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

by Matin Greenberg

  The girl climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “I can handle the truck.”

  They struggled with the men, got the inert figures into the truck.

  “Let’s make a good job,” said Searle.

  Swift caught his drift and grinned assent.

  They returned to the cellar. The fumes of the deadly gas had dispersed. There remained only an odor, something like that given off by orange blossoms. The dead form of Zin Zandor sprawled on the floor.

  They carried it to the truck. Then they loaded the stored treasure. Then they started the truck.

  “Go to the Star office,” Searle called to the girl. “We were the ones to blacken Swift’s character, and we might as well be the ones to laud him to the skies as the hero who saved the country.”

  The girl flashed him a smile.

  “Scientist Saves Day!” she said.

  “That reminds me, where do you suppose Ramsay is?”

  “Suicide,” said Searle. “We found him just before I met you last. He had blown his brains out and left a typical note— poor chap: ‘Reporter Reaps Ruin—Rum Ruins Ramsay!’ ”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “He was in on it from the beginning, of course?” asked Swift.

  “Yes. He was the contact man. He actually switched the cigarettes. He faked an attack upon himself to divert suspicion.”

  Swift sighed. “Man, but I feel sleepy!”

  “Effect of the drug. We’ve been living rapidly, perhaps more than a year in the last few hours. It’s gone out of our lives.”

  “A year in a day,” laughed the girl.

  Swift caught her eye.

  “Then I’ve known you a year, Louise,” he said.

  Her answering smile contained no trace of offense.

  “We can call it that, Art.”

  “A heck of a fast worker,” said Searle. “That goldarned scientist doesn’t need to have any one pep him up with a lot of extracts to make him work fast!”

  All three joined in a laugh as the truck with its strange load swung to a stop before the Star office, the biggest scoop in a half century delivered at the very door of the newspaper.

  THE MAN WITH

  PIN-POINT EYES

  CHAPTER 1

  Victim of a Vampire Mind

  If you are going to understand this story, you have got to visualize his eyes as I saw them there in that Mexicali dance hall.

  I have gazed into the eyes of a swaying rattlesnake. I have seen the eyes of a mountain lion reflect a phosphorescent green from the darkness beyond my camp fire. I have watched the eyes of a killer, crazed with the blood lust, his hand clawing for the holstered weapon at his side.

  But I have never seen eyes that affected me as did the eyes of the man who sought me out there in that place which is known as “Cantina Gold Dollar Bar.”

  His eyes were gray, but not the gray of the desert. It was as though his eyes had been washed with aluminium paint. They glittered with a metallic luster, and they seemed to be all the same color—if you could call it a color.

  When he got closer, I saw that the pupils were little pinpoints. You had to look close to see them. And the whites of the eyes had that same metallic luster, the same appearance of having been coated with aluminium paint.

  Those eyes gave me the creeps.

  He looked at me for three or four seconds and said nothing. I couldn’t help watching him, couldn’t keep from staring into those funny eyes. It was then I saw the pin-point pupils for the first time.

  They looked as though they were turning around and around rapidly, but they always kept the same size. I’ve seen the pupils in a parrot’s eyes do the same thing, only a parrot can change the size of its pupils. This man’s eyes were always the same, always black pin-points against aluminium.

  He got on my nerves.

  “Well,” I said, “spill it!”

  He didn’t speak right away, not even then, but his eyes kept boring into mine. When he finally spoke, his voice was the sort I’d expected, one of those deep, resonant voices.

  “I know all about you,” he said.

  I thought then he must be doped up. I’d seen those little pin-point pupils before when men were all hopped up. And I’d seen gun-play start awfully fast under those circumstances, so I began to humor him along.

  “Sure,” I said, “I could tell that as soon as I saw you. How about a drink?”

  He shook his head, not a shake back and forth the way most people would shake their heads, but a swift, single shake of his head.

  “No,” he said. “You don’t think I know about you. Let me tell you. Your name is Sidney Rane. You had two years of college in medical school. Then your health broke down and you came to the desert. You got a job as guard for the gold shipments out of Tucson, and you’ve been hanging around the Southwest ever since. You are reported to know more of the desert than any man living.”

  He stopped then, letting his words soak in.

  I glared at the pin-points.

  “Who the heck are you?” I asked, and my tone must have showed irritation.

  “Emilio Bender,” he said, and put out his hand.

  For a second or two I thought I wouldn’t take that hand, but I couldn’t keep from looking at those strange eyes of his, and finally I put out my hand and shook.

  “Now,” he said, “we’ll have a drink,” and "led the way to the bar. We drank.

  That was a hot afternoon. Flies droned about the place, or circled over the damp spots on the sticky bar. A perspiring bartender dished out the drinks as they were ordered. Half a dozen Mexicans lounged about. There were a couple of drab girls who got checks for promoting drinks. There was little tourist trade. Mostly the tourists went to the fancier places.

  Bender waited until I had finished with my glass and had half turned toward him. I knew that his pin-point eyes were staring fixedly at me, trying to catch mine.

