The Human Zero. The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner

Chapter 1 The Invisible Death

Of the five men who sat in that palatial room, Carl Ramsay had the gift of dramatic expression. He thought in blurbs, talked in motion picture subtitles.

The hour of midnight chimed from the expensive clock on the mantelpiece. Somewhere a cuckoo clock sounded.

“A new day,” said Carl Ramsay.

Tolliver Hemingway, multimillionaire, stirred uneasily.

“The day I am to die,” he said, and forced a laugh.

Nick Searle of the Star scraped a match along the sole of his shoe and grunted.

“One chance in a thousand.”

Inspector Hunter glowered about him, and his eyes were a challenge.

“One chance in ten thousand. One chance in a million,” he said.

No one contradicted him, but Carl Ramsay of the Clarion uttered another subtitle.

“The Death Day Dawns,” he murmured.

Arthur Swift surveyed the men in the room with curious eyes. It was his first experience with men of this type. Inspector Harrison Hunter, forceful, driving, alert; Tolliver Hemingway, multimillionaire, suave, polished, dignified, yet somewhat nervous beneath the external polish; Nick Searle, veteran reporter of the Star; Carl Ramsay, of the Clarion, who had been aptly described as “the man with the tabloid mind”; and, himself, a young teacher of physics in the state university. It had been Searle who had called him in, to cover the case for the Star from a scientific angle.

Yet Swift could see nothing to cover.

The room was locked, guarded. The five men were to keep a constant vigil for twenty-four hours within that locked room. Every bit of food they were to eat during that time had been hermetically sealed in cans. It would be consumed immediately after the cans were opened. Every bit of liquid they were to drink was contained in bottles that had been sealed and certified.

The room was on a third story. The windows opened out upon magnificent grounds, landscaped, cared for, and guarded. The side of the house was perfectly blank, devoid of any projection up which a man might climb. Searchlights played about the grounds. Floodlights illuminated the side of the building. A hundred armed deputies patrolled the place.

Such precautions seemed so elaborate as to be absurd. Under ordinary circumstances they would have been. But these were not ordinary.

Six of the richest men in the city had received letters on a single day. Those letters had been uniform in their terms. The men were to signify their willingness to pay a certain sum of money, which sum varied in each instance, or they were to die.

None of the men paid the slightest attention to those letters, save to turn them over to the police.

Then I. W. Steen, the millionaire head of a publishing company which included several magazines and two newspapers, one of which was the sensational Clarion, received a second letter.

That letter announced the day and the hour of his death in the event he did not comply with the request. Steen turned that letter over to the police and took precautions against attack.

The precautions were in vain.

Seated in his private office, in conference with the heads of his various publications, a sickening sweet odor became noticeable in the room. Ten seconds later Steen was dead. No other occupant of the room suffered the slightest inconvenience, the slightest sensation of discomfort, although all of them noticed the peculiar odor.

Two days later C. G. Haymes received a summons through the mail. It was in the nature of an ultimatum. He was to signify his willingness to comply with the terms of the man who signed himself “Zin Zandor,” or he, too, was to die.

The hour of his death was not given. But the day of the death was announced.

C. G. Haymes had been frankly worried. He had placed himself in the hands of the police. They had isolated him in his home, surrounded the place with guards. He, too, had become good “copy,” and the newspaper reporters who enjoyed the confidence of the administration had been permitted to cover the case. They had done it with an air of boredom. Steen’s death had been due to fright, they felt; the autopsy disclosed no organic lesion. There was no chance that coincidence would repeat itself.

Yet, while the reporters were lounging about at ease, while the police cordon surrounded the place, while even the servants had been excluded, C. G. Haymes died, and the manner of his death was as the other’s. A sickening sweet odor that had been noticed by the other occupants of the room, yet had not seemed to affect them in the least, a cry of anguish from the millionaire, a sudden spasm, and death.

Three of the remaining millionaires had capitulated.

They had followed the routine indicated in the letter for showing their willingness to pay. And they were paying, transmitting the money to the dreaded Zin Zandor by means which they refused to divulge. For Zin Zandor had made it apparent that any information given to the police would result in death.

Tolliver Hemingway alone of the remaining men who had been threatened refused to be cowed. He hurled forth his defiance, and the mail had brought him the information that he would meet his death on the twenty-fourth day of June.

Now midnight had struck on the twenty-third of June, and the clocks clacked off the seconds of the fatal twenty-fourth.

“Well, we might as well have a drink,” said Inspector Hunter, pouring himself a stiff jolt from some of the prewar whisky the millionaire’s cellars had furnished.

“None for me,” said Hemingway. “I think I’ll go easy on the drink. One can’t tell...”

The inspector snorted.

“Don’t be foolish. You’re absolutely safe here. Every bit of food and drink in this room has been checked by two police chemists. I wouldn’t even waste the time to sit here with you, only the public are in a panic over this Zandor fellow, and we’ve got to show them how powerless he is in the face of adequate precautions. In the meantime our paper and handwriting experts are at work on those letters. They were all written on a Remington typewriter, and all on the same machine. The stationery has been traced to a job lot that went to one of the big stationery firms. It’s a cinch.”

He drained the whisky.

Carl Ramsay scribbled a sentence in a notebook, and, as he wrote, read aloud the words he jotted down for future reference.

“The Man Who Dares Not Eat,” he intoned. “We’ll run a picture over that.”

Nick Searle snorted.

“You’ve got a cinch with that yellow journal of yours, Ramsay. Wish I had things as easy.”

Arthur Swift stirred in his chair uneasily.

“You both have a snap compared to me. What am I supposed to do?”

Searle laughed.

“Look wise and feel foolish. Along about nine o’clock we’ll cook up a column or two for you to write about the scientific angle of the thing. I’ll dope out what I want, you can stick in a couple of high-sounding scientific terms, something about metabolism and the oxidation of tissue. We’ll run your picture at the head of the column. There’ll be a catchy headline, ‘Noted Professor Explains Hysteria,’ or something of the sort. The idea will be that there was something akin to hypnotic suggestion in the minds of the men who died.”

Carl Ramsay lit a cigarette.

“Better headline than that,” he said: “ ‘Scientist Pits Skill Against Death.’ ”

Searle stretched, yawned.

“You ought to have the city editor I’ve got to go up against,” he said gloomily.

And Arthur Swift, watching Ramsay, suddenly saw a peculiar thing. The right hand of the reporter seemed to vanish. He rubbed his eyes. The hand was back in place.

But, for a split fraction of a second, the right hand of the tabloid reporter had simply vanished. It had not only dissolved into space, but the right arm, almost to the shoulder, had ceased to exist.

It could hardly have been a mere freak of the imagination. Neither could it have been an optical illusion. For Arthur Swift had been able to see everything else within that room clearly and with normal vision.

Tolliver Hemingway, the millionaire, was taking a cigarette from a gold case. Searle was biting the end from a cigar. Ramsay was smoking. His left hand was conveying the cigarette from his lips. Inspector Hunter was finishing the last of the generous drink he had poured.

Everything was entirely normal, save and except for that sudden disappearance of Carl Ramsay’s right hand. It had happened that Arthur Swift was watching that right hand. He had seen it suddenly become nothing. He had blinked his eyes, and the hand was back, reaching for a notebook. It could not have been more than a tenth of a second that the hand was gone, perhaps not half that long. Yet it most certainly had disappeared.

“Look here,” said Swift, “did you fellows notice anything just then?”

They looked at him, and as their eyes saw the expression on his face, they snapped to rigid attention.

“What?” asked Searle.

“Shoot,” said Inspector Hunter.

“Your hand,” said Swift, addressing himself to Ramsay, “it seemed sort of... er... well, sort of funny.”

And then a strange thing happened.

Ramsay opened his lips to make some reply, and the sounds that came forth were not words. They seemed a peculiar rattle of gurgling noise that beat with consonant harshness upon the eardrums, rattled against the intelligence with such terrific rapidity that they were like static on a radio receiver.

“What?” asked Swift.

Ramsay drawled slightly, in his normal irritating tone of voice, as he reached for the pencil and scrawled a line across the notebook.

“Guard Goes Goofy,” he scribbled, and said: “That’d look fine under your picture. It shows what hysteria will do. Sort of fits in with a general theory. Get a man to believe that a sickening sweet odor will produce death upon him alone, and then fill the room with such an odor, and the man who believed it would be fatal would kick off. Good thought that. I’ll write it up with a by-line by Professor Somebody-or-other: Scientist Suggests Solution.”

Inspector Hunter snorted. “Foolish to have amateurs in a place like this.”

Searle frowned. “One of the first things you’ve got to learn, Swift, in a situation of this kind, is to see things and see them accurately. Don’t go letting your imagination run away with you. Now all the Star wants is the use of your name and some scientific terminology. Maybe you’d better curl up and take a nap.”

But Tolliver Hemingway, accustomed to appraise character with unerring accuracy, leaned forward.

