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

by Matin Greenberg

  The plane settled, turned in a spiral, circled the field, and then came on in for an easy landing. A tawny native ran out to grasp the wing tip.

  As he saw the occupants of the plane emerge into the moonlight, his features underwent a spasm of surprise. Then they settled into emotionless impassivity. He made no comment in answer to Phil’s question in English, or to Arthur Forbes’s sharp comment in the native tongue.

  They lifted the still slumbering figure, carried her to the dark house. Through a back entrance they slipped and encountered a pacing figure, haggard of eye, blue of lip, pale of skin.

  Arthur Forbes explained.

  Colonel Crayson heard him in utter silence, then turned to Audrey Kent.

  “Can you tell how you happened to arrive at that place?”

  She shook her head, slowly, thoughtfully.

  “I guess it’s just the same story of being drugged and kidnaped.”

  “Humph!” snorted the colonel. “We’ll take it up with the authorities.”

  “The thing that can’t help but impress you,” went on the girl, “is their utter sincerity. The old woman I’m not so sure about. She’s just a cracked old witch. But the rest are devoting their lives to a cause. Aside from the living exile of it, they treated me as a queen. Of course, they were grooming me, trying to get me to understand their life work, their ambitions, and there was the wedding that was to come—”

  She broke off and shuddered.

  “I think, Colonel,” she went on, “it’d be better not to let Jean know anything. Just let her sleep it off and ask no questions.”

  The colonel fell to pacing the floor again, but it seemed that years had fallen from his shoulders. His lips were colored again, his eyes more clear.

  “This is India,” he said at length.

  “And those people are sincere,” muttered the girl. “After all, who can say there’s not something in their work?”

  And the thoughts of all three turned to that last sight they had had of the man-ape, standing with head bowed in sorrow, while about him raged the boiling turmoil of maddened priests.

  The rays of morning light shrouded the room on a soft, gray cloak. From without came the long-drawn drone of a high flying motor.

  “Murasingh!” muttered Phil.

  Colonel Crayson went to his desk, buckled on a heavy service revolver.

  “We’ll meet him,” he said simply, but his eyes were pools of glassy menace.

  They stepped out into the freshness of the dawn.

  “Do you suppose there’s any possibility he thinks we’re shot down?” asked Forbes.

  But Phil with puckered brows was watching the golden ribbons of streaming dawn, and the little man speck that was circling high overhead.

  The plane circled, swung, hung poised.

  The rim of golden sun that slipped over the eastern hills sent soft rays bathing the circling plane.

  “I wonder—” began the girl, but broke off as the plane dipped forward, slowly circled down in a spiral that became tighter and tighter.

  Phil knew, tried to pull the girl away. But she remained, calm, steady, watching the plane spinning down.

  It crashed half a mile away. Murasingh was a gentleman in that. He did not bring the shock of his tragic death home too closely to the Crayson house.

  They persuaded the girl to go back. The men went to the plane. That which had been Murasingh was a huddled bundle of shapeless flesh. But the paper which he had pasted to the instrument board had survived the crash. Upon it appeared a brief message:

  For the good of the cause.

  Murasingh, high priest of the secret cult of Hanuman, leader in the two-thousand-year long experiment to return an ape to human status, had offered his life in payment of his crimes against the British law, a mute plea not to let his acts bring disaster on the great experiment he held higher than life itself.

  Phil turned back to the house, his soul sickened, face pale. The words of the girl came to him. “They’re so utterly sincere.”

  At the entrance he met Jean Crayson, with sleep-dilated eyes.

  “Something crashed? I was asleep and I felt the earth jar. It shook the house. In some manner I seem to have had a horrible nightmare, and—oh, who left me this?”

  She looked with uncomprehending eyes at the golden tapestry that shrouded her limbs, then sank into a chair.

  “A funny dream,” she said, and slipped off to sleep.

  Phil gazed down at her face, noticed the peculiar contour of the eyes. After all, there was a something about them that reminded him faintly of the round eyes of the man-ape.

  He reached in his pocket, pulled out the diamond ring with the strange characters engraved in its golden circlet.

  Moved by some strange impulse, he stooped and pressed the ring upon the sleep-limpened fingers of the girl’s left hand. Then he tiptoed from the room.

  NEW WORLDS

  CHAPTER 1

  Flood!

  Phil Bregg was a stranger in the city, and felt the fact to the very utmost. He was heart-heavy and homesick, and he was sick of the rain. It had started the night before. On the Western cattle ranges he had seen occasional cloudbursts; never such a rain, however, as was sheeting down in the city. Being a stranger, he failed to realize that the rain was a phenomenal downpour. He took it much for granted, even when he had found the street curb-full.

  Now, swaying in the subway as the train lurched over the rails, he studied those opposite him—the steaming garments, the soggy feet. It was early, too early for the rush hour. He shuddered.

  Life in the big city was all right for those who wanted it, not for him. He idly noticed the headlines of a newspaper in the hands of a reader opposite him. “Unprecedented Flood Conditions Sweep Country.”