  It irritated me, and I kept looking away. Finally the silence became awkward. I glanced up and his eyes locked with my gaze and held it.

  “Shoot your story,” I said, and knew my irritation was showing in my tone.

  He lowered his voice. v

  “I’m a hypnotist.”

  “Don’t try it on me,” I told him. “If you want some one to practice on, go hire a Mex.”

  He shook his head, that single swift shake of negation again.

  “Listen,” he said, and led me over to a dark corner of the bar. “You’ve had an education. You’re not a fool like some of these people. I’ve got something that bothers me and I want you to look at it.”

  He waited for me to say something. I didn’t say a word.

  “Hypnotism,” he went on, “is something they don’t know anything about; and medical science is afraid to try to learn anything about it. From the time when poor Mesmer sat his patients around a washtub, their feet in water and an iron ring for their hands, up to the time when science proclaimed that hynotism is nothing but suggestion, science hasn’t learned one thing about it.”

  He waited again.

  After another interval of silence he said abruptly, “Do you know anything about multiple personalities?”

  I’d read a little something, but I shook my head.

  “They’re encountered once in a while in dealing with a hypnotic subject. A woman will suddenly become some other personality. There’ll be times when one personality dominates, then times when the other personality is in control.”

  I nodded and let it go at that.

  As a matter of fact I’d heard of cases like that. Hypnotism would seem to bring out some hidden personality from the dark places of the mind. Science has recorded half a dozen instances.

  “I want you to come,” he said.

  I kept staring into those pin-point eyes.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “With me,” he said and started for the door.

  I waited a minute, and then curiosity or the effect of suggestion or something got the
best of me, and I followed him.

  By that time the afternoon crowd of tourists was flowing in a stream across the United States border. The A.B.W. Club was doing a rushing business. You could hear the whir of roulette wheels, the click of chips, the clink of glasses.

  I rather expected we’d turn toward the border, but we didn’t. We headed down the side street which runs into the native part of old Mexicali.

  It was a ’dobe house he stopped at, and it wasn’t much different from the other ’dobe houses around it.

  There were some dirty, half-naked children playing around in the yard. They all had drooling noses and black, questioning eyes. Their mouths were sticky from eating, and more dirt had gathered at the sticky places than on the rest of their faces.

  They looked at the man with pin-point eyes, and then turned and ran, just like a bunch of quail scurrying for cover when the shadow of a hawk flits across the ground.

  The house was just a square, boxlike affair With small windows and some green stuff growing in the front yard. There was a pool of surface water that smelled sour, some peppers hanging on the wall, and a door that was half open.

  Bender and I walked into the house.

  There were three people: an old, old woman who had a nose that looked like a withered potato, a fat woman who looked hostile, and a Mexican of the cholo or half-breed class. He had a low forehead, black eyes, thick lips and looked surly.

  The man with pin-point eyes walked in just as if he owned the place.

  “Sit down,” he said to me in Mexican.

  I sat down. It was a funny adventure and I wanted to see how it ended.

  The fat woman snapped a shrill comment in the language of her race.

  “Again!” she said. “Why don’t you leave us alone?”

  “Shut up,” said the man with her, in a surly voice. “He is a friend.”

  The old woman chattered a curse.

  I caught the eye of the fat woman. “Señora” I said to her, “if I intrude I will go. I beg of you a thousand pardons.” I spoke to her in Mexican Spanish, letting her know I was a friend.

  She smiled at me, after the manner of her race, one of the most friendly races on earth—when you take ’em right.

  “You are welcome,” she said. “It is the other. He has come from the Evil One.”

  “Shut up,” said the surly man again.

  The woman turned to me and shrugged her shoulders.

  “You see how it is, señor. He has sold his soul to the devil!”

  I said nothing. The man with pin-point eyes said nothing.

  It was warm there in the ’dobe house, close with the closeness which comes from many people sharing the same room on a hot day. Yet it was hotter outside, and the sun tortured the eyes. In the ’dobe it was dark and soothing.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Past Breathes

  I sat and waited. Every one seemed to be waiting for something. One of the children came in the door. I motioned him over and gave him half a dollar. His eyes grew wide, and he thanked me in an undertone, then scampered out.

  One by one, the other children came in and got half a dollar each. They muttered thanks. They didn’t ever look toward Emilio Bender, with the aluminium eyes.

  The splotch of bright sunlight from the west window moved slowly across the floor. No one said anything. They all sat and waited. I sat and waited. It was a queer sensation, like being plunged into the middle of a dream. It was all unreal.

  They seemed to be watching the Mexican.

  He sat in a chair, stolid, indifferent, after the manner of his race. He rolled a cigarette and smoked it, flipped the stub to the floor, looked around him with eyes that were black and inscrutable in their stolid, stupidity, then rolled another cigarette.

  The splotch of sunlight slid halfway across the floor.

  There was a rustle. The old woman was muttering something and making the sign of the Cross. The fat woman rocked back and forth. “He comes,” she said, and crossed herself again.

  The man with pin-point eyes was looking at the Mexican.

  I watched him, too.

