The Other Side of Here

TWO

In front of them was the brightly lighted interior of the tunnel. The Pulaski Skyway gave direct access to it. They went through columned underpasses and then down an astoundingly wide one-way street. Then they passed an empty pay-booth and then they were in the tunnel.

The resonant echoes of the car's motor bounced back from the gleaming white tile. They thought they could hear the roar of a giant truck ahead. Then they began going up a gentle incline and some moments later they emerged into the open air of New York. Tall dark buildings loomed all around them and things were moving. People were actually walking —and everything seemed perfectly commonplace!

Steve barely spoke to Lucy as they drove northward, in perfectly ordinary traffic, stopping for red lights and moving ahead on green. It seemed nightmarish that the people about them could be so indifferent to the colossal tragedy across the Jersey meadows.

But, of course, they were not indifferent. The news simply hadn't arrived yet. Waldron and Lucy had outrun all tidings of the catastrophe. Even when they stopped before the Mayfair Hotel, the tragedy in New Jersey was only being guessed at by people on its edges.

While Waldron was telling the doorman to have his car parked, the telephone exchanges in New York were being besieged by irate citizens. By the hundreds, indignant phone users were dialing "O" to protest being cut off from their parties in Newark. By other hundreds, other persons were complaining angrily of the service that could not even get them a Newark number. Supervisors were harassedly bedeviling the maintenance department to know what was the matter that no operator in Newark could be reached on any trunk line.

While Waldron asked the desk clerk if there was a letter for Lucy, frightened Hudson Tube employees were clustered about a train in the Beekman Street terminal. It had come out of Newark and rolled past the Jersey City stations without a pause. The line was clear, so no automatic stops had checked it. The train had come grinding through the under-river tunnel. Although brightly lighted, it was traveling blindly. Emergency calls raced ahead of it. Dispatchers swore. Finally, a thrown switch brought the train to a halt just before it reached the Beekman Street platform.

Then the occupants were seen—each motionless, each in a startlingly lifelike pose. But each man and woman had flesh that was iron hard, and bodies that held no sign of life.

The motorman appeared to be sitting at ease, his hand on the controller bar. But though his fingers were not clenched, they could not be loosened. Passengers held their newspapers or clung to straps with seeming carelessness. But the newspapers had to be torn from their hands to be removed, and the hand straps had to be cut from their overhead fastenings before the passengers could be taken out of the train. Doctors, hastily called, pronounced each man and woman dead. But each person's appearance was so lifelike that the decision had to be changed. The people were alive. But there was every sign of rigor mortis—a rigidity that suggested death. But no rigor mortis could be so intense. The doctors were puzzled, but still they insisted the passengers were alive.

Ambulances transported the stiff bodies to hospitals, where other medical authorities began to go quietly mad trying to find out what had happened. Their bewilderment increased when they tried to get information from Newark on any possible cause of the phenomenon. Newark did not answer.

Outside of Newark, up in the Oranges, people were pulling glass-hard human bodies out of a bus that had rolled blindly into a motor truck. A plane radioed Newark Airport that it was coming in. It got no response. It began to circle overhead, while the pilot kept calling for permission to land. Out at Idlewild somebody heard the pilot's increasingly frantic voice. Then the voice of its pilot stopped short.

Lucy sat in a great upholstered chair in the lobby of the Mayfair and read the letter that was waiting for her. It was not in her father's handwriting. It was in Fran's. Waldron unabashedly read over her shoulder.

Lucy: If you know what's happened in Newark before you read, this, you will understand why I made you come here. If you have not heard of a terrible thing happening, stay where you are for an hour or two or even overnight. You will be safe there. You will be in much more terrible danger than you can believe, at home.

Your father is alive and well. I assure you of that on my honor. I also assure you that if you tell anyone but Steve, or if he tells anyone that you have this letter from me and that you escaped the thing that is to happen, your father will not be harmed. He will be just as safe as before. But I will be killed more horribly than you can imagine. I say this also on my honor.

I beg of you not to explain to anyone how you escaped from Newark. Let it seem an accident. If you say that I caused it, I will be a dead man.

