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

by Matin Greenberg

  There was a policeman standing at a marble table in the center of the flagged floor. All about were counters, wickets, gilt cages.

  Swift realized he was in one of the big banking establishments. The man he followed walked to one of the cages. He took a key from the inert hand of a guard, unlocked the cage door, pulled it open, entered.

  There were piles of gold on the counter, stacked up in glittering spheres of coin. The man scooped them into the suitcase. Then he left and went to another cage. Here he repeated the process. Here, also, there were several piles of large-de-nomination currency. The man scooped these in with the gold.

  When he had selected the cream of the plunder, he closed the suitcase and turned toward the door. Swift became stockstill, standing with one foot out and up, as though in the act of taking a step. The man passed within three feet of him. When he had gained {he street, Swift followed.

  His quarry led him to a corner a block away. Here he sat the suitcase down, right beside a traffic policeman who was in the act of blowing his whistle.

  He had left thousands of dollars in stolen gold and currency unguarded, right within reach of a policeman’s hand. Yet he was perfectly safe in doing so. No one could move fast enough to pick it up.

  The bank bandit shuffled into a jewelry store, selected several diamonds, dumped them into his pocket, returned to his suitcase, bowed his head to the policeman in ironical thanks, picked up the bag, and crossed the street.

  Swift followed.

  The man walked as rapidly as the air resistance would allow. He seemed intent upon reaching a certain destination as quickly as possible.

  He turned into an alley. A truck was standing there, motor running. The suitcase was tossed into the truck. There were more suitcases there, all of the same general design.

  As Swift watched, another figure came around the corner, walking in the same pavement-shuffling manner, carrying a suitcase. He tossed this upon the truck, paused to speak with the man Swift had been following.

  Then the two turned and came directly toward Art Swift.

  Once more he froze into immobility. They passed close to him. One of the men stopped.

  “Say, I’ve seen this guy before. Who the hell is he?”

  Swift remained motionless, one foot reaching out as though taking a step. Yet he knew there was something different in the studied balance of his pose from that of the other men who were caught in arrested motion.

  “Never lamped him,” said the second man. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”

  But the man Swift had been following wasn’t so certain.

  “I’m telling you there’s something funny about this guy. He stands funny, he looks funny. I’ve seen him before. I think he was standing in the bank I frisked. Let’s go through his pockets and see who in hell he is.”

  “Aw, forget it. We got no time to be pulling all the funny stuff. That newspaper gave the whole show away, Doc Zean is croaked, and we ain’t goin’ to be able to get no more of the stuff. We gotta work fast and make a clean-up while the getting is good.”

  They moved away. Swift heard the man he had followed fling a final comment.

  “When we come back we’ll see which way he’s walking and what he’s got up his sleeve. He looks off color to me.”

  The men reached the mouth of the alley and turned away.

  Swift started for cover, and, as he approached the place opposite which the truck was parked, saw a swirl of motion at the opposite end of the alley.

  He adopted his usual expedient of standing absolutely still.

  Two men, loaded down with suitcases, came into the alley. One of them stopped.

  “Say, that guy wasn’t there last trip!”

  “What do we care? He couldn’t do anything.”

  “Yeah, but he might be stallin’.”

  They set down their suitcases, walked with quiet menace directly toward Art Swift.

  Then Swift caught sight of something else. Another man glided swiftly into the alley. There was something familiar in the posture of that man. He gave a swift glance and found that it was Nick Searle of the Star.

  In some manner the reporter had speeded himself up so as to get into the game. Art thought of the metal box the girl had received, a box containing a complete assortment of the rubber capsules. Probably Searle had secured possession of that and had injected sufficient of the serum to take part in the strange game which was being enacted.

  The two bandits approached Swift. Searle was not far behind.

  “Hey, you, what you doing here?” asked one of the men, pausing before Swift.

  Swift endeavored to keep his face entirely devoid of expression. He fixed his eyes upon distance, and held his breath.

  “Aw, he’s all right,” grumbled one of the men. “Just some poor mutt that strayed into the alley and we didn’t notice him the other trip.”

  “The hell we didn’t,” insisted the more suspicious of the two. “He just wasn’t here, and if he wasn’t—”

  He moved his hand in a swift gesture, directly toward Swift’s eye.

  “If he’s on the up-and-up, we can stroke the eyeball,” said the man.

  Involuntarily Art blinked.

  “Ha!” exclaimed the bandit, and jumped forward, his fist swinging in a terrific uppercut.

  Art sidestepped, jerked his head back to dodge the blow, and shot out a straight left.

  He found the atmospheric resistance slowed his punches somewhat, but the superior strength which had come to his muscles with the speeding-up process largely overcame that. It was his clothes that suffered most.

  As he launched that straight left, the resistance of the air held his coat sleeve stationary. He had the peculiar sensation of feeling his sleeve peeled back from his arm, and the bare arm flashed forward in a quick punch which connected.

  But the second man was busy. He swung a slingshot, and only missed Swift’s head by a matter of inches.

  “The damned spy!” yelled the man who staggered back under the impetus of Swift’s punch.