“Tell us what you saw?” he said.

Arthur Swift turned red. Under the rebuke of the reporter who had employed him, he realized how absolutely foolish it would sound for him to mention that the right hand and arm of a man had disappeared — had become simply as nothing.

“Why... I guess—.”

The steady, keen eyes of the multimillionaire bored into the young man’s face.

“Yes. Go on. Nothing’s too absurd to be given careful attention.”

“Well,” blurted Swift, “if you’ve got to know; it sounds sort of goofy, but—”

He broke off as a cry of alarm burst from the lips of Carl Ramsay.

“The odor!” he cried.

And there could be no doubt of it. The room was filling with a peculiar odor, a something that was like orange blossoms, yet was not like orange blossoms. It was too sickeningly sweet to be pleasant, yet so cloyingly rich that it was not unpleasant.

Tolliver Hemingway was on his feet, his gray eyes snapping.

“All right, boys; don’t think I’m afraid, and don’t think any hysteria is going to get me. Inspector, I’ve one request. If anything should happen, search every man in this room, from his skin out. I have an idea this—”

He paused. A look of surprise came over his features. He clutched at his throat.

“I... am... not... afraid,” he said, thickly, speaking slowly as though paralysis gripped the muscles of his throat.

“It... is...”

And he swayed on his feet, lurched forward, flung out a groping hand. The hand clutched the rich cloth which adorned the table on which Inspector Hunter had set his empty glass, and on which the whisky bottle reposed. The cloth came off. The glass crashed to the floor. The bottle rolled across the room.

Tolliver Hemingway crashed to the floor.

He was dead by the time they managed to open his collar and take his limp wrist in their fingers.

Inspector Hunter rushed to the window.

Outside, the searchlights played silently across the darkness of the grounds, their beams interlacing, bringing trees and shrubs into white brilliance, casting shadows which were, in turn, dispersed by the rays of other cross-lights, flickering and flitting. The whole side of the building was covered by floodlights, and the inspector had no sooner thrust his head from the window than a voice from below called up.

“All right, inspector?”

“Anybody come near here?”

“No, sir. Of course not, sir. Our orders were to shoot on sight.”

“Who’s there with you?”

“Laughlin, O’Rourke, Maloney, and Green.”

“One of you sound the alarm. The others wait there. Shoot any stranger on sight.”

Inspector Hunter whipped a service revolver from his belted holster, and fired two shots from the open window, signal to the various guards. Almost immediately a siren screamed forth the agreed signal of death.

Inspector Hunter turned back to the room, then, suddenly snapped his revolver to the level.

“Get your hands up, Searle!”

The surprised reporter, in the act of shooting the bolt on the door, regarded the inspector with a puzzled frown.

“I’ve got to get to the paper. I can handle this so much better on the ground than I can over the wire. We’ll get out an extra—”

There was no mistaking the cold calm of Hunter’s voice.

“Get away from that door or I’ll shoot you like a dog. You know what this means. It’s the beginning of a reign of terror. This is once that the news comes second. You men will remain here. The murder will be kept absolutely secret until we’ve exhausted every possible clew.

“And every man in this room is going to be searched from the skin out. Everything in this room, including the very air, is going to be analyzed. Damn it, I’m going to get at the bottom of this!”

And Nick Searle, white-faced in his rage, slowly turned back from the door.

“The Star will break you for this,” he said, in a low tone, vibrant with anger. “You can’t pull a stunt like this and get away with it.”

“The hell I can’t,” said Inspector Hunter, his cold eyes glittering over the barrel of his service revolver. “Get back in the corner, and take your clothes off. Every damned one of you take your clothes off.”

He turned to the window.

“Green, send up some doctors, and two of the chemists. Let no one else come in to the grounds or the house. Let no one leave. Keep your mouth shut. Have two men come up here and knock on the door. Let them have their revolvers in their hands. Let them shoot to kill at the first sign of disobedience to my orders.”

And then Inspector Hunter slammed down the window.

The sickening sweet odor was still in the air, but it was not as noticeable as before.

“Boys, take off your clothes and stand over there in the corner, naked as the day you were born.”

Ramsay sneered. “Inefficient Inspector Insults Interviewer.”

Searle added another thrust: “Police Inspector Drinking at Time of Tragedy.”

Hunter whirled on him.

“You’d use that? After my pulling the wires to get you in here so you’d have an exclusive?”

“I’d use anything,” said Searle, his face still white. “The news comes first. You can’t hush this thing up, and you can’t stall it. The Star will get scooped by every paper on the street.”

Inspector Hunter shook his head, slowly.

“It won’t get out.”

“Aw, hell. It’s getting out right now. There were reporters watching the house, watching the grounds. Think they heard those shots and the alarm siren without putting two and two together? They’ll have extras on the streets within an hour announcing the death, and they’ll make a pretty shrewd guess at what’s happened afterward.”

Hunter lowered the gun slightly.

“The department will issue flat denials. We’ll deny the death. We can’t let this get out. It would rock the city. It would start a reign of terror. This means the police are powerless.”

“You can’t hush it up. Your denials will only get you in bad at the start, and give the other papers that much more prestige when you finally have to admit the truth.”

Hunter shook his head.

“This is an emergency the like of which has never faced the city before.”

He jerked up his revolver as one in whom the last vestige of indecision has vanished.

“Get over there and get your clothes off.”

“Hunter Has Hysterics!” rasped Ramsay. “Intoxicated Inspector Incarnate Inefficiency!”

“Get your clothes off!” yelled Hunter.

There was a double knock at the door.

His eyes squinting over the barrel of his revolver, Hunter threw open the door. Two uniformed policemen with drawn guns stood gaping on the threshold.

“Boys, see that these men strip!”

Nick Searle moved slowly, reluctantly.

“You’ll strip, too, damn you,” he said, “or I’ll write an article accusing you of the murder.”

“Examiner Evades Equal Examination,” sneered Ramsay, moving, however, toward the corner indicated by Hunter.

“No. I’ll join you. That’s fair. That’s what I wanted these boys up here for,” said Hunter, throwing down his gun, and taking off his collar and tie as he moved to the corner.

The police chemists found four naked men and a corpse in the room. They made a minute examination of every article in the room. They analyzed every single thing that they fancied might have played a part in the tragedy. They examined even the tobacco in the cigarettes, the paper with which they were tipped. They found nothing.

Dawn found the men working frantically.

It also found extras on the streets, intimating that there had been a tragedy despite the vigilance of the police. It found a crowd surging about the streets which bordered the spacious grounds of the millionaire’s mansion.

Noon found Hunter throwing up his hands in helpless despair.

Three o’clock found him pleading with the reporters to be reasonable and give him a break. But Searle and Ramsay, insisting upon the right of the press to print the news, were obdurate.

They were released from custody at three fifteen.

Searle took Swift to the Star offices. There they wrote frantically. Swift was given a rewrite man. He gave a few scientific terms covering possible causes of death, made some comment upon atmospheric poisons, and then read the proof on an article that was more wildly speculative than any thoughts he had dared to formulate or utter.

“Celebrated Physicist Hints at Atmospheric Poisoning,” he read, then, lower down, in smaller type: “Mysterious Ray Penetrates Walls and Locked Doors. Possibility that Radio May Act as Transmitting Medium. Scientist Confirms Report that Intoxicated Inspector Delayed Transmission of News to Eager Public.”

The cashier handed Swift a check that was three times the amount of a month’s pay at the state college.

“We’ll want a follow-up to-morrow. You’ll get the same rates,” he said.

“In the meantime?”

“Do anything you want. Keep in touch with the office.”

Swift bowed, reached for his hat.

At that moment the telephone shrilled sharply. One of the men barked excitedly as he listened to the sounds that rasped through the receiver.

Another reporter came in, breathless.

“Here’s a photo of the letter,” he said, and rushed to the dark room.

“Better stick around, Swift,” said Searle. “Hell’s to pay.”

Chapter 2 Trailing an Evil Genius

Events of the next two hours were crowded.

Six new letters had been mailed. Five had been to wealthy men. The sixth had been to none other than the President of the United States of America. Five of the letters contained a demand for money. The sixth letter demanded that the nation accept Zin Zandor as dictator.

The penalty in each case for refusal was death.

The millionaires were to begin paying tribute immediately. The government was given thirty days within which to comply with the demand. At the end of thirty days the President was to die, first of a series of martyrdoms only to be ended by surrender.

But sheer luck had given the law a break.

Post office employees had been instructed to note anything unusual in the mail, particularly anything unusual in the mail addressed to wealthy or prominent people.

One Steve Roscin, a mail carrier, driving to a mail box to pick up the mail, had noticed rather a striking figure striding away from the box.

It was a man well over six feet tall, thin, slightly stooped. The figure was muffled in an overcoat, despite the fact that the day had been oppressively warm. There was a long black beard which concealed the lower part of the face, dark glasses over the eyes, and a crush hat, pulled well down.

