The Project Gutenberg EBook of Twelve Times Zero, by Howard Carleton Browne

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Title: Twelve Times Zero

Author: Howard Carleton Browne

Release Date: May 28, 2010 [EBook #32564]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWELVE TIMES ZERO ***

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

TWELVE _times_ ZERO

By Howard Browne

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _It was a love-triangle murder that made today's headlines
but the answer lay hundreds of thousands of light years away!_]

[Illustration: _Police grilled him mercilessly, while eyes from a
hundred worlds looked on._]

Chapter I

They brought him into one of the basement rooms. He moved slowly and
with a kind of painful dignity, as a man moves on his way to the firing
squad. A rumpled shock of black hair pointed up the extreme pallor of a
gaunt face, empty at the moment of all expression. Harsh light from an
overhead fixture winked back from tiny beads of perspiration dotting the
waxen skin of his forehead.

The three men with him watched him out of faces as expressionless as his
own. They were ordinary men who wore ordinary clothing in an ordinary
way, yet in the way they moved and in the way they stood you knew they
were hard men who were in a hard and largely unpleasant business.

One of them motioned casually toward a straight-backed chair almost
exactly in the center of the room. "Sit there, Cordell," he said.

A quiet voice, not especially deep, yet it seemed to bounce off the
painted concrete walls.

Wordless, the young man obeyed. Sitting, he seemed as stiff and
uncompromising as before. The man who had spoken made a vague gesture
and the overhead light went out, replaced simultaneously by strong rays
from a spotlight aimed full at the eyes of the seated figure.
Involuntarily the young man's head turned aside to avoid the se