  Phil Bregg yawned. Then his eye caught a subheadline. “Arizona Drenched!”

  An involuntary exclamation came from Phil’s lips. The man who held the newspaper looked up, caught Phil’s eye on the sheet, and fastened him with a look of cold disapproval. He was the type of man, Phil noticed, who was particularly good at eying people with disapproval. Phil, with the ready friendliness of the open spaces, sought to explain matters.

  “Arizona’s my state,” he said. “I seen it was raining there, and that’s sure some news.”

  In his own state the remark would have brought forth a smile, a greeting, perhaps a handshake. On the New York subway it merely caused people to stare at him with cold, impersonal curiosity. The man who held the paper folded it so Phil couldn’t see the headlines. No one said anything.

  Phil felt a red flush mounting under the bronzed skin. His big hands felt awkward and ill at ease. He seemed all hands and feet, felt ashamed, yet realized bitterly that it was these others who should feel ashamed.

  A hand touched his sleeve. He looked down and to one side. A girl was smiling up at him.

  “I spent a winter in Arizona,” she said, “and I know just how you must feel. It’s funny it’s raining there. Why, down in Tucson—”

  Nothing in his life had ever felt quite so good to Phil as the touch of that hand, the sound of the words, the friendliness in her eyes^ And yet he realized she was violating the customs of the city simply to make him feel a little less hurt, that she had realized and understood.

  “Tucson, ma’am! You know the place? Why—”

  And the car suddenly, abruptly lurched to a dead stop.

  Phil looked at the black walls of the subway and forgot the words that were on his tongue. He felt very much buried alive. His wet garments were clammy. There was the dank drip of death in the air.

  “Ugh!” he said.

  The girl’s form was tense, she was staring at the windows.

  There was a red light ahead, between the rails. Now a man came running forward. The motorman lowered a glass. There was a jumble of words. Out of the darkness ahead came the

  tail end of another subway train, backing up.

  Their own car lurched into motion, started backing.
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  The girl gave an exclamation.

  “Trouble ahead. I’ll be late at the office*”

  But the car continued its reverse, gathering speed. And the train ahead was also reversing.

  “What’s the trouble?” yelled a man in the back of the car, but the question was unanswered.

  An air whistle screamed a warning signal at intermittent intervals. There came a burst of light, and the car stopped.

  A guard bellowed orders.

  “Everybody’ll have to get off here and go to the surface. Take surface transportation to your destination. There’s trouble ahead in the subway!”

  There was a muttered chorus of protest. Some man was demanding the return of his fare. Others were clamoring for explanations.

  “Hurry!” bawled the guard. “There’s water in the subway!”

  Phil Bregg didn’t know cities, but he knew men, and he knew emergencies. He recognized an undertone of something that was akin to panic in the tones of the guard’s voice.

  “Hurry,” he said. “It sounds serious.” And he gripped the arm of the young lady who had been in Tucson.

  She let him make a way for her through the crowd, swirled up the stairs in the midst of a confused boiling mass of jabbering people.

  They emerged into a drab, wet daylight, and were greeted by water. The street was filled from curb to curb. Taxicabs were grinding forward slowly. Here and there cars were stalled. People were standing open-mouthed, up to their ankles in water, watching the street. Here and there one more determined than the rest was wading knee deep across from curb to curb.

  The rain was sheeting down from a leaden sky without interruption or cessation.

  Phil grinned.

  “I’ve seen cloudbursts in Arizona,” he said, “and a fellow’s saddle can get awfully wet at times, but I don’t think I’ve ever been wetter in my life.”

  The girl’s face was puckered with concern.

  “This is serious,” she said, “and the water seems to be rising. There’s quite a current you can feel.”

  Phil pointed to some of the towering skyscrapers that stretched upward until their towers were lost in the moisture.

  “Well there seems to be lots of room to climb!”

  She nodded.

  “Let’s get inside. I want to telephone the office. But I guess this is one day I can be late without any one calling me on the carpet about it. I’m due there at a little before eight.”

  They climbed marble stairs, pushing their way through a crowd of people who were taking refuge there from the water, people who were staring, silent, wet, looking very much like sheep huddled on a small island in the midst of a rising river.

  There was a narrow lane left for occupants of the building to push their way up through the huddled figures, and Phil Bregg’s broad shoulders pushed a way for the girl through this lane.

  They entered a foyer which looked very normal and workaday. A cigar stand was in one comer. A uniformed elevator starter was starting the elevators. A long board of colored lights marked the progress of the cages as they shot up and down.

  “Sorry,” said a voice; “no loitering in the foyer. If you’ve got business, go on up.”

  “I want a telephone,” said the girl.

  The man in uniform made a motion with a gloved hand.

  “Sorry, but there’s an emergency. No loitering in the foyer. Those are orders.”

  He turned away to speak to a frightened-faced woman who was holding a whimpering child in her arms.

  “Sorry, but you can’t stay here . . .”

  And the words were lost in the noise that was made by two dozen people storming into the entrance at once. For the water, in place of streaming silently past the building in a rising sheet, had suddenly reared the crest of a miniature wave, and rose a good eighteen inches at once.

