The Other Side of Here
- Автор: Лейнстер Мюррей
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Other Side of Here». Краткое содержание книги:
Newark ... Manhattan ... Baltimore—one by one they went out. A succession of thriving communities suddenly put out like a guttered flame—men, women, children sprawled like grotesque mannikins.
Steve Waldron knew it couldn't be plague. There had to be some connection with the disappearance of the nation's top scientists. And then he plunged to the very center of a dead city and gaped at a truth he could not believe. What could he do against so fearsome a force that threatened to engulf the whole nation?
Here's a spine-tingling science-fiction novel by an old master. It will open up a new dimension of suspense and excitement.
"You'll understand in a minute. But you say it's a reflection you see, not another room, because you can't walk into it. It does not affect things which are real, and so can't be real itself. But if it did affect other things it would be real, whether you could walk into it or not. Is that right?"
Lucy knitted her brows. "I suppose so," she admitted doubtfully. "But I don't see..."
"Straussman says that the fact that we can't touch a thing or walk into it doesn't prove it doesn't exist. There are a lot of things we never see, but know exist. A press that prints the morning paper. The television transmitter that sends out programs. The dark companion of Sirius. We don't see them, and the last can't possibly be seen. But we infer their reality from their effects." Lucy stirred restlessly.
Waldron said: "There are some unexplained effects: the difficulty in calculating the moon's exact position; the anomaly in the orbit of Mercury. More things—very many more things—in wave-mechanics. Straussman suggested that those effects were like the reflection in your mirror, if it were real. Matter we can't touch or discover in ordinary physical ways. Matter, you might say, in another set of dimensions—though that isn't really it at all. Straussman talked about atomic polarities and the planes of rotation of electrons. He suggested that all the atoms of a given bit of matter must have their poles pointing very nearly in the same direction or they won't hold together. They have to face the same way, like a company of soldiers drilling. If they don't face together they aren't an organization but a mob."
"But Steve! What has this to do with ray father?"
"Everything," Waldron told her. "Just before he disappeared, he'd worked out an experiment to prove or disprove Straussman's theory. If Straussman is right, there is more than one kind of matter. There are at least three kinds, probably six, possibly eighteen and conceivably fifty-four different kinds of earth, air, water, and, of course, fire."
Lucy was silent.
"Like companies of soldiers," added Steve. "In open order. Some of them face east. Naturally they're not part of the organization which faces north. They can pass right through each other. And there are other soldiers lying on their backs staring up at the sky. If they're far enough apart —and the atoms in solid substances are relatively almost as far apart as the stars-they won't even see each other when one passes through the others. Change to atoms for soldiers and atomic poles for facings, and have the atomic poles face in different directions, and according to Straussman the two or three, or however many different kinds of matter there are, would not affect each other perceptibly-unless one looked very closely. Matter of one orientation could pass right through matter facing differently. There's plenty of room between atoms! We couldn't feel a cannonball passing through our bodies if it were made of one of those other sorts of matter."
Lucy spoke uneasily: "You mean it could be like one of those fourth dimensions people write stories about. There could be another world right around the corner, or something like that."
"According to Straussman, there would have to be another world right around the corner. Even if a planet were formed of one kind of matter, the pressure at its center would be so great that some of the atoms would have to yield and be squeezed into another orientation. That would be—in a sense—another world. If the pressure held up, some of those atoms would be squeezed into yet another angle of facing, to get room to exist in. And so there'd be pressures forcing the existence of other worlds whose atoms faced every way that atoms could face in order to get room to exist.
"Super-heavy suns and planets and so on are simply assumed to have a large number of such otherwise-oriented companions occupying the same space. That's how he accounted for the excess of Earth's mass over the specific gravity of what it's made of. The dark companion of Sirius is explained that way. And so on and so on and so on. Rather wild?"
"I remember my father talking that way," said Lucy dubiously. "But I haven't a head for that sort of thing. And what does it have to do with his disappearance?"
Waldron painstakingly fitted small parts together. Then he said: "Those mice I worked with had been in some artificial condition which partly changed the direction of their atom poles. Instead of east or north, they faced part-way between. When I put a direct current through them, they seemed to vanish. But I think it simply completed the change in the direction of their atom poles. They switched to a direction which isn't real in our world, but is very real in a world I suspect Fran comes from. I think your father was sent to that world by a similar process. He must have been expected. Fran says he's alive and unharmed. He should know! He was translated from that world to this. He's probably in regular communication."
"But ... another world ... a fourth dimension..."
"There've been several scientists vanishing, lately," Waldron told her. "They got too close to the facts. So they were snatched. But now I've made an apparatus which prevents snatching. Once it's known and proved what Fran's gang are doing, we're close enough to do the trick ourselves and go into Fran's homeland and raise the devil."
Lucy sat still. Then she leaned forward from the back seat, moving to where Waldron worked.
"I don't quite understand, Steve," she said unsteadily, "but somehow I know you can do what you say. Won't you —won't you kiss me good night?"
Waldron kissed her. Then he said gruffly: "Now go back where you belong, woman! Even if I am going to marry you, I'm human!"
He went back to work, that she might doze off while he was still awake. He made another power-pack. The parts from the filling station were superior. He made a second. He heard Lucy's breathing grow even and regular. He became conscious of the small sounds in the night outside the car. The wind made branches rustle. Presently, Waldron turned on the car radio very low. It murmured, almost inaudibly: ... thirty thousand more victims. It is considered established that the plague is the result of mutant bacteria developed by Waldron during his work with antibiotics. He is immune and acts as a madman sowing death. We do have the comfort that it does not spread, except by his action. And therefore it is officially announced that Waldron must be stopped at any imaginable cost. He may be shot down like a mad dog...
Waldron turned off the radio and shrugged his shoulders.
FIVE
At ten o'clock the next morning the phrase likening Waldron to a mad dog had been demonstrated. He was regarded as beyond all human kinship. The news broadcasts made it plain that one man—and one man only—was responsible for the most blood-chilling catastrophe in human history. And Waldron had planned things quite otherwise.
It was obvious, by now, that the physician who had started out with a high-frequency power-pack and certain knowledge of how to revive stone-hard people had not gotten through to anybody who would accept his offer to revive the supposedly dead.
The black car was hidden from overhead detection by trees which stretched over the curving narrow highway. Half a mile ahead, a northward-reaching road was jammed with a black, unending, crawling stream of motor vehicles. By this time, stalled cars had closed the Merritt Parkway. Now other, parallel roads were in use as escape routes from New York. Waldron was moving down one of them. There was not one gap in the flood of vehicles moving north. Above them hung an effluvium of burned gasoline and cylinder oil. It seemed that the very air was filled with a terror that became a palpable reality.
Waldron had tried to make a phone call from a deserted farmhouse. A desperately plausible individual had tried to keep him in conversation. But the ruse hadn't worked. Waldron had hurried back to the car and roared away to a hiding place under trees. Planes had appeared only minutes later. They bombed the deserted farmhouse from which he'd talked. They bombed a tractor in a nearby field. They went on to bomb other deserted farmhouses. That was when Waldron shot the car to a more distant place of hiding.