The Other Side of Here

ELEVEN

In a dead world there are no laws. Therefore, the boat Nick had chosen, and the three of them had stolen, ran through the night without riding-lights or any other thing to betray her position to possible pursuers. It was, apparently, a fast cabin speedboat.

Waldron held the wheel and headed for the open sea, while Nick explored and found radio and other adjuncts for navigation. He agreed with Waldron that it would be unwise to use the radio close to New York. Therefore, they cleared the harbor mouth and headed south along the Jersey coast.

For an hour or more Nick tended to putter over the engine, risking the doing of more harm than good. He then poked about among the stores, and at last managed to come to some conclusion about the amount of fuel there was on board. He came to the wheel to report, yawning a little as he did so.

"All right," said Waldron. "We'll keep going until daybreak, and then start the radio. That should be far enough away."

"It should," admitted Nick. "The only question is, will it? I'm going to sleep on the engine-room floor for a while."

He disappeared, to fall instantly asleep. Waldron settled down to a vigil. But he was no less tired than Nick. Lucy smiled maternally at him when he nodded occasionally at the wheel, steadying the boat on the course that had been picked out almost at random.

At dawn, Lucy investigated the galley and they drank coffee in the cold dawnlight. Nick came awake and demanded some coffee too, and then he turned on the broadcast receiver and they listened to news accounts. The only station they could tune in was in Chicago, despairingly broadcasting at what was four A.M. by Central time. The announcer said drearily: Rioting on the lake-front, which began at four this afternoon when mobs tried to storm the wharves of lake steamers, resulted in the death of six policemen who tried to restrain the rioters. The number of civilian deaths has not been ascertained, but at least thirty persons, many of them women, were trampled by the mob which struggles to escape the city before the plague strikes.

Nick blinked at the other two. The announcer went on: Mob violence against the owners of cars has practically ceased, because practically no cars attempt escape from the city. The ways out of the city are now filled with crowds of human beings on foot....

Waldron drank meditatively and put down his cup.

In other cities, rioting continues. St. Louis is under martial law, which means that the authorities have not yet been overwhelmed. Pittsburgh is a city of madmen, according to advices broadcast from there, Three-fourths of the population is trying to leave the seemingly doomed city. The balance, hopeless of escaping the plague which yesterday wiped out the Atlantic Coast from Boston to Baltimore and Washington, has given itself up to looting and revelry....

Lucy uttered a little cry of dismayed horror.

"Boston to Washington! Millions upon millions of people!"

"It may be for moral effect," said Waldron. "They can't loot all those cities immediately, most likely. But they can smash our civilization by panic. You remember Fran said they were afraid of us." The announcer went on dispiritedly: The last advices do lead to the opinion that the plague has ceased to advance. But it was quiescent for a time after overwhelming Newark. The cities known to have been overwhelmed, besides New York and Newark, include Albany, Schenectady, and Troy, in New York; Trenton besides Newark in New Jersey; Scranton and Philadelphia in—"

The voice droned through a long list of names, from Maryland north to Massachusetts. It went on: It is noticeable that only the larger towns have so far been affected. No city much under one hundred thousand population has so far been smitten. The meaning of this fact is not known. A late news bulletin: Niagara Falls is believed to have fallen victim to the plague. The water power from both the American and Canadian falls was cut off at eleven tonight, and no word has come from the city since that time....

Waldron said thoughtfully: "They would hit Niagara. There's plenty of electric power there. With arcs of power-transmission-line power, the trick we tried last night back in New York could revive a good many thousand square miles. If we have to work on a longtime basis, Nick, we'll fix up a sort of Army and try to seize that as a base of operations."

He switched off the radio.

"Let's try to start something. Are you set, Nick?"

"Yes," said Nick. He gulped down the last of his coffee. "It ought to take 'em an hour to reach us from New York after we start sending, even if they use planes. Finding us included, of course. Maybe they don't have planes."

