The Human Zero and Other Science-Fiction Masterpieces

by Sam Moskowitz

  “He killed Dangerfield for me, and that death covered up my own short accounts. I killed the banker because he was such a cold-blooded fish . . . Cold-blooded, that’s good.”

  There was a chuckle, rasping, mirthless, the sound of scraping objects upon the floor, as though someone tried to struggle ineffectively. Then the voice again.

  “I left a note in my clothes, warning of the deaths of you, of myself, and of that paragon of virtue, Sid Rodney, who gave you the idea in the first place. Later on, I’ll start shaking down millionaires, but no one will suspect me. They’ll think I’m dead.

  “It’s painless. Just the first chill, then death* Then the cells dissolve, shrink into a smaller and smaller space, and then disappear. I didn’t get too much of it from Crome, just enough to know generally how it works, like radio and X-ray, and the living cells are the only ones that respond so far. When you’ve rubbed this powder into the hair ...”

  Sid Rodney had been slowly advancing. A slight shadow of his progress moved along the baseboard of the hall.

  “What’s that?” snapped the voice, losing its gloating monotone, crisply aggressive.

  Sid Rodney stepped boldly up the last of the stairs, into the upper corridor.

  A man was coming toward him. It was Sands.

  “Hello, Sands,” he said. “What’s the trouble here?”

  Sands was quick to take advantage of the lead offered. His right hand dropped to the concealment of his hip, but he smiled affably.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t my friend Sid Rodney, the detective! Tell me, Rodney, have you got anything new? If you haven’t, I have. Look here. I want you to see something . . .”

  And he jumped forward.

  But Rodney was prepared. In place of being caught off guard and balance, he pivoted on the balls of his feet and snapped home a swift right.

  The blow jarred Sands back. The revolver which he had been whipping from his pocket shot from his hand in a glittering arc and whirled to the floor.

  Rodney sprang forward.

  The staggering man flung up his hands, lashed out a vicious kick. Then, as he got his senses cleared from the effects of the blow, he whirled and ran down the hall, dashed into a room and closed the door.

  Rodney heard the click of the bolt as the lock was turned.

  “Ruby!” he called. “Ruby!”

  She ran toward him, attired in flowing garments of colored silk, her hair streaming, eyes glistening.

  “Quick!” she shouted. “Is there any of that powder in your hair? Do you feel an itching of the scalp?”

  He shook his head.

  “Tell me what’s happened.”

  “Get him first,” she said.

  Sid Rodney picked up the revolver which he had knocked from the hand of the man he hunted, advanced toward the door.

  “Keep clear!” yelled Sands from behind that door.

  Rodney stepped forward.

  “Surrender, or I’ll start shooting through the door!” he threatened.

  There was a mocking laugh, and something in that laugh warned Rodney; for he leaped back, just as the panels of the door splintered under a hail of lead which came crashing from the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun.

  “I’m calling the police!” shouted Ruby Orman.

  Sid saw that she was at a telephone, placing a call.

  Then he heard a humming noise from behind the door where Sands had barricaded himself. It was a high, buzzing note, such as is made by a high-frequency current meeting with resistance.

  “Quick, Ruby! Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said, and came to him. “I’ve called the police.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Just what you thought—absolute zero. Crome perfected the process by which any form of cell life could be made receptive to a certain peculiar etheric current. But there had to be a certain chemical affinity first.

  “He achieved this by putting a powder in the hair of his victims. The powder irritated the scalp, but it did something to the nerve ends which made them receptive to the current.

  “I mentioned your theory to Sands. At the time I didn’t know about the powder. But I had noticed that when the banker was talking with Captain Harder, Sands had flipped some ashes from the end of his cigarette so that they had lit on the hair on the back of Soloman’s head, and that Soloman had started to rub at his head shortly afterward as though he had been irritated by an itching of the scalp.

