The Other Side of Here

There were many, many thousands of horsepower in the arc now flaming between pools of melted metal. There was more power in the arc—more by many tens of thousands of kilowatts—than in whatever device there was which had thrown the world's greatest city into cataleptic lifelessness. Trivial as was the current each person received, it was enough to neutralize the paralyzing force, plus something over. It was enough to start the process of revival—and to finish it.

The life in the city had been that of a partly evacuated city near midnight. But New York and Brooklyn are not silent at any hour. There should have been the sound of many motors. There were only crashes and wrecks in the streets. Folk who found themselves lying prone, others like them all about, and saw the innumerable disasters of the traffic—they could guess instantly two important matters. One was that the "plague" had struck them. The other was that they had recovered from it. Unspeakable tumult arose on all the many square miles of the city.

The noise came even into the powerhouse, and Waldron and Nick Bannerman heard it in between the cracklings and roaring of their own guns. The invaders attacked with a queer helplessness, driven on by cracking whips and raging voices behind them. And they did not know how to take advantage of the cover of the machines, and when presently they began to use firearms they were clumsy and unskilled in their management.

The great hall rang with the roaring of the sub-machine guns and with the poppings of revolvers. Waldron and Nick defended their unholy flame with an insensate savagery.

Bedlam arose upon the harbor. Tugs and steamers found themselves suddenly violating all rules and customs of navigation. They got their high-frequency current through the fact of earth-return to the powerhouse. They whistled furiously at each other to straighten out the tangle in which they found themselves. Those which had rammed each other or found themselves aground emitted the mournful, wailing blasts which called for immediate assistance. There were whistlings and hootings and bellowings on the water.

But there was more. Policemen found themselves everywhere prone upon the ground. They scrambled to their feet to see wreckage all about them, smashed cars, smashed windows. Their whistles shrilled and they raced to their beat telephones to report tragedies, or else they competently broke in the doors of the nearest stores to call ambulances with the minimum loss of time.

And these things happened not only in New York, but in Brooklyn, and Queens and the Bronx. There was uproar everywhere, except, rather quaintly, for a certain considerable area in the fifties, where the character of supplied electric current was anomalous. There the power lines carried direct instead of alternating current. The feeder lines of the other sort did not feed to them. So part of New York remained frozen and dead. But everywhere else the city cried out tumultuously.