Lucy said nothing. But she started to clear away the cups from which the two men had drunk, while they went to the desk which was in the radio room.

It was a completely quiet and matter-of-fact performance, at that. This cabin cruiser was equipped for ham short-wave radio. Nick sent out calls. Presently he talked crisply-warning his listeners not to give their own call-letters—and telling them to switch to directional aerials, if possible. There came interference. Squawking, meaningless, blasting noises, of the type first developed by an European-Asian nation which did not wish its citizens to listen to broadcasts from other countries.

Nick talked on. Once he said: "What frequency would you say, Steve?"

"Diathermy works," said Waldron. "Apparently almost anything under fifteen thousand cycles. If feeder wires carried it all over New York, it may be as low as ten."

"I'll tell 'em," said Nick composedly.

He talked. Presently he swung away.

"It's done—if it can be done. I had six hams on the air then, all on directional aerials which cut out most of the scrambling. And every one of them swore that even before he made a high-frequency pack for himself, he'd pass on the news by amateur relay. Each one says that his own town is crazy with terror. Our whole civilization is going to pot. But we've done our stuff. Now what?"

As if in answer, there came the droning hum of a plane motor, then another. The sound became the deep-toned, distant roar of many engines.

Waldron searched the sky. Small, wabbling dots appeared against the blue—not from the direction of New York, but from the west. Philadelphia, perhaps. There were all of a dozen planes, but they did not fly in the riveted, rigid formation of military ships. These were flown by men who had little experience in formation flying, certainly. In fact, they were not military plans. Highly specialized training was needed to fly a modern military plane. It was not likely that such training would be encouraged in Underones who were treated as so much dirt.

Waldron straightened out the course of the cruiser.

"This is the devil!" he said with extreme calm. "I suppose I'll have to run the boat ashore and we'll take to the woods, eh?"

The planes were still a very long distance away—mere specks in the sky.

"We must be almost past the dead area, or past it," said Lucy uneasily. "If we could get help—"

"There's a Navy ship!" said Nick crisply. "A destroyer!"

Waldron stared. A nearly formless gray blob upon the sea, it floated aimlessly. It gave no sign of life at all. Waldron realized that they had not seen sea gulls lately. Culls hovered about harbors to feed on refuse. This destroyer had undoubtedly been "frozen" as it moved slowly through some anchorage. He swung the small fast motorboat around. Nick dived for the engine room.

"I'll see if I can get more speed for you," he said hungrily. "There'll be anti-aircraft guns on that destroyer, if we can get on board and get at the ammunition."

"Better than that," said Waldron. "She'll have dynamos on board and fighting men. An arc—"

Nick uttered what was almost a yelp of joy. He vanished below deck. The engine's speed picked up. The boat headed for the far-away cruiser.

But the planes came on. Nothing could be more daunting or more menacing than a formation of swift and deadly planes, flying low for a strafing run. Yet the terror came partly from the mathematical, unhuman precision of their roaring approach. However, these planes were not fighters. They were two and four-place passenger planes and they were handled competently enough, but without the speed or deadly precision that would have destroyed all hope of escape.

Their droning hum rose to a growl. From a growl, it rose to a roar. From a roar, it became thunder. Then the first of the planes dived. The sound of its motor rose in pitch. Waldron jerked over the wheel. The cruiser heeled over as it swerved.

The wings of the plane hung batlike over the boat for a bare instant. Something small and smoking dropped from it. It hit a wave and exploded with a racking detonation. A small wall of water flung the speedy cruiser's bow aside. The plane had swept on ahead.

"This isn't too bad!" said Waldron, in grim surprise. "They aren't trained for fighting or even for bombing. Hm. They only expected to loot. They weren't trained for anything else."

A second plane dived. Lucy watched, fearfully. Another miss. This thing, whatever it was, exploded in midair. Waldron glanced up.