But the postman had caught a good look at the right hand. It was a peculiar ring on the third finger that had caught his eye. He described the ring as being carved in some grotesque fashion in the shape of interlaced triangles of white against a background of red.

The postman insisted that the ring was fully as large as a twenty-five cent piece, perhaps larger where it bulged out into a circle of mingled gem and design.

At the time he had paid no great attention to the man, noting only the overcoat, the beard, and the unusual ring. But when he had opened the green box, his eye had alighted upon six letters at the top of the pile of mail.

The uppermost letter had been addressed to the President of the United States of America. The other five letters were addressed to people of prominence in financial circles.

The postman had acted quickly. He had slammed the mail box shut, jumped into his car and whirled about in pursuit of the strange figure.

At the corner he was in time to see the man climb into a red roadster of speedy design, whose make the postman had been unable to determine. In the gathering dusk, the roadster had shot away from the curb and easily outdistanced the lighter car which the postman was driving.

He had abandoned the futile pursuit, and had telephoned to headquarters at once. Experts had appeared, examined the letters for finger-prints, opened them, found their terms, and had immediately started a search for the tall man in the red roadster who wore a peculiar ring and who wrote his letters on a Remington typewriter.

The police predicted an arrest within twenty-four hours, stating they would make a house-to-house canvass of the city if necessary.

Arthur Swift, caught in the excitement of the investigation, remained at the Star offices until nearly midnight.

By that time the telephones were ringing constantly, giving new clews, cases of arrest of suspects. Garages were combed for red roadsters, people were asked to report any tall figure with beard and overcoat that had been seen at or about the time.

The police adopted the theory that the beard was a disguise, that the overcoat was merely to prevent recognition, and that the man probably did not live anywhere near the place where the mail box was located, but had written the letters, then driven to some isolated section to mail them.

By midnight there were no fewer than fifty tall suspects incarcerated at police headquarters, awaiting a complete check of their activities for the day.

Arthur Swift caught Nick Searle for a short conference.

“Look here, Searle, there’s one thing about this business that’s strange.”

“Meaning?”

“The time those letters were mailed.”

“What of it?”

“They must have been already written, held ready for mailing, but the mailing was to be at a certain definite time.”

“The time?” asked Searle, smiling, rather patronizingly.

“The time was when the person who did the writing was certain the death of Tolliver Hemingway had taken place.”

Searle continued to smile, the smile of calm superiority.

“Wrong, Swift. The time was when the writer knew that the people had been advised of the death of Hemingway.”

Swift shook his head.

“No. You see it would have taken the letters twenty-four hours to be delivered at the very least. Therefore, had the writer been absolutely certain of Hemingway’s death, he would have mailed the letters, knowing the press would have the facts long before those letters were read by his victims.”

The smile melted from Searle’s features.

“By George, there’s a thought there! Then you mean the person who committed those murders wasn’t absolutely certain the murders had been committed. He only released certain agencies of destruction, knowing that they should work, but those agencies were not sufficiently certain to make him positive of their success.”

Swift, knowing that he now held Searle’s attention, nodded.

“That,” he said, “is one possible explanation. The other is harder to comprehend, but yet, in some respects, more logical.”

“Shoot,” said Searle.

“That the person who ordered the mailing of those letters was one of the persons who were in the room with Hemingway, and was, therefore, unable to communicate with his accomplices until after Inspector Hunter had released him.”

Searle dropped into a chair, as though his knees had suddenly weakened.

“Not that, Swift. That would make four of us suspects — and you, being of scientific training, would be the first they’d go after. They’d slam us in cells and start giving us third degrees that would make us wish we’d never been born. Why, we’ve been panning the inspector, calling him intoxicated and all that. Lord, how he’d delight in having some legitimate excuse to get us thrown in the jug and work us over.”

Swift nodded.

“I hadn’t thought of it from exactly that angle, but I was wondering about Ramsay.”

“What about him?”

“You remember I mentioned seeing something just before Hemingway’s death?”

“That’s right, you did.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you what that something was. It sounds incredible, but for a split fraction of a second, Ramsay’s hand vanished. The hand and the biggest part of the arm just melted into space.”

Searle knitted his brows.

“Listen, son, you haven’t batted around the way I have, and you don’t realize what tricks nervous strains will play on a man. They sometimes kick about the reporters being so hardboiled and calloused, but a man ain’t worth a damn as a reporter until he does get calloused. You were all worked up, and your eyes just started playing tricks on you. Even if they didn’t, how could anybody have managed to bring about the death of Hemingway without leaving any clew at all?”

Swift was stubborn.

“Somebody did. And it must have been done by unusual methods. Therefore, anything unusual—”

Searle surrendered the point. “All right. Let’s drop around and see Ramsay. We’ll ask him what he knows about it. That’ll convince you. Ramsay’s on the square.”

They got hats and coats, went out into the velvety midnight. They found Ramsay’s room, knocked on the door, got no answer, walked in.

Searle turned on the light.

Swift stood by the door.

The click of the switch showed a scene of confusion. Drawers were pulled from the dresser. The mattress had been slit in a dozen places, and the stuffing pulled out, strewn over the floor. The bedclothes were wadded into a knot. A suitcase had been cut open. The clothes closet showed a pile of garments, the pockets pulled wrong side out.

A letter file had been dumped in a chair, and the wind from the open window had sifted various letters about the room. All over the floor, even on the walls were drops of blood, and those blood-drops were scarcely dry.

Searle made a wry face.

“Another victim,” he said.

Arthur Swift made a hurried examination of the various letters and papers while Searle was telephoning the police. Among some of the more recent letters he found a bit of paper which contained a single word: “Tonight.”

That bit of paper was undated and unsigned, but, in the lower right hand corner was the imprint of a seal, an affair of interlaced triangles, the impression of which was visible only when the paper was held at an angle to the light.

Swift laid the letter or note back in the pile of papers.

“Know anything about rings?” he asked Searle.

That individual impatiently shook his head.

“To thunder with all that hooey. The thing that we’ve got to find out is the method of death. Then we can guard against it. And we’ve got to trace each individual victim. Imagine what it means when some individual can inflict death at will upon any certain man he may select, regardless of the precautions with which that individual is surrounded! Then he writes a letter demanding certain things of the government, threatening to take the life of the President.

“And he can do it, too. Make no mistake about that, Swift. I’ve seen ’em come, and I’ve seen ’em go. I know the work of the fanatic and of the bluffer. But this man is different. He works too efficiently, too damned efficiently. Imagine picking a time right after midnight to bump off Hemingway! He picked the very time when everybody was the most alert. He did it to show how little he cared for us or our precautions.”

“Maybe,” responded Swift. “But you’ve got to admit that ordinary measures get us nowhere in this case. Now there were rings made along in the fifteenth century that were known as poison rings. They were large, made especially to hold a quantity of poison, and I have a hunch such a ring figures in this case. I’m going to find out.”

“How did the murderer get the ring in contact with Hemingway?” asked Searle.

“Perhaps he poisoned him with a slow moving poison that was implanted in his system days before.”

Searle grinned. “Wrong again. He gave Hemingway the option of avoiding death at any time by simply paying out money.”

Swift made for the door.

“Anyway, I’m going to beat it before the police arrive. After the way you’ve being panning Inspector Hunter it’ll be only a question of hours until he figures out a scheme for getting you on the inside. I don’t want to be around.”

And he walked out, went to a nearby hotel, registered under an assumed name, took off his clothes and sank into deep slumber.

By morning he was ready to run down his theory. He called on certain antique ring dealers and made known his wants, a poison ring of large capacity, answering a general description.

There were five prominent dealers in such jewelry. Three of them gave him blanks. But the fourth scratched his head, consulted his books.

“It is possible we might get you such a ring. We sold one a little over sixty days ago to a man who makes a hobby of rings. He buys, holds for a while, then sells or trades.”

Swift whipped out a pencil.

“Give me his address. I’ll pay you a commission if I make a deal.”

“Marvin is the name,” said the dealer. “I’ll give you the address in a letter of introduction.”

Marvin was at home, genial, cordial. He was a little man with puckery eyes and perpetually smiling lips. He was hardly the type one would have picked as a murderer.

Swift broached the subject of rings, gradually leading the way around to various poison rings.

“I had a magnificent specimen a couple of months ago,” said the collector. “But my physician took a fancy to it and I gave it to him.”

Art Swift nodded, as though the information were of but casual interest, talked for half an hour, purchased a small antique ring, and finally announced an obscure physical ailment which had been bothering him for some time.

Marvin suggested a good physician.

“Don’t know any,” remarked Swift.

“Try mine. Dr. Cassius Zean.”

Swift yawned.

“Thanks, I may look him up. Well, I’ve got to be going. It’s been a pleasure to chat with you. Good morning.”

