by Anthology
Barrier? Meister went to the window again and looked out. The radio voice continued:
“NBC at Radio City disclaims all knowledge of the persistent signal which has blotted out radio programs from nine hundred kilocycles on up since midnight last night. This completes the roster of broadcasting stations in the city proper. It is believed that the tone is associated with the current wall around Manhattan and most of the other boroughs. Some outside stations are still getting through, but at less than a fiftieth of their normal input.” The voice went on:
“At Columbia University, the dean of the Physics Department estimates that about the same proportion of sunlight is also getting through. We do not yet have any report about the passage of air through the barrier. The flow of water in the portions of the East and Hudson Rivers which lie under the screen is said to be normal, and no abnormalities are evident at the Whitehall Street tidal station.”
There was a pause; the humming went on unabated. Then there was a sharp beep! and the voice said, “At the signal—nine a.m., Eastern Daylight Savings Time.”
Meister left the radio on while he dressed. The alarming pronouncements kept on, but he was not yet thoroughly disturbed, except for Ellen. She might be frightened; but probably nothing more serious would happen. Right now, he should be at the labs. If the Team had put this thing up overnight, they would tease him unmercifully for sleeping through the great event.
The radio continued to reel off special notices, warnings, new bulletins. The announcer sounded as if he were on the thin edge of hysteria; evidently he had not yet been told what it was all about. Meister was tying his left shoe when he realized that the reports were beginning to sound much worse.
“From LaGuardia Field we have just been notified that an experimental plane has been flown through the barrier at a point over the jammed Triboro Bridge. It has not appeared over the city and is presumed lost. On the Miss New York disaster early this morning we still have no complete report. Authorities on Staten Island say the ferry ordinarily carried less than two hundred passengers at that hour, but thus far only eleven have been picked up. One of these survivors was brought in to a Manhattan slip by the tub Marjorie Q; he is still in a state of extreme shock and Bellevue Hospital says no statement can be expected from him until tomorrow. It appears, however, that he swam under the barrier.”
His voice carried the tension he evidently felt. “Outside the screen a heavy fog still prevails—the same fog which hid the barrier from the ferry captain until his ship was destroyed almost to the midpoint. The Police Department has again requested that all New Yorkers stay—”
Alarmed at last, Meister switched off the machine and left the apartment, locking it carefully. Unless those idiots turned off their screen, there would be panic and looting before the day was out.
Downstairs in the little grocery there was a mob arguing in low, terrified voices, their faces as gray as the ominous sky. He pushed through them to the phone.
The grocer was sitting behind it. “Phone service is tied up, Mr. Meister,” he said hoarsely.
“I can get through, I think. What has happened?”
“Some foreign enemy, is my guess. There’s a big dome of somethin’ all around the city. Nobody can get in or out. You stick your hand in, you draw back a bloody stump. Stuff put through on the other side don’t come through.” He picked up the phone with a trembling hand and passed it over. “Good luck.”
Meister dialed Ellen first. He needed to know if she was badly frightened, and to reassure her if she was. Nothing happened for a while; then an operator said, “I’m sorry, sir, but there will be no private calls for the duration of the emergency, unless you have a priority.”
“Give me Emergency Code B-Nineteen, then,” Meister said.
“Your group, sir?”
“Screen Team.”
There was a faint sound at the outer end of the line, as if the girl had taken a quick breath. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Right away.” There was an angry crackle, and then the droning when the number was being rung.
“Screen Team,” a voice said.
“Resonance section, please,” Meister said, and when he was connected and had identified himself, a voice growled:
“Hello, Jake, this is Frank Schafer. Where the deuce are you? I sent you a telegram—but I suppose you didn’t get it, the boards are jammed. Get on down here, quick!”
“No, I haven’t any telegram,” Meister said. “Whom do I congratulate?”
“Nobody, you fool! We didn’t do this. We don’t even know how it’s been done!”