Again there was the rising whine of a plane diving for them. And the complete weakness of the attack became evident. It could be that such a social organization as Fran had outlined could not possibly have high fighting quality. When the rank and file hated their leaders, there was a limit to the training that could be given them. Men too close to rebellion could not be trusted with bombs, or trained to bomb with precision. Actually, with military airfields in their hands, with military planes and undoubtedly ample bombs available, because of their social system the invaders could only muster men trained to fly private planes. No men had been trained for bombing. Waldron realized that the explosions from the first two planes had been of dynamite sticks! But they could be deadly enough.

The third plane overshot. Something went off smokily ten yards ahead of the cruiser. Spray fell all over the boat.

"Nick!" snapped Waldron. "Come up here with guns! We'll let Lucy steer and we'll do some anti-aircraft stuff."

Nick bobbed up. Lucy took the wheel. And the motley group of attacking planes had no thought beyond carrying out its orders. A plane dived down. It was no more than fifty feet above the water-level when Waldron and Nick Banner-man opened fire on its cockpit, together. It came head-on. Bullets hit.

The plane went into a wild sidewise swoop. It hit the water. Something exploded smokily. A large splash arose.

"Carrying dynamite loose in the cockpit," observed Waldron. "A case of it went off, then."

A four-passenger, company-executive type of plane soared upward. Small objects came sprinkling down. From two hundred feet or more, it dropped many sticks of dynamite. Some of them exploded when they hit the water. Some vanished harmlessly.

"If one of them hits our deck, though," said Waldron, "we'll be done for. Let's keep 'em high."

The motor cruiser sped on. The flight of planes swept past, peppering the sea about the water-borne craft with explosions. None of the detonations was comparable to an actual aircraft bomb, but any of them could destroy the motorboat. The invaders simply had not dared secure bombardment or combat training for pilots. So, faced with furious orders from their surviving Leaders, those who had gone to loot Philadelphia had taken what civilian planes their fliers knew how to handle, loaded easily discoverable dynamite in them, and sent them off to kill the only three people in some tens of millions who had attempted to put up resistance.

But their lack of practice in aerial-bombing tactics was evident. The planes which had first dropped dynamite about the fleeing small cruiser did not go smoothly on, to swing in a circle and bomb again after their fellows had done the same. They swung sharply and came diving back without discipline.

Even that was dangerous enough. While Nick fired and fired, to keep the planes high—he got one Cub, which came spinning down and crashed into the sea—Waldron took the wheel again and made a crazy evasive pattern of the small boat's wake. But the inaccuracy of the bombardment almost countered the erratic course. Once a tall column of spray fell across the motor-boat's stern. But save for some hundreds of gallons of water admitted, there was no damage.

Then Lucy called out to Nick, and she kept a gun going while he made a grapnel fast to a line. They were almost at the destroyer.

Waldron came up almost at its stern, on the seaward side. Nick threw the grapnel and swarmed up the rope. In seconds he was hauling at Lucy, to get her up. Waldron himself was just swinging over the destroyer's railing when the planes made a concerted, desperate bombing run and fairly rained dynamite sticks down upon the now-stationary small craft.

Dynamite exploded beside a ventilator and shattered it. A fair hit on the small boat blew off its bow. More dynamite ripped deck planking on the destroyer.

But a destroyer was not as easy to sink as a motorboat One stick of dynamite would tear up planks and dent mild steel. But a destroyer required more than a case of industrial dynamite to produce real damage.

The three fugitives dived behind steel doors. Then they hunted busily. They found the lieutenant-commander in charge of the destroyer. Waldron unloaded a high-frequency pack from the festoons of ammunition and oddments with which he was burdened. He put the pack on the naval officer and turned it on. A little tongue of metal began to vibrate. A tiny blue spark flickered and danced. High-frequency currents, which could not even be felt, coursed through the officer's body.

