While the cab moved northward, a high-flying plane flew over Newark and released flares, by which to take photographs. But the pictures would have been quite useless, because they would show only a mass of gray mist filling all the downtown streets and on a level with the tops of the buildings. Suburban streets, however, seemed quite clear of the mist. But even these inconclusive photographs were not seen by anybody, for the plane dropped to a mere ten thousand feet for clearer pictures. Then it ceased to communicate. Radar said it kept on going down, into the city.
This was not among the news items the taxicab's radio announced during the ride uptown. There were no longer any regular programs on radio. On every station the news was the same: there was no news. Nobody had been able to get any. So there were snatches of recorded music, and then a voice saying profoundly: From East Orange comes word that ambulances moving in toward Newark have not returned. Police cars attempting to investigate the disaster simply cease to communicate. Short-wave hams report that Newark hams simply stopped talking, though their carrier-waves in some cases remain on the air. And now, a resume of information up to the moment...
The resume was completely unchanged from the one of five minutes before, and the five minutes before that.
Waldron paid off the taxicab before he went into the apartment house where Professor Jamison lived. He knew the professor, of course. He had been in conference with him several times before on behalf of his own laboratory work under Hamlin, of antibiotic fame. Seeing a self-service elevator, he went up in it. He moved along the hall to the professor's door and pushed the button.
The door was opened but not by Professor Jamison. Waldron saw a younger man. At first glance Waldron was startled. The man looked like Fran Dutt. But at second glance he plainly wasn't, although he could have been close kin. He wore a laboratory smock, work-stained and worn. The indefinable smell coming from behind the man was assuredly not unpleasant. But though it was a familiar odor, it wasn't exactly a normal smell for an apartment residence. But then Waldron remembered. Professor Jamison had no wife. Therefore, he had one room set aside for certain experiments connected with his work. There were white mice in the room too. They were of that fixed, genetically pure strain which is so valuable to biologists and which was so nearly wiped out by the Bar Harbor fire, years ago.
"I've got to see Professor Jamison," said Waldron abruptly. "I just came from Newark. I escaped what's happened over there. I have to tell him what it is. My name's Waldron."
The young man blinked at him and held open the door. Waldron entered the apartment.
"The professor will be back in a few minutes," said the young man who looked like Fran Dutt. "What is this about Newark, anyhow? I had music on and suddenly the radio babbled nonsense!"
He turned into the room where there were small cages against the walls. Waldron followed him. He saw a table with a partly assembled electronic apparatus that looked like it might be a model of a tentative electric-anesthesia device.
The young man smiled cordially at Waldron. His smile, too, looked like Fran's. He was the perfect pattern of a talented laboratory man—a younger man working under an older one for experience and training. Fran Dutt looked like that, too. And this man looked like Fran. But the resemblance was more than that of kinship. Bather, it was the resemblance of a type. A racial type. One such man would blend into any ordinary American crowd. But two of them would be noticeable.
"I know a man who looks a lot like you," said Waldron abruptly. "I wonder—"
"I wouldn't know," said the young man easily. "That Newark business has me puzzled. In the last three hours—" He turned to a laboratory table. He opened a drawer. It was a perfectly casual movement, but it was wrongly timed. He reached in a trifle too hurriedly. He had to reach far back inside the drawer and he looked sharply over his shoulder at Waldron.
Waldron went tense. This man made him think of Fran, and, just now, Fran was not a restful person to think about. Also, Waldron had been brushed off many times this night as a crank when he tried to tell his story. And the one time he'd told it, he'd been disbelieved. Without being aware of it, he'd been on edge lest Professor Jamison also think him a crank. All of these factors added together made for an almost paranoiac reaction of suspiciousness.
The young man found what he wanted. He turned. He had something in his hand which looked partly like a pistol and partly something else.
"I won—"
Then Waldron's fist hit home. His conscious mind did not command the blow. But there was no reason for anybody to receive him so cordially and say that he didn't know Fran Dutt before Waldron had finished naming him. Then for that person to reach into a drawer and look sharply over his shoulder before his hand came out with something that could be a weapon...
Waldron was appalled at his own action. The other man reeled backward and collapsed on the floor, out cold. The thing he'd held in his hand fell from his fingers.
It gave off a thin curl of pale-blue smoke. It grew hotter and glowed dull red. The smell of scorching wood rose from the floor. Then the object's parts shifted obscurely and lost all organization. It became merely a mass of copper wires, that had been held together by solder. The solder had melted and the wires had pulled away from their anchorages. It was no longer possible to discover what the object's original design had been.
The room was very silent. Waldron looked at the now-destroyed thing which had acted exactly like the object underneath his car. Also, this man looked like Fran Dutt. The shape of his head was the shape of Fran Dutt's. The slightly wide jaw was like Fran's. His nose seemed of identical shape.
The silence was extreme. There was no radio going, so the man had not been listening for news. But there was something else wrong. Some other noise that should have been there....
It was because Waldron was himself a biologist that he noticed it. The room held the faint, musky odor of white mice but the mice were utterly still—no sound of their quick movement came to him. He moved to the cages.
The mice were frozen, stiffened. They were cataleptic. He reached for a cage. Opening it, he took out a mouse. Another. A third. The flesh of the small creatures was hard, harder than rigor mortis would account for, harder than any form of catalepsy could produce. Harder, it seemed to Waldron, than even frozen flesh would have been.
But the mice did not look dead. Although they did not feel alive, they looked like consummately carved images which a person could expect would suddenly spring to life.
Steve grimly took down laboratory towels from a rack by the table. He painstakingly made the still-unconscious man helpless. Then he called the office of the Messenger and demanded to speak to Nick.
"The expedition was called off," reported Nick, as soon as he heard Waldron's voice. "A hospital sent in a gang. A gas company sent in an emergency wagon with everybody wearing gas masks. Nobody came back."
"Send somebody up here," Waldron told him, "and you can get some pictures—and some stuff for people to work on too. Get this address down, Nick!"
He carefully dictated it. Nick wrote. Then he said: "Say! Somebody called up about you. A Miss Lucy Blair. She asked for me and said, 'Fran's come,' whatever that means. How'd she know I knew you, Steve? She's at the Mayfair. Is that your hotel?"
Waldron barked into the transmitter.
"Yes. Get some cops up here to grab the young fool I knocked cold. He knows the whole business about Newark. You'll find some mice up here that are in exactly the same condition as the people in Newark. The gadget that was used to put them in that state is here on the floor, melted down. Hurry it up, Nick! Slap this guy in jail and hold him there! I've got to hurry!"