The Seed of Evil Read online

  Wessel resumed staring woodenly at the wall, ignoring his two erstwhile friends. There was not the slightest trace of a join where his face had opened.

  Brand stood stupefied. “Well?” Ruiger rasped, “you still think he’s all right?”

  He went to the arms cupboard and got two dart rifles. “We’re paying a second visit,” he said curtly, handing a rifle to Brand. “This time we’ll stay and watch the operation. Let’s see how tricky those aliens are at the point of a gun.”

  Brand followed blindly. Wessel, too, seemed to have no will to resist or argue. When ordered to do so he went with them out of the ship and walked across the grass to the Chid hut.

  As soon as they reached it Ruiger kicked the door open, and barged in.

  The smell of rottenness invaded their nostrils. The interior was exactly as they had first seen it: one Chid lay sprawled on the couch, while the other lolled in the double sling. Only the latter reacted to the intrusion, raising his head to peer at Ruiger.

  “Our friends have returned!” he chortled. “They have arrived to give us our promised sport!”

  The Chid on the couch replied with the slightest trace of an acid-sounding accent. “Yes,” he said, “but it was not polite of them to spurn our parts offering.”

  Brand and Wessel entered behind Ruiger. Ruiger spoke thickly, holding his rifle at the ready.

  “You have misused our friend terribly. His brain is not fixed in his body!”

  The Chid turned his eyes to the roof. “Ah, to be able to leave one’s body! It is every Earthman’s desire—that is what I learn in Earth religion.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  Ruiger broke off as the Chid disengaged himself from his slings. The Chid’s big frame seemed awkward, yet somehow commanding, in the cramped, confined hut. He reached out to unhook what looked like a golfer’s carrying case, complete with shoulder-strap, from the wall. The case contained numerous metal tools, many of which bore gleaming blades.

  With a snake-like motion the second Chid came off the couch and stretched himself. “Shall we take umbrage at the breach in their good manners?”

  “No. We should make allowance for their alienness. That said, we must of course recompense ourselves for the insult. Shall we arrange a brain-race? It will do our guests no harm, and provide us with welcome sport. How will you wager?”

  “I bet this one to win,” the second Chid said, pointing to Ruiger.

  The other laughed. “I bet that neither of them will make it.”

  An urgent feeling of danger seized Ruiger. He tried to speak, but could not. He tried to shoot the nearest Chid with his rifle, but could not. He was completely immobilised. The two Chid towered over him, inspecting him with their boiled-egg eyes. Their exchange continued, apparently with a discussion of stakes and odds. Then they reached for their surgical tools.

  What happened next was of such a nature that Ruiger’s mind was unable to apply any appropriate feelings to it. At first it was like being a babe in the hands of ultimately powerful adults, and the strangeness of it made all his perceptions hazy. He felt no pain, not even when the Chid, using a simple scalpel, cut his skull and face down the middle, bisecting his nose in the process, and prised apart the two halves. The minute his brain was levered out of place, however, he immediately ceased to feel that he was a human being possessing arms, legs or a torso. Eyes still functioning, he emerged from the sawn-open skull as a different creature altogether. He was a rounded grey lump, a cleft down his back, a sort of armadillo’s tail at his rear.

  After that there was a short period of unconsciousness. When Ruiger came round again, his transformation was complete.

  It was a little like being a snail. He could move about on the podium on which he squatted. He was covered with a gelatinous layer which protected his vulnerable tissue. And he could see. But he could not, of course, hear, or feel, or smell. The podium did, however, support other small organs which comprised a partial life-support. He could breathe and, after a fashion, feed, though on somewhat specialised food.

  He had been put down outside the Chid hut, amid the coarse broad-bladed grass. Not far from him he saw another part-animal like himself. He knew it was Brand. And ahead, already striding away towards the cliff’s edge by means of vestigial motor functions, were two human bodies. One was Brand’s. The other was his.