He had been in the act of drinking a cup of coffee when the "plague" struck his ship. Now he swallowed automatically, stared at the three barbarically armored figures who stood before him. Hearing the crashing sound of dynamite explosions about and upon his ship, he leaped to his feet "Commander," said Waldron sharply, "your ship's being attacked by the gang that's responsible for the so-called plague you've probably heard of. Your crew is under its influence now and you have been. But if you'll help us, Nick and I will get an arc going and—"

From a distance, the destroyer would have seemed to be in a bad way, during the next quarter of an hour. It floated aimlessly upon the sea. Planes darted about and above it, raining down small black sticks which sometimes exploded when they hit the water and sometimes did not, but always blew up when they hit the ship. Flames and smoke arose from each impact.

But suddenly the war vessel awoke. Its commander's voice roared out of the speakers which filled every deck and compartment with sound. Order after order left his lips. And in the Navy men obey orders first and ask questions afterward.

At one instant the destroyer was a helpless, floating hulk with the reek of detonated dynamite about it. The next instant its guns stirred. Men flung themselves across its decks to anti-aircraft stations. And suddenly the ship was spitting flames exclusively its own.

And now the amateurishness of the pilots and their low-speed planes was fatal. Strictly professional anti-aircraft fire blasted the slow-flying planes. When three went down in six seconds, the others tried to flee. One vanished in a sheet of flame when its dynamite cargo was hit.

None of the planes reached shore. It appeared, however, that one of them had reported despairingly by its radio before it hit the ocean. But that discovery was made later.

As of now, the destroyer got up steam. It moved steadily for New York—not at full speed in the beginning. Its electricians worked busily. They had plenty of help.

And presently the destroyer did put on full speed. It was some hours later, mid-morning, when she approached the harbor from the sea. Smoke pouring from her funnels, white water hissing at her bows, she came steaming in the Narrows with a vengeful confidence. The invaders had gotten one great bombing plane aloft. It circled and dived upon the cocky naval ship—and such a storm of anti-aircraft fire poured upon it that it reeled dizzily and crashed into the water not far from Bedloe's Island.

Then there were monstrous detonations on shore. The forts at the Narrows were firing point-blank. But the guns were not designed for such short-range work, and their desperate, improvised gun crews did not know their jobs. The guns did not average two shots apiece. Not one was a hit.

The destroyer disdainfully refused to return such fire. She swept on.

She came up the East River, floating to a stop opposite the great powerhouse. Then small boats dropped from her sides. Each was loaded with men and each man carried contrivances designed by the ship's electricians, but often made by their wearers. They were very simple—merely battery-driven spark-makers. Leads picked up the high-frequency surges made by the sparks and conducted them to the flesh of the men. That was all there was to it.

The boats neared shore and something stirred on land. Machine-gun fire from the boats swept the landing. As the sailors came close, some hand grenades were lobbed ashore. The rifle fire from shore ceased and scale-armored figures fled.

The boats docked. Compact groups of zestful fighters swung into action, and these men were not driven into battle by "Leaders" with whips.

To the cracking of rifles, they went into the powerhouse. Tumultuous gunfire and the explosion of grenades kept up for perhaps five minutes. Then that noise stopped. Other boats put ashore from the destroyer. These were not to reinforce the landing party. They raced for the navy yard. Their crews also landed. Wearing their portable high-frequency packs and carrying extras, they vanished into other naval ships.

Then a strange quiet descended. The two cities—the city on both banks of the river—were utterly still and utterly silent. The ships of the harbor were grounded or sunk or still drifted helplessly with the tides. The streets were empty of all save stiffened, grotesquely posed bodies. Not even rats scurried in the sewers. Not even insects flew.

The only visible signs of life were close together. One was a destroyer of the United States Navy, with smoke pouring from her funnels and her screw turning just fast enough to keep her opposite the powerhouse. The powerhouse itself trickled smoke from only one of its tall stacks. From within it, at long intervals, came perhaps one shot, or two, or perhaps a flurry of three or four.

