The Other Side of Here

THREE

That night occurred the most monumental traffic jam in New York's history. The business of Newark, alone, should have been sufficient stimulus to panic. But it hadn't been fully believed. However, the discovery that a small area-circular, and two crosstown blocks in diameter—in the very middle of New York was similarly affected, made panic inevitable.

In that two-block area, human beings lay frozen in that position and gesture they had held when struck by some unknown force. They lay toppled on the street or leaned drunkenly against some object that had arrested their fall. Motor vehicles had gone blindly mad, crashing into each other and into sidewalks. Some of them had rolled out of the stricken area like juggernauts, seeming corpses at their wheels.

With the spread of the news, the traffic jam began. As through repetition the facts about Newark became more and more plausible, more and more people uneasily decided to take their families farther away from the scenes of desolation. Suddenly it seemed that a whole city had taken to wheels.

This was the worst thing possible. The Holland and Lincoln tunnels could be crossed, and the George Washington Bridge was open. But nobody wanted to go closer to what they considered a plague spot. The bridges to Brooklyn and Long Island—these became the roads to safety. As a result, a ghastly crush built up at these exit points.

But most of the population wanted to get away by the highways leading north from Manhattan. The result was a jam to stagger the imagination. The cab in which Waldron and Lucy rode was caught in it. At first the cab moved yards, stopped, moved yards again. Presently it moved only feet at a time. But later it moved only inches.

At four o'clock in the morning their cab was hopelessly fixed in place. It had not stirred at all in almost an hour. Waldron grimly paid the driver and he and Lucy made for the sidewalk. They had to climb over bumpers. There appeared to be no sidewalk. Cars had filled all lanes in the streets, of course, and then desperate drivers had tried to use the sidewalks for traffic lanes. And they were stalled too.

Waldron led the way northward, squeezing past cars that were almost pressed against building walls.

"If we can get out of this and to where we can get a train," panted Waldron, helping Lucy get past a particularly tight place, "we can lose ourselves from Fran's crowd, and I'll be able to find out something from these mice."

He still had the mice from Professor Jamison's flat, and he was bitterly certain that no police had gone there to get the others for doctors to work on. He was also certain that the young man who looked so much like Fran Dutt had not been arrested. And that some men had had a weapon which did on a small scale what had been done to all Newark and one four-block area in New York.

When the sun rose, they were still not at the end of the jam. The streets running north and south were rivers of stalled cars, over which hung reeking clouds of exhaust gases. And the traffic congestion was more hopeless than ever, because many cars had run out of gas, or had overheated and stopped. Many others had been abandoned by their owners, desperately resolved to try to escape the city by subway or by train.

Waldron and Lucy turned into a tiny lunchroom which was open despite the panic. Business was not normal, of course. The most important thing in life, this morning, seemed to be the news broadcasts. All broadcasting stations had abandoned all attempt at programming and simply ran news. This continued to be essentially that there was no news about anything within either Newark or the area around the Mayfair Hotel. Then two records were played and the same news was repeated.

Waldron ordered breakfast for Lucy and himself. Then he started for a telephone. A news broadcast came on. He listened.

... the authorities announce that the outbreak of plague in Manhattan—which, however, does not seem to be spreading; repeat, does not seem to be spreading —is due to the bringing of germs from Newark by a Mr. Steven Waldron, who claimed to have escaped the onset of the plague there. The new plague area has been surrounded by a military cordon. It is known that Waldron had been in the hotel. Everyone to whom he talked at a newspaper office has been isolated and every precaution is being taken against spread of the contagion....

Waldron went back to Lucy. Nick Bannerman couldn't be reached, evidently, if he'd been isolated. Waldron drummed on the table, while immobile traffic outside the tiny restaurant filled all the air with misty exhaust fumes. He wondered if the mist he'd seen in Newark had appeared in the New York area now classed as a plague spot.

But then another broadcaster came on.

... Rumors of an invasion from outer space, as the cause of the incredible disaster in Newark, continue to be spread. Physicians, examining the passengers and crew of a tube train which arrived from Newark with everybody seemingly dead, are unable to confirm or deny this report. The victims seem dead, but doctors refuse to perform autopsies in the absence of normal changes usually following death. While the use of extraterrestrial weapons cannot be ruled out, as yet, a plague of previously unheard-of virulence is considered the more likely explanation. The sternest possible sanitary measures are now in force—

Waldron scowled. He got up.

