The Other Side of Here

To Lucy it seemed what followed was part of a nightmare, of which she was only half-conscious.

Since sundown, she and Waldron had walked not less than fifteen miles on unyielding concrete.

Presently Lucy was dimly aware of being helped to lie down on something that was blissfully soft. Later she had a quite vivid memory of hearing Waldron say: "We ought to be safe now. You go on to sleep, Lucy. Nick and I have some talking to do."

And Lucy relaxed completely and she slept.

When she woke again, it was either just past dawn or close to sundown again. She heard voices. There was the amazingly fragrant odor of freshly made coffee and something else more tantalizing. She stirred. Waldron stood over her, his face drawn with weariness, but smiling.

"Rested?"

"Yes." Then she tried to move, and said, "Oh, Steve, I ache."

"You'll be all right when you've stirred around," he told her. "There's coffee and hot dogs—waiting and ready. Come and meet Nick Bannerman."

She stood up, painfully. They were inside a small garage, tools and cars under repair all about them. Waldron led her into the garage office, where the delicious smells came from. There was Nick Bannerman, short and swarthy, holding a frankfurter over a tin can from which the blue flame of alcohol arose. He grinned at her and nodded.

"Nice mess this, isn't it?" he asked cheerfully. "I got tired of being in jail and Steve'd said it wasn't a disease, so I figured I'd be as well off proving it as staying there while they decided whether to shoot me or not. I did think I'd feel some warning symptoms before I keeled over, but I didn't. I was walking along the highway, checking my pulse and sensations and reporting them all by walkie-talkie. And then all of a sudden it was pitch dark and Steve had this dinkus on me and was explaining a lot of improbable things. So we came here to hide. It was close to daybreak."

"And we've got those devils licked, now!" said Steve savagely. "We've got them!"

"We hope so, anyhow," said Nick, amiably. "My walkie-talkie's no good. Nobody happens to be listening. That's a sort of necessity for communication—that somebody be listening. So we've got a set-up we're fixing now. Have some coffee!"

From a steaming saucepan he poured coffee. Lucy took it and drank. Then she said ruefully: "I must look horrible. What are we going to do, Steve?"

"Nick went burglarizing, just at dawn. He came back with a couple of tape recorders. Unfortunately, they're the plug-in kind. We've been adjusting that—fixing them to work on car-radio power units. We just got them working half an hour ago. We've been making recordings for them."

Nick handed Lucy the cooked frankfurter, neatly folded in a slice of bread. She nodded gratefully and bit into it.

"The point is, of course," said Nick blandly, "that we didn't go all the way back to Newark. We stopped here. And the telephone here is a Jersey City number. You catch?"

Waldron said evenly: "There's no telephonic connection from Newark to New York, of course. Fran's gang has turned off the automatic exchanges. Maybe they've got somebody watching in them —in case! But the Jersey City exchanges are working! This part of the dead spot has direct phone connection to Jersey City!"

"Oh! You can phone—"

"Dumb little me," acknowledged Nick. "I'd have done it! But Steve is a suspicious guy. He said that when he telephoned that frozen mice could be found up near Columbia University, it wasn't half an hour before that place was a plague spot. This guy Fran Dutt—whoever he may be—has friends in high places. They know as fast as any word comes in. They'd send people here—their people! Pretty good spy-system, I'd say. So we do not take down a telephone receiver and tell anybody where we are. We take down a receiver, yes. We dial a number, yes. Then we turn on the recorder to talk into that mouthpiece, and we get away from here like bats out of—" He stopped and beamed.

It seemed perfect. It seemed absolutely foolproof. And Waldron added icily: "And just to make absolutely sure, it's possible to dial a press line to Philadelphia. Nick's going to set one record going to give all this news to the Philadelphia office of the Consolidated Press Service. They'll get it and it'll be spread all over the United States before Fran's gang realizes it's happened. Spies in New York won't do a bit of good!"

It looked very neat indeed. As a precaution, they waited for sunset. There was a car in the garage, brought in for a wax-and-polish job. They made sure it was ready for a get-away and they checked their weapons.

Meanwhile, they drank coffee and ate hot dogs cooked over an alcohol flame—the coffee and provisions had come from a delicatessen shop raided by Nick during his burglarizing sortie—and rejoiced. All that was necessary was for them to pick up the telephone receiver....