The Other Side of Here

NINE

Waldron had had some hope of New York. He even stopped the car and listened, quite foolishly. The subway did not roar. Traffic did not move. There was such silence on Manhattan Island as was never there by day or night, in summer or in wintertime, since the glaciers drew back and permitted the growth of arctic grasses.

"We're too late," he said with a peculiar calmness. "Much too late. I'd guess this happened all of five minutes ago. Probably while we were in the tunnel. By the time we could get high-frequency packs made and any number of men up and convinced and armed, the invaders would find us. In empty streets like these we'd be plainly visible. You notice there aren't as many cars about as there were in Newark."

The last comment was for Lucy. It was noticeable, when one looked. But for three days, now, New Yorkers had been getting out of town by any possible means. There were only a fraction as many automobiles as normal. There were fewer people. A vast army of refugees had flowed northward and spread out. The number of cars and people visible at a little before midnight, when the invasion-weapon struck, was only fractionally as great as it should have been.

Nick chewed at his fingers.

"It looks like we're licked," he said dismally. "Damn ft, Steve, they'll get us sooner or later. Let's hunt up these guys and use up this ammunition we've got."

"I'd like to do more damage than that," said Waldron. "If they took New York, they'd take Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, I suppose. I wonder how they spread this stuff, anyhow? It must be something done electrically. It's like magnetization. A DC current turns an object from the stasis-condition into reality in that world and unreality in this. A high-frequency current undoes it. I wonder..."

It was not particularly rational to sit in a stopped car in a dead city and speculate about how it had been immobilized. Especially when a considerable force of armored men, responsible for the disaster, would be arriving at any instant.

"I've got a hunch," said Waldron thoughtfully. "The hunch is that they spread the—I suppose it's some sort of a crazy field of force—they might be able to spread it by wires. If they introduced it into a city's lighting circuits, the wires would carry it everywhere. Like captive radio—short-range stuff for colleges and small towns, transmitted over wires, that can be picked up within half a mile."

Lucy said desperately: "Steve, please don't give up! Think of all the people who've been taken there to that other world—"

"I'm not giving up," said Waldron calmly. "I've just reached the point where I can't feel angry any longer. I'm past all that. I'm thinking that they might use the city electric mains as a way to establish the condition that turns everybody into statues. And I'm thinking that just possibly we could use them to nullify it." He turned his head to Nick. "There's a huge electric power plant over on the other side of the East River, Nick. This thing isn't half an hour old, and they'll have automatic stokers and controls. We ought to be able to use a hundred thousand horsepower or so...."

The starter hummed and the motor purred, and the car moved swiftly forward. Nick headed east. The uncanniness of the frozen city did not lessen as they passed through more and more scenes disclosing the abruptness and totality of the disaster. They did see more people away from the tunnel's mouth, though. An amazing array of shabby human beings lay upon the sidewalks.

These had been people who could not secure transportation out of the city. There were scrubwomen and men who looked like janitors, and once there was a too richly dressed woman. There were bearded men—three of them—fallen beside their pushcarts. They came to one place where a woman in a gray checked apron, magnificently matronly, lay in the middle of a group of bundled-up children that she had been leading to some unknown destination.

They drove down Canal Street, sweeping past the Bowery and up upon the bridge. Then they were high over the wide East River.

Below them, on the dark water, midget tugs with shining bright lights puffed sturdily but aimlessly upon the waters. Their crews smitten, they would move at random about the harbor until their fires died down or they ran aground. Far over to the left, the multiple chimneys and the pale brick bulk of the giant powerhouse showed in the faint glow of all the city's lights. Some smoke came from the tall stacks.

"There'll still be steam," said Waldron, "but they'll want to shut off the power as soon as they can. It would be logical. Since high-frequency wakes people up, any sort of accident that would create an arc might upset their plans. When we go in the powerhouse, Nick, we'll want to take all our guns."

They came to wreckage on the bridge. Cars had met almost head-on and crashed. Their impact had swung them partly around, blocking the roadway. But somebody had come along since the crash—spilled gasoline and oil on the highway showed it—and shifted one car enough to clear the road again. This meant that somebody else was alive and moving. That could only be some compatriot of Fran's.

Waldron's jaw clenched. Nick noted it too. In any case, Waldron very painstakingly checked his high-frequency pack and reached over into the back of the car and hung extra ammunition-belts about himself until he looked rather like a harness rack. He got a sub-machine gun ready to fire.

They drove down the sloping other side of the bridge. They turned to the left and passed through streets that were mostly clear. Much of Brooklyn had fled, like much of New York.

They reached the powerhouse, standing monstrous and tall above an empty street. Chain-link fencing surrounded most of it. But there was, of course, an entrance. And here there was not silence. There was an indefinite but sustained humming sound. Once there was a faint, mechanical clanking.

Nick stopped the car at Waldron's instruction. Waldron then reached back his hand and Lucy gave him a submachine gun and shells for it Nick got cautiously out on the other side.

"I don't hear anybody," said Nick in a hushed voice, "but there must be somebody tending the machinery. Or is it automatic?"

