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

by Matin Greenberg

  CHAPTER 5

  In a Frozen World

  Searle’s voice was in his ears when he regained consciousness. There was a tang of jail odor in the air. His form was stretched on a prison pallet and the steel ceiling contained a single bright incandescent, which stabbed his throbbing eyes.

  “From the looks of this telephone number, we figured it might be a lead. I got Louise Folsom to give a ring and stall along for information, and the conversation sounded promising, so I sent her up. t

  “She ran onto this Swift. Of course, she didn’t know him at the time. He was merely a certain Dr. Zean. But he proceeded to explain to her just how the murders had been committed and—”

  He broke off as there was a commotion near the door.

  “We knocked over that office and found a nurse tied and gagged in the closet, and a dead man in the laboratory. Looks like there’s hell to pay. Somebody had been in the place and cleaned it out, busted up bottles, pulled out drawers, and raised hell generally.” A red-faced sergeant was speaking.

  There was the scraping of chairs.

  Swift struggled to a sitting posture.

  “Can’t you understand, you fools?” he asked.

  Hands grabbed his coat, jerked him forward.

  “All right. Let’s hear your story.”

  Swift kicked with his feet. “Take these handcuffs off.”

  A clock, clacking off the seconds, pointed to three minutes to four o’clock.

  “Leave him with a guard and let’s go see the office and the dead man,” said one of the officers.

  “Triple handcuff him, then,” said Searle, “because he’s the man who pulled the murders. There’s no doubt of that in my mind.”

  “It was Ramsay,” said Swift, striving to be patient. “I blundered on to this Dr. Zean, and—”

  “Save it!” snapped one of the officers.

  “No, no, let him talk.”

  Art Swift told his story. The officers looked at one another, incredulity stamped on their faces.

  “There’s a chance,” said Searle, speaking judiciously, “just a chance that he’s right. But, Swift, how did you know about the idea of switching cigarettes, the mechanics of the murders? You told Louise just how to go about it.”

  “Pure deduction, putting two and two together,” said Swift.

  One of the men clicked a key in the lock of the handcuffs.

  “Stand up here and we’ll make a search,” he said.

  Swift moved to stand up, and, as he did so, felt as though a hundred needles were shooting into his hip. He jumped, gave an exclamation, then as it suddenly dawned on him what had happened, he frantically plucked at his hip pocket.

  “The capsules!” he exclaimed. “They’ve spilled from the metal box, and 1 jabbed myself with them!”

  He pulled out of his pocket the crushed capsules. He had given himself a terrific dose of the extract. Nearly all of the capsules were crushed. The extract had penetrated to his blood. Even the big, five-hundred-to-one capsule had discharged its contents.

  Men moved toward him.

  “Maybe it’s a s . . . u . .

  Searle was talking, but midway in the sentence, his mouth ceased to make sounds. The extract had taken effect, and Swift was speeded up to a terrific rate of activity. The men before him were arrested in mid-motion. One of the officers had been in the act of jumping forward. His feet, Swift noticed, were both off the ground.

  Art amused himself by walking around the officer, bending down and inserting his hand beneath the officer’s foot. He couldn’t feel the foot even moving.

  He waited patiently for what seemed seconds, waiting for the situation to change. It remained unchanged. Men remained as they had been, their eyes staring, their mouths open. Every possible expression of surprise was depicted upon the frozen faces.

  Swift realized that there was no use spending hours in that jail waiting for these men to dawdle through their slow motions.

  He walked to the door.

  Even when he walked as slowly as possible, the wind tore savagely at his garments. He knew then that he was speeded up many times faster than when he had taken his first, experimental capsule. He, was living at a ratio of at least five hundred to one, perhaps much faster.

  He worked his way through the jail doors.

  At the outer door a guard was stationed and the officer who sat on a stool on the other side of the door was peering intently through the bars. The door was locked.

  Swift reached through the bars, grabbed the guard by the coat collar, pulled him forward. He pulled so slowly that it seemed hours before he had the man against the bars. Yet he noticed even that slow motion was about to jerk the head of the officer from his neck.

  He had to reach out with his other hand and pull the head of the guard so that it followed the body. Otherwise he would have broken the neck of the unfortunate man.

  He searched the pockets, found the key, fitted it to the lock from the outside, manipulated it with the tips of his fingers, and heard the bolts shoot back.

  He pushed open the door.

  The guard was as he had left him, but, as Swift watched, he fancied he detected the faintest possible motion of an eyelid, the beginning of a slow flutter.

  Swift waited for what was, as nearly as he could judge, five minutes, watching that eyelid. There could be no question of it, it was slowly moving.

  “Evidently he started to wink when I grabbed him,” said Swift to himself, interested in the scientific aspect of the phenomenon. “It only takes a man around a fiftieth of a second to wink his eye, but I can’t even see the blamed thing move. I must be speeded up so fast I whiz like a bullet!”

  That thought made him wonder how a bullet would appear. Could he see it leave the gun?

