Interchange Closed Until Further Notice

Jack Cromley awoke one perfectly ordinary morning to find his world profoundly changed.

Or, to be more accurate, he discovered the alteration ten minutes after he awoke, thanks to the seductive charm of the snooze bar. When the clock radio chirped to life a second time and pierced his unconsciousness, however, Jack got his first hint that something was different. The mellifluous tones of the radio announcer were in a foreign language; in truth, it was like no language he could recognize.

"Damn station changed their format," Jack muttered to himself. Without poking his head out from under the covers, he groped for the tuning knob to find another station. His fingers seemed especially clumsy this morning, even more than his usual morning stupor could explain. Strangely, every station seemed to be chattering in the same unintelligible tongue.

What the hell is going on here?, Jack wondered. Grudgingly, he peeked out at the offending clock radio...and got his second surprise of the morning. The numbers on the radio dial were in some kind of code. No, it was more like symbols--hieroglyphics, or astrological symbols, or...who knows what?

All right, calm down, Jack thought; there's got to be some logical explanation for this. Heedless of his own efforts to

slow his galloping panic, his mind raced on. His years of medical training before leaving the residency due to personal illness began to re-emerge.

I'm having a stroke, Jack realized with a sinking feeling. He remembered studying how the language center in the left hemisphere of the brain could be wiped out by an errant blood clot, leaving the unfortunate victim with a receptive aphasia-- the inability to understand spoken or written language--or an expressive aphasia--the inability to speak or write intelligibly. He remembered, too, that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, in yet another of God's little jokes (along with such useful gifts to humanity as wisdom teeth and the appendix). That meant that he should be experiencing weakness and loss of sensation in his right limbs as well. Ah-ha, Jack gulped, that would explain my clumsiness while trying to change the station on the radio. Hesitantly, he glanced down at his right arm...and screamed.

There, at the end of his arm, were seven perfectly formed fingers. The arrangement consisted of five symmetrically distributed digits with a mirror-image thumb on either side. Trembling, he stole a glance at his left hand, where seven more fingers greeted his gaze. No stroke ever did this, Jack realized.

Fran, Jack's live-in girlfriend, entered the bedroom just then, no doubt in response to his shriek a moment before.

"Fran, my God, something terrible's happened," Jack exclaimed. Fran's eyes went wide. She clapped a seven-fingered hand to her mouth.

"F-frannie?," Jack stammered, his mind whirling. Fran responded with a tirade of high-pitched gibberish, not unlike the earlier babble of the clock radio.

"Fran, what the hell's happening?" Jack's growing terror gave his voice a slightly demented quality, which was echoed in Fran's unintelligible reply. Her eyes still wide, she picked up the telephone and began to punch buttons with one of her many slender fingers.

"Who are you calling?," Jack demanded, his heart pounding painfully in his chest. Ignoring his question, Fran began speaking in an obviously forced-calm manner into the receiver, although her words remained meaningless to him. After a brief conversation, she replaced the handset, and then turned to face Jack. A bit more gibberish underlined her frightened look of concern. She could have been saying, "I love you," or "I'm leaving you," or "Your hair is on fire," and he wouldn't have known the difference.

Jack grabbed her by the shoulders. Her long reddish-blonde hair brushed against the hairy backs of his seven-fingered hands.

"Frannie...help me," Jack pleaded hoarsely. Fran squirmed free of his grip and backed away, fear widening her already large green eyes to saucer-size dimensions.

"Fran...," he tried once more, placatingly turning an elongated palm upwards in her direction. She took one more halting step backwards and turned on her heel, ran out into the hall, and slammed the door behind her. Jack dove at the closing door, only to hear the click of the key turning the lock from the other side.