His voice echoed, hushed as it was. Lucy stepped to the ground, a quaint and exotic figure in the armor of the invaders, yet with the most familiar of weapons at her waist.

They went into the powerhouse. They passed through empty, lighted corridors with unfamiliar smells. They found the room where there were long rows of iron objects, with doors through whose chinks came the gleaming of the fires of hell. They saw men here, too. They were toppled and stiff.

They went to the vast generator room, in which the humming noise was created. The room was monstrous in size and the machinery was gigantic, though not in proportion to the power it developed. And there was no moving human figure anywhere. The only attendants were small, stiffened figures scattered among the metal giants. Even alive, they would have seemed too puny to control such mechanisms.

Waldron feverishly traced bus-bars and power-leads. He followed them across the hall to the switchboard with its maze of inch-thick copper conductors. There, dwarfed by his surroundings, he said: "The main switch is thrown, Nick."

Nick ran ten paces. He looked out a window.

"Most of the city's dark. It wasn't when we came in. Somebody threw that switch while we were down in the boiler room, most likely."

Waldron said grimly: "I think we're going to get killed. We can't make a stable arc with the amount of juice that'll be pouring out, unless we do a divided flat one. We want insulating stuff to pound up and make a crucible with."

Nick opened a metal cupboard. Material for emergency repairs was there. There was a stock of copper bolts and nuts. There was highly desirable other material.

Lucy said a shaky sentence and climbed to a high walkway where she could see every entrance and exit of the huge room. She did not know what they planned. They had spoken of steam and boilers and horsepower by the hundred thousand. As they worked, they babbled of condensers and gaps and molten copper. They seemed to refer with full comprehension to some fully matured plan at which she could not even guess, and which certainly they hadn't discussed in any detail. But Lucy had come to have an extraordinary confidence in Waldron.

Nick knelt on the floor and hammered porcelain insulators to bits. Then he built the fragments into a mound such as children build on the seashore with sand. There came the sound of blows on metal, and Waldron came staggering back with ten- and fifteen-foot sections of shining square bus-bar. Nick grinned at him. Together they bent them into the shapes they required by sticking the ends in stationary machines and heaving on the ends.

Waldron came back with more bus-bar. He disappeared again. Lucy watched. Once she thought she saw a movement through one of the open bus-bars, but she could not be sure.

"It's all right," said Nick. "You and Steve are wearing their armor. That ought to confuse them a little."

There was a shot. Two more. Nick ran for the sound, swinging a sub-machine gun to readiness. Lucy turned white and darted for the steps to the floor of the great room.

But Waldron came into the huge room, dripping big sheets of thin sheet metal as he came.

"Only one man," he said calmly, "and I killed him. But we'd better hurry. Nick, these are for condensers."

Nick grabbed them.

"Glass from the windows. Big sheets!"

Waldron shattered one windowpane and strained at the frame which held in the next. He came back with a sheet of glass. Nick built up condensers. They were neither neat nor efficient nor very promising. They might arc. But they had to do.

A man in the scaly armor of the invaders stormed into the huge room. He carried one of the cane-like whips with metal lashes that Waldron had seen used on Market Street, in Newark. The man saw Lucy first, and she looked like one of the invaders herself. He rasped a savage and wholly unintelligible sentence at her.

Waldron shot him dead, very deliberately, and said mildly: "Better hurry up, Nick."

Nick worked like a madman. Two more men dashed in. A burst of shots knocked one down. The other tripped over him and fell. But he saw Nick—not in proper uniform of armor—and he screamed out in the cryptic syllables of the invaders' language. He crawled behind a turbine base and continued to scream shrill warning.

A man poked his head around a door. He aimed a queer, pistol-like device at Nick. It looked familiar to Waldron. The man absurdly hid behind the door instead of the door frame. Waldron fired a burst of shots through the wood, filling the door with holes and the man with lead. The pistol-like weapon dropped to the floor, heated up and seemed to melt.

There were running footsteps and babbling voices.

"Watch the doors on that side, Lucy," said Waldron.

Nick stood up, panting.

"I think I've got it," he wheezed. "I think so."

He ran to the great master switch. He jammed it home.

There was a flash of blue-white flame. Then another. Then a harsh, unbearable glare.

Nick had built a flat mound of powdered porcelain, something like a dry mud pie. Its top contained shallow depressions filled with stray copper bolts and nuts, and separated by a dyke of porcelain between. A streak of sheet metal had connected the metal scraps, and bus-bars led to the separate hollows.

With the switch thrown, sixty-six hundred volts of electricity and nobody could know how many amperes of current tried to go through the small, sheet-metal bridge. It heated and exploded, and a giant arc poured through the metallic vapor over the porcelain dyke. At first the arc was merely blue-white. Then it was colored by the ghastly hue of vaporized copper. It threw an unbearable, an intolerable glare upon the ceiling. The heaped-up copper objects smoked and began to glow. In seconds they were white-hot. Then there were merely two pools of melted copper, separated by a narrow mass of porcelain, with an arc flaring and flaming between them.

