"I understand what you say," said Waldron reservedly, "but not what you mean."
"Let me talk to Lucy! Please!"
Waldron beckoned to Lucy and held out the telephone. He felt distinct suspicions. Fran Dutt was the laboratory assistant who had been present when Lucy's father walked out to apparent nothingness. There had been no sense to what had happened then, and there was no sense to what Fran was saying now. Waldron heard Lucy say: "Yes.... I know that, Fran.... I think so.... Very well.... Where is the car? We'll go at once. You're going to stay here?"
She listened again. Waldron heard the click of the other receiver. Lucy was paler than before.
"The car's parked around the corner," she reported. "He says he loves me and I'm in danger here. I promised to leave with you." Then she added very quietly: "I believe him, Steve. He wouldn't let anything happen to harm me. He's going to try to get Father away from where he is. It's important that I not stay here. Will you take me to New York, Steve?"
Waldron nodded. He felt the frustrated confusion of a man who is faced with urgent matters of which he cannot even begin to make sense. Lucy left the room. She came back wearing a coat and hat. She handed a small glistening object to Waldron.
"My father had this," she said briefly. "Fran said to be sure and carry it."
Waldron tensed a little. He was not quite suspicious enough to examine the revolver then. But by the time he and Lucy had gone out of the house and turned the next corner and found his car parked there—the engine warm and the key in the ignition lock—he was very suspicious indeed.
Night was falling swiftly. He checked over the car. Nothing appeared wrong. Inside, by the map-reading light of the instrument board, he examined the pistol. Nothing wrong. He started the car. It whirred and caught instantly. The gas tank was full.
The safe route to New York," said Waldron coldly, "ought to be a crowded one. We'll go by the Skyway."
He swung downhill and headed for the business section of town. At first there were private homes, and apartment houses, and more apartment houses. The lighted windows changed character. Presently the streets themselves were different. It was early for theater crowds and a little late for close-of-business crowds. Nevertheless, Broad Street had plenty of motorized traffic.
When Steve turned for the last straight stretch before the Skyway, the sidewalks were thronged. He drove through a district crowded with tenements. Here children played, shrieking at each other. Men and women stood about. Cars sped and trucks roared along the one-way street.
Suddenly the sound of the city changed. Waldron did not notice it at first. He was absorbed in unpleasant, suspicious thoughts which would not take definite form. But the total sound of all the city had been a smooth and almost a purring noise. Now—far behind—there came a queer harsh grumbling, as of a gear grinding. Then there was a shrill, high-pitched tumult that sounded like distant screaming.
The extraordinary sound came nearer without at all increasing in volume. People were screaming, but the voices did not seem to merge. Rather, it seemed as if the screams were coming from different places.
Then the grumbling noise dissolved into a loud series of crashes, some nearer and others farther away.
Lucy looked back and cried out. Waldron glanced in the rear-view mirror. A car had swerved from its lane and very deliberately crossed the street and smashed into a building. He saw a heavy truck turning into the lane of traffic. It swerved and turned and did not straighten out. It plowed into the cars parked along the curbing and climbed up on them. Then it lurched drunkenly and fell over on its side.
Nobody ran to the spot. Lucy gasped again. The people on the sidewalk—a man sat on the steps of a small and dingy stoop, somebody fell stiffly upon him. The sitting man did not yield; the person falling upon him did not bend. Two figures collapsed crazily upon the sidewalk and lay there.
A great bus crossed an intersection ahead, moving slowly. With vast deliberation it crashed into a lamp post. The bus was in low gear and its wheels continued to turn insanely. The lamp post suddenly crashed downward and the bus kept on going.
Cars ahead bumped into each other. One hit something and was struck from behind. Waldron jerked his steering wheel to avoid the pile-up. The car that had been following him smashed into the car that had been ahead.
Now there was no movement on the sidewalks. People had been standing and walking. No longer. Now they lay stiff and unmoving, as if abruptly frozen in the midst of motion. He saw hands extended, knees bent, mouths open, eyes staring. Some of the people had been running. They lay absolutely rigid where they had toppled. It was as if every living human being had abruptly been seized with catalepsy, or on signal had gone into a horrible catatonic state. They looked like toppled wax figures.
But cars did not stop until they stalled. Traffic was heavy enough so that few vehicles had been traveling swiftly. From all sides rose the monstrous grinding, crashing and clanking as all the moving things in the city came to violent stops.
Waldron said through stiff lips: "Fran said not to get out of the car."
He was in the left-hand lane and saw that it was clear. Reaching the corner, he threaded his way across it. He went down the right-hand lane and swung again to the left. A ghastly cold horror lay all about. A city had suddenly been struck dead.
There was water in the street ahead. It rippled and swelled and spread. Waldron drove through it, with wings of spray splashing up from the wheels. A truck had crashed a water hydrant and the street was now flooded. The driver of the truck sat stiffly at his wheel.
They made a turn and the ramp to the Skyway loomed ahead. A limousine had battered through a guard rail and hung suspended, halfway fallen to the street below. Its passengers were not visible. Its driver sat foolishly behind the wheel as if he were still driving.
To right and left the street looked ridiculously like a store-window model of a city's thoroughfare, designed to look like the real thing but which had suddenly gone out of control, all the toys smashing themselves in senseless confusion. Only what Waldron saw was full sized. This was real.
Waldron drove up the ramp and sped across the Skyway toward New York. He did not react except with a frantic sense of urgency, as if he were caught in a nightmare.
There were wrecks along the Skyway—only wrecks. No other car moved.
Lucy's teeth chattered suddenly. "Wh—what happened? Did—did everybody die all at once?"
"I don't know what happened," said Waldron. He swerved the car to dodge a pile-up of battered cars. An engine was throbbing idiotically from somewhere in the wreckage.
He spoke through clenched teeth lest they chatter, too. "Whatever it was, it hit everybody but us. It was very sudden ... for death."
Steve Waldron's own occupation was biological research. He had been in the research division of a pharmaceutical laboratory, doing his work under Dr. Hamlin, who had already discovered daphnomyecitin and complacently awaited further triumps of scientific drudgery. Waldron knew enough to find it impossible to accept that any means of death could strike so abruptly and with such instant cataleptic stiffening as his unbelieving eyes had seen.
"I'm afraid," he said suddenly, his throat dry, "that this was the terrible thing Fran said was to happen. He said not to get out of the car no matter what happened. Remember?"
They passed more wrecks. The wide Pulaski Skyway climbed and climbed. It swept upward, splendidly, except for the catastrophes here and there: the collisions and the cars which had crashed into guard rails, and the one huge gap in the concrete side rail where something large and blind and senseless had ripped away all of sixty feet of railing and then dived terribly to the dark earth below.