The Seed of Evil Read online

  There were none. And once Joule had announced his decision, there were no objections.

  “Ross will instruct you concerning the preparations for the deep dive,” he continued briefly. “That is all.”

  For three days the Interstice poised her giant bulk ten miles down, while we worked on the gauss shunt. With our resources it did not prove difficult. We constructed a meson charger next to the ship’s power plant, and laid a skeleton of iron-silver channels over the inner hull, converging on a bank at the stern where the external magnetic fields could be passed back to ground. But for this, the polariser would be twisted out of alignment, and every scrap of metal would be melted by induction.

  I used a rheostat control to test the shunt’s power to vary the magnetic field strength within the ship; then we were ready to reactivate the propulsors and turn our sluggish gravitational settling into a true power-dive.

  The interior of the Interstice looked a devil’s workshop. An image came to my mind of the old days before the world’s surface was fully mapped, and windships might spread sail before new oceans, and new lands. For us, there were no free winds, no light, no rolling waters. We had passed outside the bounds of ordinary existence, and must force our way into darkness, pressure, heat.

  Obediently, the motors pushed us deeper into the Earth. In the harsh yellow light which was our only illumination, the technicians watched the changing rock formations as they showed on the screens, noting down readings from the instruments. The information for which geologists had longed for centuries was now being collected with ease.

  Down we sank, with the ever-present thought of the world’s solidity and the audacity of the human intellect which had conceived the subterrene ship. There was a quiet murmur of activity in the large hall-like enclosure of the Interstice, when I next walked her length to inspect the various equipments. We had just clocked three hundred miles.

  Then, without warning, there was a blamn, followed by a heavy grating noise, and a shivering in the air. I recognised it, with utter amazement. I had heard it before, in the Navy’s laboratories. It was nothing to do with the magnetic barrier we had encountered earlier.

  It was the noise created by the collision of two polariser fields.

  I ran through the long passageways to Command Section. In the ante-room to the control cabin, the detector crew was scanning the vicinity, and the obstruction was taking shape on the screens.

  But there was more than just one field. I saw a whole panorama of them, an extended complex, full of shadowy delineations to north, south, east and west, piling up, forming groups and spacious areas. For a while, it was more than I could believe.

  We had blundered into a subsurface city.

  Though it sounds incredible, Nature also has learned how to make two material objects occupy the same space, and she has riddled the Earth with beings in this manner. The conurbation into which we had plunged was huge, stretching beyond detector range. The scanners tended to indicate a rather weak polarisation, and I would guess that the inhabitants, if their experience can be described in human terms, dwell in a medium like thick treacle. The Interstice must have fallen on them as a super-bright, supersolid monster of almost indestructible qualities.

  I went into the control cabin, where Captain Joule was gaping at the same scene on his own monitor screens, and sat down. Joule did not bother to acknowledge me.

  He flicked a communicator switch. “Power Section! Listen for my orders. And give me steerage.”

  I heard the snick as the steerage of the Interstice was transferred from the propulsor room to the control console before Joule’s bucket seat. The Interstice had become lodged between the walls of a group of buildings, and his magnificent broad shoulders hunched in an attitude of fury over the steering wheel, sweat staring out from his skin, as he tried to extricate her and batter a way into deeper territory.

  “Look!” I said. “Do you see?”

  He paused, and gazed at the screen. Ships were approaching, a whole fleet of them, riding forward as if on a cumbersome breeze. They were odd-looking affairs, composed of long curved beams, and through the wide gaps these afforded we could vaguely distinguish crews and crude apparatus. There were also signs of flurried activity in the vicinity of the nearby buildings.

  The inhabitants were clearly prepared to defend their city. I noticed that some of the ships, larger than the others, had something mounted on their prows which looked strangely familiar, and as I watched, the foremost vessel swung into action.

  “It’s a catapult!” Joule shouted.

  Clang! The Interstice’s galleries rang with the impact of the missile against her hull. Joule laughed. “Let them shoot away!” And he bent himself once again to the control console.

  But it proved impossible to dislodge our ship, and eventually, with the subearthers’ missiles raining down on us, we resorted to our weapons. Though we used them sparingly, our torpedoes and seismo-beams caused terrible havoc before we had blown a pathway and could continue our journey. For fifty miles the fleet harried us, pounding the walls of the ship in an attempt at revenge.

  “And this is at three hundred miles!” Captain Joule exclaimed. “What will we find further on?”

  The possibilities were frightening. The Earth’s interior is much more spacious than its surface, and has room for a vaster variety of creatures. Here, we had come up against primitives. In the depths, might we find imposing civilisations of super-science, to whom the Interstice was a toy? Or there might be monsters in the Earth. …

  But discovery had become the prime object of the dive as far as I was concerned, and no danger could be allowed to stand in the way of scientific endeavour.

  And the possibility of meeting enemies was not the only danger. By now, I knew that something else was seriously wrong.

  I had been checking over the readings which the external instruments had given. By the laws of physics, it seemed inevitable that the figures for density and heat should have risen steadily as we descended. Inexplicably, they had remained the same since we began the dive at ten miles.