Then, simultaneously, smoke came in thick masses from the hitherto smokeless stacks of the powerhouse. At first thin and white, it thickened and became dense—proof that those who fired it were less than experienced with these particular furnaces. Then smoke arose from the funnels of no less than four of the frozen, immobile ships tied up at the navy yard. Electricians were working in the inwards of those ships while other men got up steam.

Abruptly, one of the moored vessels emitted an exultant bellow from its whistle. Figures stirred upon its decks. Some of them stared incredulously at the stillness of which they had been a part until a few seconds before. A second vessel boomed triumphantly. Signal flags fluttered from its mast. And then figures from the powerhouse began to wigwag to the destroyer.

With startling suddenness, there were noises all about. Bells clanged, whistles shrilled, and voices babbled everywhere. The cities were alive again. Because, with trained men to work, and the problem outlined beforehand, the great arc in the generator room had been reconstituted in a technically stable manner.

That was not all that had to be done, of course. There was more. Much more! Commandeered trucks began to move away from the powerhouse. They were driven by men who very often wore the scaly armor of the invaders—except that it could be noted that most of those suits of armor had bullet-holes in them somewhere or another. Upon the scaly helmets rested the caps of sailors or marines, who were heavily and very efficiently armed.

They whooped derisively at each other as they rode, and also at certain bewildered civilians who could not understand that they had just been revived for the second time by a great arc in the powerhouse.

Those trucks drove here and there. They went to other powerhouses, some in Manhattan and the Bronx and some over in New Jersey. They would build up arcs in each station after zestfully demolishing any invaders who might protest. They would then instruct local electricians and go on to repeat the process farther away.

In hours, cities as far away as Philadelphia would be again normal so far as their citizens were concerned. There would be more trucks moving out of each city, too. And the men in those other trucks would be very, very desirous of being resisted by the men who had come from another world to loot and shatter tills. Washington would be alive again before nightfall. Before tomorrow's dawn, even Niagara Falls would again be awake and its enormous water power diverted to the turning out of high-frequency currents making any repetition of this invasion impossible.

But that last was a precaution. Long before that time the menace of this particular invasion was over. Waldron took measures to bring that about almost at once. He had authority, because he knew more than anybody else. And there were adequate armed parties available for use from the navy yard. Waldron had asked for them.

If any counter-measure, from the world which was the other side of here—if any counter-measures had been planned, the fighting men who came to the powerhouse were ready to handle them. Although they came as landing parties—marines and bluejackets—they had with them those nasty bits of destructive equipment that had been proved in landings on remote islands ... if not on other worlds.

Waldron had the men put in readiness for a counter-invasion. The way led through the helix, whose flickering bluish flame still persisted. From one certain position, which was that which a truck riding up on the ramp would occupy, all the bluish flames seemed to coalesce. Then they formed a single solid picture. And the images on the flames, which elsewhere were fragmentary, combined together so that one looked directly into the world which was the other side of here.

Waldron saw a scene very nearly normal. To be sure, there was no city in the other world corresponding to Brooklyn. He saw green fields and sunshine and clouds, and a long distance away there were the forbidding towers of a stronghold. Nearer, there was a small town—a sprawling small town of little houses. It was not at all modem. Its streets were narrow and its houses mean. And there was fighting going on in it. Men battled with swords and spears, and other men fought savagely with weapons which were noiseless and unfamiliar. It was a quaintly alien city, and yet there were motor trucks of standard make. Men were using them as fighting machines to charge other men.

But the fighting was lessening. It seemed rather the cleaning-up process that followed after street fighting, when defeated men made last stands till they were hunted down.

Waldron watched for a long time before it seemed that he had sufficient force at hand to make a counter-invasion a really practical performance. As fresh detachments of armed men arrived, equipped with high-frequency packs and much more lethal equipment, he repeated his explanations of all he knew about the invaders and their alien world.