"I'll call the Health Department and tell them where there are some plague-stricken mice," he said to Lucy, his tone sardonic. "If they do autopsies on them, they'll find out something—maybe."

He went into the phone booth and swung the door shut. The two breakfasts arrived and Lucy began to eat her bacon and eggs. She was mildly astonished that she could eat at all. But the events of the past sixteen hours were much too far out of normal to have normal effect. She watched Waldron as he talked on the phone. She saw his frowning concentration as he dialed again. Then he asked for someone and waited, and then he talked crisply. An instant later he looked incredulous. Then, infuriated, he barked at the instrument and slammed down the receiver.

When he returned he did not sit down to his own meal. He said briefly: "We've got to move—and fast."

She rose unquestioningly. Outside, he raged: "I told them they'd find cataleptic mice in Professor Jamison's apartment, together with a tied-up character who knew everything they wanted to know if they could sweat it out of him. And they wrote that down, very carefully, and then the imbecile I was talking to commanded me very impressively to stay where I was, until quarantine officials could come for me. He added that the phone call would be traced instantly."

Then he looked out at the steaming, stinking river of stalled cars.

"They won't get any squad cars here very fast. Come on."

He led her through the motionless mass of throbbing motors and headed for an alley on the far side of the street.

Two hours later they were far uptown. By that time bulldozers had been brought into play on the traffic. Bulldozers pushed stalled cars to one side and went rumbling down the cleared space in search of other stalled vehicles. Slowly but effectively abandoned or useless cars were weeded out. Traffic began to move a bit. The bulldozers kept on the job.

Waldron and Lucy watched a steady, glistening stream of flowing traffic racing northward. Nearby, a small uptown radio-TV store had its loudspeaker blaring news. The Commissioner of Police was on the air. There were two more plague spots in New York. One centered at the little restaurant from which Waldron had called. The other centered near Columbia University, where Waldron had told of cataleptic mice who could be dissected to learn what had happened to them.

Every place where this man Waldron is known to have been, the plague breaks out within an hour! We can only assume that he is himself a carrier of the unidentified disease, that he is immune to the disease which spreads death all around him. We have reason to know that he listens to news broadcasts. Therefore, I make a personal appeal to him to surrender himself for quarantine, so that the germs he scatters can be studied, so that this terrible plague can be arrested, so that uncounted thousands of his fellow-men may live out unharmed the lives his present conduct jeopardizes, that little children—

Somebody touched his arm. Waldron whirled, ready to do battle for freedom against this incredible stupidity. A man in a dark-blue shirt and a sport cap nodded to him.

"You lookin' for a way outa town?"

"Yes," said Waldron. "Why?"

"You look able-bodied," said the man in the cap. "Nobody but you and her?"

"That's all," said Waldron. "What's the idea?"

"I got a car," said the man calmly. "A pickup truck. And I got some kids. Traffic's moving fast, here. A pal of mine just came back from further out. I was gonna stop and pick him up. He and his wife walked it here, instead. Where this traffic goes over a bridge there's a mob waiting—folks trying to climb into cars. They knocked some drivers on the head and piled in. The cops can't do a thing. Any car that gets through has to fight through. My wife can drive. I'll make room for you two if you'll help scrap. Three of us with clubs 'd oughta do all right."

"I'm with you," Waldron told him.

The car was parked in a back yard. Four children, three women and three men cramped themselves into it. The children crouched down on the floor, while the men stood ready with clubs. Waldron fumbled in his pocket and gave Lucy the pistol that had belonged to her father. The man with the cap watched calmly. He indicated the clubs, which had once been part of a prized item of furniture, and said: "This's solid maple, anyhow, and we got one extra. Let's go-"

They drove out into the side street. A little later they got into the main stream of traffic, now moving at a fairly fast speed. Then, finally, they were out of town. There had been only one really bad place. A mob of people on foot tried to cross a bridge that was filled from brim to brim with every conceivable type of motor-driven vehicle. The mob was desperate. And when the cars were forced to slow up, the pedestrians tried to surge across the bridge. As they rushed forward they fought madly to get into and onto anything with wheels.