Wait, I beg you, until I can come and explain.

Fran.

Lucy looked up. She moistened her lips. "He ... he knew what was going to happen."

"That," said Waldron, with irony, "seems fairly clear." "And he knows what happened—"

"To your father. Yes. It's even probable that he knew it beforehand, too. But you were right that he didn't want harm to come to you. But for him, we'd be in Newark too, and like everybody else who's there.... Wait here!"

He moved away, passing through the brightly lighted lounge of the hotel, where elaborate chandeliers hung down from the ceiling. He made his way out the revolving door.

"I asked you to have my car parked five minutes ago," he said to the doorman. "Where is it?"

"It's in the garage, sir. I can have it brought back."

"I want to get something out of it. Where is it?"

The doorman gave him directions. Waldron moved as swiftly as the traffic of pedestrians permitted. He went a block and a half and then stepped into the rather dingy garage that was used by the hotel.

There was a smell of smoke and steam and the pungent odor of hot metal. In the middle of the floor was his car, thin blue smoke trailing from below it. Attendants were playing a gasoline extinguisher into the smoke.

"That's my car," he said sharply. "What happened?" Dunno," said a greasy man in jumpers. "It come in, and we was puttin' it on the elevator when it begun to smoke, so we turned on the extinguisher."

There was a clanking rattle. Somebody rolled a crawler into position for use. The greasy man laid himself on it, grabbed up a wire-caged light and pulled underneath the car. His voice was somewhat muffled.

"No fire ... Huh? What's this?"

He pulled himself out and scratched his head. He reached for tools and went under again. He swore suddenly, as if he'd scorched himself. Then the crawler came out and the man raked an irregularly shaped, smoking object from under the car.

"This was it," said the mechanic. "What the hell!"

He pushed the object to a bucket of water and forked it in. There was a hissing sound and a cloud of steam arose. Waldron, his mouth dry, said: "I think I get it." He added unconvincingly, "A practical joke. It misfired. I'll take care of it!"

He passed out money. The object, pulled out of the water, was still hot enough to dry itself immediately. It was a mass of copper wires, stuck together with solder which had melted and run so that the original design could no longer even be guessed at. Waldron put it in his pocket. Feeling it uncomfortably hot against his hip, he went grimly back to the hotel.

The look of things in the Mayfair lobby had changed. There was a small, tense crowd about the hotel desk. There had been a small desk-radio there, turned discreetly low. Now it was turned to full volume, and everybody was crowded close to listen.

... and the entire city seems to be isolated from the world. From the Empire State Building it appears that all electricity in the city has been cut off. There is neither telephone nor telegraphic communication. A tube train has arrived with all its passengers dead—apparently dead when the train left Newark. Police cars from Jersey City are speeding toward the stricken city and will report by radio. The Jersey Turnpike is apparently closed by the disaster, whatever form it may appear to have taken. No cars are coming out of the section nearest downtown Newark from either direction. All traffic on the Skyway has ceased.... Here's a flash from Jersey City. A police car driving in toward Newark reported a mass of wrecked traffic ahead. Immediately afterward it ceased to transmit. It does not answer calls. Efforts are being made to contact members of the Amateur Relay League—short-wave hams—with so far no result.... Here's another flash. The Newark airport does not answer calls.... Another flash still. The telephone company reports that all its lines to Newark went dead at the same instant. Tests do not reveal circuit trouble. It is as if every person in Newark ceased to answer or else dropped dead at the same time....

There was a murmur of horror in the lobby of the hotel. Waldron slipped into a phone booth, his lips set savagely. He dropped dime after dime, dialing, dialing, dialing. He could get no answer. No connection. He was trying to reach some authority to report that he had escaped from Newark and could give information. But everybody in New York with a family in Newark was trying desperately to ask questions.

He went back to Lucy.

"Get a reservation. Get a room here," he commanded. "Explain that you live in Newark and daren't go back because of what's happened. Stay here. I'm going to report in person what I can't get an answered phone to report to. All right?"

Lucy swallowed. She nodded. "This afternoon," she said unsteadily, "I was worried about my father only. Now, with this and Fran ... I'm sort of dazed."