Meister felt the hairs on the back of his neck stirring. It was as if he were back in the tunnels of Concentration Camp Dora again. He swallowed and said, “But it is the antibomb screen?”
“The very thing,” Schafer’s tinny voice said bitterly. “Only somebody else has beat us to it—and we’re trapped under it.”
“It’s really bombproof—you’re sure of that?”
“It’s anything-proof! Nothing can pass it! And we can’t get out of it, either!”
It took quite a while to get the story straight. Project B-19, the meaningless label borne by the top-secret, billion-dollar Atomic Defense Project, was in turmoil. Much of its laboratory staff had been in the field or in Washington when the thing happened, and the jam in phone service had made it difficult to get the men who were still in the city back to the central offices.
“It’s like this,” Frank Schafer said, kneading a chunk of art gum rapidly. “This dome went up last night. It lets in a little light and a few of the strongest outside radio stations nearby. But that’s all—or anyhow, all that we’ve been able to establish so far. It’s a perfect dome, over the whole island and parts of the other boroughs and New Jersey. It doesn’t penetrate the ground or the water, but the only really big water frontage is way out in the harbor, so that lets out much chance of everybody swimming under it like that man from the Miss New York.”
“The subways are running, I heard,” Meister said.
“Sure; we can evacuate the city if we have to, but not fast enough.” The mobile fingers crumbled bits off the sides of the art gum. “It won’t take long to breathe up the air here, and if any fires start it’ll be worse. Also there’s a layer of ozone about twenty feet deep all along the inside of the barrier—but don’t ask me why! Even if we don’t have any big blazes, we’re losing oxygen at a terrific rate by ozone-fixing and surface oxidization of the ionized area.”
“Ionized?” Meister frowned. “Is there much?”
“Plenty!” Schafer said. “We haven’t let it out, but in another twenty hours you won’t be able to hear anything on the radio but a noise like a tractor climbing a pile of cornflakes. There’s been an increase already. Whatever we’re using for ether these days is building up tension fast.”
A runner came in from the private wires and dropped a flimsy on Frank’s desk. The physicist looked at it quickly, then passed it to Meister.
“That’s what I figure. You can see the spot we’re in.”
The message reported that oxygen was diffusing inward through the barrier at about the same rate as might be accounted for by osmosis. The figures on loss of C02 were less easy to establish, but it appeared that the rate here was also of an osmotic order of magnitude. It was signed by a top-notch university chemist.
“Impossible!” Meister said.
“No, it’s so. And New York is entirely too big a cell to live, Jake. If we’re getting oxygen only osmotically, we’ll be suffocated in a week. And did you ever hear of a semipermeable membrane passing a lump of coal, or a tomato? Air, heat, food—all cut off.”
“What does the Army say?”
“What they usually say: ‘Do something, on the double!’ We’re lucky we’re civilians, or we’d be court-martialed for dying!” Schafer laughed angrily and pitched the art gum away. “It’s a very pretty problem, in a way,” he said. “We have our antibomb screen. Now we have to find how to make ourselves vulnerable to the
bomb—or cash in our chips. And in six days—”
The phone jangled and Schafer snatched at it. “Yeah, this is Dr. Schafer . . . I’m sorry, Colonel, but we have every available man called in now except those on the Mayor’s commission—No, I don’t know. Nobody knows, yet. We’re tracing that radio signal now. If it has anything to do with the barrier, we’ll be able to locate the generator and destroy it.”
The physicist slammed the phone into its cradle and glared at Meister. “I’ve been taking this phone stuff all morning! I wish you’d showed up earlier. Here’s the picture, briefly: The city is dying. Telephone and telegraph lines give us some communication with the outside, and we will be able to use radio inside the dome for a little while longer. There are teams outside trying to crack the barrier, but all the significant phenomena are taking place inside. Out there it just looks like a big black dome—no radiation effects, no ionization, no radio tone, no nothin’!
“We are evacuating now,” he went on, “but if the dome stays up, over three quarters of the trapped people will die. If there’s any fire or violence, almost all of us will die.”
