The Science Fiction of Erle Stanley Gardner - The Human Zero Read online

  There was the sound of a siren from the outer street, the clang of a gong.

  “Firemen to clear the house,” said Sid.

  They stood there, shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek, letting the fresh morning breeze fan their faces. Out in the yard were hurrying shadows. Men came running to stations of vantage, carrying sawed-off shotguns. More cars sirened their way to the curb. Spectators gathered.

  Electric fans were used to clear the corridor of the gas. Men were brought up carrying bars and jimmies. They attacked the door. Captain Harder’s eyes were still disabled, as were the eyes of the others who had stood before that door.

  Sid Rodney touched the girl’s shoulder.

  “They’re getting ready to smash in the door. Can you see now?”

  She nodded.

  “I think they’ve got the hallway pretty well cleared of gas. Let’s go and see what happens.”

  She patted his arm.

  “Sid, you’re just like a big brother—some one to take care of me, some one to scold; but I like you a lot.”

  “Just as you would a brother?” he asked.

  “Just exactly.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and the disappointment of his voice was lost in the sound of splintering wood as the door swung back on its hinges.

  They stared into a great laboratory and experimenting room. It was a scene of havoc. Wreckage of bottles, equipment and apparatus was strewn about the room. It looked as though some one had taken an ax and ruthlessly smashed everything.

  Here, too, was another room without windows. Such light as there was in the room was artificial. The ventilation came through grilles which were barred with heavy iron. It was a room upon which it was impossible to spy.

  There was no trace of Albert Crome, the man whose malevolent face had been thrust through the aperture in the doorway.

  The police crowded into the room.

  Bottles of various acids had been smashed, and the pools upon the floor seethed and bubbled, gave forth acrid, throat-stinging fumes. In a cage by the door there were three white rats. These rats were scampering about, shrilling squeaky protests.

  There was no other sign of life left in that room, save the hulking shoulders of the policemen who now moved about in a dazed manner.

  Captain Harder’s voice bellowed instructions. He was blinded, but he was receiving reports from a detective who stood at his side and giving a rapid summary of conditions in the room.

  “He’s escaped some way. There’s a secret passage out of this room. Get the guards about the place to establish a deadline. Let no man through unless he has a pass signed by me. Those instructions are not to be varied or changed under any circumstances . . .”

  A man approached the officer.

  “You’re wanted on the telephone, Captain. I can plug in an extension here in the laboratory.”

  A servant, surly-faced, resentful, impassively placed a telephone extension in the hand of Captain Harder, plugged in the wires.

  The blinded officer raised the receiver to his ear.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  There came a rasping series of raucous notes, then the shrill cackle of metallic laughter and the click which announced the party at the other end of the line had hung up.

  Captain Harder started fiddling with the hook of the receiver in a frantic effort to get central.

  “Hello, hello. This is Captain Harder. There was a call just came through to me on this line. Trace it. Try and locate it . . . What’s that? No call? He said he was calling from a downtown drug store . . . All right.”

  The captain hung up the receiver.

  “Well, boys, I guess he’s given us the slip. That was his voice, all right. He was calling from a downtown drug store, he said. Told me to look in the northeast corner of the room and I’d find a secret passage leading down into his garage. Said he ran right out in his car without any trouble at all. He’s laughing at us.”

  One of the men picked his way through the wreckage of the room to the northeast corner. The others shuffled forward. Broken glass crunched under the soles of their feet as they moved.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Fantastic Secret

  The man who was bending over the wainscoting emitted a triumphant shout.

  “Here it is!”

  He gave a pull, and a section of the wall slid back, disclosing an oblong opening.

  Captain Harder was cursing as a detective led him toward this oblong.

  “I’m blinded . . . the outer guard let him slip through! What sort of boobs are we, anyhow? I thought I had this place guarded. Who was watching the outside? Herman, wasn’t it? Get me that guy. I’ve got things to say to him!”

  Men went down the steep flight of stairs which led from that secret exit, and came to the garage. Here were several cars, neatly lined up, ready for instant use, also several vacant spaces where additional cars could be kept.

  “Big enough!” grunted one of the men.

  Sid Rodney had an idea.

  “Look here, captain, it took time to smash up that laboratory.”

  Captain Harder was in no mood for theories.

  “Not so much! What if it did?”

  “Nothing. Only it took some little time. I don’t believe a man could have looked out of the door, recognized the police, turned loose the tear gas, and then smashed up this laboratory and still have time enough to make his escape by automobile from the garage.

  “I happened to be looking out of a window after that tear gas was released, and I saw your additional guards start to arrive . . .”

  Captain Harder interrupted. He was bellowing like a bull.

  “What a bunch of boobs we are!” he yelled at the men who had clustered around him in a circle. “He didn’t get away at all. He stayed behind to smash up the laboratory! Then he sneaked out and telephoned me from some place in the house. No wonder central couldn’t trace the call.

  “Look around, you guys, for another exit from this laboratory. And keep those electric fans going. I don’t trust this bird. He’s likely to flood a lot of poison gas through that ventilating system of his . . . I’m commencing to get so I can see a little bit. Be all right in a few minutes, I hope.”