  “Then Sands made the same gesture while he was talking with me. He left. I felt an itching, and wondered. So I washed my head thoroughly. Then I thought I would leave my clothes where Sands could find them, make him think he’d eliminated me. I was not certain my suspicions were correct, but I was willing to take a chance. I called you to tell you, and then I felt a most awful chill. It started at the roots of my hair and seemed to drain the very warmth right out of my nerves.

  “I guess the washing hadn’t removed all of that powder, just enough to keep me from being killed. I became unconscious. When I came to, I was in Sands’s car. I supposed he had dropped in to make certain his machine had done the work.

  “You know the rest . . . But how did you know where to look for me?”

  Rodney shook his head dubiously.

  “I guess my brains must have been dead, or I’d have known long before. You see, the man who wrote the letters seemed to know everything that had taken place in Captain Harder’s office when we were called in to identify that last letter from Dangerfield.

  “Yet there was no dictograph found there. It might have been something connected with television, or, more likely, it might have been because some one who was there was the one who was writing those letters.

  “If the story Sands had told had been true, the man who was writing the letters had listened in on what was going on in the captain’s office, had written the warning note, had known just where Sands was going to be in his automobile, and had tossed it in.

  “That was pretty improbable. It was much more likely that Sands had slipped out long enough to have written the letter and then brought it in with that wild story about men crowding him to the curb.

  “Then, again, Sands carefully managed to sneak away when Harder raided that loft building. He really did it to notify the crazy scientist that the hiding place had been discovered.

  “Even before you telephoned, I should have known Sands was in with the scientist. Afterward, it was, of course, apparent. You had seen some powder placed in Soloman’s hair. That meant it must have been done when you were present. That narrowed the list of suspects to those who were also present.

  “There were literally dozens of clues pointing to Sands. He was naturally sore at the banker for not coming through with the money. If they’d received it, they’d have killed Dangerfield anyhow. And Sands was to deliver that money. Simple enough for him to have pretended to drop the package into the receptacle, and simply gone on . . .”

  A siren wailed.

  There was a pound of surging feet on the stairs, blue-coated figures swarming over the place.

  “He’s behind that door, boys,” Rodney said, “and he’s armed.”

  “No use getting killed, men,” said the officer in charge. “Shoot the door down.”

  Guns boomed into action. The lock twisted. The wood splintered and shattered. The door quivered, then slowly swung open as the wood was literally torn away from the lock.

  Guns at ready, the men moved into the room.

  They found a machine, very similar to the machine which had been found in the laboratory of the scientist. It had been riddled with gunfire.

  They found an empty suit of clothes.

  Rodney identified them as being the clothes Sands had worn when he last saw the man. The clothes were empty, and were cold to the touch. Around the collar, where there had been a little moisture, there was a rim of frost.

  There was no outlet from the room, no chance for escape.

  Ruby looked at Sid Rodney, nodd
ed.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  Rodney took her hand.

  “Anyhow, sister, I got here in time.”

  “Gee, Sid, let’s tie a can to that brother-and-sister stuff. I thought I had to fight love to make a career, but when I heard your steps on the stairs, just when I’d given up hope . .

  “Can you make a report on what happened?” asked the sergeant, still looking at the cold clothes on the floor.

  Sid Rodney answered in muffled tones.

  “Not right now,” he said. “I’m busy.”

  The Man Who Ploughed The Sea

  by Arthur C. Clarke

  The adventures of Harry Purvis have a kind of mad logic that makes them convincing by their very improbability. As his complicated but neatly dove-tailed stories emerge, one becomes lost in a sort of baffled wonder. Surely, you say to yourself, no-one would have the nerve to make that up*—such absurdities only occur in real life, not in fiction. And so criticism is disarmed, or at any rate discomfitted, until Drew shouts “Time, gentlemen, pleeze!” and throws us all out into the cold hard world.

  Consider, for example, the unlikely chain of events! which involved Harry in the following adventure. If he’d wanted to invent the whole thing, surely he could have managed it a lot more simply. There was not the slightest need, from the artistic point of view, to have started at Boston to make an appointment off the coast of Florida. . . .