"Naturally," agreed Waldron grimly, "but there's one thing I don't want you dazed about. Fran unquestionably kept us from being involved in whatever's happened in Newark. He did it for your sake. So to some degree I trust him. But he didn't try to stop the whole business, so I distrust him too. If he turns up to talk to you, don't see him except where there are plenty of people around. And don't leave the hotel under any circumstances."

"A-all right," she said.

Waldron wanted to say something encouraging, but he couldn't think of anything. He went out and got a cab. Its radio muttered. In traffic, the driver turned it up.

... Guesses at the nature of the tragedy range to notions of an invasion from space, like the famous War of the Worlds scare of thirty years ago, or mass sabotage by subversives, or the explosion of an atomic weapon by spies, to belief in a sudden and terrible plague.... Newark, however, seems to be a city of the dead. On every side, the suburbs report disasters which add up to the statement that something unknown has wiped out all fife in a roughly circular area, bordered ...

The driver turned a scared face to Waldron. "Dam' funny thing, that! And so close!"

"Yes," said Waldron shortly.

"Wh-what in hell is it? D'you suppose it'll come over here? It—it ain't a plague, is it?"

"No," said Waldron curtly. "It's not a plague. It isn't coming to New York. I was in Newark when it hit."

The driver turned to stare. Shrieking horns reminded him of the danger of driving blindly in heavy traffic. He jerked his head back just in time to avoid a smash-up.

"M-my Gawd!" chattered the driver, "you think you caught it?"

"No!" snapped Waldron. "But I gave you the Gracie Mansion address. There'll be nobody at the City Hall. If I can get to the Mayor, I can tell him what I saw. They'll know what to check on. They can figure out what to do! Make time, will you?"

The driver forthwith became inspired. He jammed down his accelerator and drove like a crazy man with second sight. He worked through a maze of moving vehicles, and behind him there arose a bedlam of indignant hootings and more than once the shrilling of a traffic officer's whistle. Finally, the driver drew in before the Mayor's official residence.

"Wait," commanded Waldron. "They may send me somewhere else with my information."

There was a policeman on duty. Waldron said briefly that he had some information about the mess in Newark. Things had happened so fast that the officer on post outside the Mayor's residence did not know of any mess in Newark. But Waldron sounded sane and the policeman let him pass.

Inside, a politely attentive secretary said soothingly that the Mayor was in conference but would send for Mr.—Mr. what was the name? Yes. The Mayor would send for Mr. Waldron as soon as he possibly could. He would send a car and a motorcycle escort for Mr. Waldron. But just at this moment the Mayor was in conference ...

The secretary hadn't heard the news broadcasts either. He had been disturbed at routine, after-hours business. He was annoyed but extremely polite.

Waldron got out to the street again and fumed. He went to the cab and got in.

"They think I'm crazy," he said coldly.

A man came running down the sidewalk. He babbled to himself. "I've got to see the Mayor! I've got to see the Mayor!"

He stopped before the policeman in front of the gate. His eyes were bright, as he said urgently: "I've got to see the Mayor ... about the trouble in Newark. I made it. I sent some spirits over there to put everybody to sleep, but now the spirits won't wake them up again! I want some policemen to arrest the spirits who've stopped obeying me! I've got to see the Mayor—"

Waldron's taxicab drove away as the policeman resignedly rapped on the sidewalk with his night stick. Waldron's anger became tinged with irony. He had seemed to the Mayor's secretary merely a crank. They appeared constantly, besieging all in authority. Even had the secretary known of the tragedy of Newark, he would have thought Waldron to be the first of the oncoming nuts.

But in the other places where he tried to give the information he possessed, he did not appear to be the first. He had outrun the panic to Gracie Mansion. He followed it everywhere else. Newspapers came out with two-hundred-point headlines:

"PLAGUE WIPES OUT NEWARK!"

Other newspapers ran scareheads:

"REDS OCCUPY NEWARK?"

There was one which screamed in red headlines:

"FLYING SAUCERS SMASH NEWARK!"

