Manhattan Transfer

by John E. Stith

  A dozen dark lines led from points all around the island up into the air. Annie's gaze followed the cables and saw an enormous black ship even bigger than the captured borough, hovering above it. A puzzled expression wrinkled her forehead. The alcohol level in her blood was high enough that for a long moment she considered the possibility that she was witnessing the advertising stunt to end them all.

  Finally Annie yelled to her husband in the next room, "Hey, Herb, come here. You really should see this."

  #

  The rear half of the A–train subway had sustained far more damage than the front half. The rear half had crashed into something very hard.

  Groans filled her ears as Shirley Hamilburg regained consciousness. Her first thought was that she'd had a super–realistic dream about going to work, and then she worried that she'd overslept. Finally she opened her eyes and managed to convince herself she really was awake despite the fact that she couldn't see. Where was Frankie, and what was wrong with her eyes?

  Light flickered somewhere to her left. She turned her head to see where it was coming from, and she finally realized that she really had been on a subway car. So where was she now? The light flickered again. It was someone with a cigarette lighter or a match. Suddenly she realized how hot she was. The air was stifling. She was still in the car.

  Shirley lifted her head, feeling the pull of pain from her shoulder as she shifted position. Lights flickered from somewhere outside of the car. She was in a mass of bodies like some nightmarish orgy.

  Shirley tried to extricate herself from the mass of bodies. When a nearer flame lit the darkness, she saw that the man ahead of her must have hit the handrail support pole very hard. From near the front of the car came the sound of someone throwing up, and Shirley winced. She'd almost rather be dead than be throwing up.

  Shirley finally managed to free herself. She moved over a few still bodies by supporting most of her weight from the overhead bar. The door had already been forced open. Outside, to the right, near the front of the train, lights flickered. She edged between the car and the side of the tunnel. The car itself was obviously not sitting evenly on the rails, and it leaned toward the opposite side of the tunnel. She passed the end of the car and walked beside the car ahead, which had jackknifed.

  Shirley caught up with a small group of people holding flickering matches and lighters.

  By the wavering light she could see that the first car in line had somehow been cut off as though God possessed a giant meat cleaver. The crumpled half–car rested against a solid obstruction blocking the entire tunnel. Two lifeless faces gaped and stared unseeing through the blood–smeared window.

  Shirley stared at the blocked end of the subway tunnel. A man beside her said, "I don't understand. What's going on?"

  Shirley shrugged. She had no answers.

  A sudden rumbling and creaking began. Someone in the small crowd said, "It's moving!"

  Sure enough, the black barrier at the end of the tunnel was sliding upward. And outward. Light filtered into the tunnel, and Shirley squinted as her eyes adjusted.

  The gap between the tunnel mouth and the upward–moving plate widened. The gap kept on widening. Instead of revealing the other side of the tunnel, though, a chasm opened just past the mouth of the tunnel. Someone in the group murmured, "Holy crap."

  The others in the crowd seemed as speechless as Shirley was until the bottom of the moving shape reached eye level. More and more light filtered down until daylight finally reached the bottom of what was an immense cavity like a strip mine. And above the void, an incredibly large dark shape floated higher and higher.

  Water began to spill past the tunnel mouth, but not before Shirley had gotten a view of gaping tunnel mouths on the sides of the elongated chasm. The pair of holes more or less in line with the direction the severed subway tunnel pointed had to be the Holland Tunnel, and just to the right was a PATH rail line tube. To the north were another pair of severed tunnels that would be the Amtrak rail lines. God almighty.

  Even farther north was a trio of tubes, the Lincoln Tunnel. Grimy black smoke poured from the rightmost circle. Water began to slosh past the other tunnel mouths as Shirley's mind finally began to come to terms with what was fairly obvious but very difficult to accept: all of Manhattan was rising into the air, leaving a huge long hole in the ground in the same shape as the island.