It looked like a fragment of a blue-white star flung upon the floor of the generator room. Men in scaly armor flung their hands before their eyes, fearful of what seemed strange and frightening to them. Harsh voices from shelter commanded them on. But then Nick and Waldron set grimly to work with their sub-machine guns.

And then noises began in the city outside.

The sixty-six-hundred-volt arc was of necessity a generator of high-frequency current. The condensers Nick had improvised served in a fashion to stabilize that output. The arc itself fed into the city's power lines. Surges of high-frequency current poured out through all the feeder lines of the city. Automatic switches cut in the lines normally allotted to other powerhouses, and automatically synchronized alternators cut in the enormous reserve of storage-battery current which was designed to stabilize the voltage but now maintained the arc. Every AC feeder line in the city became filled with surges of current. And nearly every human being in the city had high-frequency surges induced into his body.

There were many, many thousands of horsepower in the arc now flaming between pools of melted metal. There was more power in the arc—more by many tens of thousands of kilowatts—than in whatever device there was which had thrown the world's greatest city into cataleptic lifelessness. Trivial as was the current each person received, it was enough to neutralize the paralyzing force, plus something over. It was enough to start the process of revival—and to finish it.

The life in the city had been that of a partly evacuated city near midnight. But New York and Brooklyn are not silent at any hour. There should have been the sound of many motors. There were only crashes and wrecks in the streets. Folk who found themselves lying prone, others like them all about, and saw the innumerable disasters of the traffic—they could guess instantly two important matters. One was that the "plague" had struck them. The other was that they had recovered from it. Unspeakable tumult arose on all the many square miles of the city.

The noise came even into the powerhouse, and Waldron and Nick Bannerman heard it in between the cracklings and roaring of their own guns. The invaders attacked with a queer helplessness, driven on by cracking whips and raging voices behind them. And they did not know how to take advantage of the cover of the machines, and when presently they began to use firearms they were clumsy and unskilled in their management.

The great hall rang with the roaring of the sub-machine guns and with the poppings of revolvers. Waldron and Nick defended their unholy flame with an insensate savagery.

Bedlam arose upon the harbor. Tugs and steamers found themselves suddenly violating all rules and customs of navigation. They got their high-frequency current through the fact of earth-return to the powerhouse. They whistled furiously at each other to straighten out the tangle in which they found themselves. Those which had rammed each other or found themselves aground emitted the mournful, wailing blasts which called for immediate assistance. There were whistlings and hootings and bellowings on the water.

But there was more. Policemen found themselves everywhere prone upon the ground. They scrambled to their feet to see wreckage all about them, smashed cars, smashed windows. Their whistles shrilled and they raced to their beat telephones to report tragedies, or else they competently broke in the doors of the nearest stores to call ambulances with the minimum loss of time.

And these things happened not only in New York, but in Brooklyn, and Queens and the Bronx. There was uproar everywhere, except, rather quaintly, for a certain considerable area in the fifties, where the character of supplied electric current was anomalous. There the power lines carried direct instead of alternating current. The feeder lines of the other sort did not feed to them. So part of New York remained frozen and dead. But everywhere else the city cried out tumultuously.

And Waldron and Nick Bannerman fought savagely. They dodged about among the generators, sending bullets at every attempt of the invaders to get enough men inside the great room to overwhelm them by pure numbers. The attackers were of that cringing, cowed class known—so Fran had said—as Underones. They were not good fighting men. For Leaders remaining safely under cover and threatening their men into bravery did not bring out the higher qualities of courage.

So Nick and Waldron could hold the space about their ghastly green flare. It flickered and flared and filled the room with its incredibly colored light. The crackling sound of shots stung their eardrums. The light blinded their eyes when they could not avoid glancing at it. Lucy had climbed upward again. She called down warnings of any gatherings of men about to rush toward them. The dynamos hummed and hummed and the two men fought desperately, and even more desperately they wondered when this outburst would bring police and consequently help to them. Meanwhile, however, the police worked like madmen to cope with emergencies they knew of.

Then a pilot light went out before one of the giant generators. Then another, and another. The droning of the turbine-driven dynamos had been a steady, throbbing hum. It became a fainter sound and then degenerated into a whine. The whine grew fainter. More pilot lights flicked out. The ghastly blue glare wavered. It was running exclusively on far-away banks of storage batteries now. But these were designed to have a capacity to run every device in the city for a period of ten minutes and they had been drawn on heavily for a very long time. Guns continued to crackle, but the arc which leaped between pools of melted metal grew unstable. It wavered more and more erratically. Then the same hands that had cut off steam from one turbine after another found the switch to the battery banks. The arc went out.

The noises in the city stopped. The shrieking of sirens cut off to the sound of many crashes. The whistles upon the river died away save that far down toward the Battery one lone boat wailed on and on, and would so continue until the steam in its boiler was exhausted.

"They cut off the steam," said Waldron in icy calmness. "The city's gone dead again. But it was a good try."

There came another rush of men. This time some of their Leaders followed them, striking with their whips at the men who were to do the actual fighting. And there was the courage of pure desperation in that rush. Revolvers crackled in the front ranks.