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.
They came to wreckage on the bridge. Cars had met almost head-on and crashed. Their impact had swung them partly around, blocking the roadway. But somebody had come along since the crash—spilled gasoline and oil on the highway showed it—and shifted one car enough to clear the road again. This meant that somebody else was alive and moving. That could only be some compatriot of Fran's.
Waldron's jaw clenched. Nick noted it too. In any case, Waldron very painstakingly checked his high-frequency pack and reached over into the back of the car and hung extra ammunition-belts about himself until he looked rather like a harness rack. He got a sub-machine gun ready to fire.
They drove down the sloping other side of the bridge. They turned to the left and passed through streets that were mostly clear. Much of Brooklyn had fled, like much of New York.
They reached the powerhouse, standing monstrous and tall above an empty street. Chain-link fencing surrounded most of it. But there was, of course, an entrance. And here there was not silence. There was an indefinite but sustained humming sound. Once there was a faint, mechanical clanking.
Nick stopped the car at Waldron's instruction. Waldron then reached back his hand and Lucy gave him a submachine gun and shells for it Nick got cautiously out on the other side.
"I don't hear anybody," said Nick in a hushed voice, "but there must be somebody tending the machinery. Or is it automatic?"
His voice echoed, hushed as it was. Lucy stepped to the ground, a quaint and exotic figure in the armor of the invaders, yet with the most familiar of weapons at her waist.
They went into the powerhouse. They passed through empty, lighted corridors with unfamiliar smells. They found the room where there were long rows of iron objects, with doors through whose chinks came the gleaming of the fires of hell. They saw men here, too. They were toppled and stiff.
They went to the vast generator room, in which the humming noise was created. The room was monstrous in size and the machinery was gigantic, though not in proportion to the power it developed. And there was no moving human figure anywhere. The only attendants were small, stiffened figures scattered among the metal giants. Even alive, they would have seemed too puny to control such mechanisms.
Waldron feverishly traced bus-bars and power-leads. He followed them across the hall to the switchboard with its maze of inch-thick copper conductors. There, dwarfed by his surroundings, he said: "The main switch is thrown, Nick."
Nick ran ten paces. He looked out a window.
"Most of the city's dark. It wasn't when we came in. Somebody threw that switch while we were down in the boiler room, most likely."
Waldron said grimly: "I think we're going to get killed. We can't make a stable arc with the amount of juice that'll be pouring out, unless we do a divided flat one. We want insulating stuff to pound up and make a crucible with."
Nick opened a metal cupboard. Material for emergency repairs was there. There was a stock of copper bolts and nuts. There was highly desirable other material.
Lucy said a shaky sentence and climbed to a high walkway where she could see every entrance and exit of the huge room. She did not know what they planned. They had spoken of steam and boilers and horsepower by the hundred thousand. As they worked, they babbled of condensers and gaps and molten copper. They seemed to refer with full comprehension to some fully matured plan at which she could not even guess, and which certainly they hadn't discussed in any detail. But Lucy had come to have an extraordinary confidence in Waldron.
Nick knelt on the floor and hammered porcelain insulators to bits. Then he built the fragments into a mound such as children build on the seashore with sand. There came the sound of blows on metal, and Waldron came staggering back with ten- and fifteen-foot sections of shining square bus-bar. Nick grinned at him. Together they bent them into the shapes they required by sticking the ends in stationary machines and heaving on the ends.
Waldron came back with more bus-bar. He disappeared again. Lucy watched. Once she thought she saw a movement through one of the open bus-bars, but she could not be sure.
"It's all right," said Nick. "You and Steve are wearing their armor. That ought to confuse them a little."
There was a shot. Two more. Nick ran for the sound, swinging a sub-machine gun to readiness. Lucy turned white and darted for the steps to the floor of the great room.
But Waldron came into the huge room, dripping big sheets of thin sheet metal as he came.
"Only one man," he said calmly, "and I killed him. But we'd better hurry. Nick, these are for condensers."
Nick grabbed them.
"Glass from the windows. Big sheets!"
Waldron shattered one windowpane and strained at the frame which held in the next. He came back with a sheet of glass. Nick built up condensers. They were neither neat nor efficient nor very promising. They might arc. But they had to do.
A man in the scaly armor of the invaders stormed into the huge room. He carried one of the cane-like whips with metal lashes that Waldron had seen used on Market Street, in Newark. The man saw Lucy first, and she looked like one of the invaders herself. He rasped a savage and wholly unintelligible sentence at her.
Waldron shot him dead, very deliberately, and said mildly: "Better hurry up, Nick."
Nick worked like a madman. Two more men dashed in. A burst of shots knocked one down. The other tripped over him and fell. But he saw Nick—not in proper uniform of armor—and he screamed out in the cryptic syllables of the invaders' language. He crawled behind a turbine base and continued to scream shrill warning.
A man poked his head around a door. He aimed a queer, pistol-like device at Nick. It looked familiar to Waldron. The man absurdly hid behind the door instead of the door frame. Waldron fired a burst of shots through the wood, filling the door with holes and the man with lead. The pistol-like weapon dropped to the floor, heated up and seemed to melt.
There were running footsteps and babbling voices.
"Watch the doors on that side, Lucy," said Waldron.
Nick stood up, panting.
"I think I've got it," he wheezed. "I think so."
He ran to the great master switch. He jammed it home.
There was a flash of blue-white flame. Then another. Then a harsh, unbearable glare.
Nick had built a flat mound of powdered porcelain, something like a dry mud pie. Its top contained shallow depressions filled with stray copper bolts and nuts, and separated by a dyke of porcelain between. A streak of sheet metal had connected the metal scraps, and bus-bars led to the separate hollows.
With the switch thrown, sixty-six hundred volts of electricity and nobody could know how many amperes of current tried to go through the small, sheet-metal bridge. It heated and exploded, and a giant arc poured through the metallic vapor over the porcelain dyke. At first the arc was merely blue-white. Then it was colored by the ghastly hue of vaporized copper. It threw an unbearable, an intolerable glare upon the ceiling. The heaped-up copper objects smoked and began to glow. In seconds they were white-hot. Then there were merely two pools of melted copper, separated by a narrow mass of porcelain, with an arc flaring and flaming between them.
It looked like a fragment of a blue-white star flung upon the floor of the generator room. Men in scaly armor flung their hands before their eyes, fearful of what seemed strange and frightening to them. Harsh voices from shelter commanded them on. But then Nick and Waldron set grimly to work with their sub-machine guns.
And then noises began in the city outside.
The sixty-six-hundred-volt arc was of necessity a generator of high-frequency current. The condensers Nick had improvised served in a fashion to stabilize that output. The arc itself fed into the city's power lines. Surges of high-frequency current poured out through all the feeder lines of the city. Automatic switches cut in the lines normally allotted to other powerhouses, and automatically synchronized alternators cut in the enormous reserve of storage-battery current which was designed to stabilize the voltage but now maintained the arc. Every AC feeder line in the city became filled with surges of current. And nearly every human being in the city had high-frequency surges induced into his body.