  I could see something was happening. The Mexican began to sit a little more erect in his chair. His head came back, and the chest was thrust out. There was something military in his bearing. The surly air of stupidity slipped from him. The dark eyes flashed with spirit. The lines of his entire face became more sensitive, more intelligent. His nostrils dilated and he got to his feet.

  When he spoke his words were in a Spanish tongue, but different from the slurring idiom of the Mexican. I had to listen closely to follow what he said.

  “I tell you there is a fortune in gold there! Why don’t we start? Are you a coward?” he asked of the man with the aluminium-paint eyes.

  Emilio Bender smiled an affable, ingratiating smile.

  “We have to get our army together, my friend. It takes time.”

  The Mexican laughed, and there was in that laugh a note which no peon ever yet achieved. It was the laugh of a man who laughs at life.

  “Dios! Pablo Viscente de Moreno has to wait for an army to reclaim that which is his? Bah, you make me laugh! What are you, a soldier or a coward? Bah!”

  He spat out the words with a supreme contempt.

  “We need provisions,” said the man with pin-point eyes.

  “Provisions!” said the Mexican. “Did we wait for provisions when the brave general Don Diego de Vargas went into the desert to reconquer those who had massacred our countrymen? I can show you the spot, señor, where we camped by the foot of a great rock, and I watched while the brave general wrote upon that rock with the point of his knife.

  “I can tell you the words: ‘Aquí estaba el Gen. Do. de Vargas, quién conquistó a nuestra santa fé y a la real corona todo el Nuevo Mexico a su costa, año de 1692' ”

  I translated mentally, “Here was General Diego de Vargas, who conquered for our holy faith and the royal crown all of New Mexico at his own cost, in the year 1692.”

  The Mexican laughed again, that laugh that was a challenge to the universe:

  “It was by camp fire that he wrote that message, and I stood beside him as he wrote. That day we had killed many Indians. We carried all before us. Those were the days! And now you babble about armies and provisions. Lead up my horse! Damn it, I will start alone! Get me my blade and dagger, give me the gray horse. He is better in the desert than the black . . . Come, let us away! I tell you there is gold to be taken!”

  He whirled toward me and and transfixed me with an eye that was as coldly proud as the eye of an eagle. His head was back, his shoulders squared.

  The man with pin-point eyes got to his feet and made passes with his hands.

  “Not now,” he said soothingly. “Not now, Señor Don Pablo Viscente de Moreno; but shortly. We shall go back into the desert. To-night, by the light of the moon I will come again and we shall start. Peace. Sleep until to-night at eight. Then we shall start.”

  A cloud came over the proud eyes of the Mexican. The chest drooped backward, the shoulders hunched forward. The head lost its proud bearing.

  The old woman swayed backward and forward in her chair, chanting a prayer. The fat woman crossed herself repeatedly.

  Then the Mexican was no longer a proud soldier, but a cholo once more. He looked at me with dark eyes that were stolid in their animal stupidity.

  “It is hot,” he said, and rolled a cigarette.

  Emilio Bender took me by the arm.

  “We will go,” he said. “Later, we will return.” And he led me to the door.

  There was no word of farewell from the women. The man grunted the formula which the hospitality of his race demanded. The children scuttled from the front yard and hid in the greenery at the side of the house.

  I took a deep breath of the afternoon air."

  “What,” asked the man with pin-point eyes, “do you think of it?”

  I was careful of my words.

  “The rock he speaks of is known,” I said
. “It is a great sandstone cliff and is known as El Morro, or as ‘Inscription Rock.’ It was by the old trail of the Spaniards who sought the Seven Cities of Cibola. They camped there, and because the sandstone offered a fitting place to inscribe their names and the date of their passage, they carved inscriptions. The first starts with Don Juan de Onate in 1605. After that many expeditions left their marks.

  “There is not one person in a thousand who knows of this rock. But it is a great cliff that looks like a white castle. And there is a message from General Don Diego de Vargas upon it.”

  The man with the curious eyes took a deep breath.

  “Then,” he said, “we will start. I was not sure. They told me you could give me more information of the desert than any other man. I know now we will find gold.”

  “Wait a minute,” I protested. “Do you think this man is at all genuine, or is he a slicker trying to promote something? Or is he hypnotized?”

  Emilio Bender shrugged his shoulders.

  “You have seen,” he replied. “The man who talked to us is Pablo Viscente de Moreno, a soldier who marched with General Diego de Vargas when the country was yet young. I know not the history; but I gather from what the man has said on other occasions that there was a massacre, and General de Vargas was then reconquering the country.”

  “But,” I argued, “how could a man who marched in 1692 across the desert with General Diego de Vargas speak to us in a ’dobe house in Mexicali in 1930?”

  The man with pin-point eyes shrugged his shoulders.

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

  I made a gesture with my hands and answered him in Mexican: “Quién sabe?”

  He nodded. “All right,” he said; “that’s the answer.”

  We went back to the Cantina Gold Dollar Bar and had another drink.

  “We leave at eight o’clock,” he said, and fastened his metallic eyes upon mine.

  “What’s in it for me?” I asked.

  “Fifty-fifty,” he said.