Jack headed east, holding a tight leash upon himself lest the panic which always clawed at him should seize his brain. There would be human beings to eastward. True, he would be a ghost to them, and they to him, but still - He forced himself to note all things with a careful attention. That way would come accustomedness.
He suddenly realized that there were no smells in this strange universe. Again, like sounds, a man is normally unaware of tiny odours in the air he breathes. But their absence was strange. The air seemed strangely flat. It had the insipid flavour of boiled and hence tasteless water.
Then he saw something moving. His heart leaped for ah instant. But this moving thing was itself a shadow. He watched it intently. It was a rabbit. He could look through its flesh and see the distinctly articulated, phantom bones within its mistlike body. Strangely, it seemed to see him, too. It leaped madly away. And Jack realized that, just as the rabbit seemed ghostlike to him, he would seem a ghost to it. Even more of a wraith and less visible, actually, because of the brighter light in the world of reality, whereby objects behind his no longer 'material' body would be so much more distinct.
He went on, without hope, but refusing to give way until he must. In this world of impalpable things there was no solid space on which he might rest. These was no food he could eat. There was no water he could lift to his lips or swallow. And he knew all this and trudged doggedly eastward, for no conceivable reason, for hour after hour. If he had any reason for his travail, it was that he could die without yielding to the panic Durran undoubtedly expected of him.
It was a ghastly journey. The earth-shoes upon his feet, clumsy and unaccustomed; the unearthly reddish light about him; the vaporous-seeming surface on which he walked; the knowledge of and the insistent nagging feeling of an abyss below him. He had no faintest idea of attaining to safety by this exertion. He knew the conditions under which hope might exist, and they were practically impossible. Without food or water or rest, with no means of communicating with any human being, with his loudest shout in the ear of a man but the faintest thread of a whisper - because he was a ghost - A ghost!
Once he passed through a tiny country village. He saw ghosts about him, living in phantom houses, engaged in unreal tasks. He was unseen by humans, but dogs barked at him, frightened, terrified, the hackles at the top of their necks raised and bristling. Their barks were the faintest of whispers. He went on because their uproar made a phantom baby wake and wail soundlessly.
On - on.
He strode on for hours, desperately, watching without hope for something which might give hope. The dark-eyed, nearly purple, sun sank low. He had emerged from the phantom woods long since and now plodded across a vaporous open space which was featureless and unmeaning. The cloudiness rose above his earth-shoes, now. It was probably a growing crop of wheat or rye, unseeable save as mist. Ever and again he turned to look his last upon the sun. And very suddenly it vanished and all this unreal world was dark.
There were infinitely faint reddish lights in the sky overhead - stars. He stood upon a vapour that he could not see and that was not tangible to his hands. In all the world there was/riot one solid thing besides his body and the ungainly objects upon his feet. He was exhausted. He was weak with hunger and thirst and half mad with the knowledge of doom upon him and that impending drop down into the smouldering fires that burn eternally at the centre of the earth.
Two small red glows, like fireflies, swept through the blackness from a spot to the right of him. They moved almost before him and vanished abruptly. He plodded on. Two others. They were nearer. Again they vanished when before him. A curious tail of nickering flame seemed to follow them. He was almost too weary even to be curious. But somewhere in his brain a voice said: 'Motor cars. That tail of flame is the exhaust. It's hot enough to give off infra-red, and that's what you see by.'
He plodded on. Sooner or later he would stagger from the exhaustion that crept upon him. His muscles would refuse to obey him. He would stumble. He would fall -
Then he saw a row of dim red specks. They did not move. He regarded them dully. They would be the electric bulbs of a filling-station sign. He turned and moved drearily toward them. He would die, at least, near human beings he could not even signal to. He was very tired indeed. Presently the dim red specks stretched in the three sides of a rectangle above his head. That was the roof of the service cover. And the lights were probably very bright ones, because he made out very faintly indeed the phantom of the filling station itself. He walked through the walls of that phantom. A brighter reddish glow shone there - a round ring of light. No; two round rings of light. He regarded them apathetically. He was too tired to think clearly. He found himself reaching out his hand. He touched one of the rings of light. It burned him. It was, actually, the gasoline burner of a hot-dog boiler.
'Curious,' he said dully to himself. 'In theory, if it burned me, I must have affected the flame. And if there is a man near by - but there must be - I could signal to him if we both knew dots and dashes.'
Then he shrugged hopelessly. His finger hurt. It was severely scorched, but there was not enough light to see. He made a helpless gesture with his scorched hand - and the burned finger touched something solid.
For a moment he was dazed. Sheer shock made him dizzy. He touched the thing again. It was hot and scorched his burned finger. It was impalpable to the unburned ones.
Jack gasped. 'I feel - I feel a stove!'
Then he panted to himself, all alone in the unthinkable universe of his own discovery.
'Radioactivity knocks some of the atoms loose from their co-ordination. Fire, heat, ought to do the same thing. Especially if it caused chemical change - as it does when it scorches my skin. Heat demagnetizes steel, too. It ought to -it ought to materialize -
He held his hand savagely to the flame. It was agony. It was torment. He scorched it all over, going sick from pain. And then he groped. He felt a wall. He fumbled, and fumbled -
The forty-eight hours given to the City of New York would expire at four p.m. At a little after three, Jack got rather stiffly out of a motorcycle side car at the isolated spot in New Jersey where the city's ransom was to be paid. The State trooper who'd brought him roared his machine away. Gail's father nodded to Jack, his face grey and drawn.
'I heard you were released,' he said jerkily, 'and that Gail was all right when you were turned loose.'
'She was all right,' said Jack composedly. 'But I wasn't turned loose in the way you mean. You're here to deliver the city's ransom?'
Kennedy nodded and licked his lips. 'I asked for the job,' he said desperately. 'I hope to see Gail and make terms with Durran for her release, too, you see.'
'He'll ask,' said Jack, 'for one of the new earth-ships. That's the price. I'm fairly sure.'
'He blew up four of them yesterday,' said Kennedy bitterly. 'They couldn't be moved as you wired they had to be. One was got away. He'll get the rest to-morrow, probably.'
Jack nodded. He got out a cigarette and lighted it. His fingers quivered like tuning forks.
'Listen!' he said suddenly.
He told Gail's father just how Gail had desperately bought his life by telling where the new earth-ships were being built.' He told how Durran had cheated on the contract, amusedly, while holding to the strict letter of his agreement. He told of his horrible journey in that world which was not reality, and of the accidental discovery that the scorching of his own flesh would destroy the effect of the force field upon it, just as heat will destroy the magnetism of a bar of steel.