TWELVE times ZERO
By Howard Browne
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of ScienceFiction March 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CONTENTS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Police grilled him mercilessly, while eyes from ahundred worlds looked on.
Chapter I
They brought him into one of the basement rooms. He moved slowly andwith a kind of painful dignity, as a man moves on his way to the firingsquad. A rumpled shock of black hair pointed up the extreme pallor of agaunt face, empty at the moment of all expression. Harsh light from anoverhead fixture winked back from tiny beads of perspiration dotting thewaxen skin of his forehead.
The three men with him watched him out of faces as expressionless as hisown. They were ordinary men who wore ordinary clothing in an ordinaryway, yet in the way they moved and in the way they stood you knew theywere hard men who were in a hard and largely unpleasant business.
One of them motioned casually toward a straight-backed chair almostexactly in the center of the room. "Sit there, Cordell," he said.
A quiet voice, not especially deep, yet it seemed to bounce off thepainted concrete walls.
Wordless, the young man obeyed. Sitting, he seemed as stiff anduncompromising as before. The man who had spoken made a vague gestureand the overhead light went out, replaced simultaneously by strong raysfrom a spotlight aimed full at the eyes of the seated figure.Involuntarily the young man's head turned aside to avoid the searingbrilliance, but a hand came out of the wall of darkness and jerked itback again.
"Just to remind you," the quiet voice continued conversationally, "I'mDetective Lieutenant Kirk, Homicide Bureau." A pair of hands thrust asecond chair toward the circle of light. Kirk swung it around anddropped onto the seat, resting his arms along the back, facing the manacross a distance of hardly more than inches.
In the pitiless glare of the spotlight Cordell's cheekbones stood outsharply, and under his deepset eyes were dark smudges of exhaustion. Hisrigid posture, his blank expression, his silence—these seemed not somuch indications of defiance as they did the result of some terrible anddeep-seated shock.
"Let's go over it again, Cordell," Kirk said.
The young man swallowed audibly against the silence. One of his handstwitched, came up almost to his face as though to shield his eyes, thendropped limply back, "That light—" he mumbled.
"—stays on," Kirk said briskly. "The quicker you tell