The Other Side of Here

ONE

If he'd been a detective, Steve Waldron reflected grimly, he'd have been required to turn in his trench coat. However, official detectives hadn't been able to do any better than Steve. But the official detectives didn't have to face Lucy and acknowledge that there was absolutely nothing to indicate what had happened to her father. There was only the rather unlikely hypothesis that he'd vanished into thin air.

He'd been gone for four days now. According to Fran Dutt, who'd been in his private laboratory at the time, he'd answered a phone call. Then he put on his hat, told Fran that he'd be back presently, and walked out of this world altogether. He had no motive for disappearance. He didn't have secret acquaintances. There was no explanation whatever of the phone call. On the surface of things, nobody could have any motive for wanting to get him out of the way.

Waldron turned in at Lucy's entrance and went across the concrete path to the front door. All about him was the tranquility of a residential section of a medium-sized town. This Forest Hills area of Newark, New Jersey, was beginning to run down a bit, but it still retained some of the quietude and serenity of earlier years. The sun was setting beyond Branchbrook Park. Already a few early lights burned in the houses along the street. There were a few noises: children playing, cars moving somewhere out of sight, the faint, distant sounds from the downtown part of the city.

Waldron rang the bell. Lucy opened it instantly. She had been waiting for him. She looked hopefully at his face, and her own expression clouded at his obvious dejection. But she tried to smile.

"Nothing, Steve?"

"Not a thing. Rather worse than nothing, in fact. You mustn't take this seriously, Lucy. The newspapers have to have something to print. This is nonsense."

He hadn't offered her the newspaper, but her eyes fell to the rolled-up object in his side pocket. He handed it to her, repeating: "It's nonsense!"

It was not a screamer headline. Professor Blair was not important enough to compete for headline space with news from Washington and the United Nations. But the story did rate a two-column headline.

HINT BED LINK IN BLAIR CASE

Will Call in FBI

Police today speculated that Professor Erasmus Blair, missing scientist, may have been kidnapped to be smuggled to the Soviet Union to serve as a slave-scientist there. Admittedly pure guesswork, it is pointed out that in Europe scientists have also vanished and it is suspected they met a similar fate. There are even hints that not all the recent fatal accidents to American research figures have been accidental, and the matter has been placed before the FBI by local police officials. While the FBI refused all comment—

Waldron said: "Not even the Beds would be interested in Straussman's Theory! That's nonsense, of course! There's another explanation and it will turn up. By the way"—he felt that he was unconvincingly casual—"has Fran come back yet?"

"No," said Lucy. "Why?"

Steve shrugged. "More nonsense, I'm sure. But Fran said your father left the laboratory after getting a phone call. The police found out today that the telephone line was cut. They're being very secretive about it, but it doesn't make sense. When was it cut and why? They want to ask Fran a lot of questions."

Lucy shook her head as if to clear it "I haven't heard from him, Steve. He called this morning and said he'd rowed your car to try to track down a long-shot idea he had. He didn't say what it was. That's all I know."

Lucy put the newspaper away from her, as if trying to push completely away the idea it suggested.

"I'm as uncomfortable about it as the police," said Waldron with some grimness. "I like Fran, but I don't know much about him. I can see why the police want to talk to him. Of course, he never had to have an FBI checkover, because your father's research wa—is private and not sensitive. But there've been times when I thought Fran was a foreigner—good English and all. That cut phone line has the police wanting to know more about him. If it was cut before your father disappeared..."

Lucy shook her head. She was pale and she'd lost weight in the past four days.

"Fran didn't have anything to do with my father's vanishing, Steve. He—he's in love with me."

Waldron growled.

"No!" insisted Lucy. "He knows I'm going to marry you. He isn't happy about it, but he's ... nice, Steve. I've even felt a little bit proud that somebody could care about me without hoping anything for himself. Fran isn't responsible for my father's disappearance."

Waldron said restlessly: "If I'd known more about him to tell the police..."

"I don't know much about him either," admitted Lucy. "He's been Father's assistant and I know he has some brothers and sisters, but that's all. However, I do know he wouldn't do anything to harm my father or me. Not under any circumstances!"

"Even a spy," Waldron impatiently, "wouldn't get excited about Straussman's theory that two objects can exist in the same space at the same time! That news article is nonsense! Don't worry about it. And of course when Fran comes back I'll ask him..."

Lucy hesitated.

"I've been racking my brains," she said slowly. "I'd almost thought of the newspaper idea myself, except that it was too silly. But do you remember Professor Williams? He vanished. A month later they decided that he was probably the man seen diving overboard from a coastal steamer. His body was never found. And Professor Holt?" That was an automobile accident."

"Was it? They found his car overturned. But he wasn't in it. And when you think of it, at least three people with whom my father corresponded, in the same general line of research, have vanished in six months!"

Waldron said soothingly: "Easy there, Lucy! They were working on compenetration. It's philosophically possible, but physically absurd. You should hear what Hamlin says about it! It's pure-science research. Nobody has the least idea of any practical purpose it would serve. It's a theory that needs to be checked, like the expanding-universe notion. Something to investigate, but never make use of."

