Wayne pulled up to the tiny telephone and telegraph office in a spatter of dust and pebbles, catapulted to the ground, heaved the door open with unceremonious shoulders. There was a night operator always on duty.
But even as he crashed into the single-room office he knew that his errand was futile. Merrill, the night man, seemed slightly dazed, considerably worried. Tools were scattered over the tables; the instruments were silent. He looked up in surprise at his precipitous early-morning visitor.
“Howdy, Mr. Wayne!” he greeted.
“Get me a wire to New York, Merrill!” the young astronomer rasped. “Hurry, man! It’s a matter of life and death.”
The operator swept tired fingers over the array of tools. “Sorry,” he said. “No can do. All lines are dead; there ain’t been a peep out of ’em since along midnight. I’ve been tinkerin’ an’ tinkerin’. There ain’t nothin’ seems wrong, yet the darn instruments just won’t work. Mebbe—”
But Wayne was already scribbling furiously on a pad. He ripped off the blank, thrust it in the astonished operator’s hand. “Here!” he almost shouted. “If you do manage to establish contact, send this wire to New York. Give it the right of way over everything else. The lives of ten million people depend on it.”
Then he was out like a whirlwind, leaving the gaping man looking foolishly at the slip of paper in his hand.
Howard Giles did not have to be told the news. One look at Wayne’s set, despairing face was enough. Gears clashed furiously, the car lunged forward again. Denver—two hundred and twenty miles away!
At 8:42 a. m. the mile-high metropolis of the Rockies shimmered in the green-tinged sunlight. Once they had stopped for gas, once for a flat tire, yet Wayne had averaged almost sixty miles an hour.
Here was no sleepy village. Already the city streets were jammed with neck-craning crowds, staring upward at the shining portent of that overwhelming green arc whose sear of light outrivaled even the Sun itself. But there was no fear, no terror in their eyes.
A full-blown comet, the secretly puzzled astronomers of the Denver Observatory had announced for public use, while their telescopes, their instruments, scanned the apparition frantically. A comet that somehow had been overlooked, had slyly crept, as it were, upon an unsuspecting Earth.
It was a grand show, a mighty spectacle, and the crowds jostled one another for vantage points of observation. But to the two men in the car, worming their way through traffic-blocked thoroughfares, hooting raucous horn in violation of all local regulations, disregarding red lights, the shrill, indignant whistles of trailing police, it was a terror and a desolation, an impending disaster to millions of unknowing mortals.
But at the telegraph offices they found worried, unhappy staffs. All lines were dead. Denver was cut off from communication with the rest of the world. “Must be that damned comet,” a much-harried official told them. “Our galvanometers are jumping all over the place—gone haywire.”
At the wireless stations the same tragic story unfolded—of fierce static, of ether howls that made even local signals impossible to understand. As for New York—well—
It was 9:10 when the mayor hurriedly arrived. But there was nothing he could do; nothing that any one could do—even aside from his manifest unbelief in their wild yarn. Finally, in order to get rid of his unwelcome visitors, whose names, nevertheless, commanded sufficient respect to save them from jail as cranks, he suggested that they take a plane.
“A plane!” Giles laughed bitterly. “In exactly five hours New York will be wiped out.”
The mayor shrugged. “It’s the best I can offer. There’s a special racing plane at the airport that can do four hundred miles an hour. And perhaps,” he murmured politely, “your calculations may be a trifle in error.”
John Wayne felt his heart hammer like a pile driver. His calculations, he knew, were accurate to the minute. But in five hours—If only to save Betty, to swoop down and snatch her from impending doom—to broadcast hurried warning to the fated city—
“Get us to the airport as fast as you can,” he snapped.
he mayor was a gentleman, albeit a skeptic. Motor-cycle police, come to arrest the scorner of traffic laws, remained as an escort. The cavalcade made the three miles to the drome through city traffic in four minutes flat.