Dr. Zean! The name filled him with curiosity. The man whose name was Zean might well have adopted a name such as Zin Zandor.

He called a cab, went at once to the doctor’s office.

An office girl was busy at a typewriter. Swift moved over so that he could see the make of the machine. It was an Underwood. A white-uniformed surgical nurse bustled in and out of the outer office. She had Swift fill out a card with his name, address and occupation.

The doctor, it seemed, was in, but would see no one that day. It would be necessary to make an appointment. Art Swift made an appointment for the latter part of the week, but insisted upon an immediate interview. The nurse withdrew to take the message to the inner office. She was gone for some time. Swift felt the uncomfortable feeling which he experienced at times when he felt people were talking about him.

While he was sitting there, twisting his fingers, his brain racing with thoughts and conjectures, he heard the telephone on the desk at his elbow give a series of clicks.

The desk, he saw, was one where the surgical nurse held forth when not busy elsewhere. He wondered if the telephone was merely an extension of the telephone in the private office and if the clicking of the bell clapper denoted a conversation starting by the removal of the other receiver.

Casually, he half turned in his chair. The girl at the desk was clacking out letters on the typewriter. Her eyes seemed to be entirely occupied. Stretching forth an arm, moving with the air of one who is bored and restless, Swift inserted his hand under the receiver, cupped the palm and gently lifted the receiver so that the spring tension on the hook caused a contact.

Instantly he heard the metallic raspings from the receiver which showed a conversation was being carried on over the line. Swift was sitting in a chair which brought his ear not very far from the level of the desk. He managed to work a book under the receiver, holding it up a half inch or more from the hook. Then he slumped down until his ear was but an inch or two from the edge of the desk.

The conversation became faintly audible.

“Send a messenger after it right away. We need some...”

“Can’t let you have it for half an hour.”

“All right. They’re raising hell, making a house-to-house search of the city. Better be careful about mentioning that ring. Somebody may ask you about it.”

“No chance of that. Send a messenger directly to room 920, knock once, then pause and knock twice. Will I know this messenger?”

“No, this will be a new one.”

“All right. G’by.”

“G’by.”

There was a series of clicks from the wire. Swift slipped the book out from under the receiver. The girl at the other desk continued tapping the keys of the typewriter.

The surgical nurse appeared, frowning, to communicate the doctor’s refusal to see any one except by appointment. Swift acknowledged defeat and left the office.

His mind fairly reeled with the information he had received. The telephone conversation doubtless referred to the search that was being made for the tall man with the odd ring. It was very possible that Dr. Cassius Zean was none other than the mysterious and sinister Zin Zandor.

Swift debated whether to call up Searle, finally decided to do so. He went to a public telephone, called the newspaper office, and found that Searle was out. He left a message for him.

“Tell him I’ve got something hot. I’ll call again in half an hour. If he comes in, have him wait.”

Chapter 3 Unchained Lightning

As he hung up the telephone, a daring thought possessed Swift.

Why not stroll up to room 920, knock once, pause, and then knock twice? The voice over the telephone had said the doctor wouldn’t know the messenger!

The thought had no sooner entered Swift’s mind than it crystallized into action. He sprinted for the elevator, was whisked to the ninth floor and walked the corridor upon nervously impatient feet.

At 920 he paused, contemplated the plain door for several seconds, was painfully conscious of the throbbing of his pulse, and knocked. He paused, knocked twice.

There was a vague shadow flitting over the ground glass square. Then the shadow took bulk and sharpness of outline. Swift had visions of a tall, sinister figure with a cold eye, and was absolutely unprepared for the short, stumpy man with fleshy jowls who glared at him.

“Well?”

“Messenger. Told to get somethin’ here,” said Swift, slurring his words together to disguise his nervousness.

The doctor glowered at him from eyes that were as twin chunks of polished ebony.

“Come in,” he said. “You’re early.”

“Am I?” asked Swift, striving to appear casually unconcerned. “I was told to come in half an hour. I walked around for a while, didn’t have my watch.”

The doctor grunted.

Swift noticed that he was slow and lagging in his movements, that his lips were a sickly blue, that the flesh sagged down in flabby pouches. There were pouches beneath the eyes, pouches below the cheek bones, a pouch below the chin, and a sagging pouch at the belt. The doctor was wheezing from the effort of walking toward the door.

He went to the door on his right, which Swift surmised must lead to the reception room, and locked it. Then he turned toward a door enameled a pure white.

“Just making a final test,” he said.

Art Swift got a glimpse of a long, well-lighted room. There were white tables, chairs, a long sink, a battery of test tubes, bottles, retorts, microscopes, and a cage full of canaries. These canaries sang in nervous, chirping voices, fluttering restlessly from perch to perch.

Dr. Zean left the door open as he entered the room.

“Sit down,” he wheezed over his right shoulder. “You must be the man that’s detailed to cover Washington.”

Swift resolved on a bold stroke.

“I am,” he said. “The chief sent me down here to get my stuff and get started.”

“Know how to use it?”

“Only generally. I understood you were to give me instructions.”

The doctor turned, frowned. His ebony black eyes bored into Swift’s features. The blued, flabby lips quivered.

“All damn foolishness trying to— Oh, well, you aren’t to blame.”

He reached in the cage. The birds fluttered their protests at the invading hand, flung themselves against the gilded bars. At length the fat fingers closed about a slim, yellow body. The bird gave a shrill cry of alarm, then was pulled from the cage, wings fluttering and flapping, occasional feathers drifting to the floor.

Dr. Zean raised a hypodermic, jabbed the needle into the fluttering bird. Almost instantly there came a rapid change. The fluttering wings began to move more rapidly. They gave forth a low humming sound.

“Watch,” said the doctor and liberated the bird.

The wings were moving so fast now that it was impossible to see them. They were like the wings of a humming bird, giving forth a low, droning sound. The canary hung for a split fraction of a second, poised in the air, then zipped into flight. Such a flight it was!

The bird seemed like a yellow streak, moving with incredible speed. Swift turned his head to follow the flight, turned it back again. Try as he would, he could not keep the bird in sight. Neither could he lose sight of it. The canary was merely a flash of yellow.

So rapidly did it move that the eye could see it only as a swift flicker of motion. Like an electric spark, it was impossible even to tell the direction of its flight. One time the bird seemed to be going in one direction, yet almost immediately it appeared in the opposite side of the room.

No direction in which Swift could direct his eyes but what that droning yellow streak zipped across his field of vision with such rapidity that it seemed there must be half a dozen of the birds in the air at once. In fact, there were several occasions when there seemed to be three different birds flying in opposite directions at the same time.

Swift rubbed his startled eyes.

The husky voice of the doctor took up a brief explanation, a word of warning.

“Time,” he said, “is an illusion of the senses. Space is an illusion. If there’s anything in infinity as an established fact, then there can be no limit to either time or space. To think of something that has no limit, yet has an existence, is absurd. Our finite minds place a limit on everything. So does existence.

“Therefore, the limitation of space and of time are the limitations and fallacies of the mind. It’s like a single tube radio set. It has a limited range. That doesn’t mean the radio waves that it receives are limited to that field. Same way with the human mind.

“Now some organisms live much more rapidly than others. Their concept of time is so radically different that the life energy is used up in a few hours.

“Naturally, if one could determine the particular gland which controls that time element it would be possible either to speed up life or slow it down. The dog uses up his allotted life energy in seven or, ten years, the horse in a longer time. And there are cell organisms that live but a few hours.

“There’s no time for details. You wouldn’t understand them, anyway. But the point I’m making is that the extract I am able to furnish doesn’t do anything to give new energy. It simply directs the speed with which the existing energy is burned up. So you’ve got to be careful of the dosage. It’s barely possible that one could take a sufficient dose to live up a whole lifetime in five minutes.

“The effect of this extract is to speed up everything. It wears off as quickly as it takes effect. The muscles, the nerves, the brain, the heart, all function according to the new scheme of things. And your strength is multiplied accordingly.

“We don’t know what strength is. Take the elbow, for instance. It’s a fulcrum for the forearm. The raised forearm is a lever of the third class. The power is applied but a few inches from the fulcrum. Yet a strong man can raise a fifty-to eighty-pound weight in his hand without difficulty.

“Take a pencil and paper, calculate the moments of force and you’ll see that this calls for an utterly incredible amount of power to be applied to the forearm. In fact the bone wouldn’t stand such a strain. Take the forearm of a cadaver, put such a weight in it and raise it by mechanical means and the bone snaps.

“Therefore strength has something mental about it. The mind acts on the molecular structure in some way. Gravitation is the tendency of the molecules of all matter to draw together in proportion to the mass. Because of the greater mass of the earth it attracts an object many millions of times more than the object attracts the earth.”

The doctor ceased speaking and glared at Art with a look of hostility.

“Damn it, your mouth has flopped open as though the whole thing was strange to you. I’ve repeatedly warned those who sent you to see that this preliminary ground was covered first. I can’t be running a kindergarten here!

