The Science Fiction of Erle Stanley Gardner - The Human Zero

by Matin Greenberg

  Bender grunted at that.

  The soldier laughed aloud. “What a fight it would have been had the comrades of my army been with me!”

  I turned to him. “Whatever possessed you to grab that girl?”

  “Because I wanted to,” he said promptly enough. “I could see that there were not so many men but that three soldiers could hold them at bay. But you are a charioteer and would not know the pleasure of battle.”

  That was, to him, sufficient reason. We stood there in a line against the wall, ropes knotted around our necks, ropes binding our arms behind us.

  About the fire squatted the Indians in council. From time to time stragglers, more or less seriously wounded, came into the chamber of the cave. The women were treating those who had suffered the most, and in the distance I could hear that wailing cry of savage sorrow with which primitive people mourn for a loved one who is dead.

  As the fire died down, fresh wood was piled on it. I noticed the shape of that wood. Plainly it had been cut short in order to be dragged in through an opening; it would not have been cut in such lengths to be hauled in over the long trail we had used. Nor was there any evidence of the entrance we had used being known to the Indians.

  I hoped it was a secret entrance about which they did not know. That would give us a break—if we could find our way back to that hole, and if we had the chance to get loose.

  The council droned into the small hours of the night. From what I could hear I gathered that the Indians were worried lest others should know that we had come to the cave. Before they decided what to do they wanted to make certain we were alone. '

  After several hours of powwow, they seemed to reach some decision, and slept. They left a man to watch us and see that we didn’t work loose from the ropes which held us.

  But we had been tied by Indians, and there wasn’t much chance of working loose.

  The guard regarded us with eyes in which glittered a hatred that made chills ripple the spine. It was clear that his sole desire was to wreak vengeance upon us.

  “I’ve got to lie down. I’m weak and the cords are hurting my arms. There’s no feeling in my finger tips,” said Bender.

  I laughed at that. They meant to keep us standing, without sleep. If we so much as relaxed our muscles and slumped forward against the bonds, the rope around our necks would strangle us to death unless they decided to loosen the knot after it had bit into our wind, and save us for a more horrible death. I explained as much to Bender.

  He seemed to be thinking things over.

  “What about the car?” he asked.

  “I don’t understand all they said,” I told him. “It’s a mixture of part Spanish, part Indian, and part of a dialect I’ve never heard before. But they’ve set fire to the automobile and covered the wreckage over with sand. They’re worried about how we got into the cave. They think we came in past their guards. But they’ll trail us when it comes daylight and find the entrance we came in by.”

  He let his aluminium-colored eyes narrow in thought, and I got an idea.

  “Can you hypnotize the guard?” I asked.

  He suddenly stiffened to alert attention. “I can try. Talk to him in a low voice. Get his attention on you. Then, when I start to talk, you keep silent.”

  I told him I would. The Mexican was listening to us with a frown of perplexity on his features.

  Soon the guard came close.

  “Would you like gold?” I asked of him.

  He scorned to answer me, after the fashion of an Indian.

  “Gold, lots of gold, a fortune in sacred gold,” I told him, and let my voice sink to a droning monotone. “You could be wealthy. You could traffic with the white men and buy all that you desired. You would never need to hunt, never need to work. You could have everything that any one in the tribe could have, and a thousand times more. You would be powerful, you would be chief.”

  He approached me and spat in my face.

  I waited a few moments, then droned again: “Gold, gold, gold, ever the thing of power. There is plenty of gold. You can have sacred gold, precious gold . . .”

  And then, from my right, the voice of the man with pinpoint eyes took up the refrain.

  “Gold, gold, gold,” he said, speaking in Spanish. “Gold, gold, gold. Look at me, gaze into my eyes. In them you will see that there is honesty.

  “Gold, gold, gold. You are feeling drowsy. Sleep is coming to you. Gold, gold, gold. Always there is the glitter of gold. The firelight on the wall is like gold in the rocks. You see it and the light hurts your eyes. You close them to shut out the sight of the gold, gold, gold.”

  And I noticed that the Indian was indeed closing his eyes. He fought against the drooping lids, but the fight was a losing one.

  “Gold, gold, gold,” droned the man with pin-point eyes. “And before you go to sleep you must kill the white men. You hate me. You want to kill me. When I am dead you can sleep. But you must kill me first. Take your knife from your belt, hold it in your hand, ready to cut.”

  And the brown hand sleepily went to the belt, took out the knife, and looked stupidly at it.

  “Gold, gold, gold,” droned the voice in its monotone of sleepy intonations. “Gold, gold, gold. The easiest way for you to kill me is to cut my arteries. See, I am tied up with my arteries, and my arteries stretch to the others. They are not ropes, but arteries in which there courses blood.

  “Cut those arteries and watch us slowly die in great agony. Then you can sleep. You cannot call out, you cannot stay awake. You have to sleep, and then you will wake up and find gold. Gold, gold, gold.”

