The Human Zero and Other Science-Fiction Masterpieces

by Sam Moskowitz

  “Pretty certain agreed Hume.

  “All right. Then we'll dig a notch in the ground just in front of the door, with the farther side of it at an angle to face the lower rim. We'll bed a heavy steel sheet in that side and use it as a base for some powerful jacks—ship's jacks or lorry jacks or whatever we can borrow. If we run the jacks between the steel plate and that bottom rim, and screw them up with a tommy-bar, something’ll just have to give. If the jacks don't crack up they’ll either bury the steel plate, lift the entire ship or force open that door— and the door is the weakest spot.”

  The car soon brought the extra equipment. By now the sun lay low over the horizon. The sea was calm and a darker blue save for a wide, soapy wake left by an outbound steamer. Sightseeing families with their querulous children had gone long since; in their place approaching twilight enticed courting couples who paused momentarily and stared idly at the ship.

  Bored by inactivity, two of the guards volunteered to do the spadework, and under Bradley’s direction set to with considerable vim. A V-shaped trench was dug and a steel plate embedded on one side of it. Four large jacks were positioned with their bases on the plate and their thrust-caps jammed against the bottom of the door of the vessel. Again the door squeaked as the jacks turned and built up pressure on the rim. Turn-squeak, turn-squeak, turn-squeak.

  Pausing a moment, Bradley stood with tommy-bar in hand and examined the bottom crack. “It’s widening, Ron!” He resumed his task at the jacks.

  Gradually the door opened, protesting with every fraction of an inch it was compelled to move. A fever of excitement gripped the men as the gap in the shell widened, and they drove the jacks with eager haste. Eventually the rim had sunk a full four inches, revealing the complete thickness of the vessel’s hull. Slowly it moved into the darkness of the interior, then emitted a harsh grinding sound as of strained and breaking mechanism. The grinding ended in a loud metallic crack, the door swung loose and the jacks fell over.

  Nobody bothered to pick up the jacks, but all waited a moment. Hume stood, with tommy-bar firmly held, wondering what uncouth thing might emerge from the vessel’s bowels roaring vengeance for the disturbing of its privacy. But nothing came out; not even a strange-smelling waft of alien atmosphere. Behind them, the sea slobbered and chuckled.

  Bradley pushed at the freely swinging door, got it open, put his head and shoulders inside. Then he came out, looked at his watch and at the darkening sky.

  “It’s as black as the Pit in there, and pretty soon it’ll be dark up here too. But I don't feel inclined to give up just be* cause night is falling."

  “Not on your life!” agreed Hume.

  “O.K. Yet I doubt if our torches will last out, so we'll get a couple of inspection lamps and have a good look inside this thing.”

  Without any difficulty they obtained a pair of caged-in bulbs fed by cables running back to the hotel. It was now nightfall, and the sea had merged itself into the general gloom, but the lights of Douglas made a great crescent of glowing color sweeping to Onchan three miles to the north. Somehow, the news that the space-vessel was open had spread around already. Cars made a procession of light around the Lake and up the road to the Head. They parked in the hotel's drive, their headlamps focussed on the nearby ship.

  People gathered and chattered outside the ring of guards, pestered them with questions. A few whose curiosity was limned with caution watched from a more distant vantage point where one could see anything worth seeing and yet have a good start on the rest should it become necessary. Two reporters and one photographer got through the cordon. Setting up his camera, the latter took a flashlight photograph of the open door. One of the reporters plied Bradley with questions while the other scribbled in his book.

  MYSTERY SHIP ENTERED

  MURPHY'S MOON-SHELL

  THEORY DISPROVED

  At ten-thirty last night, amid the wild excitement of unprecedented crowds, in the presence of armed guards and an audience of distinguished scientists, Manx experts Philip Bradley and Ronald Montgomery Hume entered the mystery ship on Douglas Head.