“Now here’s a box. That box contains two dozen little capsules and one big capsule. The little capsules contain enough of the extract to speed up your physical and mental processes at the rate of one hundred to one. Each capsule terminates in a hollow needle. When you are about to make use of a capsule take a deep breath, insert the needle, squeeze the capsule.

“Within the space of three deep breaths you will find your processes speeded up. You will move, think, breathe, talk one hundred times faster than normal. The small capsules last for about thirty seconds. Then the effects wear off. During that half minute you have lived fifty minutes of your normal life at a rate one hundred times as rapid as ordinary. Remember that your fast motions will be utterly invisible to ordinary eyes. If you talk, your speech will be unintelligible.

“It will be advisable to take two or three preliminary doses so you can accustom yourself to your new rate of life, and be able to gauge your motions accordingly.

“Now the big capsule is to be used only in the event of a major emergency. Every man is similarly equipped. It will speed up your life at the ratio of five hundred to one.”

There was an imperative pounding at the door which led to the reception room. Dr. Cassius Zean stifled an impatient exclamation, and wheezed his way to the door.

“I’m busy,” he said.

The girl’s voice that drifted through the panels contained some note of alarm. Art Swift could not hear the words. The doctor shot the bolt. The surgical nurse appeared in the crack of the open doorway. Art Swift kept his back turned.

There was the hissing of a sibilant whisper.

“Very well. I’ll attend to it at once,” said the doctor.

The nurse turned, paused, swung back. Art Swift could feel her eyes upon him.

“Turn around!” she cried.

Art turned, and, as he turned, he took a swift step toward the pair.

The girl’s eyes burned into his own. Her lips parted in a screamed warning. “He’s a spy!”

Dr. Cassius Zean flung a hand toward his hip.

The girl jumped into the room and kicked the door shut. Her face was chalky white, the lips a thin line of grim determination.

“A knife!” she cried. “No noise!”

But Dr. Zean was lugging a heavy revolver from his hip pocket.

Art Swift was unarmed. The girl was coming toward him, fury blazing from her eyes. The doctor was raising the revolver.

Art made a wild leap.

The girl went through the air and tackled him with outstretched arms, a tackle that would have done credit to a football star. Despite himself, the surprise of the attack, the weight of her hurtling form, threw Swift from his feet. He staggered, tried to catch his balance and crashed to the floor.

“Crack him!” he heard the girl say.

He saw Dr. Zean’s arm upraised, bringing down the weapon in a crushing blow, and flung up his knees, swung to one side.

The blow missed.

“Then shoot him, quick!” yelled the girl. “He’s breaking my grip!”

Even as she screamed the words, her hands slipped from the struggling body, and Art Swift lunged out with a circling arm, caught the ankle of the pudgy doctor, and gave a jerk. The foot slipped, the ankle gave, and the huge bulk came down with a thud. The girl’s hands had been busy. She was scratching at his face, biting, kicking.

Art rolled over, got to one knee, heedless of the fury of the nurse. He swung his right arm. The fist connected with the purpled jaw, but, even as he struck the blow, Swift realized that something was wrong. The flesh he hit was the color of fresh putty. The lips were blued, parted, gasping. The tongue protruded. Dr. Zean’s heart had given out, the excitement proving too much.

There remained the girl.

Swift flung his arms about her, held her helpless. He grabbed a roll of bandage that had become tangled in his feet and whipped it about her hands. She tried to scream then, but he stifled the sound, thrust the roll into the parted teeth. There followed a subdued gurgle. He tied the gag in place, endured the white-hot fury of her eyes, finished binding the wrists and ankles.

There was a closet opening from the room. He pushed her in there, gave a final inspection to the knots, closed and locked the door.

Then he turned to the doctor. He was dead, this pudgy physician who had isolated the extract that governed the tempo of conscious life.

As Swift started to search his pockets, there sounded a knock at the door of 920. A pause, two knocks. It was the messenger!

Art Swift grabbed the coat collar of the inert clay and dragged the pudgy form along the floor to the door of the laboratory. He pushed the man inside, closed the door, and walked toward 920. His fist was clenched. He was ready to strike the instant the man walked across the threshold.

He slipped the bolt, threw open the door.

“Come in,” he said, and then gasped his astonishment.

The figure that entered the room was that of a young woman, well-formed, beautiful. She smiled at him graciously.

“You are Dr. Zean? I was to receive certain things. Doubtless there is no explanation necessary,” and her lips parted in a smile.

Art Swift floundered in a confused greeting, invited her to be seated.

Should he tie and gag her? But she was so smiling, so innocent in appearance, so refined in her manner. Violence was unthinkable!

Then, as he hesitated, another thought flashed across his mind. Why not give her that which she sought, send her away, and follow? She would lead him to the rest of the gang.

He bowed deeply.

“If you’ll excuse me a moment,” he said, and went toward the door of the laboratory. He was careful to open it in such a manner that she could not see the corpse, and promptly closed it behind him.

He searched shelves, finally found that which he sought, a little pile of metal boxes in which were capsules similar to the ones the doctor had shown him.

He took a box of the extract, returned to the girl, and gave her as much of the doctor’s talk as he could remember.

“You look as though it was all news to you!” he stormed, just as the doctor had stormed at him. “I can’t run a kindergarten here. Why can’t they explain these rudimentary preliminaries to you before you come? Take this box and go.”

“Hadn’t I better try a capsule?”

He grunted, still keeping in the part of a testy scientist, impatient at having to explain fundamentals to an ignorant woman.

“I don’t care what you do!”

She flashed him a smile, opened the box, took out a capsule, took a deep breath, jabbed the needle into her arm, squeezed the capsule.

Then Art Swift realized that he, too, must test this diabolical extract of some nameless gland, or the girl would be able to vanish, moving a hundred times more rapidly than he could.

He grabbed a capsule from the box she held in her hand.

“I’ll take one with you,” he said, and took a deep breath.

The girl was breathing deeply. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were brilliant with excitement and with the stimulus of this strange substance.

Swift felt the bite of the needle, felt his blood tingle with the sting of the extract, and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was precisely two fifteen. The second hand of the mechanism was tick-tocking around its smaller circle. The minute hand pointed at the figure three, the hour hand at two.

The girl’s potion took effect first.

He suddenly saw her start to get up. Then it was as though she became a blur of motion. She walked, and her feet moved so rapidly the eye could scarcely follow. She talked, and her lips showed only as a filmy substance. The sound of her words was as the clatter of a watchman’s rattle.

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 followed 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 corner, 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:

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.

Chapter 5 In a Frozen World

Searle’s voice was in his ears when he regained consciousness. There was a tang of jail odor in the air. His form was stretched on a prison pallet and the steel ceiling contained a single bright incandescent, which stabbed his throbbing eyes.

“From the looks of this telephone number, we figured it might be a lead. I got Louise Folsom to give a ring and stall along for information, and the conversation sounded promising, so I sent her up.

“She ran onto this Swift. Of course, she didn’t know him at the time. He was merely a certain Dr. Zean. But he proceeded to explain to her just how the murders had been committed and—”

He broke off as there was a commotion near the door.

“We knocked over that office and found a nurse tied and gagged in the closet, and a dead man in the laboratory. Looks like there’s hell to pay. Somebody had been in the place and cleaned it out, busted up bottles, pulled out drawers, and raised hell generally.” A red-faced sergeant was speaking.

There was the scraping of chairs.

Swift struggled to a sitting posture.

“Can’t you understand, you fools?” he asked.

Hands grabbed his coat, jerked him forward.

“All right. Let’s hear your story.”

Swift kicked with his feet. “Take these handcuffs off.”

A clock, clacking off the seconds, pointed to three minutes to four o’clock.

“Leave him with a guard and let’s go see the office and the dead man,” said one of the officers.

“Triple handcuff him, then,” said Searle, “because he’s the man who pulled the murders. There’s no doubt of that in my mind.”

“It was Ramsay,” said Swift, striving to be patient. “I blundered on to this Dr. Zean, and—”

“Save it!” snapped one of the officers.

“No, no, let him talk.”

Art Swift told his story. The officers looked at one another, incredulity stamped on their faces.

“There’s a chance,” said Searle, speaking judiciously, “just a chance that he’s right. But, Swift, how did you know about the idea of switching cigarettes, the mechanics of the murders? You told Louise just how to go about it.”

“Pure deduction, putting two and two together,” said Swift.

One of the men clicked a key in the lock of the handcuffs.

“Stand up here and we’ll make a search,” he said.

Swift moved to stand up, and, as he did so, felt as though a hundred needles were shooting into his hip. He jumped, gave an exclamation, then as it suddenly dawned on him what had happened, he frantically plucked at his hip pocket.

“The capsules!” he exclaimed. “They’ve spilled from the metal box, and I jabbed myself with them!”