Fortunately, the pickup truck was in the very center.

Waldron saw a convertible buried under a writhing mass of assailants. Its driver was crushed and driving became impossible. The convertible crashed into another car. Screams arose. Seeming madmen leaped from it upon other cars—on their hoods, on their roofs—to be carried away from New York.

Waldron and the man with the cap and his pal had to fight only once. Three men swinging clubs were daunting.

Once outside of Manhattan, the pickup truck turned off the main highway. The woman driver of the truck very competently threaded side roads and byways instead of staying on the parkway where the great mass of traffic was.

But the woman took a wrong turn, and presently they found themselves riding into a sizeable small town. Worse, they crossed a highway bridge and saw the swarming, appalling, ghastly flood of traffic which was mobile New York in flight.

On the far side of the bridge, the truck stopped in order to back around and get back on relatively unused minor roads. Hardly anybody else realized these could carry them away from the metropolis.

"We'll get out here," said Waldron. "What I want is simply a town with a modern hospital in it. This should do."

"Us," said the owner of the pickup satisfiedly, "we're on the way up to Vermont. The wife's got a family up that away and we're going to visit a while. We'll take you closer in where y'want to go. I like the way you swung that table leg."

The embattled pickup truck drove them into the town. Waldron and Lucy got out, and the man with the cap waved his hand cordially. His red-haired wife smiled briefly and a child piped: "G'bye."

The truck turned and disappeared toward Vermont.

"Now," said Waldron, "I'll want a hospital's laboratory. But the way to get the use of that is through a doctor—the best one in town."

They trudged to a drugstore, where they drank malted milks and ate sandwiches. They were advised of the name and office address of one of the town's best doctors.

They found the physician just returning from his morning round of calls. Entering the office with Lucy, Waldron said briefly that he was a fugitive from New York, that he'd been a research man with Professor Hamlin—the discoverer of daphnomyecitin—that he had some data on the affair in Newark.

After asking a few questions, the doctor warmed to Waldron. They could talk shop together and this inspired confidence in the medical man.

"My name," said Waldron evenly, "is Steve Waldron. I'm supposed to be a carrier of a plague. I'm not. It isn't a plague. I have some mice here that should be autopsied."

He kept his hand in his pocket, suddenly annoyed that he hadn't thought to get back the pistol from Lucy. But the doctor said mildly: "It couldn't be a plague. A plague does have boundaries for its cases, but no plague ever known had a timing device built in for the simultaneous collapse of all its victims. And nothing has ever had a hundred per cent effect, either. What do you want to do? I don't advise a hospital. There is something about being on salary that makes a man timorous of breaking rules. A man who has to make decisions for himself takes chances. I've reasonable equipment here...."

Waldron displayed his white mice. There were five of them and they were completely unbelievable. If they were dead, they should not be as hard as ivory. If they were not dead, there was simply no possible explanation for the condition in which they were. The doctor examined them.

"Here's my equipment," he said calmly. "Get to work. I'll keep in touch with you. I'd like to help, but I have patients."

Waldron set to work. It was then about noon. The doctor's office was equipped past the dreams of doctors of former years, but doctors needed more equipment than in the past. Waldron dissected one mouse, painstakingly. The flesh cut almost as if it were formed out of mahogany. The internal organs were precisely as solid. There was no abnormality except the incredible hardness in each organ and tissue. No ordinary chemical process could have produced that hardening. The blood was solidified too. It had neither clotted nor separated. Its corpuscles were normal in appearance and number.

The doctor came in, went out and came in again. He checked Waldron's results, using his microscope. Everything was perfectly normal except for the utterly impossible, rock-like hardness of tissue. It seemed impossible!

At four o'clock Waldron felt complete intellectual frustration. It was about then that, in a last, unreasonable attempt to find some other anomaly than the rigidity of his specimens, he essayed to measure the electric resistance of muscle. He wanted to determine if muscle tissue would flex when an electric current passed through it, on the analogy of Galvani's frogs.