  Captain Joule showed an engineer’s interest, but was unperturbed. “What about magnetism?” he asked.

  “No change either,” I told him, “but then there wouldn’t be much at this depth: the gauss shunt is needed for later.”

  Just the same, we both went along to inspect the shunt, starting at the meson charger in Power Section, and tracing one of the iron-silver channels along a narrow hull corridor to the stern. I studied the meters mounted on the insulated chamber which contained the bank. The needles should have moved slightly as a small increment of magnetic force was bled away to maintain surface normal. Instead, they were dead against the stops.

  I picked up a phone and called Power Section. “Move the bleed bar two inches,” I ordered.

  As the rheostat was manipulated, one dial stirred to show force being passed to ground, and another told of decreasing field strength in the ship.

  Joule grunted. “Could anything be wrong with it?”

  I ordered the rheostat to be returned to its original position. “No,” I said, “it’s in perfect order. Perhaps we just have to accept the fact that the interior of the Earth is different from what we have always assumed. Either that, or else we are in a pocket of low density. Anyway, our progress is good.”

  But as the days passed, I kept constant check on the density, heat and magnetism readings, and always to find the same result. No change. I grew seriously worried.

  I reminded myself that apart from the Interstice’s intrinsic instruments we had no way of checking her actual velocity. To rectify this I designed a mass-meter, which, I reasoned, could tell our rate of progress by measuring first the mass of the Earth ahead of us, and then that part of the Earth we had put behind us.

  The result startled me. The two readings taken together disagreed with the known mass of the Earth.

  “That’s ridiculous!” I told Joule. “The Earth would have to weigh more than it did
when we set out. And we’ve put five hundred miles behind us, but the distance ahead is still the same.”

  Were we moving, or weren’t we?

  It was an enigma. Pointed one way, the mass-meter indicated that we were. Pointed the other way, it indicated that we were at a standstill.

  I waited a further week, during which the puzzle enlarged itself. By this time we should have reached a depth of one thousand miles, and be learning the extent of our ability to survive under extreme pressure. In fact, we had clocked a thousand vertical miles; but our approach to the core had still not advanced. We seemed to be advancing along the line of a paradox, where no matter how fast we run, the finishing line never comes nearer.

  The knowledge of it was both frustrating and depressing. It was now no longer possible to treat it as an intellectual puzzle.

  We had found no more cities, and no further attacks had been made on us, but we took care not to repeat our previous mistake. The scanners operated continuously, and showed various dim flickers of polarisation in the distance. I spent hours gazing at the screen. Occasionally, a vast shape drifted by on the edge of scanner range, and transient forms whose nature we could not guess appeared.

  After thirteen days of travel, Captain Joule called the officers to his cabin.

  Impassively, he faced them in his bucket seat, and allowed them to fall quiet, cramped and sweating, before speaking.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I wish to review our position. Ross will tell you the situation.”

  Briefly, I explained about the mass-meter readings, and the uniformity of pressure we had found at all depths of the mantle. We were driving the ship into a discrepancy between instrument readings. The further we went, the greater the discrepancy became.

  “Apart from common sense,” I finished, “there is nothing to indicate that we have gone one inch towards fulfilling our aim of reaching the Earth’s core.”

  “Then are we at a standstill?”

  “From one angle, it looks like it,” I conceded, “but I don’t think so. We are still expending energy. The propulsors are working perfectly, and this can only result in motion. We must be going somewhere, and in fact you only have to look at the detector screens to see that we are actually in motion.”

  “And getting nowhere,” Joule put in. “As far as the Navy is concerned, the purpose of this dive is to get back to base, which we do not seem to be achieving.”

  “Are you suggesting that we turn back?”

  “It has been in my mind. There may be no obstacle in our way now.”

  My heart sank at the words. Our discoveries had intrigued me enough to want desperately to continue, and the danger, and the strangeness we had encountered, only gave me an overpowering urge to journey further.

  I knew Captain Joule secretly agreed with my attitude, for he is one of the best of men, the finest of officers. There are some who find blame with our generation, saying that it has become ultraconservative and rigid; but I claim that this is no fault, only an inevitable era of civilisation. The spirit of our nation was never stronger than it is now. We are producing great men, fabulous engineers. Captain Joule knew the tacit dictum of our engineers—never to know fear, never to draw back—but he had a duty to his command, which I, though it saddens me now to confess it, did not feel.

  “Why turn back?” I asked intensely. “We must carry on! The puzzle will resolve itself—and anything we encounter in the Earth, we will deal with!”

  We had no opportunity to argue further, for the decision was taken out of our hands. As the communicator bleeped the alarm call, all monitor screens came to life.

  The detector crews had found a second species of intra-Earth intelligence approaching from a distance of some miles, and we had several minutes in which to prepare.

  Their fleet came up from below and arrayed itself about us, while we took to our battle stations. They were long, portly craft which swayed slightly due to some invisible phenomenon of the depths, and they gathered slowly, as if getting our measure, closing in with a menacing air.

  Then, either on general principle, or because they considered us enemies, they attacked.