He pulled out of his pocket the crushed capsules. He had given himself a terrific dose of the extract. Nearly all of the capsules were crushed. The extract had penetrated to his blood. Even the big, five-hundred-to-one capsule had discharged its contents.

Men moved toward him.

“Maybe it’s a s... u...”

Searle was talking, but midway in the sentence, his mouth ceased to make sounds. The extract had taken effect, and Swift was speeded up to a terrific rate of activity. The men before him were arrested in mid-motion. One of the officers had been in the act of jumping forward. His feet, Swift noticed, were both off the ground.

Art amused himself by walking around the officer, bending down and inserting his hand beneath the officer’s foot. He couldn’t feel the foot even moving.

He waited patiently for what seemed seconds, waiting for the situation to change. It remained unchanged. Men remained as they had been, their eyes staring, their mouths open. Every possible expression of surprise was depicted upon the frozen faces.

Swift realized that there was no use spending hours in that jail waiting for these men to dawdle through their slow motions.

He walked to the door.

Even when he walked as slowly as possible, the wind tore savagely at his garments. He knew then that he was speeded up many times faster than when he had taken his first, experimental capsule. He was living at a ratio of at least five hundred to one, perhaps much faster.

He worked his way through the jail doors.

At the outer door a guard was stationed and the officer who sat on a stool on the other side of the door was peering intently through the bars. The door was locked.

Swift reached through the bars, grabbed the guard by the coat collar, pulled him forward. He pulled so slowly that it seemed hours before he had the man against the bars. Yet he noticed even that slow motion was about to jerk the head of the officer from his neck.

He had to reach out with his other hand and pull the head of the guard so that it followed the body. Otherwise he would have broken the neck of the unfortunate man.

He searched the pockets, found the key, fitted it to the lock from the outside, manipulated it with the tips of his fingers, and heard the bolts shoot back.

He pushed open the door.

The guard was as he had left him, but, as Swift watched, he fancied he detected the faintest possible motion of an eyelid, the beginning of a slow flutter.

Swift waited for what was, as nearly as he could judge, five minutes, watching that eyelid. There could be no question of it, it was slowly moving.

“Evidently he started to wink when I grabbed him,” said Swift to himself, interested in the scientific aspect of the phenomenon. “It only takes a man around a fiftieth of a second to wink his eye, but I can’t even see the blamed thing move. I must be speeded up so fast I whiz like a bullet!”

That thought made him wonder how a bullet would appear. Could he see it leave the gun?

He took the revolver from the officer’s belt, pointed it at the steel wall of the jail and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

He waited, watching, his wrist braced for the explosion.

“Something wrong,” he said, and lowered the weapon, put it back in the holster of the officer. As he did so, something unusual about it caught his eye. The hammer of the weapon was only halfway back.

“Must have forgotten to cock it, but thought I did,” he mumbled, and took it once more from the holster.

Then an explanation dawned upon him. The hammer was descending, ready to fire the shell. But that split fraction of a second which elapsed between the pulling of the trigger and the exploding of the shell was so multiplied by his speeded-up senses that it seemed an interval of minutes.

He looked around the jail for a while, watching the postures of the men who remained as living statues, motionless. Here was a man who had been about to sit down. Now he was suspended in mid-air, his body jackknifed, the weight on his heels.

Swift watched him for a while, then returned and took up the revolver. The hammer was just about to contact the shell. Swift moved to a place where the light was good, pointed the weapon, waited.

There was a faint jar, a slow impulse up his wrist. Then he saw something mushroom from the mouth of the weapon. It was the bullet, propelled by a little mushroom of fire and smoke.

He was able to follow the progress of the bullet from the time it left the gun until it struck the wall of the cell. He could even see it flatten against the steel and start dropping to the floor.

He knew it must be dropping because he could see that nothing supported it. But it remained in one position so long he was unable to detect motion.

He returned the weapon to its holster, walked back to the cell where the officers had been interrogating him. The men all remained in the same position. The officer who had been jumping forward still bad his feet off the floor.

Swift turned and walked from the jail, out into the late afternoon sunlight.

The atmospheric conditions bothered him more than any other thing. There was a perpetual shortness of breath. It seemed as though his laboring lungs simply couldn’t suck enough air into his system. It was only when he was walking that he could breathe comfortably.

It must be that the rapidity of his progress forced the air into his lungs. But when he walked the wind pressure against his body was terrific. It tore his coat to tatters, and it was a physical impossibility to keep his hat on his head. He had the unique sensation of walking at a rate of speed that seemed to him to be somewhere around one mile an Hour, and having the air pressure whip his hair straight out while his garments were torn.

And he was isolated in the midst of a busy world.

The street was crowded. People were starting for home. Street cars were jammed. Vehicular traffic was at its peak. The sidewalks were a seething mass of jostling humanity frozen into rigid inactivity.

Everywhere were people. Yet nowhere was motion. There was no sound. The universe was as silent as the midst of a desert. Occasionally there would be a faint buzzing sensation in Swift’s ears, and he realized that this was probably caused by sound waves which were too slow for him to interpret as sound.

He walked across the street, threading his way through traffic, and wondering how long this strange sensation was to continue. He thought of the words of the dead scientist that it might be possible for one to live his entire life in a space of five minutes.

What a terrible fate it would be to be left to go through an entire lifetime without any contact with other people, to go from youth to middle age, middle age to doddering old age, all the time in a city that was suspended in the rush hour of its traffic.

If the scientist had been right, it would be a horrible fate. There was a man getting in a taxicab. It might be that Swift would be an old man before that fellow had traversed the length of the block. He could amuse himself for a year, then come back and find the taxicab just starting; perhaps the cabbie would be in the act of closing the door.

When Swift got to be an old man he could come hobbling back to the corner and find that the traffic signal had changed and that the man in the cab was halfway across the street.

It was an appalling thought.

But Swift was glad he had not been imprisoned in a cell. He might even have been held in a dark dungeon. He paused to think of what it would have meant. He would have had no food or water. He would have starved to death in what would, to the ordinary mortal, have been but half a dozen seconds, perhaps not that long.

The air tugged and whipped at his garments. He crawled painfully along, thinking over the events which had led up to the strange position in which he found himself.

Chapter 6 Among Living Statues

Art thought of Carl Ramsay and of how Ramsay would undoubtedly have summarized the situation in headlines. “Time Ticks Tediously,” or some such alliterative expression. And, thinking of Ramsay, he suddenly thought of the murders, and knew that he must apprehend the real criminal.

He had unlimited time at his disposal. He could cover all trains, all means of escape. It only remained to walk where he wanted to go. Any form of so-called rapid transportation was out of the question.

One mistake he made. He jumped over the wheel of a machine that stood between him and the curb. The trip up in the air was quite all right. In fact he felt like a feather. Had it not been for the atmospheric resistance it would have been simple. But the rush of air held him down somewhat.

Even so, he jumped faster, farther, and higher than he had intended or thought possible. This was doubtless due to the fact that his strength had multiplied with his ability to speed up the muscular action.

But when he wanted to come back to the sidewalk he found that he could not do so. He was held a prisoner, floating in mid-air. The force of gravitation was so slow that it seemed he wasn’t even drifting toward the sidewalk.

Finally he managed to claw his way along the side of a building, find a projection, use this to give him a handhold, and push himself toward the sidewalk.

He walked for fully a quarter of a mile before a strange pressure seemed to strike the bottoms of his feet. Then he knew that he was normally just alighting from the jump he had made. The force of gravitation had just taken hold.

That very element made it difficult for him to get about. He found that he dared not trust to any jumps, but must keep at least one foot on the pavement; if he made any sudden motion, there was not enough friction engendered by the force of gravitation to give him a foothold.

Altogether, it was a strange world, one in which every physical law seemed to be suspended. This was due, not to any change in the world itself, but merely to a change in the illusion of time. To express it in another manner, it was due entirely to the fact that Art Swift could think more rapidly.

The rate of thought, then, controlled environment.

It was a novel idea to toy with, but he couldn’t wait for speculation. He had work to do. He must solve those murders, apprehend the real criminal.

He started with Carl Ramsay.

Undoubtedly Ramsay had been the point of contact for the murders. He had taken some of the drug, diluted so the tempo of living became a hundred to one. He had switched the cigarette Tolliver Hemingway was about to take from his cigarette case, for a poisoned cigarette in which the first half inch of tobacco had been prepared with some poisonous drug.

The millionaire had inhaled that drug with the first puff of the cigarette. Then, when he exhaled the smoke, the other watchers in the room had been able to get the odor. But Hemingway had received the full force of the concentrated gas.

It had been simple.

But Ramsay had grown careless. He had made his substitution when Swift’s eyes were upon him. Swift hadn’t been able to detect what was going on, but he had been able to see the sudden disappearance of the fast-moving right hand and arm, and then, when he had talked to Ramsay, Ramsay had tried to answer before the drug wore off.