Lucy gulped, and then tried to smile. "I know, but when your father just vanishes as if he'd evaporated, and you think of other people who—"

The telephone rang sharply. Lucy put her hand to her mouth.

"Every time the phone rings I hope— You answer it, Steve."

Frowning, Waldron went across the room. He was realizing with a startled abruptness that Lucy was right about Professor Williams' body never being recovered, nor Holt's, nor any of several eminent scientists who presumably had died recently.

He put the receiver to his ear. He spoke.

"Steve!" It was Fran Dutt's voice. "Good! Listen to me! I can't come to Lucy's house. Police are waiting to arrest me and I have something I must do ... for her father's sake."

"You've found out something?" demanded Waldron. Lucy tensed.

"Something ... yes," said Fran. His voice was strained. "He's alive. He's unharmed. I do not dare to tell you more over the phone. The thing is too big, too incredible! I have found—"

"What?" demanded Waldron.

"I cannot tell you yet. I have been to New York in your Car. You and Lucy are not safe. I am not safe either, but that does not matter. Something terrible is about to happen! I beg you to believe me, Steve!"

Waldron put his hand over the transmitter and said swiftly to Lucy: "He's found out your father's safe. Not harmed." He said into the transmitter: "Well? Go on!"

"You must go to New York. You and Lucy. There is a letter at the Mayfair Hotel for her. Take your car and go at once. I stay here. There is danger. Terrible danger! Believe me, I know. And you must not get out of the car before you reach Jersey City, at least! No matter what happens!"

"I understand what you say," said Waldron reservedly, "but not what you mean."

"Let me talk to Lucy! Please!"

Waldron beckoned to Lucy and held out the telephone. He felt distinct suspicions. Fran Dutt was the laboratory assistant who had been present when Lucy's father walked out to apparent nothingness. There had been no sense to what had happened then, and there was no sense to what Fran was saying now. Waldron heard Lucy say: "Yes.... I know that, Fran.... I think so.... Very well.... Where is the car? We'll go at once. You're going to stay here?"

She listened again. Waldron heard the click of the other receiver. Lucy was paler than before.

"The car's parked around the corner," she reported. "He says he loves me and I'm in danger here. I promised to leave with you." Then she added very quietly: "I believe him, Steve. He wouldn't let anything happen to harm me. He's going to try to get Father away from where he is. It's important that I not stay here. Will you take me to New York, Steve?"

Waldron nodded. He felt the frustrated confusion of a man who is faced with urgent matters of which he cannot even begin to make sense. Lucy left the room. She came back wearing a coat and hat. She handed a small glistening object to Waldron.

"My father had this," she said briefly. "Fran said to be sure and carry it."

Waldron tensed a little. He was not quite suspicious enough to examine the revolver then. But by the time he and Lucy had gone out of the house and turned the next corner and found his car parked there—the engine warm and the key in the ignition lock—he was very suspicious indeed.

Night was falling swiftly. He checked over the car. Nothing appeared wrong. Inside, by the map-reading light of the instrument board, he examined the pistol. Nothing wrong. He started the car. It whirred and caught instantly. The gas tank was full.

The safe route to New York," said Waldron coldly, "ought to be a crowded one. We'll go by the Skyway."

He swung downhill and headed for the business section of town. At first there were private homes, and apartment houses, and more apartment houses. The lighted windows changed character. Presently the streets themselves were different. It was early for theater crowds and a little late for close-of-business crowds. Nevertheless, Broad Street had plenty of motorized traffic.

When Steve turned for the last straight stretch before the Skyway, the sidewalks were thronged. He drove through a district crowded with tenements. Here children played, shrieking at each other. Men and women stood about. Cars sped and trucks roared along the one-way street.

Suddenly the sound of the city changed. Waldron did not notice it at first. He was absorbed in unpleasant, suspicious thoughts which would not take definite form. But the total sound of all the city had been a smooth and almost a purring noise. Now—far behind—there came a queer harsh grumbling, as of a gear grinding. Then there was a shrill, high-pitched tumult that sounded like distant screaming.

The extraordinary sound came nearer without at all increasing in volume. People were screaming, but the voices did not seem to merge. Rather, it seemed as if the screams were coming from different places.

Then the grumbling noise dissolved into a loud series of crashes, some nearer and others farther away.

Lucy looked back and cried out. Waldron glanced in the rear-view mirror. A car had swerved from its lane and very deliberately crossed the street and smashed into a building. He saw a heavy truck turning into the lane of traffic. It swerved and turned and did not straighten out. It plowed into the cars parked along the curbing and climbed up on them. Then it lurched drunkenly and fell over on its side.

Nobody ran to the spot. Lucy gasped again. The people on the sidewalk—a man sat on the steps of a small and dingy stoop, somebody fell stiffly upon him. The sitting man did not yield; the person falling upon him did not bend. Two figures collapsed crazily upon the sidewalk and lay there.