Nobody seemed possessed of any intelligence whatever. The streets swarmed with people frantically asking each other questions. Men and women clustered before TV stores to listen to the latest news flashes. But aside from catastrophes to buses, a tube train, police cars and ambulances which tried to enter the city, the unchanging fact remained: Newark had blacked out.

But there was additional fact. Nobody mentioned the thin gray mist which seemed to have risen from the city's streets shortly after the major catastrophe itself. Nobody suggested that the city was burning. This would have been a logical expectation. Nobody indicated the actual fact that whatever happened had been progressive, that the cataleptic condition of people on the streets had not been instantaneous. To some degree warning had been given.

The disaster had begun behind the car in which Waldron and Lucy rode. Then it overtook and passed them, somehow not striking them. Possibly this was not a pivotal point, but it was proof that none of the sources of information for the newspapers or broadcasters had been inside Newark at the time of the catastrophe. And failure to mention the gray mist was proof that nobody succeeded in entering Newark and returning.

There were too many cranks to put in confinement. They were simply blocked from approach to any source of authority or information. And to that fact Waldron owed his own freedom to move about. He was simply brushed off, while panic increased and piled up. Hysteria would have swept the population except that a good many people simply did not believe the news. It was starkly out of all reason.

Nearly two hours passed before Waldron realized that he knew one man in New York who wouldn't be important enough to be protected against cranks. Yet this man might be important enough to do something sensible about the information that could be given him. He called the Mayfair. Lucy was all right. He told her where he was going, and headed downtown for Newspaper Row.

He sent in a note to Nick Bannerman, press photographer for the New York Messenger. Nick came out of the newspaper building, brushed aside onlookers, cranks and assorted bystanders. He dragged Waldron back into the building.

"Swell!" he said, beaming. "You live in Newark. I'll use a picture of you for somebody to hang an interview on. What you think may have happened, your agony and suspense, and so on." Then he stopped. "Hey! No! You're a biologist! You make a guess on what sort of weapon could have wiped out everybody without explosions—no noise rules out atom bombs, and—"

"No," said Waldron curtly. "I was in Newark when it happened. I got out with one other person. We're the only people who did get out."

Nick stared at him. "The hell you say! We're fixing up an expedition now. Everybody in germ-proof clothes, gas masks, and all that—as if we were going into an operating room."

"No good," said Waldron grimly.

He thought of the slowly cooling, cryptic object in his pocket. It was unquestionably the reason he and Lucy had not shared the fate of everybody else in Newark. Fran must have borrowed his car, not to make a search for Lucy's father, but to install that thing so Lucy could be gotten out of danger. Abruptly, Waldron realized that he couldn't tell anything that would involve Fran. Fran had saved him and Lucy—him, of course, in order to protect Lucy. He said he'd be killed if it were known....

Nick Bannerman yelped suddenly. "Dumb me!" he gasped. "You're an eyewitness! Come here!"

In minutes, Waldron was being photographed while men shot questions at him. He answered them—most of them. But he left Fran out. He said flatly that he and "a girl"—he did not name Lucy—were on their way to New York in his car when the city began to drop dead around them. He described what he saw. He professed complete ignorance of the reason for his and Lucy's immunity.

The story did not hold together. It would be printed, of course. But it was thin. It was lame. It was not convincing. It sounded like somebody trying to get publicity for himself.

Nick took Waldron aside when he'd finished. "Steve," he said with difficulty, "how much did you hold out? That's a damned phony story. You aren't a phony. What's up?"

"I had help getting away," admitted Waldron. "I can't tell about that. What I'm hoping, of course, is that somebody with real authority will want to ask me some more questions and I can tell the stuff that simply mustn't be made public."

"It's no accident?" demanded Nick. "Men are doing it? Reds?"

"I don't know," admitted Waldron. "Men, yes. Reds—I doubt it. And I don't know what's been done. I do know you can't go into the dead area with gas masks and come out again. It's not gas, whatever it is."

Nick thought shrewdly. "My job is getting pictures. How about shooting pictures from planes?"

