The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  CHAPTER 4

  Eleven p.m., Thursday, May ninth, 1937.

  Item: June Sims hangs on her husband’s arm as they exit from the Audubon Theatre. Her eyes sparkle with happiness. She sighs tremulously. Then: “Johnny. Maybe we’d better call up and see if Junior is all right before we go eat.”

  * * * *

  Item: Anita Harrison-Smith peers over the shoulder of her black-coated dance partner with narrowed eyes. The florid-faced, heavy man in the alcove they are just passing is her husband. His companion is Rex Cranston, president of the A.P.&C.

  Without hearing she knows their talk is of debentures, temporary reactions, resistance points on Cumulative Index graphs. Howard Harrison-Smith has forgotten Anita exists, will remain oblivious of her till she comes for him to take her home.

  Her small red lips set in a firmer line. He has a long wait ahead of him tonight.

  * * * *

  Item: Aloysia Morne lets her ermine cape slide into Felix Hammond’s deft hands. He bends and kisses her where a shoulder no less white than the snowy fur melts into the perfect column of her neck. She turns with studied grace, and her throaty voice reproduces the deepest note of a cello.

  “Do you know, Felix, this lovely place of yours is more home to me than my own so-grand rooms.” Hammond smiles thinly, and does not answer.

  * * * *

  Item: In the dim light of a decrepit pier jutting into the Hudson Professor Henry Lanson is more than ever like a gigantic larva as he putters about a grotesque combination of steel rods and glittering, lenticular copper bowls out of which a brass cylinder points telescope-like at the zenith.

  An arm-thick cable crawls over the pier’s frayed boards, and coils over their edge to the water. Lanson turns and checks connections on another, smaller machine.

  Far across the Hudson’s black surface loom the Palisades. A dash of yellow luminance zigzags against their ebony curtain, a trolley climbing to where an amusement park is an arabesque of illumination against the overcast sky.

  To the right the cables of George Washington Bridge dip, twin catenaries of dotted light, and rise again. A red spark and a green one are the apices of moire, chromatic ribbons rippling across the water to the pier head from the deeper shadow of an army launch.

  Braced vertically, five feet behind that pierhead, is a whitewashed steel plate. This is the target for the automatic rifle that will be fired from that bobbing launch as a first trial of the Lanson Screen’s efficacy.

  Other tests will follow, later. But General Thompson will not yet chance firing artillery into Manhattan.

  Henry Lanson calls, in his voice without resonance, “Ready, General. Ten minutes for the first try.”

  From across the water Thompson snaps, “Ready. Go ahead.”

  Lanson lumbers back to his machine, thrusts at a lever. There is no sound, no vibration. Suddenly the river, the Palisades, disappear. The amusement park is gone, the inverted necklaces of pearly light that mark the bridge cables. There is no sky. Lanson looks at his wrist watch.

  “Ten minutes,” he chuckles. “He couldn’t get through in ten thousand years.”

  He is very sure of himself, this man. But perhaps there is a minute residuum of doubt in his mind. After all, he has never experimented with so vast an extension of his invention’s power. He thuds to the steel target, puts one doughy paw against it, leans out to view its riverward surface. Will there be any flecks of black on it to show the impact of the bullets that are being fired at it?

  Is he warned by a sound, a creak? One cannot know. At any rate he is too obese, too ponderous, to avoid catastrophe. Under his leaning weight the steel plate rips from flimsy braces. Falls.

  Its edge thuds against the physicist’s head, knocks him down, crushes his skull.

  Professor Henry Lanson’s brain, and its secrets, are a smear of dead protoplasm mixed with shattered bone and viscous blood.

  CHAPTER 5

  Eleven-twenty-eight p.m., Thursday, May ninth, 1937.

  The lights are dim in Foo Komg’s pseudo-Oriental establishment. John Sims spoons sugar into a hot teapot.

  “I’m going to make a lawyer out of Junior,” he says slowly. “He’ll go to Dartmouth for his academic course and then to Harvard. He won’t have to start working right out of high school like I did.”

  John is reminded of the days before June belonged to him by the setting, by the dreamy light in her eyes.