  The waterfall grew louder and louder, but for the moment, the water was moving past the tunnel mouth fast enough that little water entered. By that time, the entire perimeter of the lip looked like Niagara Falls.

  A man in a sweater and a vest said slowly, "Oh, God. Do you realize what will happen when the water fills the hole and reaches this height?"

  Suddenly Shirley knew exactly what would happen. At about the same time someone else said, "We'd better schlepp our butts out of here!"

  A kid in a black jacket said, "We'll never get all the way back before the water runs down the tunnel and reaches us. We'd be better off jumping in." By now the falling water made a thunderous noise.

  "Yeah, sure," said the man in the sweater. "Be my guest. Go ahead and jump. It's like a Goddamn blender out there. And if we wait for the water to reach here, we'll just get caught and sucked back down here as the water drains into the tunnel."

  "We'll, we gotta to do something," the kid said.

  "Right. I'm running." The man ran back into the dim tunnel. Most of the others followed, and Shirley went, too.

  They ran through the nightmare blackness until Shirley's lungs threatened to explode. They hadn't even managed to reach the lowest section of the tunnel before the water began flooding in. The whooshing made her heart race even faster. Wind started rushing out of the tunnel, and two cigarette lighters went out. Cold water swept past Shirley's ankles, and seconds later she was sloshing though calf–deep water.

  The water seemed to suddenly move faster, and it swept Shirley off her feet. The current carried her in total darkness. Her feet dragged against one wall. Her body tumbled in the turbulent current. She couldn't tell which way was up, but she had to breathe.

  Shirley had held her breath as long as she possibly could by the time the current smashed her head against a maintenance panel.

  #

  Rudy Sanchez stood transfixed at the window as the Municipal Building creaked around him as though in a high wind. Some enormous ship above the city was obviously lifting the entire bubbled island into the air. A disturbance spread into the water in the Upper Bay as though a drain had opened in a giant bathtub. The Staten Island ferry had been moving toward Manhattan, but by now it had turned 180 degrees and was trying desperately and in vain to move south before it was dragged backward into the depression. Rudy could see a mass of people at the back rail of the ferry as the crest of turbulent water began to shake the ferry apart. Rudy had to shut his eyes.

  When he opened his eyes again, Rudy could no longer see the ferry, but as he craned his head and looked southwest he was just in time to see the Statue of Liberty disappear below the horizon, looking for all the world as if she were waving good–bye.

  In less than a minute Brooklyn dropped from sight, and within minutes Rudy could no longer see the Atlantic Ocean. The atmosphere slowly shifted from blue toward black. The image of the Statue of Liberty still burned in his memory.

  Rudy glanced at people on the ground. Hardly anyone was moving, and almost everyone seemed to be staring at the dome.

  The sky outside the dome now looked almost black. Rudy could see stars around the edges of the huge black shape overhead, and on the ground shadows seemed sharper than normal. The sun was brighter than he'd ever seen it.

  As Rudy watched, the dark shape overhead suddenly grew wider, blotting out more and more stars until the only stars Rudy could see were almost level with him, visible through the side of the dome. His stomach twisted as he decided the ship towing the city hadn't come closer, but instead they were now underneath a ship that dwarfed the one that had picked up Manhattan. Ru
dy swallowed hard.

  The black shape started to blot out more and more stars, as though a huge black cylinder was being lowered around the island. Rudy watched helplessly as they were pulled upward into the giant ship.

  The light from the sun was cut off, and Manhattan moved into darkness.

  Chapter 2

  Free Utilities

  As unnatural darkness spread over the Manhattan morning, Dorine Underwood, the mayor of New York City, watched in shock from her west–wing–office window in City Hall. Her job demanded her to expect the unexpected, but this was absurd.

  Dorine had also been at her desk before the regular start of the business day. Getting in early was the only way she could keep up with the steady stream of daily visitors and still manage to keep the city mechanisms operating smoothly. Long ago she had learned the importance of delegating, but she still had to make sure all the tentacles of city government waved in a consistent manner. Her predecessor had served but a single term, thanks in part to snafus like having scheduled tours of area medical research labs on Animal Rights Day.