  Harry seems to have spent a good deal of time in the United States, and to have quite as many friends there as he has in England. Sometimes he brings them to the “White Hart,” and sometimes they leave again under their own power. Often, however, they succumb to the illusion that beer which is tepid is also innocuous. (I am being unjust to Drew: his beer is not tepid. And if you insist, he will give you, for no extra charge, a piece of ice every bit as large as a postage-stamp.)

  This particular saga of Harry’s began, as I have indicated, at Boston, Mass. He was staying as a house-guest j of a successful New England lawyer when one morning his host said, in the casual way Americans have: “Let’s go down to my place in Florida. I want to get some sun.”

  “Fine,” said Harry, who’d never been to Florida Thirty minutes later, to his considerable surprise, he found himself moving south in a red Jaguar saloon at a formidable speed.

  The drive in itself was an epic worthy of a complete! story. From Boston to Miami is a little matter of 1,568 is—a figure which, according to Harry, is now engraved on his heart. They covered the distance in 30 hours, frequently to the sound of ever-receding police sirens as frustrated squad-cars dwindled astern. From time to time considerations of tactics involved them in evasive manoeuvres and they had to shoot off into secondary roads. The Jaguar’s radio tuned in to all the police frequencies, so they always had plenty of warning if an interception was being arranged. Once or twice they just managed to reach a state line in time, and Harry couldn’t help wondering what his host’s clients would have thought had they known the strength of the psychological urge which was obviously getting him away from them. He also wondered if he was going to see anything of Florida at all, or whether they would continue at this velocity down US 1 until they shot into the ocean at Key West.

  They finally came to a halt sixty miles south of Miami, down on the Keys—that long, thin line of island hooked on to the lower end of Florida. The Jaguar angled suddenly off the road and weaved a way through a rough track cut in the mangroves. The road ended in a wide clearing at the edge of the sea, complete with dock, 35 foot cabin cruiser, swimming pool, and modern ranch-type house. It was quite a nice little hide-away, and Harry estimated that it must have cost the best part of a hundred thousand dollars.

  He didn’t see much of the place until the next day, as he collapsed straight into bed. After what seemed far too short a time, he was awakened by a sound like a boiler factory in action. He showered and dressed in slow motion, and was reasonably back to normal by the time he had left his room. There seemed to be no one in the house, so he went outside to explore.

  By this time he had learned not to be surprised at anything, so he barely raised his eyebrows when he found his host working down at the dock, straightening out the rudder on a tiny and obviously home-made submarine. The little craft was about twenty feet long, had a conning tower with large observation windows, and bore the name “Pompano” stenciled on her prow.

  After some reflection, Harry decided that there was nothing really very unusual about all this. About five million visitors come to Florida every year, most of them determined to get on or into the sea. His host happened to be one of those fortunate enough to indulge in his hobby in a big way.

  Harry looked at the “Pompano” for some time, and then a disturbing thought struck him. “George,” he said, “do you expect me to go down in that thing?”

  “Why, sure,” answered George, giving a final bash at the rudder. “What are you worried about? I’ve taken her out lots of times—she’s safe as houses. We won’t be going deeper than twenty feet.”

  “There are circumstances,” retorted Harry, “when I should find a mere six feet of water more than adequate. And didn’t I mention my claustrophobia? It always coma on badly at this time of year.”

  “Nonsense!” said George. “You’ll forget all about that when we’re out on the reef.” He stood back and surveyed] his handiwork, then said with a sigh of satisfactions “Looks O.K. now. Let’s have some breakfast.”

  During the next thirty minutes, Harry learned a good] deal about the “Pompano.” George had designed and! built her himself, and her powerful little Diesel could drive her at five knots when she was fully submerged Both crew and engine breathed through a snorkle tube] so there was no need to bother about electric motors and] an independent air supply. The length of the snorkle! limited dives to twenty-five feet, but in these shallow* waters this was no great handicap.