  “Let’s walk down Broadway,” he says, “When we get through here.” That is what they used to do when all the glittering things in the store windows did not seem quite as unattainable as they did now.

  “No, Johnny. I want to go home. I have a queer feeling there’s something wrong. Mother isn’t so young any more, and she’s forgotten what to do if a child is croupy or anything.”

  “Silly. Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Take me home, hon.”

  “Oh, all right.” Petulantly. “It’s just like you to spoil things…”

  * * * *

  Anita Harrison-Smith slips out of the side door of the old Gellert Mansion on East Sixty-first Street. She signals a taxi.

  “Pier Fifty-seven.” Her violet eyes are deep, dark pools and a visible pulse throbs in her temple…

  * * * *

  Nobody looks at the sky. Nobody ever looks at the sky in New York. Nobody knows the sky has suddenly gone black, fathomless.

  CHAPTER 6

  Later:

  “Nita!”

  “Ted I—”

  “You did come! Here, driver, what’s the fare?”

  The cab circles in Fifteenth Street, vanishes eastward. Van Norden takes the woman’s arm.

  “Have any trouble getting away?”

  “No.” She is quivering. “Hurry, darling. Let’s get on board before anyone sees us.”

  “There’s some trouble. Fog or something. The pier doors are closed, but the officials say they’ll be open again directly. They won’t sail without us.”

  “Look, Ted, it is a heavy fog. Why, you can’t see the river from here. Even the other end of the ship is hidden. But there isn’t any haze here. Queer. The ship seems to be cut in half; it’s quite distinct up to a certain point, then there just isn’t anything more. It’s black, not gray like fog ought to be.”

  “Let’s go in that little lunch wagon till we can get aboard. Nobody will look for us in there.”

  “Let’s. I’m afraid, Ted. I’m terribly afraid…”

  * * * *

  Nobody looks at the sky except General Darius Thompson, bobbing in a little launch on the Hudson. He is staring at vacancy where New York had been a quarter hour before. Up the river the cables of the great Bridge come out of nothingness, dip, and rise to the western shore.

  Toward the Bay there is nothing to show where the metropolis should be. No light, no color. Nothing. Sheer emptiness. He looks at the radiant figures on his watch once more.

  “Wonder what’s keeping the old fool,” he growls. “He should have dissipated the screen five minutes ago.”

  The night is warm, but General Thompson shivers suddenly, an appalling speculation beats at his mind, but he will not acknowledge it. He dares not.

  * * * *

  A hundred yards from Thompson, in another space, a device of steel and copper and brass stands quiescent over the unmoving body of the one man who knew its secret.

  Into the dim recesses of the army pier a dull hum penetrates, the voice of a million people going about their nightly pursuits, unaware, as yet, of doom.

  * * * *

  In his cubicle on the hundred and ninetieth floor of New York University’s Physics Building, Howard Cranston watched the moving needle of his Merton Calculator with narrowed eyes. If the graph that was slowly tracing itself on the result-sheet took the expected form, a problem that had taxed the ingenuity of the world’s scientists for sixty years would be solved at last.

  The lanky young physicist could not know it, but the electrically operated “brain” was repeating
in thirty minutes calculations it had taken Henry Lanson three years to perform, two generations before. His own contribution had been only an idea, and knowledge of the proper factors to feed into the machine.

  A red line curved on the co-ordinate sheet, met a previously drawn blue one. A bell tinkled, and there was silence in the room.

  Breath came from between Cranston’s lips in a long sigh. Curiously, he felt no elation.

  He crossed the room slowly, and looked out through the glassite-covered aperture in the south wall. Just below, elevated highways were a tangled maze in the afternoon sun, and helicopters danced like a cloud of weaving midges. But Cranston neither heard nor saw them. His gaze was fixed farther away, down there where a curious cloud humped against the horizon, a cloud that was a challenging piling of vacancy; something that existed, that occupied space, yet was nothing.

  Beyond it he could see the shimmering surface of New York Bay, and rising from it a tall white shaft. At the apex of that shaft a colossal figure faced him. It was a gigantic woman of bronze, her head bowed, her hands pressed to her heavy breasts that agonized in frustration. The Universal Mother stood in eternal mourning over the visible but unseen grave of millions.