  Art knew he was no match for the two men, and jumped to one side, hoping to get where he could have his back to the wall. But they understood his maneuver and closed on him from different angles.

  He ducked, caught a punch on the back of the head, felt his stomach grow cold as a fist landed in the solar plexus, and dropped to his knees. He flung out his arm, reaching for the legs that sought to kick him in the face, caught an ankle, jerked it, and had the satisfaction of seeing the man go down.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Man Who Mastered Time

  With a roar Nick Searle joined the conflict.

  That was the determining factor. The men had hardly expected an equal battle. Having Swift down and getting ready to knife him was one thing; having that wiry young man on hands and knees grabbing at their ankles while another man swung lusty fists was quite another.

  It took but four punches to decide the battle. The two bandits sprawled on the cement.

  Swift was still on hands and knees, writhing in pain. But he had managed to tackle both of his adversaries with groping hands which had kept them from doubling up on Searle.

  “Hurt?” asked Searle.

  Swift made a wry face, gasping for breath.

  “Wind—knocked—out.”

  Searle helped him to his feet.

  After a few seconds Swift got over the temporary paralysis of the diaphragm which had been induced by the blow he had received, and gave a wry grin.

  “How’d you get here?” Art asked the reporter.

  “Took some of the serum and started out. Found I wasn’t hopped up enough, so i put half a dozen of the small capsules into effect all at once.”

  “How did you know you weren’t hopped up enough?”

  “Because of the way things were whizzing by me. I tried to follow a man, and I might as well have tried to follow an express train. I figure we are living right now at a ratio of around three thousand to one.” Searle seemed awed as he sai
d the words.

  “Not that fast.”

  “Mighty near it.”

  “The girl?” Art demanded.

  “You mean Louise Folsom?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what worries me. They’ve managed to get her somehow, and they’ve carried her off. This looks to me like the final blow-up. The expose in the Star has broken a lot of their power . . . You’ll forgive us for jumping at the conclusion you were the mysterious scientist who was at the head of the thing? Tell me how you got into it—but first let’s get these two chaps tied up nice and tight and see if we can’t locate where they were going.”

  Swift nodded.

  “There’s some rope on the truck. I’ll tell you the story while we truss ’em up. And I think I know about where headquarters are.”

  “What truck? This one?”

  “That’s the one. You’d better be careful with those suitcases. They’re all loaded with money and gems.”

  “What?”

  “Fact. They’ve lost their power to terrorize the nation and make the big executives bow to their will, but they still have their power to rob without the victim’s being able to guard against it. They’re stripping the city.”

  “Humph. And there’s only two of us,” commented Nick Searle, as he trussed up one of the bandits. “Guns any good?” “None whatever. The bullets could be dodged, and it takes forever and a day for the hammer to explode the shell. If we wanted to shoot one of these men when he broke loose, we’d have to start shooting the gun now. Then we could go about our business for a while, come back and see if the man had got the knots untied, and, when he did, trust the explosion of the revolver would happen somewhere along about that time.” Searle laughed.

  “You paint a gloomy picture.”

  “It’s almost that bad. Notice the truck is backed up to a cellar. I have an idea that cellar is of some importance. Let’s explore in it a little.”

  “Suits me. What’ll we do with the men?”

  “Drag ’em in . . . Look out! Here come another couple! Lord, there are two more. Four of ’em. We’ve got to hide here in the truck, and when we start hostilities we’ve got to work fast. There’s a couple of stakes that’ll make good clubs.”

  Swift crouched behind a pile of the strangely streamlined suitcases. Four men appeared, laden with loot. They called a greeting, started for the truck.

  “Look out!” yelled one. “Somebody’s hiding here!”

  “Let’s go!” shouted Art Swift.

  The young scientist and the reporter got into action.

  One of the outlaws, doubtless forgetting the uselessness of the weapon, pulled an automatic from his pocket, leveled it, and pulled the trigger. Then he dashed it to the ground when the weapon failed to explode.

  Two of the men had knives. One climbed on the side of the truck, the other tried the rear.

  Thud, thump sounded the clubs, and the men drew off, one of them with a broken arm.

  “Let’s go!” yelled Swift, for the second time, and they charged.

  It happened that the two men had chanced upon the most deadly weapon available. Knives were limited as to range. Guns were of no use. Clubs, swung with terrific speed and force, were bone-breaking instruments of destruction.

  Apparently these outlaws had never encountered resistance in the time-plane upon which they had learned to function. They had never experimented with various weapons, and the futility of their guns, the limited efficiency of their knives, left them helpless before the onslaught of the two men armed with clubs.

  Searle surveyed the sprawled figures, grinned at Swift.

  “Looks like a good job. Do we tie these up?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “How about headquarters?”

  “Let’s investigate.”

  “Attaboy! Better keep that club. We’ll probably run into some more trouble.”

  They lowered themselves into a cellar, pushing themselves down the stairs because the force of gravitation was too slow to function, felt their way along a passage, and emerged into a lighted room.