  Ruiger experienced a terrible hunger for the body that went walking away from him. He knew that he could possess it again, but to do so he must catch up with it before it fell over the cliff, and so he set off, sliding over the uneven ground with all his puny strength.

  This, he realised, was the Chid’s brain-race. The Chid had placed bets on whether he or Brand, who also was straining not far away, would recover his body first. Already Ruiger was gaining on his body. If it should fall but once, he told himself, he would be able to catch up with it.

  But the minutes passed and the body did not fall. Instead, Ruiger himself became entangled in a clump of grass. By the time he freed himself it was far too late. Desperately he lunged forward, only to see his body, striated by blades of grass, walk straight over the edge of the cliff, to fall on the rocks and the sea below.

  It was gone. His body was gone. Numb with failure, Ruiger turned round. The Brand body, too, had disappeared, and of the Brand brain there was no sign. He made out the Chid hut. Near it was Wessel, standing casually, his brain out of his skull again and clinging to the side of his neck like an enormous slug. Beyond that, he dimly saw the Chid spaceship, not far from the little wood.

  He saw his own spaceship, too, but that was no use to him now. Ruiger’s gaze settled on the wood. The dark patch, the motionless copse, was like an island amid the tawny bush. Curious … he was already forgetting what it was like to have a body … The burning hunger faded, his humanity receded from him as if he had lost it, not minutes ago, but decades ago, and the little wood was no longer gruesome or grotesque. It was a lush, gentle, sheltering place to part-animals like himself. It protected and nurtured them. In the wood he could live—after a fashion. And life, he remembered dimly, was worth hanging on to at any cost.

  The sun and stars were burning down on him. He was naked and helpless here in the open. He could not live here. Steadily, pushing his way through the stiff grass, thinking of the welcoming pool of blood, of the enclosing black foliage, of the pulsing warmth, he crawled towards the still, dark hollow.

  The God-Gun

  It might seem improbable that my friend Rodrick (the spelling is his) could be the perpetrator of the world’s ultimate evil. His everyday conduct is neither more nor less reprehensible than the average man’s, and indicates no propensity for extreme villainy. Yet philosophically his depravity is profound, and has led him to commit the supreme crime, a crime of such magnitude as even to put him beyond the reach of divine retribution (or so he claims, and I, his only confidant, believe him).

  The event of which I speak took place late one summer evening, in the final quarter of this century. It is thanks to Rodrick’s vanity that I witnessed the deed—that and our habit of drinking together in various bars in the town where we both live. I believe these meetings are for Rodrick almost his only social activity. For me, they provide the kind of stimulating conversation that is not always easy to come by in a small town. In the course of an evening our discussion might range through particle physics, organic chemistry, metallurgy, magic, magnetism, senology, cosmology, comparative religion, systematics, computer design, and on what would be the proper classification of human types. But always it has been a somewhat one-sided debate, for there has never been any question of my being equal to Rodrick. Always he outdistances me, always I am the pupil being talked to by a master who holds in his memory every fact and idea known to man.

  My acquaintanceship with Rodrick has been a long one, and goes back nearly fifteen years. We both lead prosaic lives; I as an accountant and he, with a waste of ability all too typical of him, as a designer in a local television fact
ory. We are, it will be guessed, intellectual dilettantes. But whereas I am strictly an amateur, Rodrick might almost be termed a professional, an avid scholar, and besides that a genuine inventor. The range of his studies is vast. I know, for instance, that he not only keeps himself fully informed as to the state of the physical sciences, but that he has also made a detailed examination of every philosophical and mystical system available. Confronted with the latest X-ray readings from suspected black holes, he is able to add comment derived from some obscure Kabbalistic text. Conversely, to refute a point in some ancient metaphysical doctrine quite unheard of by me, he will cite the discovery of the microwave background radiation.