  I was exultant. Now the Interstice, previously untried in full-scale combat, would use her full capacity, and the temper of our expedition would crystallise, one way or the other. For these adversaries of ours were not the primitives of the higher levels. Their ships moved under their own power, and their weapons could do us damage.

  Yet still they were not our technological equals. They fired flashing arrow-like projectiles which could penetrate our armour, and they skilfully deployed their large numbers in an attempt to compensate for our superior armament. But the Interstice bulked huge above them, bristling with torpedo tubes and seismo-beam turrets; we were a match for them.

  It was a running fight. Power Section strained the propulsors to their utmost, and we pressed down like a whale surrounded by a cloud of sharks. Captain Joule gave up trying to evade the enemy missiles, and left our defence to the wicked power of Weapons Section.

  When I entered the main body of the ship to keep a watch on the performance of our equipment, the galleries were booming like bells from enemy strikes, and shuddering from the explosions of our own torpedoes as they flashed out of polarisation and caused titanic convulsions in the Earth—I’ll warrant the subearthers never heard of that trick! I could hear the surging rush of their launching, and from the alcoves set high in the walls came the buzzing of seismo-beams.

  Just ahead of me, a twenty-foot lance lunged through the side of the wall and hurtled aslant the spacious central well. A gunner fell from the wall, his head cleft open. The seismo-beamer he had been operating was a ruined mess.

  Thirty times their projectiles broke our hull, and we lost eight men. But what of it? We were an invincible dreadnought. The Interstice was truly a battleship.

  Eventually they withdrew, with heavy losses. Perhaps we had passed outside their domain.

  There was a drumming of power tools as the crewmen applied themselves to repairs amid the fumes of our own weapons. I returned to the control cabin, where Captain Joule was checking Polariser, Weapons and Power Sections. He turned to me as I entered.

  “Steering’s gone,” he said gloomily. “There’s no choice about what we do now. I wouldn’t like to try to turn the ship on the main drive; the polarisers would blow, no doubt about that.”

  I made no answer. The Interstice, unable to turn aside without the elaborate gear necessary to change the direction of a polarised field, could do nothing but journey on, and on.

  We had gained a victory, but lost control over our destiny. It was in this helpless mood that the officers of the Interstice directed her even deeper into the solid Earth.

  For a month we sank down under the force of the motors. Every day I anxiously studied the instrument readings. In all that time, the nature of the external rock showed no change.

  Everything, with the exception of the second mass-meter reading and the plain fact that we were moving downwards, indicated that we were still at rest ten miles below the surface.

  Joule and I gave all our thought to the problem. Sometimes, he shuddered. Was this the bottomless gulf of which poets speak in terror?

  “It’s impossible!” he said in exasperation. “Rock is flowing past us! Living creatures appear from ahead, and drop behind. Yet we are unable to approach the centre!”

  We drew a circle to represent the Earth, and resolved the mystery to the fact that the mass-meter gave two conflicting positions for the Interstice within that circle. Or was it some radically new geometry, where two quantities no longer add up to their sum? What do we know of the universe? We only have experience of the surface of our planet—perhaps, elsewhere, laws are different.

  Experimentally, we drew in quadrant of the circle, and contemplated the figure. Joule drew in concentric rings, and we noticed that in the quadrant, the arc shortened in proportion to the radius.

  It was a subtle thought.

>   Apart from the philosophical considerations, I also wondered whether the gauss shunt, by draining surplus energy back to ground, was somehow the source of an illusion affecting all the external instruments and the mass-meter. I could think of only one way to find out.

  Captain Joule regarded me with horror when I requested permission to turn off the shunt.

  “If the conjecture is correct,” he said in a hushed tone, “we’ll be blown to kingdom come.”

  “What of it?” I cried, gesturing wildly. “We can’t carry on like this. We could as well be journeying in Limbo. We might get away with it if the shunt is out of action for only a few milliseconds.”

  We did the thing secretly. With my own hands I assembled the timing mechanism and connected it to the bank. For twenty milliseconds the shunt was inoperative.

  The meters did not even flicker.

  “Try again!” Joule ordered.

  Three times I repeated the experiment. Then I turned off the shunt permanently. Never having encountered the conditions for which it was designed, it need never have been built at all.

  “That leaves the other explanation,” Joule said, “The philosophical one. But it entails a relativity more staggering than any our physicists have thought of—”

  I should have known that his calm, inexorable mind would have produced the answer eventually, But as he was about to explain, the third subsurface attack began.

  They were a small, swift raiding force which swooped down on us from the north. We never knew where they came from: there were no signs of the habitations we had seen on higher levels. Most likely they were pirates, or warrior nomads, for they were professional, ferocious—and more deadly than anything we had yet encountered.

  What was more, they had learned how to crack a polarised field.

  Perhaps our own equipment was too strong for them, or perhaps they simply wished to frighten us into surrendering, but for only two brief intervals did we hear the ear-splitting shriek of their appliance, the groan of the polarisers and experience the suffocating heat of a wavering field. Then again, the depleted resources of Weapons Section were brought to bear.