That was the reason those first sounds which came from Ramsay’s lips had been so unintelligible. Doubtless they had been words, perfectly formulated. But the sounds had been so rapid that it had been impossible for the eardrums of his hearers to split those sounds into words.

Then something had happened to Ramsay. Either he had planned his disappearance because he knew he would be suspected, or else he had actually been abducted after a struggle.

Swift determined to find out which.

He battled his way against the ever-present roar of the rushing atmosphere to Ramsay’s room and took up the trail from there.

The police had combed the room, and had taken every article that might be of value. Yet Swift made a search of his own, going into every nook and corner. He found nothing.

He wondered if he should make an attempt to cover trains, and thought of Dr. Zean’s office. He might find something there, and he could drop into the Union Depot on the way.

He walked down the stairs to the street, and suddenly jerked himself upright with an exclamation. A strange sight met his eyes.

The street was frozen into arrested activity. He had grown accustomed to that spectacle. A horse was trotting, and but one foot was on the ground. On his back was a mounted policeman. He had evidently been swinging his club. Now he was like a mounted statue. A taxicab was cutting over on the turn, and the tires on the outside were flattened by the weight of the car. There was not the slightest motion in either wheels or tires.

But that which arrested Swift’s attention was the peculiar sight of a man walking casually through the tangled mass of arrested traffic.

The man’s coattails were whipped out behind. His hair was streaming. His hat had gone, and he walked with the peculiar pavement-shuffling gait which Art Swift had found so necessary to cultivate.

Here, then, was a man, the tempo of whose life was some five hundred times plus that of other men. Here was a man who must be inoculated with the mysterious extract which Dr. Cassius Zean had discovered. By that same token, he must be one of the outlaw gang.

He carried a suitcase, and the suitcase had been streamlined to make it offer less resistance to the air. He walked like a man with a certain fixed purpose, and he seemed perfectly at ease, confident in his own power.

Watching him, Swift became convinced the man was an old hand at this rapid life. He seemed to show no interest in the strange phenomena of the frozen world where motion had been stilled. He walked calmly, sedately.

And Swift, slipping behind a parked automobile, watched him curiously, wondering what strange errand had caused this man to speed up his life at a ratio of five hundred to one.

The other slithered his way across the street, paused before the door of an imposing edifice. There was a fleshy woman leaving the door of that building, and Swift had noticed her prior to seeing the other man.

She was tugging at the door, one foot stretched out, ready to step to the pavement. Her mottled face was flushed with dark color. Her glassy eyes were staring straight ahead. Her mouth was open. Probably she was gasping for breath, but it would have taken seeming hours for her progress to the place she was going, minutes for the first intake of her breath to be apparent.

Swift realized now that he had no mere five-hundred-to-one ratio in his life tempo. The cumulative effect of the dosage he had taken when several capsules jabbed their contents into his blood stream had given him a much faster rate of life than that. He had no means of knowing just how fast.

The man he followed walked directly to the door out of which the woman was emerging. He ducked under her arm, brushed against her, and entered the lobby of the building.

Swift followed.

Once the man turned. By the simple process of freezing into complete immobility, Swift defied detection. All about were the figures of men staring with glassy, unseeing eyes at what was going on about them.

There was a policeman standing at a marble table in the center of the flagged floor. All about were counters, wickets, gilt cages.

Swift realized he was in one of the big banking establishments. The man he followed walked to one of the cages. He took a key from the inert hand of a guard, unlocked the cage door, pulled it open, entered.

There were piles of gold on the counter, stacked up in glittering spheres of coin. The man scooped them into the suitcase. Then he left and went to another cage. Here he repeated the process. Here, also, there were several piles of large-de-nomination currency. The man scooped these in with the gold.

When he had selected the cream of the plunder, he closed the suitcase and turned toward the door. Swift became stockstill, standing with one foot out and up, as though in the act of taking a step. The man passed within three feet of him. When he had gained the street, Swift followed.

His quarry led him to a corner a block away. Here he sat the suitcase down, right beside a traffic policeman who was in the act of blowing his whistle.

He had left thousands of dollars in stolen gold and currency unguarded, right within reach of a policeman’s hand. Yet he was perfectly safe in doing so. No one could move fast enough to pick it up.

The bank bandit shuffled into a jewelry store, selected several diamonds, dumped them into his pocket, returned to his suitcase, bowed his head to the policeman in ironical thanks, picked up the bag, and crossed the street.

Swift followed.

The man walked as rapidly as the air resistance would allow. He seemed intent upon reaching a certain destination as quickly as possible.

He turned into an alley. A truck was standing there, motor running. The suitcase was tossed into the truck. There were more suitcases there, all of the same general design.

As Swift watched, another figure came around the corner, walking in the same pavement-shuffling manner, carrying a suitcase. He tossed this upon the truck, paused to speak with the man Swift had been following.

Then the two turned and came directly toward Art Swift.

Once more he froze into immobility. They passed close to him. One of the men stopped.

“Say, I’ve seen this guy before. Who the hell is he?”

Swift remained motionless, one foot reaching out as though taking a step. Yet he knew there was something different in the studied balance of his pose from that of the other men who were caught in arrested motion.

“Never lamped him,” said the second man. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”

But the man Swift had been following wasn’t so certain.

“I’m telling you there’s something funny about this guy. He stands funny, he looks funny. I’ve seen him before. I think he was standing in the bank I frisked. Let’s go through his pockets and see who in hell he is.”

“Aw, forget it. We got no time to be pulling all the funny stuff. That newspaper gave the whole show away, Doc Zean is croaked, and we ain’t goin’ to be able to get no more of the stuff. We gotta work fast and make a clean-up while the getting is good.”

They moved away. Swift heard the man he had followed fling a final comment.

“When we come back we’ll see which way he’s walking and what he’s got up his sleeve. He looks off color to me.”

The men reached the mouth of the alley and turned away.

Swift started for cover, and, as he approached the place opposite which the truck was parked, saw a swirl of motion at the opposite end of the alley.

He adopted his usual expedient of standing absolutely still.

Two men, loaded down with suitcases, came into the alley. One of them stopped.

“Say, that guy wasn’t there last trip!”

“What do we care? He couldn’t do anything.”

“Yeah, but he might be stallin’.”

They set down their suitcases, walked with quiet menace directly toward Art Swift.

Then Swift caught sight of something else. Another man glided swiftly into the alley. There was something familiar in the posture of that man. He gave a swift glance and found that it was Nick Searle of the Star.

In some manner the reporter had speeded himself up so as to get into the game. Art thought of the metal box the girl had received, a box containing a complete assortment of the rubber capsules. Probably Searle had secured possession of that and had injected sufficient of the serum to take part in the strange game which was being enacted.

The two bandits approached Swift. Searle was not far behind.

“Hey, you, what you doing here?” asked one of the men, pausing before Swift.

Swift endeavored to keep his face entirely devoid of expression. He fixed his eyes upon distance, and held his breath.

“Aw, he’s all right,” grumbled one of the men. “Just some poor mutt that strayed into the alley and we didn’t notice him the other trip.”

“The hell we didn’t,” insisted the more suspicious of the two. “He just wasn’t here, and if he wasn’t—”

He moved his hand in a swift gesture, directly toward Swift’s eye.

“If he’s on the up-and-up, we can stroke the eyeball,” said the man.

Involuntarily Art blinked.

“Ha!” exclaimed the bandit, and jumped forward, his fist swinging in a terrific uppercut.

Art sidestepped, jerked his head back to dodge the blow, and shot out a straight left.

He found the atmospheric resistance slowed his punches somewhat, but the superior strength which had come to his muscles with the speeding-up process largely overcame that. It was his clothes that suffered most.

As he launched that straight left, the resistance of the air held his coat sleeve stationary. He had the peculiar sensation of feeling his sleeve peeled back from his arm, and the bare arm flashed forward in a quick punch which connected.

But the second man was busy. He swung a slingshot, and only missed Swift’s head by a matter of inches.

“The damned spy!” yelled the man who staggered back under the impetus of Swift’s punch.

Art knew he was no match for the two men, and jumped to one side, hoping to get where he could have his back to the wall. But they understood his maneuver and closed on him from different angles.

He ducked, caught a punch on the back of the head, felt his stomach grow cold as a fist landed in the solar plexus, and dropped to his knees. He flung out his arm, reaching for the legs that sought to kick him in the face, caught an ankle, jerked it, and had the satisfaction of seeing the man go down.

Chapter 7 The Man Who Mastered Time

With a roar Nick Searle joined the conflict.

That was the determining factor. The men had hardly expected an equal battle. Having Swift down and getting ready to knife him was one thing; having that wiry young man on hands and knees grabbing at their ankles while another man swung lusty fists was quite another.

It took but four punches to decide the battle. The two bandits sprawled on the cement.

Swift was still on hands and knees, writhing in pain. But he had managed to tackle both of his adversaries with groping hands which had kept them from doubling up on Searle.

