing ridges around its middle. Had a drum been made of wax to reproduce a steel one faithfully, buried in hard-packed earth, then been melted carefully and pumped out, the result would have been a hole like this, cast in the ground.
The earth at the sides of the hole was fused and bluish, as if it had been exposed to tremendous heat. And if there had ever been anything in it, at least there was nothing now. Whatever had blistered the solid earth had burned any contents to nothingness; or else, if there had been traces of something, it had been removed before The Avenger arrived on the scene.
Benson looked up, then, having examined the ground first.
Far overhead, like a red star, burned the warning beacon placed there to keep planes from colliding with the steel skeleton. Between the red star and the man with the colorless, deadly eyes was an iron ladder, up the spindly steelwork, so thin that it seemed to have been fashioned of black cobwebs.
The Avenger began to climb the ladder.
Up he went, smoothly, effortlessly, seeming to flow along the rungs rather than laboriously climb them. A little faster than an ordinary man would have mounted a similar number of steps, he was at the top. Such was his physical condition that his breathing wasn’t even accelerated.
He looked first at the beacon light.
It was a new one, standard, lens and all. And from it went new cable. Where the old light had been, the tip of the tower was pitted and burned. It looked as if some sort of super-rat had chewed the solid metal as ordinary rats chew bites out of cheese.
And the serrated edges had the same blue tinge, a fused, glazed tinge, like the hole in the earth at the foot of the structure.
It was then that the tower began to lean!
The average person would have thought at first that he was suffering from some illusion induced by the height. But The Avenger, with his perfect sense of equilibrium, knew instantly that it was no illusion, but an actual tilting of the tower.
He stared down. Even his telescopic gaze could reveal no figure at the base of the tower, so far down in the black night with nothing but the blackness of earth as a background. But he did see something.
A single blue-white flash. Someone down there was working on the slender legs with an acetylene torch, held under a shield to guard its flashing fire from other eyes.
If the tower was leaning, it must mean that at least one other leg had been seared through . . .
There was a heavy tremor, and the tower tipped some more! This time it kept on tilting. The killer on the ground had done enough!
Two hundred feet high. And on the top of that tower, like an insect on the top of a falling yardstick, was Dick Benson.
The thing was like a stage act with chairs piled ten high and an acrobat on top. Slowly, at first, the tall tower leaned, then more and more swiftly till it was rushing toward the distant ground with moaning speed.
At the very tip, Benson paused, ice-pale eyes calmly regarding the uprushing earth. Then he poised and leaped far out from the collapsing steel, into thin air!
Smitty didn’t wait for the man from the Marville plant in the audience chamber. He went out a minute or so after Benson had left and took up a stand in a dark doorway.
Meanwhile, Smitty had passed the word to Mac.
The man knew by sight The Avenger, Mac, and Smitty. Benson and Smitty had left the audience room. When the fellow finally got up and made for the door, Mac did his share of keeping the man in ignorance of their visit by bending down as if he had dropped something, thus
There was a blue hole here.
It was a most peculiar hole. It was perfectly concave, about two and a half feet across and five feet deep. Two deep, regular indentations encircled the hole at about the center. A certain similarity of shapes was instantly plain.
The hole looked like the shell of a standard oil drum, two and a half by five feet, with two bracing ridges around its middle. Had a drum been made of wax to reproduce a steel one faithfully, buried in hard-packed earth, then been melted carefully and pumped out, the result would have been a hole like this, cast in the ground.
The earth at the sides of the hole was fused and bluish, as if it had been exposed to tremendous heat. And if there had ever been anything in it, at least there was nothing now. Whatever had blistered the solid earth had burned any contents to nothingness; or else, if there had been traces of something, it had been removed before The Avenger arrived on the scene.
Benson looked up, then, having examined the ground first.
Far overhead, like a red star, burned the warning beacon placed there to keep planes from colliding with the steel skeleton. Between the red star and the man with the colorless, deadly eyes was an iron ladder, up the spindly steelwork, so thin that it seemed to have been fashioned of black cobwebs.
The Avenger began to climb the ladder.
Up he went, smoothly, effortlessly, seeming to flow along the rungs rather than laboriously climb them. A little faster than an ordinary man would have mounted a similar number of steps, he was at the top. Such was his physical condition that his breathing wasn’t even accelerated.
He looked first at the beacon light.
It was a new one, standard, lens and all. And from it went new cable. Where the old light had been, the tip of the tower was pitted and burned. It looked as if some sort of super-rat had chewed the solid metal as ordinary rats chew bites out of cheese.
And the serrated edges had the same blue tinge, a fused, glazed tinge, like the hole in the earth at the foot of the structure.
It was then that the tower began to lean!
The average person would have thought at first that he was suffering from some illusion induced by the height. But The Avenger, with his perfect sense of equilibrium, knew instantly that it was no illusion, but an actual tilting of the tower.
He stared down. Even his telescopic gaze could reveal no figure at the base of the tower, so far down in the black night with nothing but the blackness of earth as a background. But he did see something.
A single blue-white flash. Someone down there was working on the slender legs with an acetylene torch, held under a shield to guard its flashing fire from other eyes.
If the tower was leaning, it must mean that at least one other leg had been seared through . . .
There was a heavy tremor, and the tower tipped some more! This time it kept on tilting. The killer on the ground had done enough!
Two hundred feet high. And on the top of that tower, like an insect on the top of a falling yardstick, was Dick Benson.
The thing was like a stage act with chairs piled ten high and an acrobat on top. Slowly, at first, the tall tower leaned, then more and more swiftly till it was rushing toward the distant ground with moaning speed.
At the very tip, Benson paused, ice-pale eyes calmly regarding the uprushing earth. Then he poised and leaped far out from the collapsing steel, into thin air!
Smitty didn’t wait for the man from the Marville plant in the audience chamber. He went out a minute or so after Benson had left and took up a stand in a dark doorway.
Meanwhile, Smitty had passed the word to Mac.
The man knew by sight The Avenger, Mac, and Smitty. Benson and Smitty had left the audience room. When the fellow finally got up and made for the door, Mac did his share of keeping the man in ignorance of their visit by bending down as if he had dropped something, thus
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