  And I saw the hand that held the knife raise it and start sawing at the ropes. As the first of the ropes parted I could see the expression upon the savage features.

  Never have I seen such an expression of horrible blood lust before, nor do I care to again. It was as though I could study, through the lens of a slow-motion picture camera, the face of a man who was murdering me in a burst of savage hatred.

  The eyes were maniacal. The lips slavered. The facial muscles writhed with the animal pleasure of torture inflicted upon an enemy.

  “I groan, I scream, I cry out in my anguish,” purred the man with the aluminium-colored eyes, “and the sound is as music to your ears. Not too fast do you work the knife, but just fast enough to let the blood flow from my arteries and leave me in agony. The warm blood is splashing upon your arms now. You are bathed in it, and you are being revenged. And presently you will sleep, and when you wake up you will find gold, gold, gold.”

  The words droned on while the Indian cut through the bonds that held us together and anchored us to the wall.

  “Now I am dead and you can sleep,” said the droning voice. “You will lie back upon the floor and your eyes will close. You will relax your hold upon the knife. You have avenged your tribe. And you will sleep a deep and dreamless slumber. When you awaken it will be to find gold. Gold, gold, gold.”

  The Indian slumped to the rocky floor, flung one arm under his head and instantly went to sleep.

  “What magic is this?” demanded the Mexican.

  “Shut up!” I hissed at him in a whisper.

  The council fire was some little distance from us, and the men slept about it like logs of wood. I knew the Indian delicacy of sense. They would be almost certain to hear us before we could make good our escape. But every second was precious now.

  I sat down on the rock floor and inched my way toward the sleeping Indian, took the knife from his nerveless fingers, and held it rigid in my hand.

  By an effort I got to my feet. The aluminium-eyed man leaned against the blade of the knife and sawed the last of his bonds across it. When they had dropped to the floor he took the knife and cut my ropes, then those of the soldier.

  CHAPTER 10

  Through the Blackness

  Our swords had been taken from us and flung into a corner of the rock chamber. We retrieved them, and I was barely able to restrain the soldier from then and there givin
g his battle cry by pointing out to him in a whisper that he was accompanied only by a charioteer and a scrivener who were worse than useless in battle. He regretfully agreed, and then we wormed our way silently toward the arched opening through which we had been marched.

  In one of the pockets carved in the rock wall by the action of the elements, were stacked some pitch knots to be used as torches, and I gathered up two or three of these.

  “You have the matches?” I asked of Bender.

  He nodded.

  Back of us some one stirred,,

  “Run!” I whispered.

  There was a shout from behind us, but it was the confused shout of one who is not in full possession of his faculties.

  Some sleeping Indian, hearing the faint sound of our feet, had doubtless awakened, looked toward the wall and seen that we had gone. But he did not know in which direction.

  “Feel your way through the darkness,” I cautioned them. “Do not show a light and do not make noise. They don’t know which way we have gone.”

  They followed my instructions, although the Mexican grumbled at being forced to flee from a horde of ignorant heathens.

  I had no time to explain to him the development of the modem revolver, or the repeating rifle. I could only urge him to run by warning him that he was with two cowards. It was the only argument which moved him.

  I doubt if we could have found our way back to the place where the gold was stored had it not been for the uncanny sense of perception of the Mexican. He seemed able to see in the darkness, and he must have known the inside of that cave as a river pilot knows his stream. For he took us on a swift but silent walk until I could hear the wailing of women, and knew that we were approaching the scene of our conflict.

  We had some light here, the light of a distant camp fire in the other chamber of the cave. The women had taken the bodies out into this chamber and built a fire. About this fire they rocked back and forth, wailing their thin chant of mourning.

  They were as hypnotized with their grief as the Indian guard had been with the droned words of Emilio Bender.

  Getting past them was easy, but we had to use considerable care to keep some of the children from spotting us. It was the older girls who made the trouble. They sat in on the mourning party, but youth is ever unable to concentrate for long upon any emotion other than love; and we could see the slender forms of the girls flitting about the mourning fire, putting on additional wood.

  We finally reached the cleft where the gold had been stored. It was still there, intact.

  Emilio Bender raked out the gold pieces and struck one of the matches. He devoured them with his eyes. There were golden ornaments, little gold images, even gold arrowheads.

  In the greed of that moment, the man with the strange, aluminium-colored eyes forgot himself. He scooped such things as he desired into his pockets.

  “This is my third,” he said, heedless of the fact he had taken a good three-quarters. “You two divide the rest and we’ll get going.”

  It must have been the silence which warned him. It was the silence which precedes a storm, and Emilio Bender looked up to encounter the flaming gaze of the man who claimed to be Pablo Viscente de Moreno, a soldier who had marched the deserts three hundred-odd years ago.

  “So!” yelled the soldier. “You would loot the plunder of a soldier, eh? You who claim to be a soldier, but are not even a charioteer!”

  And the right hand of the soldier whipped the naked blade in a hissing arc.

  “Arise and account!” shouted the soldier.

