The Mystery of the Blinking Eye

You should go inside, Barbara. The Jefferson draft of the Declaration of Independence is on permanent exhibit there. We’re coming to the Empire State now. Seems as though we could have walked here faster. It wasn’t your fault,” Jim quickly told the driver. “It was a miracle you ever got through that traffic at all.”
    “Anyone who wants my job can have it at this time of night,” the driver answered. “One thing you can remember: If you rid^ with me, you won’t get your pocket picked.. It happens all the time out there in that mob.”
    “That’s one of the reasons we ride,” Jim told him. “And thank you very much.”
    Inside the magnificent lobby, the twins and Ned gazed wonderingly at the strange modernistic mural on the walls, then at the mass of elevator doors.
    “There must be a hundred elevators!” Bob said, awed. “Gosh!”
    Trixie took Barbara’s hand in hers. “Very near a hundred. When we get on one, it will go faster than any elevator you’ve ever been on in your life, Bob. Stand right here beside me, Barbara.”
    Trixie needn’t have bothered for fear Barbara would be afraid. As the elevator shot up the granite shaft, the girl from Iowa cried out exultantly.
    Not so Diana. “My ears!” she wailed. “They’re popping so. What did you say, Trixie? I can’t hear you.”
    “I said to click your back teeth together, and that will stop the popping.”
    ‘I did it!” Diana said after a moment. “It’s heavenly! Oh, there they go again!”
    “Click them again. Then don’t swallow!”
    “I’m glad you told Di that,” Bob said. “I had the same trouble with my ears. We must have gone a thousand feet a minute.”
    The passengers were discharged at the eightieth floor. There they took another elevator to the eighty-sixth floor, where the first balcony was located.
    Diana was still shaking, so Trixie went with her into the enclosed area to wait till she calmed down a little. The others hurried out to the promenade, where they stood leaning against the rails, watching the quick-changing panorama far below. Trixie and Diana soon joined the group again.
    “Over there against the sky is the tip of the Chrysler Building,” Brian explained. “Beyond it, below, is the East River. You can see the cars crossing the Queensboro Bridge.”
    “It’s like a blur of ribbons trailed by tiny ants,” Barbara said, awed. “What is that big space on the ground filled with lights like stars?”
    “Central Park,” Trixie told her. “Can you find the theater district?”
    “I can!” Bob cried. “It’s right down there, isn’t it? Gosh! No wonder they call it the ‘Great White Way.’ Say, I wouldn’t have missed this for a million. I’ll bet we’re higher up in the sky right now than we were on the plane that brought us to New York.”
    “What if a guy were up here on this floor and the elevators stopped running?” Ned asked. “Would he have to walk?”
    “I guess so,” Brian replied. “Some Norwegian ski jumpers climbed up here just for kicks one time. It took them only twenty-five minutes.”
    “Plus all their wind for a week, I’ll bet,” Bob said with a laugh. “Did you just make that up, Brian?”
    “Nope. It’s true.”
    “Remember what the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland said?” Trixie asked. “ ‘I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ ”
    “Yeah? You can be sure she lived in Manhattan and not in England as the book says.” Dan smiled.
    Bob and Barbara and Ned walked around the high parapet two or three times, all the while asking the Bob-Whites to point out on the ground below some of the places where they had visited.
    “There’s a blaze of light like the North Star right over us,” Ned said. “Where is it coming from?”
    “It’s the Beacon of the Four Freedoms,” Trixie answered. “Isn’t it magnificent? When the weather is just right, those beams can be seen eighty miles away. Helen Keller came up here one time—she was deaf and blind, you know—but after she’d stood here, she went home and wrote an article. In it she said, ‘The sun and stars are suburbs of New York, and I never knew it.’ ”
    “She saw more here than many people who have their sight,” Honey said thoughtfully.
    “It makes an ordinary guy ashamed.... Say, let’s go on up to the tower,” Mart said. “You’re really swinging in space up there—a hundred and two floors up!”
    “Not me!” Diana said quickly. “I have the