“You talk,” Meister said, “as if you want me to kill the screen all by myself.”
Schafer grinned nastily. “Sure, Jake! This barrier obviously doesn’t act specifically on nuclear reactions; it stops almost everything. Almost everyone here is a nuclear man, as useless for this problem as a set of cooky-cutters. Every fact we’ve gotten so far shows this thing to be an immense and infinitely complicated form of cavity-resonance—and you’re the only resonance engineer inside.”
The grin disappeared. Schafer said, “We can give you all the electronics technicians you need, plenty of official backing, and general theoretical help. It’s not much but it’s all we’ve got. We estimate about eleven million people inside this box—eleven million corpses unless you can get the lid off it.”
Meister nodded. Somehow, the problem did not weigh as heavily upon him as it might have. He was remembering Dora, the wasted bodies jammed under the stairs, in storerooms, fed into the bake-oven five at a time. One could survive almost anything if one had had practice in surviving. There was only Ellen—
Ellen was probably in The Box—the dome. That meant something, while eleven million was only a number.
“Entdecken,” he murmured.
Schafer looked up at him, his blue eyes snapping sparks. Schafer certainly didn’t look like one of the world’s best nuclear physicists. Schafer was a sandyhaired runt—with the bomb hung over his head by a horsehair.
“What’s that?” he said.
“A German word,” Meister answered. “It means, to discover—literally, to take the roof off. That is the first step, it seems. To take the roof off, we must discover that transmitter.”
“I’ve got men out with loop antennas. The geometrical center of the dome is right at the tip of the Empire State
Building, but WNBT says there’s nothing up there but their television transmitters.”
“What they mean,” Meister said, “is that there was nothing else up there two weeks ago. There must be a radiator at a radiant point no matter how well it is disguised.”
“I’ll send a team.” Schafer got up, fumbling for the art gum he had thrown away. “I’ll go myself, I guess. I’m jittery here.”
“With your teeth? I would not advise it. You would die slain, as the Italians say!”
“Teeth?” Schafer said. He giggled nervously. “What’s that got to—”
“You have metal in your mouth. If the mast is actually radiating this effect, your jawbones might be burned out of your head. Get a group with perfect teeth, or porcelain fillings at best. And wear nothing with metal in it, not even shoes.”
“Oh,” Schafer said. “I knew we needed you, Jake.” He rubbed the back of his hand over his forehead and reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette.
Meister struck it out of his hand. “Six days’ oxygen remaining,” he said.
Schafer lunged up out of his chair, aimed a punch at Meister’s head, and fainted across the desk.
The dim city stank of ozone. The street lights were still on. Despite radioed warnings to stay indoors, surging mobs struggled senselessly toward the barrier. Counterwaves surged back, coughing, from the unbreathable stuff pouring out from it. More piled up in subway stations; people screamed and trampled one another. Curiously, the city’s take that day was enormous. Not even disaster could break the deeply entrenched habit of putting a token in the turnstile.
The New York Central and Long Island Railroads, whose tracks were above ground, where the screen cut across them, were shut down, as were the underground lines which came to the surface inside The Box. Special trains were running every three minutes from Pennsylvania Station, with passengers jamming the aisles and platforms.
In the Hudson Tubes the situation was worse. So great was the crush of fleeing humans there, they could hardly operate at all. The screen drew a lethal line between Hoboken and Newark, so that Tube trains had to make the longer of the two trips to get their passengers out of The Box. A brief power interruption stopped one train in complete darkness for ten minutes beneath the Hudson River, and terror and madness swept through it.
Queens and Brooklyn subways siphoned off a little pressure, but only a little. In a major disaster the normal human impulse is to go north, on the map-fostered myth that north is “up.”