  In an interview with our special correspondent, Professor Bradley revealed that the existence of a door in the vessel's side disposes once and for all of the moon-shell theory advanced by Professor Murphy, internationally renowned astrophysicist—

  He ceased scribbling, tilted back his hat and said, “Well, Doc, what's inside?”

  “We don't know. We've not yet been inside.” Bradley blinked as another flashlight went off. “Now, if you gentlemen will permit us, we'll carry on with our job. You can depend on it that the Press will be kept informed.” “We’ll be here,” said the reporter bluntly, “even if we have to squat all night. Make it juicy for us, will you ?”

  “I'll see what can be done.”

  Smiling, Bradley climbed through the door, Hume after him.

  The pair were silent as they held their lamps and examined the space behind the door. The sharply tilted floor cut straight across a section of the vessel’s curve, while beside them swung the door, shaped to match the radius of the shell and, like the shell itself, full four inches in thickness. Great hinges, cunningly wrought, still held the door at the top, while down one side and along the bottom ran a series of arms and eccentrics engaging a quadruple catch along the lower rim. But the catches were smashed, an eccentric had fallen loose, and two of the arms were broken.

  “See,” said Bradley, “there’s a cup-shaped handle which operated these catches through the broken mechanism.” He bent down, studied the smashed locking system. “Those catches are what held us up, but the jacks made a mess of them. This hollow handle is queer, don’t you think ?” He fiddled with the object for a moment, then added, “I get it the door is unlocked when this is pressed.”

  “A bolt or a turn-cap would be simpler,” scoffed Hume. “I see no point in unnecessary complications.”

  “Which suggests that this complicated system was considered imperative,” Bradley responded. “If this door was made so that it had to be pressed to unlock, it must have been because the intended opener could only perform the simple action of pressing and was not capable of a more involved movement such as lifting and drawing a bolt. But why the hollow, cup-shaped knob? I give it up—we’ll find out, sooner or later.”

  He swung the lamp around, and his own shadow stooped over him like a gigantic djinn. There was a wall to the front, another to the rear, none opposite the door. On that side, where Hume was studying what stood before him, were two great cabinets with a sloping alleyway between them. The cabinets stretched from floor to roof; a tangle of heavily sheathed cables ran from their bases and turned fore and aft. Their sides were plain, unornamented, and totally devoid of meters, switches, controls or anything which would give a clue to their contents.

  Climbing into the alley, Bradley found that it ran a mere couple of feet before connecting with the main fore-and-aft catwalk. He estimated the center of the latter as being six feet from the door, which meant that it ran along the exact middle of the ship. Before him, on the side of the catwalk opposite the alley leading to the door, stood two more cabinets resembling the pair between which he had just passed; and these, too, had a tangle of cables sprouting from their bases. But between them was a gap of only a few inches, leaving him no room to go through.

  Raising his inspection lamp, he held it into the gap, and saw behind the two cabinets yet another one large enough to fill the entire space matching that behind the door. Not one was relieved by a dial or indicator of any sort; all were of the same dull, leaden metal as the shell of the ship. As he stared in puzzlement at the blank and baffling shape of his latest find, it emitted a hard, metallic click.

  “There you are!” he exclaimed. “That’s the relay assembly. It’s as big as a rural telephone exchange. Someone outside has activated a cell and caused a relay to snap over.”

  Rising on his toes, Hume looked through the gap at the big cabinet. “It’s a devil of a lot wider than the door,�
� he observed. “How the blazes did they get it in? And how’re we going to get it out?”

  “It went in piecemeal and was assembled on the spot, by the look of it. We’ll have to deal with it in the same way—strip it down and lug it out in bits.” Bradley moved his lamp, drew the other's attention to the catwalk, the walls and the roof. “More puzzles. Have you noticed a lack of evidence of assembly? Not a rivet, nor a bolt, not a sign of welding. The body and its compartments might all have been moulded in one piece—but it's incredible that any science could mould a metal object so large, heavy and complicated.”

