The Other Side of Here

Half an hour later, the three of them moved away from the garage where Lucy had slept and where Nick and Waldron had arranged for recorders to speak into telephones. They were heavily loaded down with their apparatus.

They moved with extreme caution through the darkness and stillness. It was another half-hour before they entered a small corner drugstore. With shielded flashlights, they set up one recorder to start its message. They left it. A block away, they set up another in a butcher shop.

"Here goes," said Waldron curtly.

He lifted the telephone receiver. He listened. There was a dial tone. He carefully dialed the number Nick gave him. He heard a bored voice say: "Consolidated Press. Go ahead!"

"Get this recorded if you can," said Waldron. "It's a recording from Nick Bannerman and Steven Waldron. It's coming from inside the military cordon around Newark. Get every word of it. It will repeat twice!"

Nick threw the switch. The recorder began to speak in the silent store.

"Nick Bannerman of the Messenger speaking. I am inside the supposed plague spot which includes Newark. I have been hit by the plague and have recovered. I tell you from the beginning that—"

Then they were out of the butcher shop. Waldron paused to close the door firmly, so that the sound of the recording could not be heard from the street. They ran through soft, black, deadly stillness. They arrived at the drugstore where the other recorder was set to speak. Nick dropped a coin in the slot. He listened. He heard the dial tone. He dialed the number of the Messenger's rewrite line. A familiar voice said: "Messenger, rewrite. Who is it?"

"It's me," snapped Nick. "Nick Bannerman. Get the stuff that's coming. I'm telling you. I'll repeat it once. Listen!" The recorder began: "Nick Bann—"

Then Nick hung up the phone, rather absurdly. He said through stiff lips: "No good, Steve. Somebody cut me off. And the dial tone didn't come back on. Somehow, those devils are monitoring the phone lines from this area. Let's beat it!"

They went swiftly out into the street. Waldron seized Lucy's hand and dragged her after him. They ran. And about them was the terribly deadly silence which cracked one's eardrums. It was broken only by their own footsteps, which sounded thunderous.

Then the silence, which was horrible, was replaced by a sound which was even more horrible. It was the purring of motors. Cars were racing through the blackness: muffled cars, unlighted cars. It should not be possible for anybody to drive so furiously in absolute darkness. Then Waldron made a guess.

"Snooperscopes!" he panted to Nick. "I wondered how the trucks could do without lights! They've got snooperscopes!"

Nick ran on for just three paces. Then he stopped and lay down on the sidewalk. He put out one leg in an ungainly attitude, as if he had fallen while walking. Waldron dragged Lucy to one side.

"Still!" he panted. "Act frozen!"

A snooperscope, of course, was a device that was invented for snipers in warfare. It transformed infrared light —heat-rays—into visible light on a screen. A man could drive a truck through absolute blackness by the difference in temperature of streets and building walls, which would appear on the screen as different degrees of brightness.

A car turned a corner a block ahead. It was crowded with men. It raced past them, dropped out four men a bare hundred yards beyond them, swerved and raced down a side Street to leave other men at other intersections.

Waldron found himself sweating profusely. Even after he had heard the car go past and even after it had turned the corner, he sweated in the ghastly realization that purest chance had saved them. Because they, being alive and active, would have showed as warmer, brighter and more visible on the infra-red instrument screen.

Other cars moved swiftly at other places. Unlighted cars. Furiously driven cars. The purring of their motors divided and spread. They were forming a cordon about the place from which telephones had been dialed. It was the purpose of the drivers to establish a cordon of armored men about that place where desolation had somehow become contaminated with life. They had to destroy that life, because it tried to destroy them by telling their deepest secret.

The noise of motors dwindled and stopped. The cars were still. There was a cordon. Had the driver of the car that passed within twenty feet of them been driving less frantically, he would have noticed the brighter prone figures on the sidewalk. The snooperscope, in fact, would have showed them as warm-blooded and alive, just as the "third eye"—the heat-perceptive organ—of pit-vipers detects the bodies of small warm-blooded animals in the darkness of empty woodlands.

The four men dumped out a hundred yards away now began to progress very slowly and carefully away from the three who played dead. They stopped and touched every prone figure on the sidewalks. They reached into every stalled or wrecked car. Once Waldron saw a faint flicker of light as one of them guardedly used a blue-glow flashlight up an alley. Of course, they would not all be equipped with infra-red devices. But they had been warned that the person —the incredibly alive and active person, perhaps the traitor among them—might be disguised as a victim. So they touched every tumbled body to see if it was other than iron-hard.