The Runaway Skyscraper

The Runaway Skyscraper, by
Murray Leinster

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Title: The Runaway Skyscraper
Author: Murray Leinster
Release Date: December 19, 2005 [EBook #17355]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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The Runaway Skyscraper
by Murray Leinster

COMPLETE IN THIS ISSUE.[*]

I.
The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower
began to run backward. It was not a graceful proceeding. The hands
had been moving onward in their customary deliberate fashion, slowly
and thoughtfully, but suddenly the people in the offices near the clock's
face heard an ominous creaking and groaning. There was a slight,
hardly discernible shiver through the tower, and then something gave
with a crash. The big hands on the clock began to move backward.
Immediately after the crash all the creaking and groaning ceased, and
instead, the usual quiet again hung over everything. One or two of the
occupants of the upper offices put their heads out into the halls, but the
elevators were running as usual, the lights were burning, and all seemed
calm and peaceful. The clerks and stenographers went back to their
ledgers and typewriters, the business callers returned to the discussion
of their errands, and the ordinary course of business was resumed.
Arthur Chamberlain was dictating a letter to Estelle Woodward, his
sole stenographer. When the crash came he paused, listened, and then
resumed his task.
It was not a difficult one. Talking to Estelle Woodward was at no time
an onerous duty, but it must be admitted that Arthur Chamberlain found
it difficult to keep his conversation strictly upon his business.
He was at this time engaged in dictating a letter to his principal
creditors, the Gary & Milton Company, explaining that their demand
for the immediate payment of the installment then due upon his office
furniture was untimely and unjust. A young and budding engineer in
New York never has too much money, and when he is young as Arthur
Chamberlain was, and as fond of pleasant company, and not too fond of
economizing, he is liable to find all demands for payment untimely and
he usually considers them unjust as well. Arthur finished dictating the

letter and sighed.
"Miss Woodward," he said regretfully, "I am afraid I shall never make
a successful man."
Miss Woodward shook her head vaguely. She did not seem to take his
remark very seriously, but then, she had learned never to take any of his
remarks seriously. She had been puzzled at first by his manner of
treating everything with a half-joking pessimism, but now ignored it.
She was interested in her own problems. She had suddenly decided that
she was going to be an old maid, and it bothered her. She had
discovered that she did not like any one well enough to marry, and she
was in her twenty-second year.
She was not a native of New York, and the few young men she had met
there she did not care for. She had regretfully decided she was too
finicky, too fastidious, but could not seem to help herself. She could
not understand their absorption in boxing and baseball and she did not
like the way they danced.
She had considered the matter and decided that she would have to
reconsider her former opinion of women who did not marry. Heretofore
she had thought there must be something the matter with them. Now
she believed that she would come to their own estate, and probably for
the same reason. She could not fall in love and she wanted to.
She read all the popular novels and thrilled at the love-scenes contained
in them, but when any of the young men she knew became in the
slightest degree sentimental she found herself bored, and disgusted with
herself for being bored. Still, she could not help it, and was struggling
to reconcile herself to a life without romance.
She was far too pretty for that, of course, and Arthur Chamberlain often
longed to tell her how pretty she really was, but her abstracted air held
him at arms' length.
He lay back at ease in his swivel-chair and considered, looking at her

with unfeigned pleasure. She did not notice it, for she was so much
absorbed in her own thoughts that she rarely noticed anything he said
or did when they were not in the line of