The Human Zero- The Science Fiction Stories Of Erle Stanley Gardner

by Matin Greenberg

  There was another object, an oblong of yellow paper, printed upon, with blanks left for data and signature. It was backed with carbon compound so as to enable a duplicate impression to be made, and written upon with pencil.

  Sid studied it.

  It was an express receipt for the shipment of a crate of machinery from George Huntley to Samuel Grove at 6372 Milpas Street. The address of the sender was given as 753 Washington Boulevard.

  Sid puckered his forehead.

  No. 753 Washington Boulevard was the address of Albert Crome.

  Sid opened the cigarette case. Rather a peculiar odor struck his nostrils. There was a tobacco odor, also another odor, a peculiar, nostril-puckering odor.

  He broke open one of the cigarettes.

  So far as he could determine, the tobacco was of the ordinary variety, although there was a peculiar smell to it.

  The lighter functioned perfectly. The fountain pen gave no hint of having been out of condition. Yet the clothes were as empty as an empty meal sack.

  Sid Rodney walked to the door.

  He found himself staring into the black muzzle of a huge revolver.

  “Stand back, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but there have been strange goings on here, sir, and you’ll get your hands up, or, by the Lord, sir, I shall let you have it, right where you’re thickest, sir.”

  It was the grim-faced servant, his eyes like steel, his mouth stretched across his face in a taut line of razor-thin determination.

  Sid laughed.

  “Forget it. I’m in a hurry, and . . .”

  “When I count three, sir, I shall shoot . .

  There was a leather cushion upon one of the chairs. Sid sat down upon that leather cushion, abruptly.

  “Oh, come, let’s be reasonable.”

  “Get your hands up.”

  “Shucks, what harm can I do. I haven’t got a gun, and I only came here to see if I couldn’t . .

  “One . . . two . .

  Rodney raised his weight, flung himself to one side, reached around, grasped the leather cushion, and flung it. He did it all in one sweeping, scrambling motion.

  The gun roared for the first time as he flung himself to one side. It roared the second time as the spinning cushion hurtled through the air.

  Sid was conscious of the mushrooming of the cushion, the scattering of hair, the blowing of bits of leather. The cushion smacked squarely upon the end of the gun, blocking the third shot. Before there could have been a fourth, Sid had gone forward, tackling low. The servant crashed to the floor.

  It was no time for etiquette, the hunting of neutral comers, or any niceties of sportsmanship. The stomach of the servant showed for a moment, below the rim of the leather cushion, and Sid’s fist was planted with nice precision and a degree of force which was sufficiently adequate, right in the middle of that stomach.

  The man doubled, gasped, struggled for air.

  Sid Rodney took the gun from the nerveless fingers, scaled it down the hall where it could do no harm, and made for the front door. He went out on the run.

  Once in his car, he started for the address which had been given on the receipt of the express company as the destination of the parcel of machinery, Samuel Grove at 6372 Milpas Street. It was a slender clue, yet it was the only one that Sid possessed.

  He made the journey at the same breakneck speed that had characterized his other trips. The car skidded to the curb in front of a rather sedate-looking house which was in a section of the city where exclusive residences had slowly given way to cleaning establishments, tailor shops, small industries, cheap boarding houses.

  Sid ran up the steps, tried the bell.

  There was no response. He turned the knob of the door. It was locked. He started to turn away when his ears caught the light flutter of running steps upon an upper floor.

  The steps were as swiftly agile as those of a fleeing rabbit. There followed, after a brief interval, the sound of pounding feet, a smothered scream, then silence.

  Sid rang the bell again.

  Again there was no answer.

  There was a window to one side of the door. Sid tried to raise it, and found that it was unlocked. The sash slid up, and Sid clambered over the sill, dropped to the floor of a cheaply furnished living room.

  He could hear the drone of voices from the upper floor, and he walked to the door, jerked it open, started up the stairs. Some instinct made him proceed cautiously, yet the stairs creaked under the weight of his feet.

  He was halfway up the stairs when the talking ceased.

  Once more he heard the sounds of a brief struggle, a struggle that was terminated almost as soon as it had begun. Such a struggle might come from a cat that has caught a mouse, lets it almost get away, then swoops down upon it with arched back and needle-pointed claws.

  Then there was a man’s voice, and he could hear the words:

  “Just a little of the powder on your hair, my sweet, and it will be almost painless ... You know too much, you and your friend. But it’ll all be over now. I knew he would be suspecting me, so I left my clothes where they’d fool him. And I came and got you.

  “You washed that first powder out of your hair, didn’t you, sweet? But this time you won’t do it. Yes, my sweet, I knew Crome was mad. But I played on his madness to make him do the things I wanted done. And then, when he had become quite mad, I stole one of his machines.

  “He killed Dangerfield for me, and that death covered up my own short accounts. I killed the banker because he was such a cold-blooded fish . . . Cold-blooded, that’s good.”

  There was a chuckle, rasping, mirthless, the sound of scraping objects upon the floor, as though someone tried to struggle ineffectively. Then the voice again.

