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

by Matin Greenberg

  She made toward the door, moving so fast that she was as a streak of whizzing speed, and then something clicked in Swift’s brain. Just as he was trying with leaden feet to move and intercept her, he suddenly saw her moving at normal speed, her hand on the door-knob.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be going,” she said.

  Swift wondered if the effect of the extract had worn off so quickly.

  “Just a moment,” he said, sparring for time.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “You felt the effect of the extract?” he wanted to know, curious as to her feelings.

  “Just a slight dizziness. When does it take effect? It seemed to make you almost unconscious. You must have sat motionless for nearly five minutes. I talked to you and you didn’t answer. You seemed sick. I was alarmed.”

  A sudden explanation flashed upon Art Swift. He looked at the clock. It was three seconds past two fifteen. The second hand seemed to have stopped in its motion. But there was a low-pitched sound coming from the clock, a long-drawn rasping of some sort of slow-moving mechanism.

  He listened, attentively.

  “T . . . O . . . C;. . . K,” said the clock, and the second hand moved an infinitesimal fraction of an inch of crawling motion.

  He pointed toward the clock.

  “Can’t you see? You’re under the influence of the extract now.”

  She regarded him with startled eyes, then moved toward the clock.

  As she walked, Art watched her clothing. It was flattened against her figure as though pressed by some invisible hand.

  Then he remembered a strange, whizzing sound that had been in his ears as he had moved.

  The girl modestly pulled at her skirt. It remained plastered against her limbs.

  Swift laughed.

  “The atmospheric pressure remains the same,” he said. “You are moving just one hundred times more rapidly than normal. Naturally, your speed through the atmosphere forces your clothing against you. There’s no use struggling with it. You’d have to remain still for some apparently perceptible interval to give the air currents a chance to adjust themselves.”

  The girl laughed, a nervous, throaty laugh.

  Swift found himself keenly interested in the various physical phenomena which surrounded them.

  “Do you mean to say we’ve speeded up our lives so we live fifty minutes while that second hand clacks through thirty seconds?”

  He nodded.

  “And when I’m in the room,” said the girl, “and take the drug, then what do I do?”

  Of a sudden, Art Swift knew exactly what she was to do.

  “Simple,” he said. “Train yourself to sit absolutely still. Remain motionless with your body for minutes on end. Move only your right arm. That will enable you to put the poisoned cigarette in the hand of the victim without being detected. The motion of the hand will be far too swift for ordinary senses to detect. If any one should happen to be looking directly at you he will see your right hand apparently disappear. So be careful not to make the motion until every one is looking in some other direction.”

  “But what if they should flash me a quick glance?”

  “Quick?” He laughed. “The quickest glance they could flash you would be so slow that you would see their eyeballs move as though by slow clockwork.”

  “And the cigarette?”

  “Will have the extreme end of it filled with the poison. The victim inhales it fully into his lungs and dies. The other occupants of the room sense only the greatly diluted odor of the poison gas as a sickening sweet smell.”

  “Goodness!” she exclaimed. Then, her eyes filling with some sort of emotion he could not fathom: “I must be going.”

  She moved toward the outer door.

  “I’ll see you to the elevator,” said Swift, and opened the door, taking care to slip a metallic box of the capsules into his hip pocket.

  The outer office looked just as it had when Swift had first seen it. The furniture, the windows, the rugs. But as he opened the door he seemed pulling against a great weight, and he noticed the sudden vacuum swirl the rugs into bulging ripples of slow motion.

  He understood then what he had done. He had jerked that door open with a motion one hundred times as swift as the ordinary opening of a door. It had disturbed the atmospheric equilibrium of the room.

  Alarmed, he glanced at the stenographer to see if she had noticed it, to see if she would sense anything unusual in a strange man’s emerging from the private office, escorting a young woman to the door.

  As he looked, she was about to glance up from her typewriter. She was striking the letters of the machine, glancing toward the door. Swift; pressed the arm of the girl.

