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

by Matin Greenberg

  “Do I get another drink, Miss Wagner?”

  “You do not!” she snapped.

  “Thanks. No harm in asking. But, Professor, if I may ask you a question—”

  The question was never asked.

  There was the sound of crashing lumber, the splintering of boards, a tearing of metal. Hurried footsteps sounded without the door. A frantic banging of fists caused Professor Wagner to fling it open.

  A man, armed with rifle and revolver, gestured toward the fence.

  “They’ve driven their machine right through the fence, sir, and are trying to get to the bell!”

  Wagner’s dark eyes glittered with cold fury. He snatched a rifle from over the desk, made the door in two great strides. Nor was his daughter far behind.

  Click Kendall jumped to his feet, felt a great wave of dizziness, groped for a chair, and stood, swaying. His eyes could see the running figures through the open door. There was a length of smashed fence, a wrecked automobile, running men as they deployed toward the metal shell.

  One of them raised his arm. A revolver spat viciously. The professor flung up his rifle. It cracked forth a high velocity bullet that sent the rushing man tumbling to the ground in a search for cover. Another figure on the left ducked behind a pile of lumber, opened fire.

  Click saw the bullets kicking up dust near Professor Wagner’s feet. He saw the girl pleading with her father, leading him toward the great metal beehive. Out in the road a passing motorist had stopped. The passengers gawked in open-mouthed wonder.

  Click tried a feeble, wobbling run.

  The professor gained the metal bell. The girl was behind him. Then the enemy rushed.

  Professor Wagner threw his rifle to his shoulder, then suddenly spun half around, and lurched against the girl.

  The running figures held their fire, pressed grimly forward. The man who had given the warning, apparently a watchman not overburdened with intelligence, fired an indecisive shot or two, then lowered his rifle, standing uncertainly.

  Click passed him, snatched the revolver from its holster.

  “Hands up!” he yelled at the foremost figure.

  His answer was a singing bullet that wasped its way past his ear. Click fired once, then held his fire, fearing to hit the girl. He reached her side almost at the same time as did the running enemy.

  A single lucky swing of the revolver, and he felt the impact of the barrel on the man’s skull. Then he realized that there were struggling figures about him, that the girl had clubbed the rifle taken from her father and was swinging it. There was a spatter of shots. The enemy withdrew, apparently nonplused by the unexpected strength of the defense.

  The entrance of the polished metal beehive was before them.

  “Inside,” piped the professor in a weak voice. “It’s bulletproof.”

  Click helped the girl get the professor in the open door. She slammed it shut.

  “Dad, are you badly hurt?”

  “Nothing much; caught my shoulder an awful wallop. The shock was the worst. Guess we can bandage it up. We’re safe from bullets here.”

  He got to his feet, explored his right shoulder with the tips of his left fingers.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said.

  Click Kendall looked about him eagerly.

  The bell was not over twenty-five feet high, but was more than thirty-five feet in diameter. Within the shell was a cone of what appeared to be silver. It furnished a rounded mirror in which the reflections of the little group flickered in weird distortions. There was a metal table, a glass case containing various instruments, a clutter of boxes and barrels. And there were windows in the metal sides of the shell, little round windows in which three-inch plate glass was set in what appeared to be live rubber.

  Breathing heavily, still weak from his loss of blood and exertion, Click pressed his face against one of the windows, wondering what had become of their attackers.

  He saw two men grouped in ominous conference, saw a third bringing up an oblong box. Click recognized the label. It was dynamite.

  “Quick!” he called. “They’re going to blow off a side of the metal. Is there a loophole through which we can fire?”

  And his words brought Professor Wagner to his side.

  “Yes, we can and will. Those men deserve to be killed.”

  “No, no, Father. There must be some other way!”

  Click noticed the men dart their alarmed glances to the left, noticed also a sudden ripple of panic in their attitude, and turned his own eyes.

  He saw a red machine, filled with grim men, swinging in from the road. A siren was fastened to the front of the car, just below the radiator.