  “Everything about it is incredible. No air system, for instance. No airlock, but a mere door. Dammit, I’d have thought that even Saturnian Whosits would have to breathe.” Hume turned, started along the catwalk towards the tail. “Most surprising thing of all is the absence of a welcoming committee. There’s nobody on board. I know it somehow, can feel it in my bones. This ship is as deserted as a skunk’s convention.”

  He sneezed violently, muttered something about the rock of ages crumbling to dust, and added, “It’s just as I told you—a cosmic Marie Celeste!"

  With his lamp held at shoulder level, Hume stopped suddenly, stared at the right-hand wall of the catwalk. His eyes were fixed on a spot a foot below the curve of the roof. He tapped the wall and listened. Then he turned around, examined the opposite wall, tapped that too and listened again.

  “Phil, I've got a notion that these walls are merely the sides of two more built-in cabinets. They don't sound particularly hollow. But these have got gadgets—look!”

  He drew Bradley’s attention to indicators on each wall. They were similar; both consisted of a rotating metal finger like the hour hand of a clock, inscribed around which was a circle marked with regular dots. Bradley counted the dots, found that each circle had forty-eight, and noted that on both walls the central hand pointed to the same dot. Since the dots were not numbered or marked in any way, and there was nothing to show which was first and which last, or which way round they were to be counted, it was impossible to tell how far the hands had progressed around their respective dials—even if that knowledge would have gained them anything.

  Reaching up, Bradley touched a hand, moved it easily to an adjacent dot. There was no response from any part of the dead ship. He looked at the opposite indicator, noted that it was still in its original position and moved that one also, with abortive effect. Gently he restored both to their former places.

  “Looks as if they’ve long ceased to function. They may be potent controls or mere recorders. We’ll have a poke at them some other time—come on."

  So saying, he stepped past the walls, propping himself on one against the sidewise tilt of the catwalk, and soon found himself in what both men instantly knew to be the ship’s engine-room. Despite the fact that neither had the remotest notion what an alien space-vessel’s engines might look like, the impression of bottled power was irresistible.

  The room held a tailward-running mass of one-inch tubes, slightly flared at the rear end where they sank into the perforations of the tail-plate, narrowed at the forward end where they fed into the swollen rim of a great metal tire or ring-dough-nut. In turn, the metal ring surrounded a small, compact array of apparatus from which many small conduits ran to the inside of the rim at points adjacent to those occupied by the driving-tubes. And at the front of this apparatus, sloping backward at a convenient angle, stood a control panel bearing an indicator matching the pair seen in the passage, with a number of small metal studs set in orderly rows. This indicator also had forty-eight points around its perimeter, and its hand was directed to exactly the same point as that chosen by the others. All the studs stood out boldly, none being depressed. Hume counted forty-eight rows of them with ten studs in each row,

  “How about jabbing some of them, Phil? ‘Let’s see whether we can get the hang of how this thing works.”

  “What and take off? Not on your sweet life! Who can say whether this gadget is really dead and done for, or whether it’s merely dormant? Lay off it, Ron —I don’t want you lighting a firecracker under my seat!” He swung the light round to the catwalk. “We’ll do things just as soon as we’ve a shrewd idea what we’re doing. Meanwhile we’ll go and have a look at the prow, eh?”

  “All right.” Hume left the control panel with itchy-fingered reluctance. Bradley was right, of course, but most people found it a temptation to discover what happened when one pressed a mysterious button. Musing, he bumped into his companion as Bradley suddenly stopped.

  “Those look like the cell-leads, Ron.” He pointed to raised veins of metal cunningly running over the shell from various points in its surface. His light moved, found more of them threading down the sides to somewhere behind the cabinets. “Twin lines carried in partially embedded conduits. But there’s still no sign of the actual cells. How the devil did they manage to build them so craftily into the hull? And how did they manage to sink the conduits into hard, tough metal?”

  “How? Who? What?” voiced Hume. “If questions were answers, we’d soon get educated in this tin can.”

  Puzzled, they moved on, past the entrance with its curved door and into the forward section. Here the catwalk ended in a chamber shaped like a sliced cone of which the ship’s nose was the apex while the floor was the slice. And this place was another museum of alien cabinets.