  “It might be dangerous,” Howard Cranston muttered. “The gases of the decomposed bodies—there was no way for them to escape. Before I start building the machine I must find out. Carl Langdon will know.”

  He turned away. “But first I’ll draw it up. It’s simple enough—will take less than a week to build.”

  The design that presently took pictured form under Howard Cranston’s flying fingers was strangely like that which sixty years ago Henry Lanson had called his B machine. But there was a difference. This one could be used from outside the Screen.

  With the aid of this, by expanding the radius to include the original barrier, it would be a simple matter to destroy the hemiobloid of impenetrable force that was a city’s tomb, to release the force which Lanson had set up.

  CHAPTER 7

  Rand Barridon’s flivver-plane settled before a graceful small structure of metal and glass. He swung his rather square body out of the fuselage, crunched up the gravel path.

  The door opened, iris-like, as he stepped into the beam of the photoray. Somewhere inside a deep-toned gong sounded, and tiny pattering feet made a running sound. “Daddy! Daddy’s home!”

  Blond ringlets were an aureole around tiny Rob’s chubby face. The father bent to him, tossed him in the air, caught him dexterously. Ruth Barridon appeared, taller than her husband, her countenance a matured, more feminine replica of the boy’s. Rob was a warm bundle against her breasts as her lips met Rand’s. “You’re late, hon. Supper’s been ready twenty minutes.”

  “I know. We were talking about what they found down there.” He gestured vaguely to the south. “One of the fellows flew down last night. They wouldn’t let him land. But he saw enough, hovering on the five thousand foot level, to keep him awake all night.”

  Ruth paled, shuddered. “What an awful thing it must have been. You know, nobody ever thought much about it. The cloud had been there all our lives and it really didn’t seem to mean anything. But seeing all those buildings where people just like us once lived and worked, seeing those…”

  “Afterward, dear.” Ruth caught the signal of the man’s eyes to the quietly listening child and stopped. “I’m hungry. Let’s get going.”

  The soft glow of artificial daylight in the Barridon living room is reflected cozily from its walls of iridescent metal. Rand stretches himself, yawns. “What’s on tap tonight, hon?”

  “We’re staying home for a change.”

  “I thought this was Matilda’s night.”

  “It is. But Mrs. Carter asked me to change with her, she had something on. And I would rather stay home. There’s a new play by Stancourt. I think they call it ‘Alone with Love.’ Fred Barrymore is taking the lead.”

  “That gigolo—I can’t see what you women find in him!”

  “Rand! That’s just a pose. You know darn well you turn him on every time.”

  “Oh, all right. But let’s get the magazine viewcast first. They always have something interesting.” He crosses the room, touches an ornamental convolution on the wall. A panel slides noiselessly sideward, revealing a white screen. A switch clicks, the room dims, the screen glows with an inner light. Rand twirls a knob.

  The wall-screen becomes half of an oval room, hung with gray draperies, gray-carpeted. There is a small table in the room, behind it show the legs and back of a chair. Like the furniture in the Barridons’ own place, table and chair are of lacquered metal, but these are gray. The drapes part, a tall man comes through. His face is long, pinched, his blond hair bristles straight up from his scalp, and his brown eyes are grave. The impact of a strong personality reaches out from the televised image, vibrant with a stagy dominance even over the miles of space intervening between actuality and reproduction.

  “Oh, it’s Grant Lowndes,” Ruth breathes. “I love him!”

  “Shhh.” Barridon is intent. “Shhh.”

  The Radio Commission’s premier reader moves with practiced grace. An adept at building up interest in trivialities by pantomimed portentousness, Lowndes is weaving a spell about his far-flung audience that will assure him concentrated attention. As he sinks into the seat his eyes stare from the screen with hypnotic penetration. He places a book on the table before him. Its covers are of tooled leather, but there is a smudge of green mould across them concealing the design. He opens it.

  The pages are yellow, frayed-edged. Faded handwriting is visible; minuscule. An old diary, perhaps, picked up from some dusty second-hand display.