"I doubt very much that a plane can fly low over Newark and come back. Maybe a drone plane. I don't know why I think so. But I do." Then he added bitterly: "Not that my thinking is too good! I thought I had some information that would be useful. Your reporter friends thought I was crazy and a liar to boot. Anybody would—unless I told them what I can't!"

Nick said meditatively: "Y'know, Steve, I don't. I don't think you're crazy. You couldn't tell me the stuff you held out just now?"

Waldron hesitated, irresolutely. Then he said grimly: "I don't think I'd better."

Nick said shrewdly, again: "But you almost did. So there's something you do know. Are you sure, Steve, that germ-proof clothes won't do any good?"

"It wasn't germs," said Waldron shortly. "It moved in a wave, whatever it was. Spreading out from a center."

Nick said vexedly: "I should've told the guys your specialty—biology. They'd have asked questions from that angle. Your story'd have sounded better. Too late now." Then he added: "Everything's crazy! But if it wasn't germs that blacked out Newark, could it have been gas?"

"I didn't have a gas mask," said Waldron. He shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe I'll have something more by morning."

He went out, disillusioned and uncomfortable. He hadn't done much good.

He got back in the cab. Biologist ... Suddenly he reached forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. This cabbie was also listening to a news broadcast. Waldron gave him the address of Professor Jamison, near Columbia University.

Waldron was more than an eyewitness; he was also a biologist. Maybe if he found the right man who knew how to make use of Waldron's special insight and at the same time make some sense out of the now-cold metal thing in his pocket ...

Of course, the answer was the leading American authority on electric anesthesia. Although it was not practical, one could produce anesthesia sometimes, to a limited degree and in a limited area. The use of it, however, was tricky and not fully understood. The theory surrounding the phenomenon was incomplete and the results were very erratic. But something underneath a car had set itself on fire and then destroyed itself before it could be examined. And this something had kept the occupants of the car from turning stiff and glass-hard and lifeless. There was a connection, tenuous enough, but at least a possibility.

He would tell Professor Jamison exactly what he had seen. He wanted to know if it were possible to apply a large-scale electrical anesthesia to a city—the effect moving outward like a wave, as the generating source of anesthesia increased its power and reached a critical value. If such a thing were possible, then there would be a way to counter it by something that—say—could be put under a car. And if it could be countered, the still city could be entered and the generator of anesthesia smashed....

While the cab moved northward, a high-flying plane flew over Newark and released flares, by which to take photographs. But the pictures would have been quite useless, because they would show only a mass of gray mist filling all the downtown streets and on a level with the tops of the buildings. Suburban streets, however, seemed quite clear of the mist. But even these inconclusive photographs were not seen by anybody, for the plane dropped to a mere ten thousand feet for clearer pictures. Then it ceased to communicate. Radar said it kept on going down, into the city.

This was not among the news items the taxicab's radio announced during the ride uptown. There were no longer any regular programs on radio. On every station the news was the same: there was no news. Nobody had been able to get any. So there were snatches of recorded music, and then a voice saying profoundly: From East Orange comes word that ambulances moving in toward Newark have not returned. Police cars attempting to investigate the disaster simply cease to communicate. Short-wave hams report that Newark hams simply stopped talking, though their carrier-waves in some cases remain on the air. And now, a resume of information up to the moment...

The resume was completely unchanged from the one of five minutes before, and the five minutes before that.

Waldron paid off the taxicab before he went into the apartment house where Professor Jamison lived. He knew the professor, of course. He had been in conference with him several times before on behalf of his own laboratory work under Hamlin, of antibiotic fame. Seeing a self-service elevator, he went up in it. He moved along the hall to the professor's door and pushed the button.

The door was opened but not by Professor Jamison. Waldron saw a younger man. At first glance Waldron was startled. The man looked like Fran Dutt. But at second glance he plainly wasn't, although he could have been close kin. He wore a laboratory smock, work-stained and worn. The indefinable smell coming from behind the man was assuredly not unpleasant. But though it was a familiar odor, it wasn't exactly a normal smell for an apartment residence. But then Waldron remembered. Professor Jamison had no wife. Therefore, he had one room set aside for certain experiments connected with his work. There were white mice in the room too. They were of that fixed, genetically pure strain which is so valuable to biologists and which was so nearly wiped out by the Bar Harbor fire, years ago.