  “Notice the mechanics of alarm,” he said.

  They watched.

  Slowly, the girl’s eyes swung upward. The lips sagged open in what was doubtless to be a gasp, but it was so ludicrously slow that they both laughed. The right hand pressed down on one of the keys of the typewriter. They saw the type bar slowly move upward to strike the paper.

  The bar struck the paper, remained pressed against it for what seemed seconds, then slowly began to drop back. The carriage started a sluggish movement to make way for the next letter which was already being pressed, and still the girl’s eyes had not fully raised to the two figures who were watching her.

  “Let’s move and see if she can follow us,” said Swift.

  He grabbed the girl’s arm, darted to one side.

  The typist’s eyes were raised now, but they stared in wide-eyed, frozen alarm at the place where they had been and not at the place where they were.

  CHAPTER 4

  Outlawed from Mankind

  They darted to the outer door, tugged it open, slipped into the outer corridor.

  “I didn’t get your name,” said Swift.

  “Louise Folsom.”

  “You’re the Washington agent?”

  “Er—yes, the Washington agent.”

  She jabbed a forefinger to the button of the elevator.

  They waited for a short time in silence; then, suddenly, Swift burst out laughing.

  “Foolish. You can’t get an elevator.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  He pointed to the glass door through which could be seen the cables controlling the cages. The strands were crawling at such a slow rate it seemed the cable was hardly moving.

  “We’re speeded up too fast. You’ll have to wait for what’ll seem a very long time, or else take the stairs.”

  “Nine flights?”

  “Nine flights.”

  “How long will it seem to me if I go down on the elevator?” “Nearly ten minutes.”

  She paused, uncertain.

  “I rather think I’ll wait. Nine flights is a long way.”

  This gave Swift the opportunity he was looking for.

  “All right. But be careful when you get in the cage. Move so slowly that you seem to be fairly crawling. Try to take eight or ten seconds to get into the elevator. Don’t try talking with anybody until the effect of the extract wears off. You’ve got your box?”

  She nodded.

  Swift turned and left her, walking down the corridor.

  He noticed a red light flash on over the elevator door, saw the bottom of one of the cages come creeping into view and slowly crawl to position before the door. This was the break for which he had been waiting, and, as the girl concentrated her attention on the elevator, Swift darted for the stairs.

  He went down the nine flights with such speed that his coat streamed straight out behind him. He beat the elevator to the ground floor and was waiting when the door opened and the girl came out.

  She had forgotten his admonition, and was rushing at a rate of speed a full hundred times faster than that of the average pedestrian in a hurry. Open-mouthed spectators stood frozen in motionless surprise as she whizzed by them. Then, as she gained the street, they seemed not to see her at all, so rapidly did she move.

  Swift followe
d her, and emerged from the office building into a strange world.

  Automobiles barely crept along the street. Even the noise and confusion of the city had been toned down until it sounded as a hollow boom of slow noise, low-pitched, almost inaudible. Hurrying pedestrians seemed standing upon one leg, their feet almost motionless. Their swinging arms were held at grotesque postures. A newsboy crying his wares stood for seeming minutes with his mouth open, a queer, rattling sound slowly emerging from the throat. A paper being waved in front of a passing pedestrian seemed utterly motionless; one comer, fluttering in the wind which whipped down the street, was barely moving.

  Swift followed the girl, keeping well behind her, swinging his way between other pedestrians as though* they had been inanimate figures, bunching on the sidewalks for purposes of ornamentation.

  No use to take a car or cab. Walking at a rate of speed that seemed painfully slow, the atmosphere whipped his garments until it seemed they would be torn to ribbons. The girl’s short skirt streamed and fluttered, flapped and blew, whipped and skirled. Her hair came out from under her hat and streamed back of her head. She was exerting her every ounce of strength to fight against the wind caused by her rapid progress through the air.