  He took the revolver from the officer’s belt, pointed it at the steel wall of the jail and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  He waited, watching, his wrist braced for the explosion.

  “Something wrong,” he said, and lowered the weapon, put it back in the holster of the officer. As he did so, something unusual about it caught his eye. The hammer of the weapon was only halfway back.

  “Must have forgotten to cock it, but thought I did,” he mumbled, and took it once more from the holster.

  Then an explanation dawned upon him. The hammer was descending, ready to fire the shell. But that split fraction of a second which elapsed between the pulling of the trigger and the exploding of the shell was so multiplied by his speeded-up senses that it seemed an interval of minutes.

  He looked around the jail for a while, watching the postures of the men who remained as living statues, motionless. Here was a man who had been about to sit down. Now he was suspended in mid-air, his body jackknifed, the weight on his heels.

  Swift watched him for a while, then returned and took up the revolver. The hammer was just about to contact the shell. Swift moved to a place where the light was good, pointed the weapon, waited.

  There was a faint jar, a slow impulse up his wrist. Then he saw something mushroom from the mouth of the weapon. It was the bullet, propelled by a little mushroom of fire and smoke.

  He was able to follow the progress of the bullet from the time it left the gun until it struck the wall of the cell. He could even see it flatten against the steel and start dropping to the floor.

  He knew it must be dropping because he could see that nothing supported it. But it remained in one position so long he was unable to detect motion.

  He returned the weapon to its holster, walked back to the cell where the officers had been interrogating him. The men all remained in the same position. The officer who had been jumping forward still bad his feet off the floor.

  Swift turned and walked from the jail, out into the late afternoon sunlight.

  The atmospheric conditions bothered him more than any other thing. There was a perpetual shortness of breath. It seemed as though his laboring lungs simply couldn’t suck enough air into his syst
em. It was only when he was walking that he could breathe comfortably.

  It must be that the rapidity of his progress forced the air into his lungs. But when he walked the wind pressure against his body was terrific. It tore his coat to tatters, and it was a physical impossibility to keep his hat on his head. He had the unique sensation of walking at a rate of speed that seemed to him to be somewhere around one mile an Hour, and having the air pressure whip his hair straight out while his garments were torn.

  And he was isolated in the midst of a busy world.

  The street was crowded. People were starting for home. Street cars were jammed. Vehicular traffic was at its peak. The sidewalks were a seething mass of jostling humanity frozen into rigid inactivity.

  Everywhere were people. Yet nowhere was motion. There was no sound. The universe was as silent as the midst of a desert. Occasionally there would be a faint buzzing sensation in Swift’s ears, and he realized that this was probably caused by sound waves which were too slow for him to interpret as sound.

  He walked across the street, threading his way through traffic, and wondering how long this strange sensation was to continue. He thought of the words of the dead scientist that it might be possible for one to live his entire life in a space of five minutes.

  What a terrible fate it would be to be left to go through an entire lifetime without any contact with other people, to go from youth to middle age, middle age to doddering old age, all the time in a city that was suspended in the rush hour of its traffic.

  If the scientist had been right, it would be a horrible fate. There was a man getting in a taxicab. It might be that Swift would be an old man before that fellow had traversed the length of the block. He could amuse himself for a year, then come back and find the taxicab just starting; perhaps the cabbie would be in the act of closing the door.

  When Swift got to be an old man he could come hobbling back to the corner and find that the traffic signal had changed and that the man in the cab was halfway across the street.

  It was an appalling thought.

  But Swift was glad he had not been imprisoned in a cell. He might even have been held in a dark dungeon. He paused to think of what it would have meant. He would have had no food or water. He would have starved to death in what would, to the ordinary mortal, have been but half a dozen seconds, perhaps not that long.

  The air tugged and whipped at his garments. He crawled painfully along, thinking over the events which had led up to the strange position in which he found himself.

  CHAPTER 6

  Among Living Statues

  Art thought of Carl Ramsay and of how Ramsay would undoubtedly have summarized the situation in headlines. “Time Ticks Tediously,” or some such alliterative expression. And, thinking of Ramsay, he suddenly thought of the murders, and knew that he must apprehend the real criminal.

  He had unlimited time at his disposal. He could cover all trains, all means of escape. It only remained to walk where he wanted to go. Any form of so-called rapid transportation was out of the question.

  One mistake he made. He jumped over the wheel of a machine that stood between him and the curb. The trip up in the air was quite all right. In fact he felt like a feather. Had it not been for the atmospheric resistance it would have been simple. But the rush of air held him down somewhat.

  Even so, he jumped faster, farther, and higher than he had intended or thought possible. This was doubtless due to the fact that his strength had multiplied with his ability to speed up the muscular action.

  But when he wanted to come back to the sidewalk he found that he could not do so. He was held a prisoner, floating in mid-air. The force of gravitation was so slow that it seemed he wasn’t even drifting toward the sidewalk.