Navy launches were readied to ferry as many as cared to make the try out to where The Box lay over the harbor and the rivers, but thus far there were no such swimmers. Very few people can swim twenty feet under water, and to come up for air short of that twenty feet would be disastrous. That would be as fatal as coming up in the barrier itself; ozone is lung-rot in high concentrations. That alone kept most of the foolhardy from trying to run through the wall—that, and the gas-masked police cordon.
From Governor’s Island, about half of which was in The Box, little Army ferries shipped over several cases of small arms which were distributed to subway and railroad guards. Two detachments of infantry also came along, relieving a little of the strain on the police.
Meister, hovering with two technicians and the helicopter pilot over a building on the edge of the screen, peered downward in puzzlement. It was hard to make any sense of the geometry of shadows below him.
“Give me the phone,” he said.
The senior technician passed him the mike. A comparatively long-wave channel had been cleared by a major station for the use of emergency teams and prowl cars, since nothing could be heard on short-wave above that eternal humming.
“Frank, are you on?” Meister called. “Any word from Ellen yet?”
“No, but her landlady says she went to Jersey to visit yesterday,” came over the air waves. There was an unspoken understanding between them that the hysterical attack of an hour ago would not be mentioned. “You’ll have to crack The Box to get more news, I guess, Jake. See anything yet?”
“Nothing but more trouble. Have you thought yet about heat conservation? I am reminded that it is summer; we will soon have an oven here.”
“I thought of that, but it isn’t so,” Frank Schafer’s voice said. “It seems hotter only because there’s no wind. Actually, the Weather Bureau says we’re losing heat pretty rapidly; they expect the drop to level at fifteen to twenty above.”
Meister whistled. “So low! Yet there is a steady supply of calories in the water—”
“Water’s a poor conductor. What worries me is this accursed ozone. It’s diffusing through the city—already smells like the inside of a transformer around here!”
“What about the Empire State Building?”
“Not a thing. We ran soap bubbles along the power leads to see if something was tapping some of WNBT’s power, but there isn’t a break in them anywhere. Maybe you’d better go over there when you’re through at the barrier. There are some things we can’t make sense of.”
“I shall,” Meister said. “I will leave here as s
oon as I start a fire.”
Schafer began to sputter. Meister smiled gently and handed the phone back to the technician.
“Break out the masks,” he said. “We can go down now.”
A rooftop beside the barrier was like some hell dreamed up in the violent ward of a hospital. Every movement accumulated a small static charge on the surface of the body, which discharged stingingly and repeatedly from the fingertips and even the tip of the nose if it approached a grounded object too closely.
Only a few yards away was the unguessable wall itself, smooth, deep gray, featureless, yet somehow quivering with a pseudo-life of its own—a shimmering haze just too dense to penetrate. It had no definite boundary. Instead, the tarpaper over which it lay here began to dim, and within a foot faded into the general mystery.
Meister looked at the barrier. The absence of anything upon which the eye could fasten was dizzying. The mind made up patterns and flashes of lurid color and projected them into the grayness. Sometimes it seemed that the fog extended for miles. A masked policeman stepped over from the inside parapet and touched him on the elbow.
“Wouldn’t look at her too long, sir,” he said. “We’ve had ambulances below carting away sightseers who forgot to look away. Pretty soon your eyes sort of get fixed.”
Meister nodded. The thing was hypnotic all right. And yet the eye was drawn to it because it was the only source of light here. The ionization was so intense that it bled off power from the lines, so that street lamps had gone off all around the edge. From the helicopter, the city had looked as if its rim were inked out in a vast ring. Meister could feel the individual hairs all over his body stirring; it made him feel infested. Well, there’d been no shortage of lice at Dora!
Behind him the technicians were unloading the apparatus from the ’copter. Meister beckoned. “Get a reading on field strength first of all,” he said gloomily. “Whoever is doing this has plenty of power. Ionized gas, a difficult achievement—”
He stopped suddenly. Not so difficult. The city was enclosed; it was, in effect, a giant Geissler tube. Of course the concentration of rare gases was not high enough to produce a visible glow, but—