  Swift figured they were walking at a rate of speed that would ordinarily have taken them two miles an hour. Now, multiplied a hundredfold, that speed of two hundred miles an hour caused the terrific rush of air to threaten to tear their clothes off their backs.

  He felt his coat whip and slat into a ripping tear. He slowed his speed still further, noticed that the girl’s skirt was coming off, saw her stop to adjust it. Yet it seemed several long minutes before it ceased its fluttering.

  During all of this time the street traffic seemed barely crawling along; the wheels of the automobiles hardly moved in their slow revolutions.

  The girl resumed her pace. She was walking more slowly now. A man standing at the window of a store, apparently engrossed in the display within, seemed vaguely familiar to Swift. As he glanced for a second look, he saw the girl was approaching him. She put her hand on his arm.

  The man started what was evidently intended to be a swift whirl. To Art Swift it seemed to be but a slow motion picture of a slow motion picture. After an interval of what seemed seconds he had his eyes telling more than his ears, for the two were gazing at each other* and the man was Nick Searle of the Star.

  The girl was talking. Swift could see her chin move, see the lips opening and closing. Searle was trying to talk, but the slow, drawling sounds which issued from his leisurely lips were nothing the girl could wait for. Her eagerness to impart her information made her pour out a torrent of sound at top speed.

  Swift wondered how much longer the drug would act, and, even as he wondered, saw the phenomenon happen before his eyes. The girl suddenly became a sluggish replica of her former self. She had started a gesture with her right hand. That gesture slowed in its motion until the hand barely crawled toward the lapel of Searle’s coat.

  Swift knew then that the drug had worn off. He remembered also that he had taken his drug just a second after the girl had taken hers. That would give him the advantage.

  He moved forward, walking as swiftly as he dared, the wind whipping at his garments.

  So rapidly did he move that the eyes of the two never faltered from each other. Not by so much as a glance did they see this man who was circling them at a rate of speed which made him almost invisible.

  There was a pillar of concrete supporting an alcove, almost directly behind Searle, and Art Swift made for this place of concealment. He wanted to hear what the girl was saying, and he wanted to warp Searle that the girl was in reality one of the gang of crooks that bid fair to terrorize the country.

  He leaned forward. The girl was speaking. Her slow words drawled with such exasperating languor that it seemed to take fully half a minute to drag out a word.

  The traffic continued to crawl. Noises were as a low-pitched clack of sound, overlapping at times, but hardly audible. And then, right in the middle of a sentence, Swift’s ears snapped back to normal. There was a brief period of dizziness as his functions returned to normalcy.

  * * *

  Of a sudden the traffic resumed its customary rumbling roar and shot past the store. The girl’s voice was shrill with hysteria. The words ceased to drawl, but beat upon Swift’s ears as the patter of a torrential rain on a tin roof.

  “I have some of the drug. He never questioned my identity at all.”

  Searle’s voice was also rapid, fierce in its intensity.

  “Could you recognize this man?”

  “Of course.”

  Searle pulled a photograph from his pocket.

  Art Swift, crouched behind the pillar, cast about for some way by which he could warn Searle of the identity of the girl, of the danger of being trapped. But the reporter handed her the photograph.

  “Why, yes. It’s this man, the third from the end.”

  “Great Scott! Why, that’s Art Swift!”

  “I can’t help who it is. It’s the man that gave his name as Dr. Zean.”

  Swift’s mind whirled. What was this all about? He started to step forward.

  “Then we’ll have to kill him on sight,” snapped Searle’s voice. “He knows too damn much!”

  Swift sank back against the support of the cold concrete.

  Searle, then, was the real arch-villain in the whole affair! He had been the one to bring about the deaths of the millionaires. He had been the one to send the letters to the unfortunate men who had attracted his attention.

  As Swift turned this matter over in his mind, Searle and the girl moved away.

  Swift waited a few minutes, thinking, then moved out into the stream of pedestrians. A chance fragment of a passing man’s conversation came to his ears.