"I've got to see Professor Jamison," said Waldron abruptly. "I just came from Newark. I escaped what's happened over there. I have to tell him what it is. My name's Waldron."

The young man blinked at him and held open the door. Waldron entered the apartment.

"The professor will be back in a few minutes," said the young man who looked like Fran Dutt. "What is this about Newark, anyhow? I had music on and suddenly the radio babbled nonsense!"

He turned into the room where there were small cages against the walls. Waldron followed him. He saw a table with a partly assembled electronic apparatus that looked like it might be a model of a tentative electric-anesthesia device.

The young man smiled cordially at Waldron. His smile, too, looked like Fran's. He was the perfect pattern of a talented laboratory man—a younger man working under an older one for experience and training. Fran Dutt looked like that, too. And this man looked like Fran. But the resemblance was more than that of kinship. Bather, it was the resemblance of a type. A racial type. One such man would blend into any ordinary American crowd. But two of them would be noticeable.

"I know a man who looks a lot like you," said Waldron abruptly. "I wonder—"

"I wouldn't know," said the young man easily. "That Newark business has me puzzled. In the last three hours—" He turned to a laboratory table. He opened a drawer. It was a perfectly casual movement, but it was wrongly timed. He reached in a trifle too hurriedly. He had to reach far back inside the drawer and he looked sharply over his shoulder at Waldron.

Waldron went tense. This man made him think of Fran, and, just now, Fran was not a restful person to think about. Also, Waldron had been brushed off many times this night as a crank when he tried to tell his story. And the one time he'd told it, he'd been disbelieved. Without being aware of it, he'd been on edge lest Professor Jamison also think him a crank. All of these factors added together made for an almost paranoiac reaction of suspiciousness.

The young man found what he wanted. He turned. He had something in his hand which looked partly like a pistol and partly something else.

"I won—"

Then Waldron's fist hit home. His conscious mind did not command the blow. But there was no reason for anybody to receive him so cordially and say that he didn't know Fran Dutt before Waldron had finished naming him. Then for that person to reach into a drawer and look sharply over his shoulder before his hand came out with something that could be a weapon...

Waldron was appalled at his own action. The other man reeled backward and collapsed on the floor, out cold. The thing he'd held in his hand fell from his fingers.

It gave off a thin curl of pale-blue smoke. It grew hotter and glowed dull red. The smell of scorching wood rose from the floor. Then the object's parts shifted obscurely and lost all organization. It became merely a mass of copper wires, that had been held together by solder. The solder had melted and the wires had pulled away from their anchorages. It was no longer possible to discover what the object's original design had been.

The room was very silent. Waldron looked at the now-destroyed thing which had acted exactly like the object underneath his car. Also, this man looked like Fran Dutt. The shape of his head was the shape of Fran Dutt's. The slightly wide jaw was like Fran's. His nose seemed of identical shape.

The silence was extreme. There was no radio going, so the man had not been listening for news. But there was something else wrong. Some other noise that should have been there....

It was because Waldron was himself a biologist that he noticed it. The room held the faint, musky odor of white mice but the mice were utterly still—no sound of their quick movement came to him. He moved to the cages.

The mice were frozen, stiffened. They were cataleptic. He reached for a cage. Opening it, he took out a mouse. Another. A third. The flesh of the small creatures was hard, harder than rigor mortis would account for, harder than any form of catalepsy could produce. Harder, it seemed to Waldron, than even frozen flesh would have been.

But the mice did not look dead. Although they did not feel alive, they looked like consummately carved images which a person could expect would suddenly spring to life.

Steve grimly took down laboratory towels from a rack by the table. He painstakingly made the still-unconscious man helpless. Then he called the office of the Messenger and demanded to speak to Nick.

"The expedition was called off," reported Nick, as soon as he heard Waldron's voice. "A hospital sent in a gang. A gas company sent in an emergency wagon with everybody wearing gas masks. Nobody came back."

"Send somebody up here," Waldron told him, "and you can get some pictures—and some stuff for people to work on too. Get this address down, Nick!"

