The Other Side of Here

Fortunately, the pickup truck was in the very center.

Waldron saw a convertible buried under a writhing mass of assailants. Its driver was crushed and driving became impossible. The convertible crashed into another car. Screams arose. Seeming madmen leaped from it upon other cars—on their hoods, on their roofs—to be carried away from New York.

Waldron and the man with the cap and his pal had to fight only once. Three men swinging clubs were daunting.

Once outside of Manhattan, the pickup truck turned off the main highway. The woman driver of the truck very competently threaded side roads and byways instead of staying on the parkway where the great mass of traffic was.

But the woman took a wrong turn, and presently they found themselves riding into a sizeable small town. Worse, they crossed a highway bridge and saw the swarming, appalling, ghastly flood of traffic which was mobile New York in flight.

On the far side of the bridge, the truck stopped in order to back around and get back on relatively unused minor roads. Hardly anybody else realized these could carry them away from the metropolis.

"We'll get out here," said Waldron. "What I want is simply a town with a modern hospital in it. This should do."

"Us," said the owner of the pickup satisfiedly, "we're on the way up to Vermont. The wife's got a family up that away and we're going to visit a while. We'll take you closer in where y'want to go. I like the way you swung that table leg."

The embattled pickup truck drove them into the town. Waldron and Lucy got out, and the man with the cap waved his hand cordially. His red-haired wife smiled briefly and a child piped: "G'bye."

The truck turned and disappeared toward Vermont.

"Now," said Waldron, "I'll want a hospital's laboratory. But the way to get the use of that is through a doctor—the best one in town."

They trudged to a drugstore, where they drank malted milks and ate sandwiches. They were advised of the name and office address of one of the town's best doctors.

They found the physician just returning from his morning round of calls. Entering the office with Lucy, Waldron said briefly that he was a fugitive from New York, that he'd been a research man with Professor Hamlin—the discoverer of daphnomyecitin—that he had some data on the affair in Newark.

After asking a few questions, the doctor warmed to Waldron. They could talk shop together and this inspired confidence in the medical man.

"My name," said Waldron evenly, "is Steve Waldron. I'm supposed to be a carrier of a plague. I'm not. It isn't a plague. I have some mice here that should be autopsied."

He kept his hand in his pocket, suddenly annoyed that he hadn't thought to get back the pistol from Lucy. But the doctor said mildly: "It couldn't be a plague. A plague does have boundaries for its cases, but no plague ever known had a timing device built in for the simultaneous collapse of all its victims. And nothing has ever had a hundred per cent effect, either. What do you want to do? I don't advise a hospital. There is something about being on salary that makes a man timorous of breaking rules. A man who has to make decisions for himself takes chances. I've reasonable equipment here...."

Waldron displayed his white mice. There were five of them and they were completely unbelievable. If they were dead, they should not be as hard as ivory. If they were not dead, there was simply no possible explanation for the condition in which they were. The doctor examined them.

"Here's my equipment," he said calmly. "Get to work. I'll keep in touch with you. I'd like to help, but I have patients."

Waldron set to work. It was then about noon. The doctor's office was equipped past the dreams of doctors of former years, but doctors needed more equipment than in the past. Waldron dissected one mouse, painstakingly. The flesh cut almost as if it were formed out of mahogany. The internal organs were precisely as solid. There was no abnormality except the incredible hardness in each organ and tissue. No ordinary chemical process could have produced that hardening. The blood was solidified too. It had neither clotted nor separated. Its corpuscles were normal in appearance and number.

The doctor came in, went out and came in again. He checked Waldron's results, using his microscope. Everything was perfectly normal except for the utterly impossible, rock-like hardness of tissue. It seemed impossible!

At four o'clock Waldron felt complete intellectual frustration. It was about then that, in a last, unreasonable attempt to find some other anomaly than the rigidity of his specimens, he essayed to measure the electric resistance of muscle. He wanted to determine if muscle tissue would flex when an electric current passed through it, on the analogy of Galvani's frogs.

The muscles not only did not kick, they did not conduct current!

At first he could not believe it. He tried again and again. Then he stepped up the battery voltage. At twenty volts the needle of the millimeter flicked feebly—perhaps one, perhaps one and a half milliamperes. At twenty-five volts, the current jumped to sixty milliamperes. At thirty volts—