  “I’ve put a lot of novel ideas into her,” said George enthusiastically. “Those windows, for instance—look at, their size. They’ll give you a perfect view, yet they’re] quite safe. I use the old Aqualung principle to keep the air-pressure hi the ‘Pompano’ exactly the same as the water-pressure outside, so there’s no strain on the hull| or the ports.”

  “And what happens,” asked Harry, “if you get stuck on the bottom?”

  “I open the door and get out, of course. There are a couple of spare Aqualungs in the cabin, as well as a life-raft with a waterproof radio, so that we can always yell for help if we get in trouble. Don’t worry—I’ve thought of everything.”

  “Famous last words,” muttered Harry. But he decided that after the ride down from Boston he undoubtedly had a charmed life: the sea was probably a safer place than US 1 with George at the wheel.

  He made himself thoroughly familiar with the escape arrangements before they set out, and was fairly happy when he saw how well designed and constructed the little craft appeared to be. The fact that a lawyer had produced such a neat piece of marine engineering in his spare time was not in the least unusual. Harry had long ago discovered that a considerable number of Americans put quite as much effort into their hobbies as into their professions.

  They chugged out of the little harbour, keeping to the marked channel until they were well clear of the coast. The sea was calm and as the shore receded the water became steadily more and more transparent. They were leaving behind the fog of pulverized coral which clouded the coastal waters, where the waves were incessantly tearing at the land. After thirty minutes they had come to the reef, visible below them as a kind of patchwork quilt above which multicolored fish pirouetted to and fro. George closed the hatches, opened the valve of the buoyancy tanks, and said gaily, “Here we go!”

  The wrinkled silk veil lifted, crept past the window, distorting all vision for a moment—and then they were through, no longer aliens looking into the world of waters, but denizens of that world themselves. They were floating above a valley carpeted with white sand, and surrounded by low hills
of coral. The valley itself was barren but the hills around it were alive with things that grew, things that crawled and things that swam. Fish as dazzling as neon signs wandered lazily among the animals that looked like trees. It seemed not only a breathtakingly lovely but also a peaceful world. There was no haste, no sign of the struggle for existence. Harry knew very well that this was an illusion, but during all the time they were submerged he never saw one fish attack another. He mentioned this to George, who commented: “Yes, that’s a funny thing about fish. They seem to have definite feeding times. You can see barracuda swimming around and if the dinner gong hasn’t gone the other fish won’t take any notice of them.”

  A ray, looking like some fantastic black butterfly, flapped its way across the sand, balancing itself with its long, whiplike tail. The sensitive feelers of a crayfish waved cautiously from a crack in the coral; the exploring gestures reminded Harry of a soldier testing for snipers with his hat on a stick. There was so much life, of so many kinds, crammed in this single spot that it would take years of study to recognize it all.

  The “Pompano” cruised very slowly along the valley, while George gave a running commentary.

  “I used to do this sort of thing with the Aqualung,” he said, “but then I decided how nice it would be to sit in comfort and have an engine to push me around. Then I could stay out all day, take a meal along, use my cameras and not give a damn if a shark was sneaking up on me. There goes a tang—did you ever see such a brilliant blue in your life? Besides, I could show my friends around down here while still being able to talk to them. That’s one big handicap with ordinary diving gear—you’re deaf and dumb and have to talk hi signs. Look at those angel-fish—one day I’m going to fix up a net to catch some of them. See the way they vanish when they’re edge-on! Another reason why I built the ‘Pompano’ was so that I could look for wrecks. There are hundreds in this area—, it’s an absolute graveyard. The ‘Santa Margarita’ is only about fifty miles from here, in Biscayne Bay. She went down in 1595 with seven million dollars of bullion aboard. And there’s a little matter of sixty-five million off Long Cay, where fourteen galleons sank hi 1715. The trouble is, of course, that most of these wrecks have been smashed up and overgrown with coral, so it wouldn’t do you a lot of good even if you did locate them. But it’s fun to try.”