He carefully dictated it. Nick wrote. Then he said: "Say! Somebody called up about you. A Miss Lucy Blair. She asked for me and said, 'Fran's come,' whatever that means. How'd she know I knew you, Steve? She's at the Mayfair. Is that your hotel?"

Waldron barked into the transmitter.

"Yes. Get some cops up here to grab the young fool I knocked cold. He knows the whole business about Newark. You'll find some mice up here that are in exactly the same condition as the people in Newark. The gadget that was used to put them in that state is here on the floor, melted down. Hurry it up, Nick! Slap this guy in jail and hold him there! I've got to hurry!"

He paused to pocket the five tiny cataleptic bodies of the mice and then moved quickly out of Professor Jamison's apartment. The self-service elevator seemed to take an age to get downstairs. It took another age to find a cab. When he did find one, he convinced the driver of his need of haste in getting to the Mayfair Hotel.

He got the haste. Had he been less concerned about Lucy, he might have spent some time worrying about himself. But his distrust of Fran was more intense than ever. Someone with Fran's own racial characteristics had tried to use on him a weapon that produced frozen rigidity. This time the victims were mice instead of the people of Newark. Waldron had a sad conviction that Professor Jamison was missing too, just like Lucy's father. And with Fran near Lucy, Waldron felt anxiety of the most nerve-wracking sort.

However, when he came rushing through the revolving doors of the hotel lobby, he saw Lucy almost immediately. She was pale but composed, sitting quietly on a sofa at one side of the great open room. She talked to Fran, but her eyes were on the doorway. Pure relief showed in them when she saw Waldron. Fran, on the other hand, looked sick and wretched.

Quickly Waldron stepped over to them. He nodded briefly and sat down, facing the two of them.

"What're the developments, Fran?" he asked coldly. "You were right. It was wise for Lucy to get out of Newark. Something pretty terrible did happen there. Now what?"

Unsteadily, Lucy said: "Fran's been urging me to go out West somewhere. He's been offering money. For ... both of us."

Waldron's jaw muscles tightened.

"That so? Does your crowd propose the same sort of thing in New York, Fran?"

"My crowd? Why say that, Steve?" But Fran's voice was strained. "I think I've proved that I don't want any harm to come to Lucy. Or even you. You can't class me with—"

"I do, though," said Waldron grimly. "You're one of the gang who did what's been done to Newark."

"I resent that!" said Fran harshly.

"Don't be a fool!" snapped Waldron. "I'll be willing to bet that about your person you've got a—well—let's call it a pistol. It's something like a pistol, but it doesn't shoot bullets. And if you drop it to the floor, it'll heat up and destroy itself—like that gadget you put underneath my car!"

Fran had been pale. He went paler yet.

"Where'd you hear about pistols like that?"

"I just had an argument with a man who had one," Waldron told him. "He lost the argument. Instead of hitting me with whatever it delivers, he hit some white mice. They're the hardest, brittlest corpses you ever saw. Like the people in Newark. Men used something of the same kind in Newark. Your kind of men, Fran!" Waldron added very softly: "You'll notice my hand is in my pocket, Fran. Don't put your hand in yours!"

Fran Dutt hesitated in an agony of indecision. Then he looked at Lucy. Desperately, he said: "All right! I'll admit it. I do have such a pistol in my pocket—and I'll use it if I have to. But I did get you two out of Newark. I do want to go on keeping Lucy safe. But if you fight me, Steve, I can't. My fife's in your hands, but I'm the only person who can help Lucy and her father."

"Are you asking a price?" asked Waldron icily.

And Fran flushed hotly and then went deathly pale again.

"I am not! For Lucy I will do anything I can! I love her and she knows it! I am risking my life—and more than my life—in what I've said to you here and now. You cannot begin to understand what I am risking. But I would be a traitor to my homeland if I tried to do more than protect Lucy! What I have done for you has been incidental. It was necessary for someone to take Lucy away. That is why I looked out for you. You were my friend but—"

"Your homeland," snapped Waldron. "Russia?"

"Those fools? No! You wouldn't understand. You wouldn't even begin to believe—"

Waldron's eyes narrowed.

