The Science Fiction of Erle Stanley Gardner - The Human Zero

by Matin Greenberg

Click tried to frame the question.

  Gluckner caught the idea and answered it slowly in simple words.

  “Rain. Once a month it comes; sometimes oftener. It is in those times that the people from the dark side attack. They have eyes that see well in the dark. The natives of this side see but indistinctly. I see not at all. These men see through the fog, but not the darkness. You understand?”

  Click gave a swift translation.

  “Yes, yes,” purred the pleased professor. “Now ask him about the satellite. Is it true there is a small satellite? And ask him—”

  Click interrupted. “How about the girl? Where is she?”

  The German grunted.

  “The girl? You do not know? The wife of the man Badger? She was the ransom price given to the chief for the liberty of that man.”

  “What?” yelled Click.

  The German repeated. “She becomes the wife of the chief. Otherwise he could not have her for a wife. He could take her, but that is against the law. Captives can be slaves, but not wives. So the man Badger sells his wife to the chief for his liberty. It is not that which one should do, but—”

  From the rain-soaked darkness without came a fierce yell of wild menace. There was the sound of rushing bodies.

  “The night people! They come. It is bad.”

  A body staggered against the doorway. A huge shape blotted out what little gray light seeped through this opening.

  Click could hear the sound of a blow, a mortal groan. Something slumped to the floor.

  He had a vague sense of something rushing toward him.

  He hurtled forward, driving his right in a swing, slipping his knife in his left hand.

  The right connected. There was the jar of impact, a whoosh as one who has had his breath knocked from him, and then great hands clasped the wrist that held the knife. The weight of a body was thrown against him.

  From the darkness he heard the German’s voice.

  “They are big men, these people of the night. Beware their fangs. They tear throats with their teeth, these night men.”

  Click sensed the warning, flung himself backward.

  In the darkness there was the gnashing sound of fangs clashing together. Hot breath was on his throat, steaming in his nostrils.

  He flung his right across and over. The blow landed on the creature’s jaw, staggered him. Click tried to free his left, and then felt himself beaten to the ground.

  Rushing shapes swept through the hut as football players thunder down a field.

  The inert bulk of his adversary fell on him, shielded him. He could hear spears thudding into the ground, heard men falling to their death. The smell of blood was in the steaming air. The rattle of dying men sounded above the pelting roar of the rain.

  Click squirmed, twisted, finally worked his way out from under the enormous body that had covered him. His hand encountered a spear thrust into the ground. He pulled it out, staggered to a corner of the hut, braced himself for attack.

  But the conflict had swirled out of the hut, gone on to a more remote portion of the village.

  “Professor,” he called cautiously.

  There was no answer. The interior of the hut was silent.

  Click felt his way forward. His feet encountered a body. His hand stretched out in exploration. Instinctively he knew it to be one of the night people. The body was huge, cold, clammy. A spear was driven clear through the breast, well into the ground.

  His hand encountered another body; this time it was the night man he had knocked out with his swinging punch. The man stirred slightly.

  Click’s hand went over the features. He shuddered as he felt the mort slime of wide open eyes, staring straight up, unconscious. The eyes were as big as the palm of his hand.

  He pushed on. His hand encountered the side of the stretcher. He felt for the German. He encountered the outlines of the huge body, the gnarled limbs with their twisted joints. He felt for the head, and drew back in horror.

  Evidently it had been some species of war club that had finished Herr Gluckner. But he was finished, completely and conclusively finished.

  A sudden horror rippled Click’s spine.

  “Professor! Professor!” he called, raising his voice, shouting as loudly as he could.

  There was no answer.

  His feet stumbled upon a body. His exploring fingers encountered clothes. It needed but a second to complete the identification. It was the body of Professor Wagner, and he was quite dead, the entire top of the head crushed by a terrific blow of a war club.

  Then, over the pelting of the storm, over the hissing sound of the rushing water, the rattling leaves, the swaying, groaning branches, came a sound that was unmistakable. It was the crisp crack of a rifle. Again and again it sounded. Then there was silence once more.

  Click flung himself out into the pouring darkness. Water sloshed about his ankles. The green slime of the forest had washed down to the ground, turning it into a soggy mass of slush upon which his feet slipped.

  There was nothing to give him the faintest sense of direction except the general idea which he had of the location of the rifle shots. About him in the darkness there was a vague sensation of rushing forms. Occasionally he could hear grunts, groans, blows.

  A spear hissed through the darkness, thudded into the bole of a tree. That spear could not have missed his body by more than inches.

  From behind him sounded a wild yell, running steps. Instinctively he ducked forward, half spun, collided with a tree trunk, flung himself around it.

  There was a puff of explosive sound and something spattered the tree trunk with a peculiar suggestion of vicious force. Click realized it must be a mushroom-poisoned missile from a blow gun.

  He whirled, made for the dense forest, then cut in a zigzag, floundering through wet ferns, crashing into slimy trees, constantly inundated with the torrential downpour that emptied itself from the black heavens.