You’re lucky,” growled the sergeant who clung to the running board. “There’s Pete Halleck warming up his plane now.”
hey swept down upon the astonished pilot like a cyclone. In half a minute he had grasped the emergency; in two minutes more all tanks were loaded; and in three minutes flat the speedy plane was zooming into the heavens, Wayne and Giles, white-faced, urging him on to more speed—and still more speed.
he rampart of the Rockies fell away; the Great Plains spread like an interminable sheet beneath. The Mississippi, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, fled westward beneath them. The gauge quivered at four hundred and thirty-two miles per hour. The plane shook with fierce vibration; the struts howled in the wind; the propeller roared in thunderous accents.
ut the Sun crept remorselessly past the meridian, and the great green arc made an ever smaller angle with the horizon. At two in the afternoon they swept over Reading, about a hundred and twenty miles from New York.
welve more minutes,” groaned Giles. “And a hundred and twenty miles to go. It’s impossible to make it.”
ut Wayne’s face was a death mask. “Early or late, I’m going there,” he said tonelessly. He leaned toward the motionless pilot. “Pete!” he yelled. “Faster!”
alleck half turned. “Doing the best I can, Mr. Wayne,” he shouted back. “This crate never did four hundred forty before, and she’s doing it now.”
lready the green swath of flame hung low in the heavens, its dazzling, cruel beauty paling the white radiance of the Sun. Straight ahead its tip seemed to dip and touch the horizon. Straight ahead to the east, where New York City lay, ignorant of its fate. In a few short minutes—
Allentown was behind, Bethlehem gone with the wind. The rolling hills of Jersey came into view. All the sky was now tinged with ghastly green; the fiery sword was broader, lower, more baleful than ever before. The air shimmered and danced; the Sun blotted out; the motor sputtered as spark plugs, caught in strange currents, refused to function.
Two ten!
Newark was a green map in the distance; the towers of New York made a serrated edge on the horizon. The world was an emerald color.
Two twelve!
Straight ahead, as the motor coughed and died, the blinding green swath swooped, impinged on the topmost glittering towers, sank downward until city and glistening river and bay flamed with eerie color. The plane was gliding swiftly on a long, descending slant, but Wayne did not see. All his gaze was on that far-off vision.
A great cry tore at his throat, pierced even the drumming of the struts. Giles groaned; Pete Halleck swore profanely.
New York was shrinking before their very eyes.
The great, proud skyscrapers, interpenetrated with the fierce viridescent flame, transparent almost against the backdrop of the heavens, shrank swiftly smaller, compressed in ordered, equal recession to toy dimensions. The long oval of Manhattan Island, the wide band of the Hudson, the thinner ribbons of the East River and Harlem, the Bay, the spaces of the Bronx, the low ridge of Yonkers, the walls of the Palisades, retracted inwardly upon themselves, engulfed in a swiftly enlarging sphere of black, featureless darkness.
Smaller, smaller, like a picture viewed through the reversed lenses of a powerful telescope; a Lilliputian village, perfect in every proportion, yet infinitely tiny, until—a child’s plaything, a toy floating in a world of tossing night—it flickered a moment—and went out.
Where once a proud city had stood, four square, solidly planted on a solid Earth, a hemisphere of vast, unrelieved blankness now reigned. For a moment its edges were sharp, intact. Then, as the green sword that had slain New York lifted again, rearing its fiery length up from the whirling orbit of the planet, out
raged nature rushed in to fill the spacious vacuum.
With a howl like ten thousand cataracts, the atmosphere of Earth hurled itself into the void; with a roar like the massed artillery of the world, the sea poured into the vast depths that had been magically scooped from the solid, perdurable rock.
Pete Halleck saw it coming, cried out desperate warning. He jerked crazily at the controls. But the sucking winds caught the little craft, tossed it from cyclone to cyclone with demoniac glee, sent it crashing to Earth. There was a grinding, splintering sound. Wayne involuntarily flung up his hand to ward off disaster. Then something hit him on the back of his head!
III.
Betty Middleton reached New York comfortably by 8 a. m. that fateful morning. She had slept well in the luxurious cabin of the great airliner, and she was happy. Happy in the love of John Wayne, waiting for her in the Rockies, happy in the expectant thrill that comes only once in a woman’s life-time—the ecstatic garnering of a trousseau. The company bus from the Newark Airport had rumbled through Holland Tunnel, emerged into the work-hurrying crowds of New York.