A great bus crossed an intersection ahead, moving slowly. With vast deliberation it crashed into a lamp post. The bus was in low gear and its wheels continued to turn insanely. The lamp post suddenly crashed downward and the bus kept on going.

Cars ahead bumped into each other. One hit something and was struck from behind. Waldron jerked his steering wheel to avoid the pile-up. The car that had been following him smashed into the car that had been ahead.

Now there was no movement on the sidewalks. People had been standing and walking. No longer. Now they lay stiff and unmoving, as if abruptly frozen in the midst of motion. He saw hands extended, knees bent, mouths open, eyes staring. Some of the people had been running. They lay absolutely rigid where they had toppled. It was as if every living human being had abruptly been seized with catalepsy, or on signal had gone into a horrible catatonic state. They looked like toppled wax figures.

But cars did not stop until they stalled. Traffic was heavy enough so that few vehicles had been traveling swiftly. From all sides rose the monstrous grinding, crashing and clanking as all the moving things in the city came to violent stops.

Waldron said through stiff lips: "Fran said not to get out of the car."

He was in the left-hand lane and saw that it was clear. Reaching the corner, he threaded his way across it. He went down the right-hand lane and swung again to the left. A ghastly cold horror lay all about. A city had suddenly been struck dead.

There was water in the street ahead. It rippled and swelled and spread. Waldron drove through it, with wings of spray splashing up from the wheels. A truck had crashed a water hydrant and the street was now flooded. The driver of the truck sat stiffly at his wheel.

They made a turn and the ramp to the Skyway loomed ahead. A limousine had battered through a guard rail and hung suspended, halfway fallen to the street below. Its passengers were not visible. Its driver sat foolishly behind the wheel as if he were still driving.

To right and left the street looked ridiculously like a store-window model of a city's thoroughfare, designed to look like the real thing but which had suddenly gone out of control, all the toys smashing themselves in senseless confusion. Only what Waldron saw was full sized. This was real.

Waldron drove up the ramp and sped across the Skyway toward New York. He did not react except with a frantic sense of urgency, as if he were caught in a nightmare.

There were wrecks along the Skyway—only wrecks. No other car moved.

Lucy's teeth chattered suddenly. "Wh—what happened? Did—did everybody die all at once?"

"I don't know what happened," said Waldron. He swerved the car to dodge a pile-up of battered cars. An engine was throbbing idiotically from somewhere in the wreckage.

He spoke through clenched teeth lest they chatter, too. "Whatever it was, it hit everybody but us. It was very sudden ... for death."

Steve Waldron's own occupation was biological research. He had been in the research division of a pharmaceutical laboratory, doing his work under Dr. Hamlin, who had already discovered daphnomyecitin and complacently awaited further triumps of scientific drudgery. Waldron knew enough to find it impossible to accept that any means of death could strike so abruptly and with such instant cataleptic stiffening as his unbelieving eyes had seen.

"I'm afraid," he said suddenly, his throat dry, "that this was the terrible thing Fran said was to happen. He said not to get out of the car no matter what happened. Remember?"

They passed more wrecks. The wide Pulaski Skyway climbed and climbed. It swept upward, splendidly, except for the catastrophes here and there: the collisions and the cars which had crashed into guard rails, and the one huge gap in the concrete side rail where something large and blind and senseless had ripped away all of sixty feet of railing and then dived terribly to the dark earth below.

They came to the highest point of the Skyway. Here a gigantic structure of steel girders carried the road to a height which was skyscraper-tall. They could see indefinitely across the meadows between Jersey City and the city they had left behind. Innumerable bright lights lay ahead. There were the fairylike towers of New York on beyond. Below the Skyway there were railroad tracks and scattered factories and the luridly lighted Jersey Turnpike. Below that were isolated straight lines of street lights and occasional illuminated windows.

Suddenly Waldron reached down and braked the car. He stared back toward Newark. The glow above it was the same as every city casts up to the sky at night. Winking red lights rose from neon signs. There were lights in windows, on moving signs. From far off, the city looked completely untouched, completely normal. It was impossible to believe that in that same city an incredible disaster had just taken place, Then Waldron caught his breath. Mist was rising from the city. What seemed to be fog filtered upward. The city's street lights seemed to become dim. The glow in the sky became fainter. The mist could be smoke, but smoke would rise higher. There would be columns of it. There would be leaping flames. If the city had caught fire, there would have been no gentle upward surging of mist. No, there was no conflagration. The city was not burning.

As they stared, one huge, irregularly shaped section of the lighted space went dark. Abruptly, all its lights went out. Then another huge section. A third. With methodical deliberation, one part after another of the city went black. It was blotted out precisely as if someone pulled the master switches of its electricity-supply service, plunging the city, bit by bit, into darkness.

There seemed no longer any city back there. Looking out into the night that was now around them, it seemed as if the city had been wiped off the face of the earth.