  “Good evening, friends.” His voice is mellow, warming, vibrant with a peculiar tenseness. Ruth’s tiny, stifled gasp is a tribute to its art. “The manufacturers of General Flyers Helioplanes have honored me tonight with a great privilege and a sad task. I bring to you a voice from the past, a voice long silent, speech from a throat long moldered into dust, thoughts from a brain whose very molecules are one with the snows of yesteryear. I bring to you the palpitant, living agony of the greatest catastrophe the world has ever known.” His eyes drop to the volume on the lectern, and his slim, white hand presses down upon its face.

  “My colleagues of the viewcast service have informed you of the rending of the veil that sixty-two years ago cut off Manhattan Island from the world. They have brought into your homes the awful vision of dead buildings; dead streets strewn with twisted skeletons. You have, I am sure, tried to picture what must have happened there in the tragic days till eternal silence fell and the entombed city had become a vast necropolis. Today, my friends, the searchers found an account of one man’s experience, a painstakingly written chronicle of that time. General Flyers is sponsoring the presentation to you of this human, pitiful tale. I will quote from the diary.”

  CHAPTER 8

  May 9, Thursday: It is four in the morning. Aloysia came here with me from the theatre… I have just returned from escorting her to the place where she resides. She does not call it home—that name she reserves for these rooms. “Home, Felix,” she said, “Is the place where happiness dwells.” I recognized that it is a line from one of her earlier appearances. Her mind is a blotter, seizing the thoughts, the ideas, the mental images of others and becoming impregnated with them. No. Molding itself to them. Perhaps that is the secret of her arts—dramatic and amatory.

  I am restless, uneasy. There is a peculiar feeling in the air, a vague sense of impending catastrophe. Even the recollection of the past few hours with her does not drive it away…

  I thought music might fit my mood. But the radio is out of gear. Tonight nothing but silence. Strangely enough the police talk was roaring in. There seems to be some trouble along the waterfront…

  It ought to be getting on to dawn, but it is still pitch dark outside. There isn’t any breeze. The sky is absolutely black. I have never seen anything like it in New York. Clouds at night always reflect
the glow of the city lights. And if there are no clouds there should be stars, a moon. Can there be a storm coming down on the big city—a tornado? That would explain the way I feel.

  May 10, Friday: There has been no daylight today. The only illumination is artificial. Somehow that seems the worst of what has happened to the city. For something has happened. Manhattan is surrounded by an impenetrable barrier. Nobody, nothing can get in or out. There have been no trains at Grand Central or Penn Station, the subway is operating only within the borders of Manhattan Island.

  I have been driving around with Aloysia all day. In spite of the darkness things went on very much as usual in the morning-children went to school, toilers to their work. It dawned only gradually that more than half the staffs in offices and stores had not shown up. Those who do not live in Manhattan. At noon the newspapers came out with scare headlines. Every bridge out of the city is closed off by the veil of—what can I call it? Every pier. A cover has shut down over us as if Manhattan were a platter on which a planked steak was being brought from the kitchen of the Ritz Plaza. Even the telephone and telegraph have been affected.

  By three in the afternoon the whole city was in the streets. My car was forced to move at a crawl. There was no sign of fear, though. The general consensus was that the phenomenon was something thrilling, a welcome break in the humdrum of daily existence. The mayor’s proclamation, in the newspapers and over the few radio stations located within the city, seemed quite superfluous. He urged the people to be calm. Whatever it was that had shut us in was only temporary, it would vanish of itself or a way would be found to get rid of it. He has appointed a committee of scientists from Columbia and the City Colleges to investigate and make plans. The best of them all, however, is unavailable. Henry Lanson. He was found crushed to death on a Hudson River pier, killed in some obscure experiment.

  Aloysia left me in time for the evening performance. The theaters and movie houses are crowded—they have had the best day in their history.

  At ten o’clock tonight I went to take a drink of water. None ran from the tap. I called the superintendent and he said the mains had been shut off. There was no longer any pressure. Police orders are that water is to be used only for drinking and cooking. It is being pumped from the main by fire engines stationed at the hydrants and a rationing system has been devised. I have two or three cases of Perrier—they should be sufficient for my needs till this thing is over. There is plenty of wine and Scotch, but I have no desire for alcohol.