Millions of people—human termites—scurrying to tall office buildings, diving into ornate entrances, unknowing that this was to be their last look at blue sky, at kindly Sun.
The flaming portent from Messier 33 was in the sky, but low on the horizon, its green blaze obscured by soot-laden air, by towering roofs. If any of the hurrying millions noticed the strange apparition, it was with quick side glances. It wouldn’t do to be late to work—the boss might be angry—jobs were scarce these days—and the insatiable maw of office, factory and loft swallowed them all.
At two o’clock in the afternoon Betty emerged from her midtown hotel, ready for the day’s serious business. She had checked in, tubbed, freshened up, unpacked, had her lunch. The fashionable shops of Fifth Avenue beckoned her. What feminine heart could resist their allure?
There was a greenish tinge in the sky, but she did not notice it. Nor did many of the thronging crowds who hurried interminably along the canyonlike streets. In the offices there was confusion—much swearing and fuming at telephone companies and their ilk. But no panic. Why should there be? The phones had gone dead! Well, it had happened before. In a short time the trouble shooters would be on the job and service resumed. In the meantime it was damned inconvenient. Office boys scurried out of great buildings on personal messages, cocked an eye at the queer green light, whistled snootily at resplendent doormen.
Betty smiled refusal at expectant taxis, walked briskly up Fifth Avenue. The strange green glare grew stronger. It began to be noticeable. But Betty, being a woman, was too preoccupied with her love, the gorgeous shop windows, to wonder much. There was a vigorous tingle in the air that made it good to be alive. A strange tingle, indeed. A sort of pressure that seemed to penetrate her very being, and yet was sharp and keen as of the mountaintops. Her blood was on fire; it raced with the vigor of strenuous exercise.
The glow increased in intensity. People were beginning to stop on corners, to crane their necks, to cluster together. Betty looked up too, stopped short. The sky was a deep, insupportably brilliant green now. There was no Sun. The eerie glare illuminated all the vaulting spires, tipped them with emerald flame. The uplifted faces of the people, too, were becoming ghastly, macabre.
Still Betty saw nothing to be alarmed about. How was she, how was any one in the doomed city to know that they were shrinking to infinitesimal proportions; that the electrons, the protons, which composed alike their bodies, stones, pavement, plaster, automobiles, were compacting themselves to densities compared to which the unbelievable mass of Van Maanen’s Star was but a tenuous vacuum?
Everything was shrinking along with them in like degree; they had no yard-stick with which to measure the absolute contraction; and therefore they sensed no difference. And anyway, not many of New York’s tremendous population had ever heard of Van Maanen’s Star, and fewer still had heard of an unimportant, infinitely remote nebula listed in the catalogues as Messier 33.
“What do you make of it, brother?” one gaping man asked another.
“Search me,” said the second. “Maybe it’s an aurora.”
“Aurora your grandmother,” put in a third with conviction. “It’s a new kind of advertising campaign. Soon we’ll be seeing a bunch of sky writers spelling out some cockeyed tooth paste up there while us poor dopes’re breakin’ our necks lookin’.” And he walked rapidly away.
But Betty had been scientifically trained, was engaged to a famous scientist. A shiver passed through her. This was not man-made. No human power could evoke this tremendous display. She strained her eyes. There was no Sun, no blue sky. Through the shimmering, dazzling blaze of green could be seen—nothing! Yet the luminous color was transparent.
A hush had fallen on the city. Slowly it began to dawn on the staring millions that nature had gone wrong. But still there was no panic. That would come later. It took time for limited human minds to grasp even the hem of their predicament. The full truth would never come to them. They would have gone mad if it had.
But Betty was alarmed. It was not the flaring green which pervaded everything that bothered her. It was something else. It was the fact that beyond the green flame, where sky and universe should have taken up their sway, there was—nothing.