  Finally he managed to claw his way along the side of a building, find a projection, use this to give him a handhold, and push himself toward the sidewalk.

  He walked for fully a quarter of a mile before a strange pressure seemed to strike the bottoms of his feet. Then he knew that he was normally just alighting from the jump he had made. The force of gravitation had just taken hold.

  That very element made it difficult for him to get about. He found that he dared not trust to any jumps, but must keep at least one foot on the pavement; if he made any sudden motion, there was not enough friction engendered by the force of gravitation to give him a foothold.

  Altogether, it was a strange world, one in which every physical law seemed to be suspended. This was due, not to any change in the world itself, but merely to a change in the illusion of time. To express it in another manner, it was due entirely to the fact that Art Swift could think more rapidly.

  The rate of thought, then, controlled environment.

  It was a novel idea to toy with, but he couldn’t wait for speculation. He had work to do. He must solve those murders, apprehend the real criminal.

  He started with Carl Ramsay.

  Undoubtedly Ramsay had been the point of contact for the murders. He had taken some of the drug, diluted so the tempo of living became a hundred to one. He had switched the cigarette Tolliver Hemingway was about to take from his cigarette case, for a poisoned cigarette in which the first half inch of tobacco had been prepared with some poisonous drug.

  The millionaire had inhaled that drug with the first puff of the cigarette. Then, when he exhaled the smoke, the other watchers in the room had been able to get the odor. But Hemingway had received the full force of the concentrated gas.

  It had been simple.

  But Ramsay had grown careless. He had made his substitution when Swift’s eyes were upon him. Swift hadn’t been able to detect what was going on, but he had been able to see the sudden disappearance of the fast-moving right hand and arm, and then, when he had talked to Ramsay, Ramsay had tried to answer before the drug wore off.

  That was the reason those first sounds which came from Ramsay’s lips had been so unintelligible. Doubtless they had been words, perfectly formulated. But the sounds had been so rapid that it had been impossible for the eardrums of his hearers to split those sounds into words.

  Then something had happened to Ramsay. Either he had planned his disappearance because he knew he would be suspected, or else he had actually been abducted after a struggle.

  Swift determined to find out which.

  He battled his way against the ever-present roar of the rushing atmosphere to Ramsay’s room and took up the trail from there.

  The police had combed the room, and had taken every article that might be of value. Yet Swift made a search of his own, going into every nook and corner. He found nothing.

  He wondered if he should make an attempt to cover trains, and thought of Dr. Zean’s office. He might find something there, and he could drop into the Union Depot on the way.

  He walked down the stairs to the street, and suddenly jerked himself upright with an exclamation. A strange sight met his eyes.

  The street was frozen into arrested activity. He had grown accustomed to that spectacle. A horse was trotting, and but one foot was on the ground. On his back was a mounted policeman. He had evidently been swinging his club. Now he was like a mounted statue. A taxicab was cutting over on the turn, and the tires on the outside were flattened by the weight of the car. There was not the slightest motion in either wheels or tires.

  But that which arrested Swift’s attention was the peculiar sight of a man walking casually through the tangled mass of arrested traffic.

  The man’s coattails were whipped out behind. His hair was streaming. His hat had gone, and he walked with the peculiar pavement-shuffling gait which Art Swift had found so necessary to cultivate.

  Here, then, was a man, the tempo of whose life was some five hundred times plus that of other men. Here was a man who must be inoculated with the mysterious extract which Dr. Cassius Zean had discovered. By that same token, he must be one of the outlaw gang.

  He carried a suitcase, and the suitcase had been streamlined to make it offer less resistance to the
air. He walked like a man with a certain fixed purpose, and he seemed perfectly at ease, confident in his own power.

  Watching him, Swift became convinced the man was an old hand at this rapid life. He seemed to show no interest in the strange phenomena of the frozen world where motion had been stilled. He walked calmly, sedately.

  And Swift, slipping behind a parked automobile, watched him curiously, wondering what strange errand had caused this man to speed up his life at a ratio of five hundred to one.

  The other slithered his way across the street, paused before the door of an imposing edifice. There was a fleshy woman leaving the door of that building, and Swift had noticed her prior to seeing the other man.

  She was tugging at the door, one foot stretched out, ready to step to the pavement. Her mottled face was flushed with dark color. Her glassy eyes were staring straight ahead. Her mouth was open. Probably she was gasping for breath, but it would have taken seeming hours for her progress to the place she was going, minutes for the first intake of her breath to be apparent.

  Swift realized now that he had no mere five-hundred-to-one ratio in his life tempo. The cumulative effect of the dosage he had taken when several capsules jabbed their contents into his blood stream had given him a much faster rate of life than that. He had no means of knowing just how fast.

  The man he followed walked directly to the door out of which the woman was emerging. He ducked under her arm, brushed against her, and entered the lobby of the building.

  Swift followed.

  Once the man turned. By the simple process of freezing into complete immobility, Swift defied detection. All about were the figures of men staring with glassy, unseeing eyes at what was going on about them.