  Shuffling awkwardly along the slope of the floor, they surveyed the set-up in defeated silence. In orderly array, the cabinets stood in all shapes and sizes. Some were squat, some tall and narrow. All were firmly secured to the floor as if anchored against the ravages of time, the wrath of the cosmos and the inquisitive prying of men. All spewed cables of varying thickness and unknown purposes; all were blankly devoid of instruments, gadgets or anything that might provide a clue to their respective functions.

  “These people, observed Hume lugubriously, “had a veritable mania for boxing things. I’ll bet that even their houses were metal coffins without doors, windows or chimneys, and that they bought their beer in plain, unlabelled metal cartons.” He edged between Bradley and a tall, imperturbable sarcophagus, moved towards the nose. “Before we can get to the bottom of a darned thing we'll have to lug out this lot somehow or other, tear open the casings and dissect their contents." His voice trailed off, paused, then came back with excited animation. “But here's something a damnsight different, Phil!"

  Stepping carefully between cold slabs of apparatus Bradley looked at what the other had found. The object of interest squatted Buddha-like in a space of its own right behind the ship's nose. It certainly wasn't another cabinet; rather did it resemble a distorted version of an automotive pillar-box.

  It was a cylinder four feet high by eighteen inches in diameter, with a domed top in which several slots gaped like startled mouths all the way round and a few inches below the dome. Just inside the slots could be seen a mesh of fine, glistening wire. A third of the way down the body of the cylinder, spaced equidistantly around it, hung four many-jointed arms of metal, each ending in a ball the size of a door-knob. So long were the arms that the knobs just touched the floor.

  But the most curious feature of the whole contraption was in its base; for here the cylindrical trunk fitted snugly into a square platform on two sides of which were mounted tiny but efficient-looking tractors. They were neat caterpillars with ingenious, heavy-duty treads engaging four sprogged wheels.

  “This is quite a relief," commented Hume. “It breaks the monotony. This thing, you’ll note, is designed to move." He sniffed, appraised it closely. “I was beginning to think that the ship was a purposeful expression of extra-terrestrial cynicism. You know the poem?" He recited with gusto. “Lives of great men all remind us we must hasten up to town, taking care to leave behind us nothing that is not nailed down.”

  “It's nailed down like the rest of the gadgets. Or it's fastened in some effective, manner. Otherwise it would have been tossed all over the ship." Dropping to his knees, Bradley splashe
d light under the platform at the cylinder's base. “I thought as much—it's secured by heavy clips."

  Still clinging to his inspection lamp, he lay down on his side, his legs bent in the inadequate space, his eyes keenly examining the platform's underside. Presently he shoved an arm between the caterpillar tracks, pushed and pulled. His efforts were futile. He tried again, grunting with exertion.

  “It's no use, Ron. The clips are stiff and stuck. We’ll have to hammer them free.”

  Getting up from the floor, he noticed a small knob projecting from the cylinder’s midriff. He considered it gravely, then looked at Hume, who wriggled his fingers and grinned some encouragement. Frowning, he pressed the knob, half expecting it might be some sort of automatic release. The knob refused to sink in response to his pressure, so he tried to turn it, twisting it first one way and then the other, to no better effect. Finally he pulled it and, much to his surprise, it came out easily in his hand.

  He found himself holding a small plug a couple of inches long and the thickness of an ordinary pencil. His torch beamed into the little hole from which the plug had come, and revealed a deposit of greyish powder, blocking its other end. Thoughtfully, Bradley replaced the plug, glanced at his wrist-watch.

  “First thing in the morning we’ll drag out this contraption and see what makes it tick—if it still does tick. We’ll also get men on the job of unlimbering most of the other apparatus. How the blazes they’re going to manage it I don’t know, but the difficulties shouldn’t be beyond solution by a couple of good engineers. Careful dismemberment and intelligent deduction should enable us to gain essential knowledge of this ship, and the motives of the people who built it.”