  But it would be wrong, I suppose, to describe Rodrick as a genius, for all his mental scope. Genius usually carries with it the capacity for deep feeling, and there Rodrick is, not simply deficient, but actually disabled: he is an emotional imbecile. I have come to know well his dry, arrogant voice, his tight, triumphant smile, his rapidly blinking eyes, symptoms of features in his psyche that are, perhaps, an aspect of our time. Nothing ever engages his attention that is not of a purely intellectual character; he worships, so to speak, the problem-solving intellect, its cleverness, its ingenuity, its facility for making the previously impossible possible. The need for a new type of life-saving surgery, or the interesting but frustrating question of how to achieve controlled nuclear fusion and so supply limitless energy to mankind, is to him no different from the problem of how to arrange the perfect murder, or of how to annihilate a nation.

  This manic obsession with means regardless of the morality of ends, this extraordinary shallowness in his otherwise brilliant make-up, may be why so little has come out of Rodrick’s efforts. His minor improvements in radio engineering have not been commercially adopted, and though he maintains a well-equipped workshop on the top floor of his house, most of his private inventions have too small a practical application to make them viable. Only the automata with which he has populated his house seem to have proved even moderately useful, dusting and cleaning, finding their way by following white lines painted on the floor, climbing stairs and walls on a system of guide-rails, but leaving large patches of dust and rubbish unattended. And even they are complicated, clumsy, and too expensive to be marketable.

  Of late Rodrick has become much absorbed in laser technology. It was to this subject that he first turned on the evening in question. He told me that he had just finished constructing “a unique device” employing a number of very powerful lasers he had bought recently. When I asked him what this device did, he changed his tack and went on to discuss the incongruent properties of electromagnetic radiation: its constant velocity in vacuo, unaffected by the velocity of the observer; its ubiquitous role as a conveyor of energy, and so forth. He said he suspected that laser light, because of the discipline of its coherent vibrations, could be used to disintegrate solid objects “into atoms”, as he put it, if only it could be tuned finely enough.

  We were drinking in the White Bear, a quiet place lit by shaded lamps. Suddenly breaking off his discourse, Rodrick turned to me and asked abruptly if I believed in God.

  The question surprised me. “Not in so far as I’ve ever thought about it,” I said.

  “I have thought about it a great deal,” Rodrick said airily, “and I’m convinced that God does exist. The universe is the result of an act of creation. In other words, we have a maker.”

  It surprised me a great deal to hear Rodrick talk this way. We had both always taken a materialistic view of things, and although Rodrick is familiar with mystical doctrines, as I have said, I had presumed his interest in them to be for the sake of completeness only. To take seriously the notion of God, to admit religion, seemed to me to smack of superstition, of unreason, of what Rodrick has called “animal belief”. I would not have thought it possible, either, for Rodrick to experience the sense of humility that belief in God is supposed to inculcate, and it saddened me, a little, to imagine now that there was a breach in the armour of his hubris.

  His next words, however, were reassuring. “And if God exists, the next question is, how may he be contacted, influenced, forced, even injured.”

  “It’s not possible,” I answered. “Believers are unanimous on that score. He is impalpable, transcendent.”

  Rodrick looked at me intently, with that small, tight smile of his that meant he was leading up to something. “They are quite mistaken,” he said firmly. “What you are quoting is the shoddy superstition of the worshipper, the cringing obeisance he adopts towards the creator. The point is, I have never yet studied an account of the creation, whether mythical or metaphysical, that managed to do without some connection between the creator and the created. Since the universe is physical, it follows that this connection must, necessarily, be of a physical kind.”

  He swallowed his rum and coke before continuing. “Do you see where I am leading? It all means that God shares some of the properties of matter. Not that he’s material in the same sense that we are—though one sect, the Mormons, teach that he is—but he must possess some material characteristics. Substantiality without extension, perhaps, or not even substantiality as such, but at any rate something, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to arrange for the creation of a physical universe.”

  Rodrick prodded a finger at me. “And as you know, there’s no such thing as a purely one-way physical arrangement. If he was able to create us, there must be some way we can hit back at him. God can be killed, even.”