  “Something whizzed right in between us. It must have been a cannon ball or something. It went so fast I could feel the air tugging at my clothes, but I couldn’t see a damned thing.

  I’d have thought I was dreaming or,drunk, but Roberts felt the same sort of a sensation.”

  Swift moved away. His senses were reeling. He looked at his watch. It was exactly sixteen minutes past two o’clock. All of this frantic action had taken place in just about a minute.

  He thought of the dead doctor, the nurse imprisoned in the closet. He must arrange for the arrest of the nurse, and he must arrange to have Searle arrested.

  A sudden drowsiness overtook him. He went to his room in the hotel, telephoned police headquarters, and asked that a detective be sent out to interview him. Then he fell asleep.

  The newsboys were crying “Extra!” on the street when he awoke, and some one was pounding on his door. Swift turned the key, instinctively knew the square-toed man who hulked on the threshold was a detective.

  “You had a tip an’ wanted a man from headquarters?” asked the man.

  “Yes,” said Swift. “Come in.”

  The detective entered the room, whirled, swung out a hand. By sheer luck Swift was able to dodge that grasping hand.

  “What—” Art began, dodging another fist, and then the detective was on him in a lunging attack.

  The very bulk of the man made him clumsy. Yet his charge knocked Swift to a corner. He saw it all, then. This could be no detective, but an agent of the crime ring, sent out to kill him. Fear and desperation gave him strength.

  The other was pulling a revolver from his hip. Swift swung a chair. There was the crashing of wood as the rungs slivered, and then Swift saw the man staggering back, slumping to the floor.

  Swift ran from the room to the foot of the stairs. A newsboy thrust out an extra of the Star. Swift grabbed it, and, to his horror, saw his own features staring forth at him, just underneath the words:

  KILL THIS MAN ON SIGHT!

  Then followed an article about the identification of Art Swift as the arch-killer, the greatest blackmailer, the scientific wonder who had used his genius to undermine civilization.


  Swift stared at it, stupefied. Was it possible Searle was so daring as to hope he could prevent discovery by making a counter-accusation? The idea had merits, particularly as the Star argued that the scientific knowledge of the criminal made him immune to arrest and necessitated his being shot as a mad dog would be dealt with.

  Swift read the article. To his surprise, it exposed the secret of the extract which speeded up the human metabolism to such an extent that life was lived a hundred times more rapidly than was possible under normal conditions.

  The article claimed that Searle had solved the mystery with the aid of a female assistant who had tricked the arch-criminal into explaining the details of the crime to her.

  That might have been correct. The girl might have been an assistant. Then Searle would not be the real criminal, but just what he appeared, a reporter. Yet, suppose this was merely a trick? Suppose Searle was so clever he had planned for this all along?

  Swift wanted to think it over. He clutched the newspaper to him, started for a taxicab. There was the crash of glass, a bellow of rage, the shrill of a police whistle.

  The detective had smashed out the glass of the hotel window, was frantically blowing his police whistle. As men looked up in startled surprise, the detective opened fire.

  Swift ducked behind a parked car. The bullets from the detective’s gun crashed into the metal, spattered the glass from the door windows, but failed to find their real mark.

  Swift realized, however, he was trapped. It would be all right if he had a chance to tell his story. But how about the hysteria of the police? Would they get rabid and shoot on sight as the Star requested them?

  He thought then of the box he had in his pocket, the rubber capsules that would speed up his body so that he could escape. He slipped the cover from the box.

  And just then a burly form catapulted around the corner of the car. Swift had only time to thrust the box back in his pocket. The cover clattered to the sidewalk. A great blue-coated figure swung a club. Swift tried to dodge, but to no avail. He felt the impact, felt a great wave of nausea and engulfing blackness. Dimly, he realized that the thing that smacked him between the shoulders was the cold pavement. He felt the bite of handcuffs at his wrists, and then lost all consciousness.