  “Here comes the sheriff. It’s all right!” Click exclaimed.

  And the three, setting down the case of dynamite, sprinted for the gap in the fence.

  “All right nothing!” moaned the professor. “We’ll have to testify, go through all sorts of red tape, be photographed, held for a trial—”

  He staggered to the metal table, lurched into the chair.

  “You put in the provisions, Dot?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Professor Wagner pulled a lever. Then Click Kendall gasped his utter incredulity.

  For the sheriff and his companion drifted down and away. There was no sensation of motion. It was merely that in place of watching the striding figure of the sheriff he suddenly saw the top of the broad-brimmed hat, then caught the oval of an upturned, open-mouthed face.

  “Good heavens!” exclaimed Click. “What’s happened?”

  He saw Professor Wagner at the table, crouched over, studying the instruments. He wanted to see what was going on, ask him what was happening.

  He took a swift stride, and then found himself shooting up toward the pointed dome of the shell. Frantically he waved his arms, kicked his feet. All to no avail. He drifted up until he touched the roof.

  He pushed his hands against the metal to ward off the impact, and found himself descending, squarely for the professor’s head.

  Click tried to avert that collision. His efforts availed nothing. He saw that he would fall squarely on the man’s head.

  “Look out!” he yelled.

  Professor Wagner looked up. As he did so, Click fell directly into the upturned features.

  To his surprise there was no shock of collision. The professor did not crumple to the floor, crushed beneath the weight of the falling body. Instead Professor Wagner brushed Kendall away with his uninjured hand as one might brush off a fly.

  And Click Kendall found himself floating through space until he fetched up against the far side of the shell.

  “Watch out where you’re going!” snapped Professor Wagner. “You might interfere with my instruments!”

  Click Kendall was too astounded to even attempt an answer.

  It was the girl’s voice that gave him the explanation.

  “You see there isn’t any gravitation up here,” she said. “There’s a window in the floor. Take a look through it. Dad, do let me take a look at that shoulder. You’re losing blood.”

  The man gave the instruments a final adjustment.

  “All right. We’re safe here. I just got the missing factor in my calculations this morning, and I’m not exactly certain of the coefficient of balance and repulsion. But we can keep an eye out. Kendall, keep your eye to the window in the floor. If we start drifting down warn me at once. All right, Dot. I don’t think it’s serious, but I can’t afford to lose any blood. I think the collar bone’s fractured. You’ll find the medicine chest under the table; but no opiates. Must have my senses clear.”

  Click dropped to the floor.

  “Call me if I can help,” he said, then looked through the glass window.

  What he saw made him believe he was dreaming.

  The shell hung suspended at about a thousand feet. Below him, the fenced portion of the ranch stretched in a square, a square that was rapidly filling with moving figures.

  He could see
the winding glitter of dusty road, the thicket of brush, could see the hills beyond, then the shimmering ribbon of placid river. Far over to the right was Centerberry with its smokestacks, its clusters of trees, white houses. But the elevation of the shell was hardly high enough to give him other than a hazy view of the place.

  Click glanced again at the grounds below.

  To his surprise they seemed to have moved to the right.

  But he could see the road, see, also', the sudden increase in traffic as automobiles came crawling along to ascertain what it was all about. Click thought how weird the shimmering metal beehive had appeared when he had first beheld it floating like a bubble in the air, and realized how much more of a spectacle it was now, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet up in the air, glittering in the slanting sunlight of mid-afternoon.

  No wonder that automobilists, glancing upward, suddenly turned from their course to come tearing along the branch highway, jolting and rattling along the last few dust-covered miles.

  The roadway around the fence was blocked. Black automobiles parked before the torn section as thick as iron filings clustering to the ends of a magnet.

  Kendall looked up.

  “We seem to be drifting to the southwest,” he said.

  Professor Wagner, stripped of shirt, was watching his daughter’s skillful fingers as she packed antiseptic lint into the puncture in his shoulder.