Then a motor truck came bumbling toward that portion of the flame through which Waldron looked. It came at a brisk pace to the very entrance, in that other world, to the helix— which was in this. There it stopped. Six men in scaly armor got out. Fran Dutt was one of them.

Fran strode up the other-world ramp to this helix. He spread out his hands to show that he was unarmed. He walked into the helix and appeared here. The other five followed him. Fran looked completely unsurprised at the mass of men making ready for invasion. He nodded grimly at Waldron.

"Steve," he said, unsmiling, "we've had our revolution. Perhaps it's thanks to you for scaring us into it. We've got this town and a few others, already. We'll get the rest. I'm speaking for the Revolutionary Committee."

"We've had a few doings in this world too," said Waldron dryly.

"I know," said Fran. "It scared our Leaders and made our job easier. I'm here to make terms. You're ready to invade us, in your turn. But there's no use fighting. What's happened was our Leaders' fault. We've started the job of chucking them out—it's mostly wiping them out—and we'll finish it. But I want to avoid fighting with you people if I can."

"You've been in this world long enough to know how much authority I don't have," said Waldron, again dryly.

"But people will listen to you," Fran told him, "because you licked our Leaders. Now—we'll return everything that's been looted. We'll pay for everything that's been done. We'll return all prisoners, of course. And we invite settlers from your world. Partly, that'll be to prove we don't intend to lot anything like this happen again. Partly it'll be to stiffen our backbones in case anybody tries to start up that Leader business again. Incidentally, if you people will hang our Leaders for us, we'll be much obliged. We're much too strongly tempted to execute them by their own approved methods."

Waldron was about to speak, when Fran held up his hand.

"Wait! We've less than a million civilized people—if you call us civilized. We need colonists. We'll welcome them, and we'll give them land, and we'll learn from them never to cringe to any other living man—"

Fran's eyes flamed, then. The five behind him nodded. One meditatively tightened a bandage about his arm. Blood was oozing from it. The five nodded again.

"Fran," said Waldron soberly, "it looks to me as if we couldn't ask any other terms. But—for guarantees—"

"March your men through!" said Fran Dutt fiercely. "We ask nothing better! They'll encourage waverers to join us. Only, tell them to grin, Steve, if they see anybody look scared, and everything will be all right."

There was a conference. So complete and bloodless a victory seemed suspicious to the naval officers. One of them begun to stipulate the number of men and arms who should be allowed to pass through the helix.

"Damn it!" cried Fran. "I'm asking you to go through! My people went mad and fought, today. But tomorrow they might be scared and cringe before what Leaders survive, through pure habit. I'm begging you to come through so my people will have the courage to stay free! We've been slaves too long!"

In minutes there was the steady tramping of men marching into the helix which was the entrance to the other world. Each man vanished, only to appear on the other side of here.

Fran turned suddenly to Waldron.

"One question," he said harshly. "Lucy?"

"All right," said Waldron. "She's on the destroyer. Safe. We're getting married right away."

Fran had been pale. He went paler yet.

"You would.... We got the laboratories where her father was. He'll probably get here in an hour or so. Wish Lucy happiness for me. And I mean it!"

He did not smile, but Waldron believed he meant it. He turned and walked into the helix again, between two detachments of sailors.

"Now," said Waldron, to nobody in particular—because Nick Bannerman was feverishly on the way to dictate the story of the "plague" for his newspaper to print—"now to get back to normal!"

It did not take too long. Full realization of the benefits that would come from the doubling—but it would later appear to be much more than doubling—of the space available to the human race did not come for many years. But the affairs of the world went back to normal in a surprisingly short time.

In fact, only the next day the wedding of Steve Waldron and Lucy Blair was interrupted by a conscientious health official who insisted that there was a warrant for the arrest of Waldron, which had never been dismissed and so had to be carried out. It seemed that Waldron was required to be arrested for having violated an order of quarantine, forbidding anybody either to enter or to leave the plague-stricken city of Newark, New Jersey.