“Hurt?” asked Searle.

Swift made a wry face, gasping for breath.

“Wind — knocked — out.”

Searle helped him to his feet.

After a few seconds Swift got over the temporary paralysis of the diaphragm which had been induced by the blow he had received, and gave a wry grin.

“How’d you get here?” Art asked the reporter.

“Took some of the serum and started out. Found I wasn’t hopped up enough, so I put half a dozen of the small capsules into effect all at once.”

“How did you know you weren’t hopped up enough?”

“Because of the way things were whizzing by me. I tried to follow a man, and I might as well have tried to follow an express train. I figure we are living right now at a ratio of around three thousand to one.” Searle seemed awed as he said the words.

“Not that fast.”

“Mighty near it.”

“The girl?” Art demanded.

“You mean Louise Folsom?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what worries me. They’ve managed to get her somehow, and they’ve carried her off. This looks to me like the final blow-up. The expose in the Star has broken a lot of their power... You’ll forgive us for jumping at the conclusion you were the mysterious scientist who was at the head of the thing? Tell me how you got into it — but first let’s get these two chaps tied up nice and tight and see if we can’t locate where they were going.”

Swift nodded.

“There’s some rope on the truck. I’ll tell you the story while we truss ’em up. And I think I know about where headquarters are.”

“What truck? This one?”

“That’s the one. You’d better be careful with those suitcases. They’re all loaded with money and gems.”

“What?”

“Fact. They’ve lost their power to terrorize the nation and make the big executives bow to their will, but they still have their power to rob without the victim’s being able to guard against it. They’re stripping the city.”

“Humph. And there’s only two of us,” commented Nick Searle, as he trussed up one of the bandits. “Guns any good?”

“None whatever. The bullets could be dodged, and it takes forever and a day for the hammer to explode the shell. If we wanted to shoot one of these men when he broke loose, we’d have to start shooting the gun now. Then we could go about our business for a while, come back and see if the man had got the knots untied, and, when he did, trust the explosion of the revolver would happen somewhere along about that time.”

Searle laughed.

“You paint a gloomy picture.”

“It’s almost that bad. Notice the truck is backed up to a cellar. I have an idea that cellar is of some importance. Let’s explore in it a little.”

“Suits me. What’ll we do with the men?”

“Drag ’em in... Look out! Here come another couple! Lord, there are two more. Four of ’em. We’ve got to hide here in the truck, and when we start hostilities we’ve got to work fast. There’s a couple of stakes that’ll make good clubs.”

Swift crouched behind a pile of the strangely streamlined suitcases. Four men appeared, laden with loot. They called a greeting, started for the truck.

“Look out!” yelled one. “Somebody’s hiding here!”

“Let’s go!” shouted Art Swift.

The young scientist and the reporter got into action.

One of the outlaws, doubtless forgetting the uselessness of the weapon, pulled an automatic from his pocket, leveled it, and pulled the trigger. Then he dashed it to the ground when the weapon failed to explode.

Two of the men had knives. One climbed on the side of the truck, the other tried the rear.

Thud, thump sounded the clubs, and the men drew off, one of them with a broken arm.

“Let’s go!” yelled Swift, for the second time, and they charged.

It happened that the two men had chanced upon the most deadly weapon available. Knives were limited as to range. Guns were of no use. Clubs, swung with terrific speed and force, were bone-breaking instruments of destruction.

Apparently these outlaws had never encountered resistance in the time-plane upon which they had learned to function. They had never experimented with various weapons, and the futility of their guns, the limited efficiency of their knives, left them helpless before the onslaught of the two men armed with clubs.

Searle surveyed the sprawled figures, grinned at Swift.

“Looks like a good job. Do we tie these up?”

“Sure thing.”

“How about headquarters?”

“Let’s investigate.”

“Attaboy! Better keep that club. We’ll probably run into some more trouble.”

They lowered themselves into a cellar, pushing themselves down the stairs because the force of gravitation was too slow to function, felt their way along a passage, and emerged into a lighted room.

A man sat in this room with telephone receivers clamped to either ear. He was tall, gaunt, dominating. His eyes held a restlessness that seemed unclean, unhealthy. The thin lips were compressed into a single razor-blade slash that cut from cheek to cheek. His jaw was bony, determined.

On the third finger of his right hand gleamed a ring of interlaced triangles. He glanced at the two men, looked at their clubs, half rose from the chair.

“Mr. Zin Zandor, I presume,” said Swift.

The restless eyes snapped to his face.

“So?” rasped the man, and fumbled beneath his desk.

“Stop him,” shouted Searle, and made a wild leap forward.

Swift lowered the point of his club and launched it through the air like a lance with every ounce of force of which he was capable.

At the same instant he became aware of a sickening sweet odor which permeated the room.

Zandor tried to duck. The hurtling club caught him on the forehead as he lowered his head, cutting an ugly gash, sending him staggering back.

His right hand flashed up. It held a sort of gas mask, which he tried to raise to his nostrils. But the impact of the blow had dazed him. His hands seemed to function uncertainly. He turned half purple in the features as congested blood mottled the skin.

“He’s holding his breath,” shouted the reporter, quick to grasp the situation.

Swift whirled. Together they fought toward the door, holding their breath, the sickly-sweet odor seeming to constrict the muscles of their throats.

Behind them they heard a peculiar scraping sound. They turned for one last look.

Zin Zandor was clawing at the top of the desk. The poison gas had got him now. His features were distorted, his mouth open. Even as they looked he went limp, and apparently remained suspended in mid-air.

“Dead and falling,” said Swift as he dragged his companion into the passageway, out to the open air.

They sucked in great lungfuls, feeling strangely dizzy.

“The girl!” cried Searle.

Without an instant’s hesitation, Swift turned and led the way back into the passageway.

“Take a deep breath and we’ll try for her. Probably the gas rises. Keep your head near the floor.”

They dived down and crawled along the floor. The sickening sweet odor was in their nostrils. At the corner of the desk, inclined at an angle of almost forty-five degrees, was the form of the man who had signed himself Zin Zandor. He was falling to the floor, and the force of gravitation was so slow, compared to the speeded-up life forces of the two men who watched him, that he seemed to drift downward with hardly perceptible motion.

There was a door to the left of the desk. Swift took a deep breath, reached upward, turned the knob. The door opened; they scrambled into the inner room.

Here was a Remington typewriter, doubtless the one upon which the blackmail letters had been written. Here, also, was stored great treasure, gold coins, currency, gems. And here they found the girl who had posed as messenger. She was bound hand and foot, gagged — Louise Folsom, captured, doomed to die.

Her eyes stared straight up at the ceiling of the room. She made no move when they entered.

“Living at a normal rate. Can’t see us,” said Searle.

He drew a knife and cut the ropes. Even then she did not move. They watched her anxiously. The closed door was shutting out many of the poison fumes. But there was a chance she had already inhaled too many of them.

Searle reached out and gently touched the eyeball with the tip of his finger. The lid gradually — very, very slowly — commenced to droop.

“She’s alive,” said Swift.

The girl’s lips moved with such slowness that the motion was hardly perceptible.

“She knows we’re here, trying to talk.”

Searle nodded.

“We’ve got to get her out of here. That gas, you know.”

“The door’s closed. Remember, it disperses quickly. It takes a concentrated dose to produce death. He probably had it in the ring. He intended to liberate the gas from the poison ring and fill the room with it. Then he was going to put on some sort of a gas mask.”

“Yeah. Your blow with the club got him groggy, and he sucked in a mouthful of the concentrated gas before he knew what he was doing.”

“How about getting the girl out?”

“Let’s try to carry her. But pick her up gently or we’ll jerk her to pieces, and we’ll have to stop easy like or — wait a minute — I’m feeling queer!”

At that same moment Art Swift felt a peculiar sensation at the pit of his stomach.

“The gas!” he exclaimed.

“No,” said Searle. “We’re coming back to normal!”

There was a brief spell of vertigo, and then, of a sudden, things were normal.

The girl’s eyes were blinking; her lips were forming words.

Beyond the door that led to the, other room something crashed — the body of Zin Zandor, just falling to the floor.

The girl’s rapid words rang in their ears.

“Hoped you would come. They were planning to make this the day of the big clean-up. They had all their men ready to bring on a reign of terror, and they were going to kill me.”

Swift pointed to a door that opened from one side of the room. He picked up a chair, crashed it through one of the panels.

“Let’s get out of here!”

They felt the tang of fresh air upon their faces, saw the street roaring with the busy life of a rush hour. The noise burst upon their ears. In the alley, motor running, was the truck, filled with the strangely shaped suitcases. Sprawled just inside the door, where the two adventurers had dragged them, were the bodies of the unconscious bandits, tied hand and foot.

There was no traffic in the alley, but the street just beyond was filled with activity.

“Load ’em in and start for headquarters,” said Searle, and grinned.

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.