  The men scattered, examining the wainscoting.

  “Here we are, captain!” called one of the men. “Take a look at this. Something here, right enough, but I can’t just figure how it works . . . Wait a minute. That’s it!”

  Something clicked as the officer stepped back. A section of the wainscoting swung open, revealing a passage the height of a man crawling on all fours.

  “Volunteers,” said Captain Harder. “Damn these eyes! I’m going myself.”

  And he approached the passageway.

  There was a stabbing burst of flame, the rattle of a machine gun, and a withering hail of bullets vomited from out of the passageway.

  Captain Harder staggered backward, his right arm dangling at his side. The man who had been next to him dropped to the floor, and it needed no second glance to tell that the man was dead, even before he hit the floor.

  The walls of the laboratory echoed to the crash of gunfire. Policemen, flinging themselves upon the floor, fired into the yawning darkness of that oblong hole in the wall. Here and there, riot guns belched their buckshot into the passageway.

  There was the sound of the mocking laughter, another spurt of machine gun fire, then silence.

  Captain Harder had his coat off, was groping with his left hand for the location of the two bullet holes in his right arm and shoulder.

  “Reckon I’m going to be an ambulance case, boys. Don’t risk anything in there. Try gas.”

  The captain turned, groped for the door, staggered, fell. Blood spurted from the upper wound, which had evidently severed an artery.

  Men grabbed him, carried him to the head of the stairs where ambulance men met them with a stretcher. Officers continued to keep up a fire upon the passageway. A man brought in a basket containing hand grenades and tear gas bombs.
The pin was pulled from a tear gas bomb. The hissing of the escaping gas sounded plainly while the men on the floor held their fire.

  The man who carried the gas bomb ran along the side of the wainscoting, flung the bomb into the opening. It hit with a thud, rolled over and over.

  There was no sound emanating from the passageway, save the faint hiss of the gas.

  “Give him a dose of it and see how he likes it,” said one of the men.

  As though to answer his question, from the very vicinity of the tear gas bomb, came a glittering succession of ruddy flashes, the rattle of a machine gun.

  One of the men who was on the floor gave a convulsive leap, then quivered and was still. A hail of bullets splintered through the glass equipment which had been broken and scattered about. An officer tried to roll out of the way. The stream of bullets overtook him. He jumped, twitched, shivered, and the deadly stream passed on.

  Sid Rodney grasped a hand grenade from the basket, pulled the pin, jumped to his feet.

  The machine gun whirled in his direction.

  “He’s got a gas mask!” yelled one of the men who was crouched behind the shelter of an overturned bench.

  Sid Rodney threw the grenade with all of the hurtling force of a professional baseball pitcher.

  The missile hit squarely in the center of the opening, thudded against something that emitted a yell of pain.

  The machine gun became silent, then stuttered into another burst of firing.

  A livid sheet of orange flame seared its way out into the room. The whole side of the place seemed to lift, then settle. A deafening report ripped out the glass of windows in one side of the house. Plaster dust sprayed the air.

  The oblong hole from which the machine gun had been coughing its message of death vanished into a tumbled mass of wreckage.

  Men coughed from the acrid powder fumes, the irritating plaster dust.

  “Believe that got him,” said one of the men, rolling out from the shelter, holding a riot gun at ready as he rushed toward the tumbled mass of wreckage.

  A human foot was protruding from between a couple of splintered two-by-fours. About it eddied wisps of smoke.

  The officer was joined by others. Hands pulled the rafters and studs to one side. The body of a mangled man came sliding out.

  From the blackness of that hole came the orange flicker of ruddy flame, the first faint cracklings of fire.

  The mangled body had on what was left of a gas mask. The torso was torn by the force of the explosion parts of a machine gun were buried in the quivering flesh. But the features could be recognized.

  Albert Crome, the crackbrained scientist, had gone to his doom.

  Men rushed up with fire-fighting apparatus. The flames were swiftly extinguished. The wreckage was cleared away. Men crawled into that little cubicle where the scientist had prepared a place of refuge.

  It was a little room, steel-lined, fitted with a desk, a table, and a cot. Also there was a telephone extension in the room, and an electrical transformer, wires from which ran to a boxlike affair, from the interior of which came a peculiar humming sound.

  “Leave it alone until the bombing squad gets here. They’ll know if it’s some sort of an infernal machine. In the meantime let’s get out of here.”

  The sergeant who gave the orders started pushing the men back.

  Even as he spoke, there was a glow of ruddy red light from the interior of the box-like affair into which the electric wires ran.

  “Better disconnect those wires,” called one of the men.

  The sergeant nodded, stepped forward, located the point of contact, reached to jerk one of the wires loose.

  “Look out, don’t short circuit ’em!”

  Sid Rodney had crawled back out of the passage. The sergeant was tugging at the wires. They came loose, touched. There was a flash from the interior of the box-like machine, a humming, and then a burst of flame that died away and left a dense white smoke trailing out in sizzling clouds.