  “I left a note in my clothes, warning of the deaths of you, of myself, and of that paragon of virtue, Sid Rodney, who gave you the idea in the first place. Later on, I’ll start shaking down millionaires, but no one will suspect me. They’ll think I’m dead.

  “It’s painless. Just the first chill, then death* Then the cells dissolve, shrink into a smaller and smaller space, and then disappear. I didn’t get too much of it from Crome, just enough to know generally how it works, like radio and X-ray, and the living cells are the only ones that respond so far. When you’ve rubbed this powder into the hair ...”

  Sid Rodney had been slowly advancing. A slight shadow of his progress moved along the baseboard of the hall.

  “What’s that?” snapped the voice, losing its gloating monotone, crisply aggressive.

  Sid Rodney stepped boldly up the last of the stairs, into the upper corridor.

  A man was coming toward him. It was Sands.

  “Hello, Sands,” he said. “What’s the trouble here?”

  Sands was quick to take advantage of the lead offered. His right hand dropped to the concealment of his hip, but he smiled affably.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t my friend Sid Rodney, the detective! Tell me, Rodney, have you got anything new? If you haven’t, I have. Look here. I want you to see something . . .”

  And he jumped forward.

  But Rodney was prepared. In place of being caught off guard and balance, he pivoted on the balls of his feet and snapped home a swift right.

  The blow jarred Sands back. The revolver which he had been whipping from his pocket shot from his hand in a glittering arc and whirled to the floor.

  Rodney sprang forward.

  The staggering man flung up his hands, lashed out a vicious kick. Then, as he got his senses cleared from the effects of the blow, he whirled and ran down the hall, dashed into a room and closed the door.

  Rodney heard the click of the bolt as the lock was turned.

  “Ruby!” he called. “Ruby!”

  She ran toward him, attired in flowing garments of colored silk, her hair streaming, eyes glistening.

  “Quick!” she shouted. “Is there any of that powder in your hair? Do you feel an itching of the scalp?”

  He shook his head.
/>   “Tell me what’s happened.”

  “Get him first,” she said.

  Sid Rodney picked up the revolver which he had knocked from the hand of the man he hunted, advanced toward the door.

  “Keep clear!” yelled Sands from behind that door.

  Rodney stepped forward.

  “Surrender, or I’ll start shooting through the door!” he threatened.

  There was a mocking laugh, and something in that laugh warned Rodney; for he leaped back, just as the panels of the door splintered under a hail of lead which came crashing from the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun.

  “I’m calling the police!” shouted Ruby Orman.

  Sid saw that she was at a telephone, placing a call.

  Then he heard a humming noise from behind the door where Sands had barricaded himself. It was a high, buzzing note, such as is made by a high-frequency current meeting with resistance.

  “Quick, Ruby! Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said, and came to him. “I’ve called the police.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Just what you thought—absolute zero. Crome perfected the process by which any form of cell life could be made receptive to a certain peculiar etheric current. But there had to be a certain chemical affinity first.

  “He achieved this by putting a powder in the hair of his victims. The powder irritated the scalp, but it did something to the nerve ends which made them receptive to the current.

  “I mentioned your theory to Sands. At the time I didn’t know about the powder. But I had noticed that when the banker was talking with Captain Harder, Sands had flipped some ashes from the end of his cigarette so that they had lit on the hair on the back of Soloman’s head, and that Soloman had started to rub at his head shortly afterward as though he had been irritated by an itching of the scalp.

  “Then Sands made the same gesture while he was talking with me. He left. I felt an itching, and wondered. So I washed my head thoroughly. Then I thought I would leave my clothes where Sands could find them, make him think he’d eliminated me. I was not certain my suspicions were correct, but I was willing to take a chance. I called you to tell you, and then I felt a most awful chill. It started at the roots of my hair and seemed to drain the very warmth right out of my nerves.

  “I guess the washing hadn’t removed all of that powder, just enough to keep me from being killed. I became unconscious. When I came to, I was in Sands’s car. I supposed he had dropped in to make certain his machine had done the work.

  “You know the rest . . . But how did you know where to look for me?”

  Rodney shook his head dubiously.

  “I guess my brains must have been dead, or I’d have known long before. You see, the man who wrote the letters seemed to know everything that had taken place in Captain Harder’s office when we were called in to identify that last letter from Dangerfield.

  “Yet there was no dictograph found there. It might have been something connected with television, or, more likely, it might have been because some one who was there was the one who was writing those letters.

  “If the story Sands had told had been true, the man who was writing the letters had listened in on what was going on in the captain’s office, had written the warning note, had known just where Sands was going to be in his automobile, and had tossed it in.

  “That was pretty improbable. It was much more likely that Sands had slipped out long enough to have written the letter and then brought it in with that wild story about men crowding him to the curb.

  “Then, again, Sands carefully managed to sneak away when Harder raided that loft building. He really did it to notify the crazy scientist that the hiding place had been discovered.

  “Even before you telephoned, I should have known Sands was in with the scientist. Afterward, it was, of course, apparent. You had seen some powder placed in Soloman’s hair. That meant it must have been done when you were present. That narrowed the list of suspects to those who were also present.