  I snorted. “Preposterous!”

  For reply Rodrick indulged in one of his theatrical gestures I often find irritating. He rose abruptly to his feet, without a word to me, and strode for the door, leaving me to trail along after him.

  He was already some yards up the street before I caught up with him. I asked, somewhat annoyed, where we were going.

  “To kill God,” he answered doggedly.

  His pace did not falter and I, weakling that I am, fell in step beside him.

  Certain impressions of that evening remain in my memory. The warmth of the night, the vanished sunset that still left a lingering after-glow. Rodrick’s half-timbered house, like a dark mass; Rodrick’s lean face, wolf-like in the light of shaded cresset lamps as we mounted the staircase that led to the upper floor. One of Rodrick’s cleaning robots had fallen from its guide-rails and lay broken on the tiling below. It was ignored by its brothers, who continued to purr clumsily about their business.

  Rodrick kept up a constant expatiation during the short walk. “You see, our space-time must be in contact with the creative principle at all points. That principle must in turn emanate directly from the deity. Discover that principle and learn to control it, and you have a weapon to which God is susceptible, and which can be aimed from any point within the creation.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Perfectly.”

  Either Rodrick was joking or he was paranoid, I decided. But I asked: “If you were to destroy God, wouldn’t the universe disappear?”

  “Ah, you stand revealed as a pantheist!” Rodrick declared dryly. “You subscribe to the Vedantic view that the universe is an aspect of Brahman, or God, and is indistinguishable from him. I’m fairly sure the cruder, Christian view is the correct one. The universe is distinct from God, produced by an act of will, and therefore is capable of an independent existence.” He waved a hand. “Just as those buildings have outlasted the men who built them.”

  Now we were in Rodrick’s laboratory, and I gazed around as he switched on the lights. An elaborate framework had been constructed on the main workbench. A number of lasers—presumably those Rodrick had mentioned purchasing—were bracketed into it, in a manner that suggested a carefully conceived pattern. Distributed through the framework, like the fruits of a bizarre tree, were mirrors, lenses and prisms.

  Beyond the windows there seemed to stretch an endless menacing abyss. It struck me how sinister was the atmosphere of the workshop, with its timber rafters and clumps of grim
e (the house automata were not admitted here). It was more like the laboratory of a medieval alchemist than of a twentieth-century man of science. The apparatus was modern, of course, but the dim lamps created countless dark corners, and it struck me that Rodrick could have arranged the lighting better.

  “All right,” I said, “granted for the moment there is a physical principle by which one might gain access to God, supposing him to exist, how would you ever locate such a principle?”

  “Perfectly simple, as it happens,” Rodrick said blandly. “That information has been available for at least three thousand years. ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ Book of Genesis, verse three. And a remarkable insight on the part of the writer, if I may say so.”

  Rodrick moved around the workbench to examine the lasers from all angles and began to check the alignments of his contraption with a digitised micrometer. While working he kept up a continuous low-toned monologue. “It’s obvious, once you think about it. The tool God used to construct solid matter, to unroll space and time, was light. That’s why it has such peculiar properties—why its velocity is constant for all observers, contrary to the expectations of Michelson and Morley, and also why it’s the basis of all energy exchange. But we don’t want the ordinary light that just goes zipping endlessly through space; that’s no good to us at all. We need light that can reverse its direction, as it were, that can become intense enough to implode, so to speak, and cross the threshold back into the pre-creation state … At this point we come to the fact, which is very interesting, that while the velocity of light is constant for all observers, it is not constant for all media. Inside a material environment it slows down. In diamond, for instance, its velocity is a mere seventy-seven thousand miles per hour—a bare two-fifths of its velocity in vacuo. What velocity, I asked myself, would light adopt in a medium composed entirely of light? The answer is that it would have no velocity at all, since it would only have itself to measure that velocity by.”