She was on a side street now, where the crowds were not so dense. An indefinable instinct urged her aloft, where there would be unobstructed view, where perhaps she could penetrate that featureless beyond. On the spur of the moment she stepped into the nearest building. It was of an elderly vintage, but fairly high. The elevator man took her up to the top floor. His eyes were beginning to roll a bit in the penetrative hue, but he had not as yet taken to his heels. He would do that later.
Luckily it was the old-fashioned type of hydraulic elevator. The modern electrics in neighboring buildings were out of commission. The top floor was deserted. There was no one to stop her from mounting the little-used stairs to the roof. Outside again, she gasped. The searing green blinded her eyes. It was deepest emerald now. The pressure on her seemed to have increased, yet, curiously enough, there was no concomitant feeling of discomfort.
She stared upward, shading her eyes against the glare. Again that suffocating feeling of limitless limitation, of boundless green, yet queerly bounded. Involuntarily her eyes went to the west, over the lesser roof tops toward the broad, placid waters of the Hudson. The light that swathed the city was strangely clear and piercing. It almost held the qualities of a lens.
Betty started violently. She saw the Hudson, all right. Its outlines were familiar enough. But she was peering over the cliffs of Weehawken, was seeing beyond their tops. There, rightly, should have been the Jersey flats, stretching monotonously and interminably away to the horizon. She saw no such thing.
Instead, to her incredulous eyes was unfolded a seeming hallucination. The Jersey flats ended abruptly. Beyond them, smooth and glossy, stretched barren, gray rock, glinting with spangled lights in the all-pervading glare.
Then that ended, and green fields took its place—green fields that ran imperceptibly into tangles of suburban houses, then into factories with smoking chimneys. And beyond the factories rolled a broad river, not quite as wide or majestic as the Hudson. Bridges spanned its bosom, bridges that looked horribly familiar. In a shattering daze she saw beyond—beyond to a thickly clustered island, to tall, pinnacling towers.
Betty cried out, but there was no one else on the roof to hear her cry. Trembling at that which she had seen, hoping almost that she had gone mercifully mad, she pivoted to the east. There, as in a mirror image, reversed, she saw what she had just seen to the west. The same buildings, the same East River with its far-flung bridges, the factories, the suburban homes, the green fields of Long Island; then—gray barren rock, Jersey flats, the lordly Hudson, and Manhattan again.
She pressed her aching eyeballs. Turned to the west, she had seen clear around to the east of where she stood; turned to the east, she
had witnessed the western reverse of herself. She was viewing clear around a limited world, a world cut off from all the rest, a world in which there was no beginning and no end, a world in which light traveled, not in straight lines, but around and around and around!
Being a scientist’s fiancée, she did not go mad. Instead, she tried to think it out. The green glow had been responsible. Somehow New York and its vicinity had been sliced off from the universe, had been infolded in its own space time, its own gravitational field. That accounted for the light rays that went clear around New York. The barren rock that faced both ways was, of course, the sliced undercrust of the Earth. There was no other way to figure it.
Then it came on her in overwhelming flood. She and ten million other human beings were cut off for all time from their universe. They were marooned in a space time of their own. Never again would she see John Wayne; never again would she feel his strong arms around her.
“It’s a lie!” she cried out wildly to the unheeding tiny world—that world which could he circumscribed in a day’s journey—if day and night held any meaning where there was no Sun, only a piercing green blaze. “I know John won’t rest until he finds a way to rescue me. He’s a great scientist—the greatest in the world! He’ll come for me some day!”
Then panic finally overtook her; she ran sobbing down the many flights of stairs, down to spread her incredible gospel to those millions of others—prisoners like herself.
But deep in her heart, festering like a canker worm, crawled the searing knowledge that John Wayne’s premonitions had been only too correct—that never again in either universe would they meet.
By other standards, Betty Middleton was no bigger than a protein molecule; by other standards, Manhattan Island itself was but a thimbleful in size; by those same standards, all of the ravished strip of Earth was not a cubic yard in three dimensions. A Lilliputian world with infinitesimal inhabitants! And even that small, though incredibly dense measure of matter was vanished to a compact, self-contained universe of its own, while the broad Atlantic surged over the yawning gulf where once New York had stood in all its majesty.
When The Future Dies Page 20