  “That’s the wind, a gentle northeast breeze. I don’t care about that. It’s the height. How are we staying up?”

  “I should say we were holding our elevation pretty well.”

  The lines of the scientist’s pain-tortured face relaxed a bit.

  “Mathematically we should be rising a trifle. The heated air must have an up current. And there should be a slight drift to the westward. That Is, the motion of the earth should not entirely be counteracted by the motion of the atmospheric blanket. However, we’ll take a look at that presently. In the meantime, we’ve got to complete our preparations.”

  “Keep a sharp watch,” snapped the girl.

  Click resumed his station.

  His mind seethed with a tumbling confusion of thoughts. It was impossible to concentrate. Try as he might, no single line of thought could shut out the overwhelming influx of new sensations.

  He knew the country well. He could recognize many of the ranches as places where he had hunted. Now the country seemed strangely new, viewed from this angle. It was so different from riding in an airplane. Here was no roaring of motors, no shrieking of wind, no altering perspective. Nor was it quite the same as being in a balloon.

  A drifting shadow came scudding over the ground. Click wondered what was causing that shadow. A rushing shape screamed past his window, just below. The bell rocked and spun with the twisting air currents.

  “There’s an airplane come to look us over!” yelled Click.

  Professor Wagner muttered his irritation.

  “I’ll attend to them,” he snapped.

  Click returned to his window, located the shadow, then peered from one of the windows in the side.

  He knew that plane. It was Bill Savier, an old-timer in the game, and with him was a helmeted individual who fairly screamed “newspaper reporter” to Click’s trained eye.

  The Graflex camera covered with a wooden shield to protect the bellows, the whipping coat, the grease-stained collar, all told their own story. Here was a reporter snatched from a desk and rushed aloft by a frantic editor.

  The plane banked so the reporter could get a better picture. The lens of the Graflex glittered darkly as it was pointed at the bell.

  And then, suddenly, the plane vanished. It simply wasn’t. Click saw blue sky, unbroken by any flitting plane as it banked and wheeled.

  He looked down at the window in the floor, and gasped.

  The plane was far, far below, a mere speck, zooming upward with all the power of its mighty motor. And it actually seemed to be falling, so rapid was the ascent of the bell. There was a bursting sensation in his eardrums. A sudden nausea gripped him.

  He felt weak, tried to shout, but was unable to do more than make a few squeaky noises in his throat.

  The ground below that had been so plainly visible, seemed mantled by a haze. The timbered hills had flattened out until they were only a dark stretch of green. The winding ribbon of the river had become a thread so fine as to be almost invisible. There was a rushing scream of whipping air skidding past the pointed dome of the bell, a strange rocking sensation.

  Centerberry, which had been far in the distance, seemed right below. It was not possible to see individual buildings. The entire city showed as a mere cluster of checkered squares, and those squares, as fine as the meshes of a tea strainer, Click knew were, in reality, full city blocks.

  CHAPTER 3

  Defying Gravity

  The professor was shouting.

  “I didn’t do that. We’re out of control, falling upward!”

  “Falling upward?” asked Click, suddenly having recovered his voice.

  “Falling upward. Something’s happened—no, wait. Look at those controls. Quick, the gun!”

  Professor Wagner, his bandaged shoulder bare, his suspenders flapping about his scrawny legs, made one swift reach for the revolver, approached the inner shell, and flung open a door.

  “Come out!” he shouted.

  Click realized, suddenly, that his laboring lungs were crying in vain for life-giving air. He was weak, dizzy, seeing things as in a dream.

  He saw a man come staggering out of the inner shell. He noticed that this man’s face was warped in a smile of triumph.

  “The oxygen tanks, Dad!” shouted the girl. “They’re jammed, won’t open.”

  Professor Wagner gave Click the gun.

  “Keep him covered. Be careful how you move. When you walk just tap the tips of the toes gently on the floor.”