  Phil pushed the girl toward an elevator.

  “You can get a telephone in an office upstairs,” he said. “There’s going to be a riot here.”

  The girl allowed herself to be pushed into the elevator. The door clanged, and the cage shot upward.

  “There must be a broken dam somewhere,” explained the girl. “There couldn’t be this much water collected from the rain. And the drains are probably clogged. Heavens, I hate to think of the people that must be crowded in the subway! I hope the water doesn’t get any higher!”

  The elevator was whisking upward.

  “Express to the thirtieth floor,” said the operator.

  “Thirtieth,” said the girl.

  The cage swung to a sickening stop, a door opened, and, abruptly, the lights went out. The elevator operator worked the handle of the door, swung the elevator control from side to side.

  “Lucky you called,” he grinned. “Power’s off.”

  Phil Bregg instinctively took the arm of the girl with the manner of a protector. “Let’s get to a telephone,” he said. “Maybe your office won’t keep open, after all.”

  The girl looked around her at the marble corridor, lined with doors.

  “Here’s an insurance office,” she said in a tone that strove to be cheerful and matter of fact. “They’ll have a telephone.”

  She tried the door, it was locked. . . .

  They walked down the corridor, trying doors. Here and there a man ran past them. From the street below sounded a vague rumbling, rushing noise. It was so like the roar of traffic that neither one paid any attention to it for a while.

  They finally found an open office. The place was deserted.

  The girl went to the telephone, tried it,' muttered an exclamation.

  “The line’s dead,” she explained.

  Through the windows the sound of the roar became louder. There was a shrill note underlying it, a wailing ululation of sound that was like a composite scream.

  “Let’s look out,” she said. “It sounds like traffic has resumed. I can get a cab.”

  She walked to one of the front windows of the deserted office, peered out, gave a little scream and jumped back, hand to her throat.

  “What is it? You’re not hurt?” said Phil Bregg.

  She motioned toward the window.

  “Look!”

  He pressed his face to the glass, looked down.

  The buildings formed a concrete canon, irregular in its skyline, broken here and there by much lower buildings. Phil, unaccustomed to these canons of steel and concrete, could see nothing wrong for a second or two until his eyes focused through the dampened surface of the window upon the street below, a threadlike thoroughfare along which black objects were moving.

  At first he thought traffic had started again. Then he saw it was sweeping in one direction, and in one direction alone. Next he observed that traffic wasn’t moving of its own accord. A sullen, roaring stream of water was rushing in a black torrent through the street, sweeping automobiles along, sending black specks which were people swirling and spinning, sweeping them onward.

  Here and there a man was swimming, trying vainly to stem the tide. A man clutched at an open window in one of the buildings as he was swept by, tried to crawl in. He was painfully slow and deliberate about it. He seemed to be hardly moving. Phil wanted to shout at him to wake up.

  Then he saw that it was the power of the current which was pulling the man back into the stream. The muscles fought against the grip of the torrent, and the man dragged himself in the window.

  Another man caught the side of the same window, tried to pull himself in. The water dragged him back, broke loose his handhold, sucked him into the current once more and whisked him off.

  Phil located the source of the roaring sound. The water was rushing against the comers of the buildings, piling up in frothy masses of tumbled foam, just as water rushes over a submerged rock in a mountain torrent.

  Phil turned back to the girl, grinned.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s a long ways below us. Let’s walk up to the top floor and look over the city. Maybe we can see where the water’s coming from.
”

  “It’s fifteen stories up,” said the girl.

  Phil grinned.

  “It’ll be good exercise. Let’s try it.”

  She nodded, white-faced, tense. They started climbing. Somewhere, in the big office building, a girl was having hysterics, and the sound of her screams echoed from the mahogany doors and the marble facings of the hall. Every once in a while some one would run down a corridor shouting.

  They stopped twice to rest, then dragged themselves up to the last floor.

  “There’s a tower,” said the girl. “Let’s see if it’s open.”

  They found a winding staircase, continued to climb, came to a door that was open. Rain was whipping through the oblong of the opening, and water was trickling down the stairs, forming in little pools.

  “Looks like somebody’s left the door open,” grinned Phil. “Raised in a bam, maybe.”

  He took her elbow, and they fought their way through the doorway. As they did so, the big skyscraper shivered a little, as though a restless tremor had run through the steel framework. The tower seemed to swing slightly, oscillate.

  “Must be moving in the wind,” said Phil.

  They pushed against the wind to the edge of the building.

  The rain stung their faces, then, as the wind let up for a moment, ceased to beat against them.

  They looked down.

  The water was hissing along the street now. There were no more automobiles being swept along on the crest of the tide. Phil had an idea the stream was now too deep for automobiles.

  But there were innumerable black dots that were being swirled past, and those black dots were screaming, shouting, twisting, turning, vanishing from sight. The street comer was a vast whirlpool into the vortex of which men were being drawn like straws.

  The rain ceased abruptly.

  Drifting cloud scud overhead broke for an instant, and there was just a glimpse of sunshine.