The muscles not only did not kick, they did not conduct current!

At first he could not believe it. He tried again and again. Then he stepped up the battery voltage. At twenty volts the needle of the millimeter flicked feebly—perhaps one, perhaps one and a half milliamperes. At twenty-five volts, the current jumped to sixty milliamperes. At thirty volts—

Waldron stared in stupefaction. The bit of tissue vanished completely from between the two electrodes. It seemed to evaporate instantly. It simply ceased to be.

He paced up and down the room, thinking furiously. Lucy watched anxiously. She'd been watching silently all the while he labored.

Presently he took one of the remaining cataleptic little creatures and moistened its fur in two places. He put electrodes in the two spots. He motioned to Lucy to watch. She came close, staring. He threw the switch.

The immobile white thing which was the mouse disappeared like the blown-out flame of a candle.

"Steve!" cried Lucy. "Where did it go?"

To the place Straussman guessed at," said Waldron, with a grim and savage satisfaction. "You might call it the Other Side of Here. Some people have called it the fourth dimension, but that's wrong. And some have called it Avalon, and Tir-nam-beo, and some have called it Hell. I suspect the last is closest. I'm certainly going to work like the devil to keep you from going there!"

He began to work more furiously than before. Now he used another tiny strip of muscle tissue from the dissected creature.

"Halfway between," he muttered. "Intermediate stage. Now what will cancel it? Hm ... Orientation ... The mouse is as if it were magnetized.... A crazy idea! But the way to demagnetize something..."

He worked swiftly with wires and rheostats. The doctor's office had X-ray machines, and an electrocardiograph machine, and diathermy— He used the diathermy machine. He placed two terminals on moistened spots of a strip of muscle. The diathermy machine would send high-frequency currents through the tiny bit of flesh.

He turned on the diathermy current. The muscle stretched. It sagged.

Waldron paced up and down yet, and Lucy watched him with absorbed attention. He seemed to be suffering as he frowned in concentration and scowled at some mental difficulty. Clenching and unclenching his hands unconsciously, he worked out one item after another. Lucy began to feel uneasy. But Waldron was actually feeling the deepest satisfaction a scientific worker can experience. The items of a difficult problem were beginning to fit themselves together. Answers to other parts of the large problem were beginning to suggest themselves.

He was working on the third mouse, fitting the electrodes to its body, when the doctor came back. Waldron called him. His hands were shaking with triumph and excitement.

"Watch this, Doctor!" he commanded feverishly. "I've put this mouse in a diathermy circuit! I doubt that such high-frequency is necessary, but—" He brought himself under control. "Check the mouse, please. I think a diathermy circuit will bring it back to normal-tissue condition. I've even got a crazy idea— Check this!"

The doctor asked questions. Waldron told him, with difficulty, of the effect of the diathermy current on muscle tissue that had been dissected out. He showed that bit of tissue. He showed the other dissected parts of the mouse, still iron-hard. The doctor fumbled at his chin. Then, without words, he picked up the mouse Waldron had made ready. He examined it carefully. It was iron-hard. It was at least cataleptic. He put it back as Waldron had arranged it. In silence, he waved Waldron away and threw the diathermy switch.

There was a faint humming sound and the smell of ozone. A frightened squeak rose and a small white mouse fought frantically to release itself from entrapment. The doctor picked the rodent up and dropped it in a porcelain tray. The mouse ran about feverishly and then subsided, its beady small eyes fearfully regarding the humans above it.

Waldron's face glowed. "They're not dead!" he cried. "The hundreds of thousands of people like that—they can be brought back to normal and to life with diathermy machines! The odds are that even simpler stuff—any high-frequency current of high enough voltage—will do the trick. But if you try to tell anybody about it, Doctor, one of the spies of the people who're pulling this trick will be on the job to stop you. They're after me. We've got to work out a fool-proof trick."

The doctor said quietly: "Without wasting words congratulating you, I think you must be right. I'll call every doctor in town here, describe your results and invite them here for a demonstration. Then, separately, we will head in for New York. We assuredly have data justifying the use of diathermy machines on patients nobody else has any idea how to treat. We will revive those patients. And then we will name you. Not before. If anyone admitted he had been in contact with you, he would probably be mobbed. Have you been listening to the news broadcasts?"

