Durstine looked terrible, hollow-eyed, unshaven, but he seemed in better shape than I. It was he who caught the first flicker of Baxter's eyes and dropped to his knees. The color came back to the scientist's face in a rush of pink, and his chest heaved with deep breathing.
"Can you hear me?" Durstine began.
An hour later Baxter was dead as predicted. And so was all hope of removing the lethal debris with his other invention. The "extractor" didn't work, he had told us. Yes, he'd been trying to reverse the field to retrieve the metallic objects from the other dimension, but the experiment was a failure!
Durstine took my arm. "Come on, Gene. We've done all we can. I know one safe place—a place where no kids ever played."
"Yeah, I know," I said with a tongue two sizes too big. "The nearest bar. The damned kids! They've murdered us! Leo Baxter and the damned kids!"
Things were turning gray, but I remember the chief catching me by the shoulder and jerking me around. Too late I remembered about his little Jerry and the agony my words must have carved in his heart. I wished he'd slug me, but he didn't. He looked at me for a long minute and said something I don't remember, because the fog closed in—a hot, dry fog that swept into my brain and blacked out the light. I don't even remember falling.
The last thought I had was, the fever! I've got it. And Thorsen said there were no more antibiotics or drugs left in the city.
Some weeks later it was a surprise but no pleasure, to discover I was still alive. Through the smoke of my unfocussed eyes I could tell that my "private" room was occupied by at least a dozen other patients. Some were on cots and some, like me, simply lay on the floor with a blanket over them.