  His slithering feet found the slimy mud of the immense clearing in which the shell had landed. He had no very good idea as to his location. Was he on the near side or the far side of that circular clearing? He had no means of ascertaining other than to keep exploring in the hope that he would stumble upon some clew. And stumble upon it he did, for he literally fell over the body of a man.

  Swift exploration with his questing fingers disclosed that this was one of the night people, that a bullet hole had accounted for his death. The bullet had torn through his heart and the man had died in his tracks.

  The direction of that bullet hole, the way the body was facing, all served to give Click a general idea of the direction he wanted to take.

  Of a sudden he realized that it was growing lighter. There was a faint margin of visibility creeping out from the surrounding circle of darkness.

  Then to his left, hardly fifteen yards away, there again sounded the deep-throated roar of a rifle. A running figure barely visible in the rapidly increasing light, jumped high in the air, flung up its arms, fell forward, twitching, jerking.

  Click saw the outline of the shell, sitting upon the muddy field, the polished sides streaked with moisture, the base spattered with mud. The door was open, and standing just without the door was Badger, the rifle at his shoulder.

  Had Badger lowered that rifle and turned, it must have been certain death for Click Kendall. But the cruelty of his nature was too strong. It was not enough that he had merely disabled the runner, Badger wanted to kill him. And so he waited, squinting down the sights of the rifle, his entire face twisted with a ferocious blood lust.

  The native struggled to hands and knees, tried to stand, but was unable. He dropped, began to crawl. Badger slammed in another shell. The gun roared forth its summons. The native crashed to the ground, splashing water and mud in a death agony.

  Badger lowered the rifle and stepped within the shell. His arm reached to the door, slammed it over.

  And Click Kendall managed to just thrust a foot in that door to keep it from slamming shut. His sh
oulder thrust against it, sent it crashing inward, and charged. His head crashed into the pit of Badger’s stomach. For a moment they hung, locked, poised, then they crashed to the floor.

  Badger whipped over his arm, tried to obtain a strangle hold. Click gave no thought to guarding, but sought rather to smash to his objective. He sent his fists in short, jabbing rocking blows, thudding home with all of his shoulder muscles behind them.

  His wounded arm sent little shoots of agonized pain racing up his shoulder, stabbing into his very brain. But he persisted.

  Badger rolled over, squirmed free, got to his knees. He swung with all his force and the blow caught Click as he came in.

  Click felt the nauseating blackness of that blow, but fought grimly to keep his senses. Blood poured from his nose. His eye was swelling. He caught the other off balance, sent his right straight for the chin, a blow that carried momentum behind it.

  The fist crashed straight to the button. Badger’s head snapped back. He flung up his hands, crashed over backward. His head thudded against the metal floor of the ship.

  Click scrambled to his feet, weak, dizzy, wet.

  He floundered to the door, swinging upon its metal ballbearing hinges. The rain clouds had vanished. The same rosy-hued fog was filling every nook and cranny of the steaming world. Water glistened everywhere.

  CHAPTER 9

  Disaster

  Click moved to the control table. Had the little men placed the shell out of control? He pushed the slide over to gravitation zero, felt the same sensation of lightness which enabled him to drift about the shell, and sighed his relief. He had a chance, just one chance in a hundred, but he was going to take that chance.

  He moved the slide control into the negative segment. The shell slipped upward, bounced from bole to bole, swung from branch to branch as lightly as a bit of thistle. Click possessed himself of the rifle, snapped a shell into the barrel, and searched the unconscious form of Badger.

  He found a couple of boxes of shells, found also several rough diamonds of the type which the natives fashioned into knives. Click found a bit of rope, proceeded to tie the man’s hands and feet. Badger fluttered his eyes, groaned.

  “Where’s the girl?” demanded Click.

  Badger’s swollen lips twisted in an effort to speak.

  “Find her!”

  Click picked up one of the great diamonds, its hard edge fashioned into a razor edge, held it over Badger’s throat.

  “If she’s come to harm—”

  The man’s face turned livid with fear.

  “No, no. In the inner cone, locked in!”

  Click gained the inner door, found it barred, flung it open. Dorothy Wagner was stretched on a cot, bound hand and foot. Her eyes rolled toward the door in an agony of hopelessness, found his, then lit until they were as twin stars.

  “Click! You escaped! You came! Father, where’s Father?”

  Click would have broken it to her gently, but she read correctly the expression on his face. Tears welled into the eyes.

  “Cut me loose, Click. There’s a whole box of those diamond knives there on that table. Badger traded me off for them and his liberty. He told the natives I was his wife. Then he killed my guards and brought me here.”

  Click saw the box. The diamonds were unpolished, in the rough, but they caught the light and sent it glittering in brilliant reflections. They were large, some being three inches in length.

  He grasped one, cut through the cords which held the girl, assisted her to her feet.

  “Could we—Father’s body?”

  He shook his head.

  “It was in the thick of the fighting. And it’s getting light now. The storm’s over.”

  “Where are we?”

  Click Kendall led the way to the outer room.

  He turned to the window in the floor, began a minute study of the ground below.

  Little men were rushing about, splashing through the mud. The ground was carpeted with dead and wounded, showing where the brunt of the fight had taken place, and most of the victims were of the dwarf tribe.