  “You’ve short circuited the thing. That other wire must have been a ground and a button . . "

  But Sid Rodney was not listening.

  His eyes happened to have been upon the cage of white rats as the voice called its warning. Those rats were scampering about the cage in the hysteria of panic.

  Abruptly they ceased all motion, stood for a split fraction of a second as though they had been cast in porcelain. Then they shrank upon themselves.

  Sid Rodney screamed a warning.

  Men looked at him, followed the direction of his pointing forefingers, and saw an empty cage.

  “What is it?” asked a detective.

  Sid Rodney’s face was white, the eyes bulging.

  “The rats!”

  “They got away. Somebody turned ’em loose, or the explosion knocked the cage around or blew a door open,” said the officer. “Don’t worry about them.”

  “No, no. I saw them melt and disappear. They just dissolved into the atmosphere.”

  The officer snickered.

  “Don’t bother yourself about rats,” he said. “We’ve got work to do. Gotta find out what’s going on here, and we’ve gotta locate Dangerfield.”

  He turned away.

  Sid Rodney went over to the cage. He grasped the metal wires. They were so cold to his touch that the slight moisture on the tips of his fingers stuck to them.

  He jerked one hand, and a bit of skin from the tips of his fingers pulled away.

  He noticed a little pan of water which had been in the cage. It was filmed with ice. He touched the wires of the cage again. They were not so cold this time.

  The film of ice was dissolving from the pan of water in the cage.

  But there were no more white rats. They had disappeared, gone, utterly vanished.

  * * *

  Sid Rodney examined the cage. The door was tightly closed, held in place with a catch. There was no possible loophole of escape for those white rats. They had been caged, and the cage held them until, suddenly, they had gone into thin air.

  There was a touch on his shoulder.

  “What is it, Sid?”

  Sid Rodney had to lick his dry lips before he dared to trust his voice.

  “Look here, Ruby, did you ever hear of absolute zero?”

  She looked at him with a puzzled frown, eyes that were dark with concern.

  “Sid, are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes, yes! I’m talking about things scientific. Did you ever hear of absolute zero?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes, of course. I remember we had it in school. It’s the point at which there is absolutely no temperature. Negative two hundred and seventy-three degrees centigrade, isn’t it? Seems to me I had to remember a lot of stuff about it at one time. But what has it got to do with what’s been going on here?”

  “A lot,” said Sid Rodney. “Listen to this:

  “Dangerfield disappears. He’s located in a room. There’s no such thing as escape from that room. Yet, before our eyes— or, rather, before our ears—he vanishes. His watch is stopped. The ink in his fountain pen is frozen. His clothes remain behind.

  “All right, that’s an item for us to remember.

  “Then next come these white rats. I’m actually looking at them when they cease to move, dwindle in size and are gone, as though they’d been simply snuffed out of existence.

  “Now you can see the ice film still on the water there. You can see what the wires of the cage did to my fingers. Of course, it happened so quickly that these things didn’t get so awfully cold . . . but I’ve an idea we’ve seen a demonstration of absolute zero. And if we have, thank Heavens, that dastardly criminal is dead!”

  The girl looked at him, blinked her eyes, looked away, then back at him.

  “Sid,” she said, “you’re talking nonsense. There’s something wrong with you. You’re upset.”

  “Nothing of the sort! Just because it’s never been done, you think it can’t be done. Suppose, twenty yea
rs ago, some one had led you into a room and showed you a modem radio. You’d have sworn it was a fake because the thing was simply impossible. As it was, your mind was prepared for the radio and what it would do. You accepted it gradually, until it became a part of your everyday life.

  “Now, look at this thing scientifically.

  “We know that heat is merely the result of internal molecular motion. The more heat, the more motion. Therefore, the more heat, the more volume. For instance, a piece of red-hot metal takes up more space than a piece of ice-cold metal. Heat expands. Cold contracts.

  “Now, ever since these things began to be known, scientists have tried to determine what is known as absolute zero. It’s the place at which all molecular motion would cease. Then we begin to wonder what would happen to matter at that temperature.

  “It’s certain that the molecules themselves are composed of atoms, the atoms of electrons, that the amount of actual solid in any given bit of matter is negligible if we could lump it all together. It’s the motion of the atoms, electrons, and molecules that gives what we see as substance.

  “Now, we have only to stop that motion and matter would utterly disappear, as we are accustomed to see it.”

  The girl was interested, but failed to grasp the full import of what Rodney was telling her.

  “But when the body started to shrink it would generate a heat of its own,” she objected. “Push a gas into a smaller space and it gets hotter than it was. That temperature runs up fast. I remember having a man explain artificial refrigeration. He said . .

  “Of course,” interrupted Sid impatiently. “That’s elemental. And no one has ever reached an absolute zero as yet. But suppose one did? And remember this, all living matter is composed of cells.

  “Now, this man hasn’t made inanimate matter disappear. But he seems to have worked out some method, perhaps by a radio wave or some etheric disturbance, by which certain specially prepared bodies vanish into thin air, leaving behind very low temperatures.