They came to the highest point of the Skyway. Here a gigantic structure of steel girders carried the road to a height which was skyscraper-tall. They could see indefinitely across the meadows between Jersey City and the city they had left behind. Innumerable bright lights lay ahead. There were the fairylike towers of New York on beyond. Below the Skyway there were railroad tracks and scattered factories and the luridly lighted Jersey Turnpike. Below that were isolated straight lines of street lights and occasional illuminated windows.
Suddenly Waldron reached down and braked the car. He stared back toward Newark. The glow above it was the same as every city casts up to the sky at night. Winking red lights rose from neon signs. There were lights in windows, on moving signs. From far off, the city looked completely untouched, completely normal. It was impossible to believe that in that same city an incredible disaster had just taken place, Then Waldron caught his breath. Mist was rising from the city. What seemed to be fog filtered upward. The city's street lights seemed to become dim. The glow in the sky became fainter. The mist could be smoke, but smoke would rise higher. There would be columns of it. There would be leaping flames. If the city had caught fire, there would have been no gentle upward surging of mist. No, there was no conflagration. The city was not burning.
As they stared, one huge, irregularly shaped section of the lighted space went dark. Abruptly, all its lights went out. Then another huge section. A third. With methodical deliberation, one part after another of the city went black. It was blotted out precisely as if someone pulled the master switches of its electricity-supply service, plunging the city, bit by bit, into darkness.
There seemed no longer any city back there. Looking out into the night that was now around them, it seemed as if the city had been wiped off the face of the earth.
TWO
In front of them was the brightly lighted interior of the tunnel. The Pulaski Skyway gave direct access to it. They went through columned underpasses and then down an astoundingly wide one-way street. Then they passed an empty pay-booth and then they were in the tunnel.
The resonant echoes of the car's motor bounced back from the gleaming white tile. They thought they could hear the roar of a giant truck ahead. Then they began going up a gentle incline and some moments later they emerged into the open air of New York. Tall dark buildings loomed all around them and things were moving. People were actually walking —and everything seemed perfectly commonplace!
Steve barely spoke to Lucy as they drove northward, in perfectly ordinary traffic, stopping for red lights and moving ahead on green. It seemed nightmarish that the people about them could be so indifferent to the colossal tragedy across the Jersey meadows.
But, of course, they were not indifferent. The news simply hadn't arrived yet. Waldron and Lucy had outrun all tidings of the catastrophe. Even when they stopped before the Mayfair Hotel, the tragedy in New Jersey was only being guessed at by people on its edges.
While Waldron was telling the doorman to have his car parked, the telephone exchanges in New York were being besieged by irate citizens. By the hundreds, indignant phone users were dialing "O" to protest being cut off from their parties in Newark. By other hundreds, other persons were complaining angrily of the service that could not even get them a Newark number. Supervisors were harassedly bedeviling the maintenance department to know what was the matter that no operator in Newark could be reached on any trunk line.
While Waldron asked the desk clerk if there was a letter for Lucy, frightened Hudson Tube employees were clustered about a train in the Beekman Street terminal. It had come out of Newark and rolled past the Jersey City stations without a pause. The line was clear, so no automatic stops had checked it. The train had come grinding through the under-river tunnel. Although brightly lighted, it was traveling blindly. Emergency calls raced ahead of it. Dispatchers swore. Finally, a thrown switch brought the train to a halt just before it reached the Beekman Street platform.
Then the occupants were seen—each motionless, each in a startlingly lifelike pose. But each man and woman had flesh that was iron hard, and bodies that held no sign of life.
The motorman appeared to be sitting at ease, his hand on the controller bar. But though his fingers were not clenched, they could not be loosened. Passengers held their newspapers or clung to straps with seeming carelessness. But the newspapers had to be torn from their hands to be removed, and the hand straps had to be cut from their overhead fastenings before the passengers could be taken out of the train. Doctors, hastily called, pronounced each man and woman dead. But each person's appearance was so lifelike that the decision had to be changed. The people were alive. But there was every sign of rigor mortis—a rigidity that suggested death. But no rigor mortis could be so intense. The doctors were puzzled, but still they insisted the passengers were alive.
Ambulances transported the stiff bodies to hospitals, where other medical authorities began to go quietly mad trying to find out what had happened. Their bewilderment increased when they tried to get information from Newark on any possible cause of the phenomenon. Newark did not answer.
Outside of Newark, up in the Oranges, people were pulling glass-hard human bodies out of a bus that had rolled blindly into a motor truck. A plane radioed Newark Airport that it was coming in. It got no response. It began to circle overhead, while the pilot kept calling for permission to land. Out at Idlewild somebody heard the pilot's increasingly frantic voice. Then the voice of its pilot stopped short.
Lucy sat in a great upholstered chair in the lobby of the Mayfair and read the letter that was waiting for her. It was not in her father's handwriting. It was in Fran's. Waldron unabashedly read over her shoulder.
Lucy: If you know what's happened in Newark before you read, this, you will understand why I made you come here. If you have not heard of a terrible thing happening, stay where you are for an hour or two or even overnight. You will be safe there. You will be in much more terrible danger than you can believe, at home.
Your father is alive and well. I assure you of that on my honor. I also assure you that if you tell anyone but Steve, or if he tells anyone that you have this letter from me and that you escaped the thing that is to happen, your father will not be harmed. He will be just as safe as before. But I will be killed more horribly than you can imagine. I say this also on my honor.
I beg of you not to explain to anyone how you escaped from Newark. Let it seem an accident. If you say that I caused it, I will be a dead man.
Wait, I beg you, until I can come and explain.
Fran.
Lucy looked up. She moistened her lips. "He ... he knew what was going to happen."
"That," said Waldron, with irony, "seems fairly clear." "And he knows what happened—"
"To your father. Yes. It's even probable that he knew it beforehand, too. But you were right that he didn't want harm to come to you. But for him, we'd be in Newark too, and like everybody else who's there.... Wait here!"
He moved away, passing through the brightly lighted lounge of the hotel, where elaborate chandeliers hung down from the ceiling. He made his way out the revolving door.
"I asked you to have my car parked five minutes ago," he said to the doorman. "Where is it?"
"It's in the garage, sir. I can have it brought back."
"I want to get something out of it. Where is it?"
The doorman gave him directions. Waldron moved as swiftly as the traffic of pedestrians permitted. He went a block and a half and then stepped into the rather dingy garage that was used by the hotel.