  There was only the faintest light from the distant camp fires. They glinted in half reflections from the polished blade, and served to show the men as half-formed shadows moving against the chalklike wall of the cave.

  “But think,” said Emilio Bender in his droning voice, “of what you can buy with that gold! Think of the sleep you have lost . . .”

  I still believe that if he had surrendered the gold instead of trying to use his hypnotism he could have saved himself. But he was flushed by his success with the Indian and emboldened by greed.

  “Sleep, sleep, sleep,” he droned. “You need to rest, to relax, to let your senses become warm and drowsy. You feel a strange quiet . . .

  It was then that the Mexican said something which has puzzled me, and will always puzzle me. Some of what had happened could be explained through the theory of dual personalities. But this remark tended to show that he knew.

  “Quiet!” he shouted. “Sleep, you say! I have slept for three hundred years. Now look out for yourself!”

  It happened so quickly that I could not interfere even had I wanted to. These two men had come to the final show-down, and that show-down was inevitable. The hypnotist had virtually created this strange man who was now challenging him. And the greed of the man with eyes like pin-points was bound to bring about such a conflict, sooner or later. As well sooner as later.

  I heard the rasp of steel on steel, and an exclamation from the soldier.

  “You would try to slip a blade into my stomach from below, would you? Then stand up and fight, man to man.”

  “Quick!” yelled Bender to me. “Run him through in the back and we will divide the gold.”

  I know of no remark that better illustrated the character of the man. It was his last.

  There was the whirl of a blade, a cut, a thrust, a groan and something staggered back and slumped to the rock.

  “Fool!” grunted the soldier. “You would pose as a soldier and turn out a thief!”

  I groped for the pulse of the man with pin-point eyes. There was no pulse. His wrist was limp and already chilling with death.

  The soldier saw my motion and laughed bitterly. “Am I so clumsy then that when I run my blade through their hearts you can feel a beat in the wrist? He is dead, I tell you. Come.”

  He stooped and took the gold from the pockets of the dead man, and he made a rough division with me.

  “Thus do soldiers share their spoils upon the field of battle,” he said.

  I crammed my gold into my pockets.

  From the main body of the cave was a terrific clamor of noise. The Indians were loose and on the trail, rushing down the cave toward us.

  “Quick, run!” I yelled.

  “Run? Why? Are we not two soldiers?”

  “They have guns,” I said. “We have no chance against them.”

  I doubt if I could have moved him, but, of a sudden, he spoke in a thicker, slower tone.

  “Very well, then, let us run. I know this cave. Follow me.”

  He ran; and as he ran his steps became more heavy, slower. The body gradually lost the spring and became as the muscle-bound body of a cholo laborer.

  We ran through the dark, he leading the way.

  “Stoop here,” he called; and I stooped, felt a low archway graze my body.

  “There is another entrance, a secret entrance,” he said. “I hope I can find it. I am getting drowsy. Some one is shouting in my ear to go away and leave his body alone. Why should I have some one shout at me to leave my own body?

  “Carramba! It’s all because of that man with the funny eyes. I know now that I must die because I killed him. As his corpse gets cold, so does my own soul get cold. I am paying a price, and yet it is not a price. It is something I have already paid . . . Here, amigo, take all the gold. I would rather you had it than the strange man who is pushing me out of my skin. How he pushes! And he is slow and stolid. He could never oust me but for the death of the man with the strange eyes. I can feel an inner chill.”

  He stopped in his tracks, thrust golden ornaments and turquoise necklaces into my hands.

  “Fill—your—pockets . . . Adios, amigo!"

  And he was gone. I knew instantly when the other came into possession of his body.

  “Que es? What is it?” he demanded, Mexican fashion, and his tone was dull as the tone of a man who is slowly awakening from a long sleep.

  “We are in a cave,” I said. “Follow me.”r />
  He accepted the statement with the unreasoning stolidity of his kind. I led the way in the same general direction the soldier had been piloting me. It was dark, and yet it was not entirely dark. There was a half light in the air, and a freshness which reminded me of dawn.

  We pushed forward, seeing the vague shape of walls and minarets on our sides. I thought there was an opening overhead and glanced upward. I saw the pale glow of a star, pin-pointing out before the dawn, and I thought of the man with pin-point eyes.

  Somewhere, we had left the cave and were in a canon which towered on either side in great cliffs. The cliffs spread apart. The floor of the canon became rough and bowlder-strewn. We fought our way forward. The light grew stronger, and dawn smells were in the air.

  We found a deer trail angling from the floor of the canon to the side of the mountain, around it to the desert plain below the mesa. I led the way along this. There were no signs of Indians.

  The Mexican looked down at the sword he was using for a walking stick. It was stained with sticky red, and even now the flies were commencing to drone about it.

  “What is this?” he asked in his thick, suspicious voice, and raised it to his eyes. Then he flung it far down the canon. It clattered upon the rocks. He crossed himself, looked at me with eyes which were showing a glint of expression, an expression of wonderment.

  “It is nothing,” I said. “Come.”