"The broadcasters have guessed at plague—which is wrong. They've guessed at subversives letting off a bomb or something similar. That's wrong! They've guessed at flying saucers and an invasion from space. And that's wrong!" Waldron was watching Fran's face. Fran tried to interrupt, but he went on savagely. "One of your—ah—compatriots worked for Professor Jamison, Fran. The professor's vanished, hasn't he?"

"Ye—how do I know? Steve, you're wasting time."

"Williams," said Waldron, inexorably. "Holt, Lucy's father. Now Jamison. The first three were working on things allied to Straussman's Theory: two objects in the same space at the same time. Jamison's electric anesthesia might have had some bearing on it. Eh? Your compatriot—whom the cops are going to get and question—and you, Fran—you were spies for your fellow-countrymen. You were saboteurs—guerillas— and now what's happened to Newark is a sort of Pearl Harbor. My country is in a war that it doesn't yet know exists— waged by a nation none of us has ever heard of."

Fran's hand went to his coat pocket. Waldron's own hand tensed. Fran had gone paler and paler with every word. Now he said bitterly: "You do want Lucy to hate me, don't you? All right, it's true! I am a spy! My country has invaded yours! But try and tell your countrymen so. They'll call you a lunatic."

"I have been called a lunatic," said Waldron. "I'm used to it."

"But I hate the whole business!" said Fran desperately. "There was no need for this war! There are many of us who do not believe our Leaders are right in this thing. Many of us hate our Leaders. We would be glad to overthrow them, to wipe them out utterly. But what can we do? You can't reach my country. It is invulnerable. You can't even believe it exists. So I was sent through to be a spy. If I fail my parents, my brothers, my sisters—"

"You're telling me plenty," said Waldron. "I'm still not sure I believe it, even though I know it's so. But you turned white when I mentioned Straussman. He disappeared too!" He ground his teeth. "And if you people hate the ones who decide on things—Leaders, you call them—maybe you were planning a revolt. On this world"—he used the phrase deliberately and Fran caught his breath. Waldron nodded—"on this world wars have been started to stave off revolutions. That might be the reason in yours."

"Perhaps," said Fran desperately. "But still—"

A newsboy shouted outside the hotel. "Extra! Eyewitness from Newark! Man who saw the whole thing tells his story! Extra!"

Fran Dutt started up, his face contorted.

"Me," said Waldron. "But I covered you, Fran. I didn't tell anything they couldn't believe. And they didn't believe that!" He called a bellboy and sent him for a paper. "I want to know how straight they printed what I did say," he added tonelessly. "If they did print it straight, somebody might guess—"

The bellboy came back, panting in his haste. He'd gotten a copy for himself. Waldron ran his eye down the account of the interview. The extra had been gotten out in record-breaking time. He exclaimed furiously: "The idiots! All nonsense! Listen! 'Steve Waldron, on finishing his story, said, "That's all I can tell you now. I've proved that men are responsible for the destruction of Newark. I'm going to get some rest and start out to lick them." He expects to organize defense measures from his suite at the Mayfair Hotel-"

Waldron heard the inarticulate sound that Fran Dutt made. Fran's face was white as chalk.

"Get Lucy away from here. They mentioned this hotel and I'm not the only spy in New York."

Waldron's mouth dropped open. Then he stood up and grabbed Lucy's arm in one motion. He led her swiftly out the front revolving door. Fran Dutt followed them out and then moved quickly down the street. Seeing a taxicab discharging a passenger in front of the hotel entrance, Waldron thrust Lucy inside and snapped: "Drive on! In a hurry! Speed!"

The taxi lurched. In half a block there was a traffic jam. In a block there was a red light. Waldron said fiercely: "Straight ahead—keep going!" The light glowed green and the cab started again.

There was a tumult of crashings behind them. Screams suddenly filled the air. Heavy, sodden bumps mingled with other screams and there was the shattering of plate glass and the roaring of automobile horns and the shrilling of police whistles.

Waldron looked back. He said evenly to the driver: "Driver, the stuff that hit Newark is at work back there. You'd better step on the gas!