  The changed city sounds had brought her to the window, where her body momentarily seized up. She couldn't breathe, couldn't swallow. She just stood there petrified, on the verge of panic, as Manhattan rose through the atmosphere.

  The darkness was not total. The few buses, cabs, trucks, and cars stopped on the streets below and not yet abandoned by their drivers showed twin sets of lamps cutting through the artificial night.

  Dorine would have felt more comfortable in the dark. The dark could let her pretend nothing had changed. None of the headlights below penetrated the bubble she had seen placed around the edge of the shoreline. Instead, the lights reflected off the bubble, creating a fun–house mirror image of the panicked city and making the recent changes impossible to disbelieve. She shivered uncontrollably in the warm room.

  For a moment she closed her eyes in another futile attempt to pretend everything was normal. In the self–imposed blindness, Dorine Underwood realized that even in darkness the events of the last half–hour could not be ignored. She felt lighter.

  She opened her eyes again and this time focused on herself instead of on the panic outside. She lifted her arm. Her wrist seemed to have strings attached, pulling gently upward. She knew what that meant—that the island of Manhattan was now in a weaker gravity field than Earth's—but she still had trouble accepting it.

  As a test, she jumped. Fortunately her office ceiling was so high that she didn't hit her head hard enough to hurt. She fell back to the floor in slow motion, and the time it took her to fall was so long that she tipped on the way down and landed awkwardly on one ankle before falling to the floor with far less dignity than proper for a mayor of the Big Apple.

  Unhurt but astonished, she regained her footing and looked out the window again. Her breath came in short bursts. Nothing in the mayor's manual had been adequate preparation for this.

  #

  Julie Kravine had felt the tremors as she hurried along with the others in the subway tunnel, and now she, too, realized that somehow she was much lighter than before. Walking was no longer an instinctive act; she had to concentrate on keeping her balance between steps, and the ground seemed slick. The foursome carrying the wounded man had all stumbled, twice almost dropping the victim.

  One of the men said, "What's going on? This feels like one of those low–gravity rides at Epcot."

  Flickering lights from the cigarette lighters seemed slightly taller and thinner than before. The tall man who had more or less assumed command, Matt, said, "I can't think of any explanation. Let's just get this guy to safety, and we'll all find out."

  Julie found herself wanting to participate in the discussion rather than just acting as an observer. She said, "This isn't just some tunnel cave–in, though, don't you think? I'm nervous."

  Matt said, "I'm nervous, too. But there's not much we can do about it, is there?"

  Julie shook her head. Probably no one saw the gesture in the dim light.

  After a few more steps, the woman in the foursome suddenly said, "Look! Up there! There's a light."

  A train. Julie was suddenly nervous. Was there enough room for the train to pass without grinding them against the tunnel walls? Would it crash into their stopped train, killing even more people? The worried thoughts all flickered through her brain so fast that only a second later she realized the idea of a running train no longer made sense.

  She was right. Far ahead was the first working emergency light Julie had seen since they left the stalled cars behind. They must be close to the station. Finally they'd find out what was going on.

  #

  Matt and the three helpers maneuvered the man who'd lost his hand up onto the subway platform. The man rested on his back while they climbed up to the platform easily in the lighter gravity.

  As Matt picked up his corner of the raincoat again, the injured man's eyelids fluttered, then opened. "What?" he said groggily. His eyes focused somewhere behind Matt, and his forehead wrinkled in puzzlement. Matt glanced where the man was looking and saw a subway poster from the Ultimate Savior Church, showing in huge black letters, "Repent!"

  Matt looked back at the man and said, "We're here. You've got help. Don't worry about anything."

  Pain flickered across the man's face, and Matt wished they had some anesthetic for him. The man looked to be in his forties, with thin lips, black eyes, and lopsided eyebrows. His eyes closed, then opened slightly and closed again, like eyes of a child who wanted to stay up late but just couldn't last any longer.