  Then he backed away.

  Click realized why he had the dreamlike impression of objects when he saw the manner in which Professor Wagner backed away.

  He merely tilted backward, slowly, as though he were making the motions in a slow motion picture camera. Then he tapped a toe gently on the floor and sailed through the intervening space to the table. He thrust over a lever, slid the button along the grooved guide.

  Click was panting for air, suffocating. He saw that the man on whom he trained the gun was in as bad a way. He staggered about as though he would have fallen had it not been for the suspended power of gravitation. As it was, he wobbled weakly back and forth, swaying like a bit of seaweed swinging to the ocean currents. His face was the color of putty.

  Then, as Professor Wagner pulled the slide over, there was a sudden tug of gravitation. Click felt his legs buckle under the quick pull, braced himself, felt that he would give much for a single breath of air, then crashed to the floor.

  Almost instantly he felt light again, felt a peculiar sense of ease. He saw the professor swimming in the air above him, approaching the inner shell. He heard the rasp of metal, and then the professor came plunging out, like a trout darting through a shaded pool.

  “He—had—the other set of controls. Had one of the windows open—oxygen escaped—air rarefied, cold. We’re falling now. Won’t be long, better air—turn that compressed air cock.”

  Click saw the face of the girl. It was a purplish hue of convulsed agony. He saw her turn a valve, heard a hissing stream of escaping air, felt his eardrums swell until it seemed they would burst, and then his lungs sent great gulps of life-giving air into his blood.

  Professor Wagner had stood the ordeal the best of any, notwithstanding the shock of the wound in his shoulder. And he was cool, alert, vigorously watchful.

  “All right, Kendall. Feel better now? Watch through that floor window. I’ll watch the instruments. We’re falling with gravitation accelerated a thousand per cent. We’ve got to watch out.”

  Click pressed his face to the window.

  The earth was leaping up to meet him.
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  “Too fast!” he yelled.

  Professor Wagner flipped his wrist.

  It seemed that ten thousand crushing hands pressed Click’s body to the floor. He tried to move, couldn’t. It was all he could do to breathe.

  In an agony of suspense he watched the rushing ground.

  He felt a slight ease in the pressure, caught a breath, turned, and saw Professor Wagner’s face set in taut lines.

  “Something’s wrong,” gasped the professor. “Shouldn’t act like this. Some factor overlooked! But we’ve got to stop. Hold fast!”

  His wrist twitched. The lever moved.

  It seemed as though a ton of water pressed Click down and down. The very metal of the floor seemed to bulge out with the pressure.

  The ground was still far away, but it was rushing up rapidly. They were almost over Centerberry now. The buildings rushed into view. The squares were like those of a checkerboard, grew until they were as patterned linoleum.

  The terrific pressure increased. The ground hesitated in its mad upward rush. The pressure upon Click’s chest relaxed enough so he could breathe.

  Click could see the streets, the people scurrying about like ants, the moving automobiles, the belching smokestacks, the tangle of tracks in the railroad yards, the spires of churches, the roofs of buildings.

  Closer and closer came the ground. The pressure was terrific. The buildings zoomed up, seemed rushing into his very face. He couldn’t breathe. The air that had been in his lungs whooshed out. He felt that he would rather die a thousand deaths than suffer such agony.

  He felt a relief in the cruel pressure and managed to raise his face. A welcome flood of air was in his lungs. He gave a great gasp.

  Then suddenly every bit of pressure was relieved. He was as light as he had been before. He saw Professor Wagner draw the back of his left hand over his head while his injured right arm dangled at his side.

  “A close squeak, a mighty close call. We developed too much acceleration falling through the rarefied upper atmosphere,” rasped the professor. “I threw it back to stop it, but even with gravitation accelerated to twice normal falling speed the check was so great that it nearly crushed us with momentum. I’m afraid there’s some factor that’s escaped my calculations. But we managed to check ourselves, and just in time, too. Look out and see where we are and what happened.”