Waldron shook his head.

"It's bad," said the doctor calmly. "So bad, indeed, that I would suggest that you tear some of my equipment apart and try to improvise something on the order of a high-frequency generator that will not produce a fever. To use as —ah—an immunizer against whatever causes this condition of catalepsy."

There were two white mice left in the condition which had seemed to be rigid death. The doctor carefully put them aside for use in his scheduled demonstration. Then he began to make his calls to fellow-physicians.

Waldron got to work. He understood, with deep satisfaction, what the device Fran had put under the car had done. It had generated high-frequency currents in the metal of the car. Those currents had induced high-frequency currents in Waldron's and Lucy's bodies. He took out the gadget and examined it. Melted as it was, it was useless. He threw it away. It was much easier to improvise small battery-operated generators of his own.

He made one battery-operated high-frequency generator, then another. He set to work on a third, a fourth. Meanwhile, the doctor made one phone call after another. Waldron could hear his voice, very calm and unexcited, as he talked to other doctors or tracked them down through their nurses. He was setting a time for the demonstration so that all of them should be able to attend. There were only two mice left to use in the experiment.

The doctor finished his calls and came to watch Waldron at work. Darkness fell outside. However, the office remained brightly lighted, and the expression on the faces of the three remained enwrapped. Waldron was absorbed in his work and in speculations as to the complete disappearance of a mouse when a direct current was passed through its body. Straussman's Theory gave a clue to that. Straussman had expounded a completely unconvincing theory, which among other things implied the possibility of such a disappearance. He, himself, had disappeared. But nobody believed it. It was quite irrational and nobody believed in things that do not make sense.

The doctor watched with professional interest, while Lucy observed with a peculiarly wistful, almost maternal pride. Outside, there was a continuing faint noise of the traffic on the Merritt Parkway, half a mile out of town. Also, there were the closer sounds of the town's cars and human beings.

"It was a crazy guess," said Waldron, almost ashamedly. "I thought of the analogy to magnetism. The mice, according to Straussman's Theory, would be partly in a state analogous to magnetism. And the way to demagnetize a magnet is to use alternating current. I had controlled alternating current in the diathermy machine. I even figured that high-frequency would be better than low-frequency. But it was a crazy idea. I had the break of a lifetime when it worked."

He slipped dry batteries into place in the little generator he had made. He turned it on. It was almost soundless, but it created tiny high-frequency currents. It should—

There was an impact somewhere out in the street. There was a thunderous crash somewhere a block away. A long distance off, there rose a growling noise. It was a most unusual and extremely distinctive noise. Waldron was probably the only man in the world who would have recognized it instantly. It was the sound of innumerable crashings of unguided cars. It was the roar of sound rising out of uncountable collisions.

Waldron jerked his head up, his face going white. The other two in the office sat quite still. Lucy did not move a muscle; the doctor did not even blink. They were stiff, motionless—cataleptic.

Waldron swore thickly. The sound of crashings ended. The town outside fell silent—utterly silent. It was as still as Newark and those "plague spots" in Manhattan. It was the silence of death—no, it was worse than that. It was the silence of life which was frozen and chained and hopelessly imprisoned in stiffened flesh.

Then he heard quiet, unexcited voices. They spoke an unintelligible language. He heard footsteps. They moved in an approximate cadence, like men marching together upon a certain definite errand.

The footsteps came closer. They moved directly for the small building housing the doctor's office. Waldron listened with his hands clenched fiercely on the small object he'd made. Lucy and the physician were absolutely motionless. They did not even breathe.

Waldron knew bitterly that this small town had become what men would call a plague spot. One of the city's physicians, informed of a prospective proof of a way to cure the "plague," had reported that specimens of "plague-stricken" experimental animals were in the city. He had named the physician who proposed to display them to other medical men. And Fran Dutt's compatriots had learned of the report. They had, therefore, made a new dead spot, a new plague spot of this small town, so that they might seize that doctor. And they would seize Lucy and, of course, Waldron himself. They would completely prevent anybody from finding out what Waldron now knew.