  Click had an opportunity to study one of the night men who had been taken captive. He was tall, well over six feet, splendidly muscled. The skin was pale, and the forehead seemed to be all eyes. They were astonishingly large and the man continually kept his crocked arm over them, shielding them from the rays of the sun as these rays filtered through the envelope of mist.

  “I think,” said Dorothy, “Father would prefer being left here. It’s his planet, you know.”

  And her tapering finger firmly slid the control button to negative gravitation.

  Like a rocket hissing through the air, the shell darted

  through the warm moisture of the fog-filled air, shot past towering trees, and suddenly seemed enshrouded with white radiance. For only a fraction of a second did the white radiance grip the atmosphere, and then the shell, gathering speed with every foot of travel, shot out into the clear open air.

  The blazing sunlight seemed the promise of a new world. The blue of the sky, intense, brilliant, deep; the piling billows of cloud below, all seemed clean, an augur of a more happy existence than the life of the fog-drenched planet.

  Faster and faster they went. Click moved the lever. The car swung into lateral motion, went skimming over the top of the fog.

  The dark rim of twilight loomed before them, showed a crescent of eternal darkness.

  “The earth should be about above us now,” said the girl.

  Click slammed the control over to extreme negative gravitation, and the car shot into accelerated motion. The planet below began to show the motion of its diminishing perspective, and the outer air grew dark with the darkness of interplanetary space.

  The girl twisted a valve. Compressed air hissed into the car. She opened another valve.

  “Oxygen,” she said, “and there’s a valve control to exhaust the foul air. Let’s go back in the inner room. There are controls there. I don’t like to be out here with Badger.”

  Click followed her into the inner shell.

  “These controls are arranged in series now,” she said. “We can handle the car from here.”

  Click nodded.

  “You get some sleep. I’ll keep it moving until we get some-where’s near the earth.”

  She nodded, patted his hand.

  “Good old Click!”

  He got her to lie down on one of the beds, started an alcohol stove, brewed her a hot milk drink, saw her head nod with utter exhaustion even as she drank it. He eased her form back on the pillow, covered her with blankets, then turned his attention to the problem of navigating the car through space.

  It was not easy, yet it was not so difficult as he imagined. He could see the disk of a bright star which he knew must be the earth. He moved the control over to a more easy rate of repulsion so that their speed would not be entirely beyond control.

  His own head nodded with fatigue, but he grimly fought off the warm drowsiness. The clean sun beat with dazzling splendor upon the metallic sides of the car. The universe showed clean and sparkling, gems set in jet black.

  Click improved his time by taking stock of the contents of the inner shell. It touched the outer shell only upon one long seam. There was a window at the top where it joined the top of the other shell. Click could see that this window was made to open inward. The glass was set in live rubber, under terrific pressure. This was to prevent the window blowing outward in space with the pressure of the air in the shell. And there were complicated levers and screws by which that window could be swung into place.

  It was out of this window, then, that the life-giving air and the pressure necessary to sustain existence had leaked on that first wild plunge into the upper regions of the atmosphere.

  Click inspected the bookshelf with its tables of planetary positions, its gravitational formulae, then turned his attention to the other equipment. There was a telescope, well made, mounted upon a folding tripod. There was a bulky package hangin
g from the wall. Inspection showed that it contained two parachutes of the type worn by aviators.

  Evidently Professor Wagner had placed them there for use during his earlier experiments. They offered him a way back to earth should the shell prove unmanageable.

  Click set up the telescope, unfolded the tripod, and swung the objective toward the window in the top.

  The glass was crystal-clear, yet gave some distortion to the image, a species of haziness that prevented really clear perception. But Click was able to pick out the earth, almost directly above them. He could see the whirling continents, the seas, the cloud areas, those places where the sun beat down with glittering light upon shimmering deserts. The shadows of a mountain range loomed plainly.

  Click saw they were approaching with terrific speed. He had made no effort to calculate speed other than by the unaided estimate of his eye. He felt reasonably sure of coming somewhere within the influence of the earth’s gravitation. He didn’t need to hit it at all close, a hundred thousand miles in either direction would still enable him to fall into the earth.

  And then sheer exhaustion levied her toll. Click slumped to his side, pillowed his head on his arm, and slept. Hours later he awoke with a start. He could see that the car was somewhere above the Pacific Ocean. He caught a glimpse of Australia, China, then shifted his gaze to the east. Late afternoon mantled the shores of California, Oregon, Washington, Mexico, South America. He could see the mighty mountain chains casting long shadows to the east. And the car was whizzing its lateral motion with constant acceleration.

  The girl was awake, at the controls. She smiled at him. “We’re getting there,” she said.

  Click rubbed his eyes, peered through the window.

  It was a breath-taking spectacle. The girl prepared a meal while they watched the panorama below. The great black disk of the earth, illuminated by the moon, the flaming stars, the mighty disk of the sun itself, blazing in white-hot splendor.

  Then the sun was obscured by the earth. All about them reigned darkness save for the pin-points of flaming stars. Click groped for the light switch, set the lights going. He and the girl ate in anxious silence.