  A man sat in this room with telephone receivers clamped to either ear. He was tall, gaunt, dominating. His eyes held a restlessness that seemed unclean, unhealthy. The thin lips were compressed into a single razor-blade slash that cut from cheek to cheek. His jaw was bony, determined.

  On the third finger of his right hand gleamed a ring of interlaced triangles. He glanced at the two men, looked at their clubs, half rose from the chair.

  “Mr. Zin Zandor, I presume,” said Swift.

  The restless eyes snapped to his face.

  “So?” rasped the man, and fumbled beneath his desk.

  “Stop him,” shouted Searle, and made a wild leap forward.

  Swift lowered the point of his club and launched it through the air like a lance with every ounce of force of which he was capable.

  At the same instant he became aware of a sickening sweet odor which permeated the room.

  Zandor tried to duck. The hurtling club caught him on the forehead as he lowered his head, cutting an ugly gash, sending him staggering back.

  His right hand flashed up. It held a sort of gas mask, which he tried to raise to his nostrils. But the impact of the blow had dazed him. His hands seemed to function uncertainly. He turned half purple in the features as congested blood mottled the skin.

  “He’s holding his breath,” shouted the reporter, quick to grasp the situation.

  Swift whirled. Together they fought toward the door, holding their breath, the sickly-sweet odor seeming to constrict the muscles of their throats.

  Behind them they heard a peculiar scraping sound. They turned for one last look.

  Zin Zandor was clawing at the top of the desk. The poison gas had got him now. His features were distorted, his mouth open. Even as they looked he went limp, and apparently remained suspended in mid-air.

  “Dead and falling,” said Swift as he dragged his companion into the passageway, out to the open air.

  They sucked in great lungfuls, feeling strangely dizzy.

  “The girl!” cried Searle.

  Without an instant’s hesitation, Swift turned and led the way back into the passageway.

  “Take a deep breath and we’ll try for her. Probably the gas rises. Keep your head near the floor.”

  They dived down and crawled along the floor. The sickening sweet odor was in their nostrils. At the corner of the desk, inclined at an angle of almost forty-five degrees, was the form of the man who had signed himself Zin Zandor. He was falling to the floor, and the force of gravitation was so slow, compared to the speeded-up life forces of the two men who watched him, that he seemed to drift downward with hardly perceptible motion.

  There was a door to the left of the desk. Swift took a deep breath, reached upward, turned the knob. The door opened; they scrambled into the inner room.

  Here was a Remington typewriter, doubtless the one upon which the blackmail letters had been written. Here, also, was stored great treasure, gold coins, currency, gems. And here they found the girl who had posed as messenger. She was bound hand and foot, gagged—Louise Folsom, captured, doomed to die.

  Her eyes stared straight up at the ceiling of the room. She made no move when they entered.

  “Living at a normal rate. Can’t see us,” said Searle.

  He drew a knife and cut the ropes. Even then she did not move. They watched her anxiously. The closed door was shutting out many of the poison fumes. But there was a chance she had already inhaled too many of them.

  Searle reached out and gently touched the eyeball with the tip of his finger. The lid gradually—very, very slowly—commenced to droop.

  “She’s alive,” said Swift.

  The girl’s lips moved with such slowness that the motion was hardly perceptible.

  “She knows we’re here, trying to talk.”

  Searle nodded.

  “We’ve got to get her out of here. That gas, you know.”

 
; “The door’s closed. Remember, it disperses quickly. It takes a concentrated dose to produce death. He probably had it in the ring. He intended to liberate the gas from the poison ring and fill the room with it. Then he was going to put on some sort of a gas mask.”

  “Yeah. Your blow with the club got him groggy, and he sucked in a mouthful of the concentrated gas before he knew what he was doing.”

  “How about getting the girl out?”

  “Let’s try to carry her. But pick her up gently or we’ll jerk her to pieces, and we’ll have to stop easy like or—wait a minute—I’m feeling queer!”

  At that same moment Art Swift felt a peculiar sensation at the pit of his stomach.

  “The gas!” he exclaimed.

  “No,” said Searle. “We’re coming back to normal!”

  There was a brief spell of vertigo, and then, of a sudden, things were normal.

  The girl’s eyes were blinking; her lips were forming words.

  Beyond the door that led to the, other room something crashed—-the body of Zin Zandor, just falling to the floor.

  The girl’s rapid words rang in their ears.

  “Hoped you would come. They were planning to make this the day of the big clean-up. They had all their men ready to bring on a reign of terror, and they were going to kill me.”

  Swift pointed to a door that opened from one side of the room. He picked up a chair, crashed it through one of the panels.

  “Let’s get out of here!”

  They felt the tang of fresh air upon their faces, saw the street roaring with the busy life of a rush hour. The noise burst upon their ears. In the alley, motor running, was the truck, filled with the strangely shaped suitcases. Sprawled just inside the door, where the two adventurers had dragged them, were the bodies of the unconscious bandits, tied hand and foot.

  There was no traffic in the alley, but the street just beyond was filled with activity.

  “Load ’em in and start for headquarters,” said Searle, and grinned.