  “There were literally dozens of clues pointing to Sands. He was naturally sore at the banker for not coming through with the money. If they’d received it, they’d have killed Danger-field anyhow. And Sands was to deliver that money. Simple enough for him to have pretended to drop the package into the receptacle, and simply gone on . . .”

  A siren wailed.

  There was a pound of surging feet on the stairs, blue-coated figures swarming over the place.

  “He’s behind that door, boys,” Rodney said, “and he’s armed.”

  “No use getting killed, men,” said the officer in charge. “Shoot the door down.”

  Guns boomed into action. The lock twisted. The wood splintered and shattered. The door quivered, then slowly swung open as the wood was literally torn away from the lock.

  Guns at ready, the men moved into the room.

  They found a machine, very similar to the machine which had been found in the laboratory of the scientist. It had been riddled with gunfire.

  They found an empty suit of clothes.

  Rodney identified them as being the clothes Sands had worn when he last saw the man. The clothes were empty, and were cold to the touch. Around the collar, where there had been a little moisture, there was a rim of frost.

  There was no outlet from the room, no chance for escape.

  Ruby looked at Sid Rodney, nodded.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  Rodney took her hand.

  “Anyhow, sister, I got here in time.”

  “Gee, Sid, let’s tie a can to that brother-and-sister stuff. I thought I had to fight love to make a career, but when I heard your steps on the stairs, just when I’d given up hope . .

  “Can you make a report on what happened?” asked the sergeant, still looking at the cold clothes on the floor.

  Sid Rodney answered in muffled tones.

  “Not right now,” he said. “I’m busy.”

  MONKEY EYES

  Author's Note

  I guess all of us writers dabble in the occult more or less. I was fooling around with it twelve or fifteen years ago, and I had a funny experience with a man who claimed to be a priest of Hanuman.

  When you come right down to it what is a monkey?

  The priests of Hanuman claim he's a man that got started downward in the chain of reincarnation. He was a man. Now he's something less than a man, and we call him a monkey.

  Science tells us he's a creature that hasn't evolved to the same extent as a man. Or rather that man has evolved from a “missing link" up from the monkey family.

  Rob them of their differentiations in terminology and there's not such a great deal of difference between the two schools of thought. It would be interesting to turn the clock back a few million years and see what the answer really is, or was.

  This chap that 1 knew wouldn't ever admit he worshiped monkeys. Rather he felt he had devoted his life to hastening the monkey karma which would bring them back to the estate of man.

  I remembered his theories, and one time when l was watching a serious-faced monkey with moist, sad eyes do clowning at the bidding of the dirty organ grinder who “owned" him l tried to put some of his theories in practice. I don't know exactly what happened. Call it hypnotism or animal magnetism or anything you want, but the monkey came to me and clung to me, Begged me for something. It broke up the show. I felt conspicuous and embarrassed, and got away. Thereby 1 probably turned away from what might have developed into something a little more significant than an adventure.

  But some day when you get the eyes of a monkey, remember something of the theory of the priests of Hanuman. Will with all your deepest sympathy to help speed that monkey along the path of evolution, or of reincarnation.

  And if you're really thinking of what you're trying to think about, instead of being conscious of the ego that's thinking the thoughts—well, something may happen. It's worth trying.

  And I've heard stories of what goes on in the jungle—little stil
l whispers, they are. They can't be authenticated, and they can't be repeated; but they're persistent whispers. Fictionized they make good stories. Perhaps some reader can tell us something about those whispers. Perhaps “Monkey Eyes" isn't quite as much fiction as it might appear. All I can say is it's founded, not on fact, but on whispers.

  And that brings us back to where we started. What is a monkey?

  —Erle Stanley Gardner

  CHAPTER 1

  Suspicion

  There were four men at the table: Arthur Forbes, who talked too much; Colonel Crayson, whose glazed eyes wandered aimlessly from face to face; Murasingh, who held his countenance studiously impassive; and Phil Nickers, who tried to draw out the others.

  The other diner was a woman, Colonel Crayson’s niece, Jean. She, too, was a fresh arrival. Nickers recognized her as a fellow passenger on the India-bound boat. Yet he had not known she was coming to Assam until ^the day before docking. And not until he met her at dinner did he know they were to be sheltered, at least temporarily, under the same roof.

  Colonel Crayson made an excellent, if somewhat mechanical, host. Black servants flitted about. The food was good, the wine excellent. The dinner should have been a huge success.

  But, very apparently, it was not. An atmosphere of distrust settled upon the board as a pall. In one way or another it affected all the diners, brought out different phases of their characters.

  Phil Nickers wondered if some rumor of his errand had, in some manner, preceded him. The thought was absurd. He had embarked secretly, with no credentials other than a single letter of introduction to Colonel Crayson. Since his embarkation he had written no letters, and received none.

  And yet the calm air of the warm, Indian night reeked with suspicion.

  That was why Forbes talked too much, why Colonel Crayson let his glassy eyes wander from face to face, puzzled in his heavy, pop-eyed manner. Was it why Murasingh kept his face as woodenly impassive as a poker player? Nickers would have given much to know the answer to that question.