  Even as they made their way up the dark stairs from the subway tunnel, Matt saw additional confirmation that whatever had happened was something far out of the ordinary. If the problem had been local, they would have found help at the station, or even before. On their way up, they encountered no one, and the city sounds seemed strange even to him.

  Car horns filtering down the stairwell didn't sound like the normal jumbled mess of short blasts. Instead, maybe a dozen horns of various pitch and volume blared steadily, as though a dozen accidents had left drivers slumped over their steering wheels.

  Matt and the others reached the final stairs to the street without finding any lighting other than the occasional emergency lamps. From the distance came the sounds of crying and a mass of mumbling people. The reporter moved ahead of them up the stairs. Matt watched his footing carefully and kept checking on the injured man. When they reached ground level, they moved past some people cowering near the wall, and Matt found the reporter standing there motionless, looking up.

  Instead of the daylight Matt had expected, he found night. Suspended over Manhattan was a reflected image of a darkened city lit only by the headlights of buses, cabs, trucks, and cars stalled and abandoned in the grid–locked streets. The sidewalks were lined with people in clumps staring up at the distorted reflections. Here and there a person lay flat on the ground. Someone maybe a half–block away wailed steadily. Matt's stomach lurched. He could understand the people lying down; the image suspended over the city, coupled with the low gravity, gave him a sharp twinge of acrophobia.

  One of the men in the foursome wobbled a bit, then recovered. Luckily the victim's weight was much less of a burden than before. Matt glanced around. Down the block was an ambulance caught in the traffic snarl.

  "Let's get this guy down there," Matt said, and pointed.

  They threaded their way through the people on the sidewalk and street. When they reached an open area and walked faster, Matt almost lost his footing. The pavement seemed too smooth, no doubt thanks to the low gravity allowing less friction.

  The ambulance attendants stood on the pavement next to their open doors, both looking up at the sky.

  "We've got someone who needs your attention," Matt said to the driver.

  It took a moment for the driver to focus on Matt and start to react to what he was saying, but after a few seconds his training must have taken over, and he and the other attendant start
ed to put the man with no hand onto a stretcher. Matt explained that they hadn't been able to locate the man's hand.

  The reporter came up beside Matt as the paramedics started puffing medication into the man's arm. The man's eyes fluttered open again, and the reporter asked, "Do you remember anything about what happened to you?"

  The man glanced toward the arm without a hand. He licked his lips and said softly, "I think God's trying to tell me something." His voice was mellow, resonant, despite the softness.

  "What do you mean by that?" she asked, but the man's eyes closed and his features relaxed, no doubt thanks to the medication taking over.

  Matt got back to the curb just as a bright light came on in the sky to the west of the city. A round spot the size of the sun penetrated the reflected images above the skyline and began to grow brighter. A hush fell over the people on the sidewalks and in the street.

  The "sun" grew brighter and brighter until it hurt to look at it, and the city streets lightened until they were as bright as day.

  When the "sun" reached what seemed to be its maximum intensity, the dome started losing its reflectivity, and in stages began to grow transparent. Matt moved a few steps so he could see better to the east. The first thing he realized was that although his memory told him the Brooklyn Bridge should be in view, it wasn't. Rather, all that showed was a stub of the bridge.

  The dome continued to increase in transparency, and Matt felt his mouth go dry. He could see through the dome, and what he saw didn't bear any resemblance at all to Brooklyn.

  Instead, the island of Manhattan rested on a vast gray plain. In the distance was another dome sitting on the plain, and to its left another. Slightly farther away than the pair was yet another dome. Matt shifted position again as the crowd came to life with screams and loud voices. He could see two more domes in the distance.

  Beneath the other domes were what seemed to be other cities, one a jumble of prismatic arches, another what looked like one enormous building, another a mass of needle–thin spires with halos near the top, and even someone much less well–traveled than Matt would have instantly known these cities had never existed on Earth.