He plodded across the floor, his feet silent on the plush carpet, and paused half-way across. His mild blue-eyed gaze took in the huge room. A number of passengers were seated on couches and at tables, talking, reading, and doing the desultory things people occupy themselves with when they are forced to spend their days waiting. Brian had not mixed with them much, and it would have been difficult for him to do so. He had found that they did not like someone who took so little notice of them.
He noticed that three tall, cloaked scientocrat officers were just leaving. Brian’s gaze lingered on them. As he turned away, one of the passengers caught his attention.
The man was large-boned and fair-haired. He was reading a technical magazine at a low table.
It took Brian several seconds to be sure. Then he hurried over.
He said: “Mercer.”
The man looked up, blankly at first. Gradually, a look of recognition and astonishment came over his features.
“Brian!” he said.
He stood up. The two inspected one another surreptitiously, surprised at the familiarity of each other’s face after an absence of ten years.
Brian’s grin became sheepish. He shrugged his shoulders self-consciously, aware of how the other was regarding him and making a reckoning of the teenager he had once known—as indeed Brian himself was doing. It was an odd sensation, like being confronted with an outside view of his own life he had lost grip of.
Each wished to question the other, but it was awkward at first to make a start. “I’m looking for the lay-out model of the ship,” Brian said. “Are you coming?”
The other gestured enthusiastically. “I’ve already seen it. It’s over here.”
They spent about ten minutes studying the stereoscopic schema. Brian peered through the bioscopes, following corridors, hallways, engine rooms and power leads, while Mercer chattered expertly about the design. As always, he was excited by technicalities and already, after a previous brief intense examination, he knew the functioning of the starship inside out. More than the actual schema, he was aware of the principles on which it was founded. In those ten minutes his brilliant exposition gave Brian a competent knowledge of the ship which by himself would have taken a fumbling hour.
Brian regarded Mercer as a phenomenon. He took all the advantages of society, but wasn’t fooled by it. At the same time, he was willing to take a place in it. It was this, his willingness to compromise, that made him different from Brian.
Brian was glad to see that though he was approaching the end of his third decade, he was still essentially the same person. He had not undergone the frightening metamorphosis which betrays the shallowness of most people.
They left the lay-out and found a table in the further part of the lounge. Here, they talked of various matters. Chemistry (Mercer’s subject), physics, astrophysics, and micro-physics. All the time their conversation veered nearer to philosophical considerations and the intriguing question of why things exist.
It was their schoolboy discussions, all over again.
“What do you think about it all now?” Mercer asked presently. “Have you come to any further conclusions?”
Brian didn’t answer. The question was too sudden for him. He shrugged his shoulders, slightly embarrassed.
Mercer had not really expected an answer, but he had felt compelled to ask. After all, that was what probably held them together, and if the interest was neglected now, it might never be repaired again.
“Where are you bound for?” he asked, conversationally, when Brian’s eyes did not lift from the table-top.
“I’ve got a job on Drone VII. Computer clerk.” He smiled wryly.
“I’ve got a job there, too.” Mercer decided not to press the point that his was permanent, well-paid and professional. “I never thought you were much given to travelling to get work.”
“No … I’ve lived a static sort of life so far. Only now and then becoming an aberrant and weirdy kid!” He grinned, and glanced around him. “It’s only for seven months, then they pay my fare back.” He grinned again. “They’ll go to any expense to get labour out there.”
Mercer nodded, following his own thoughts. He remembered that when Brian had been a fourteen-year-old boy he had started going around with a preoccupied air, as though working out some grave and fundamental problem. As it happened, this was the case, for the inquiry into philosophy and science had for him taken a sudden turn, from being abstract and speculative, into something immediate, personal and urgent.
How was anything known? Only in terms of something else. And how was that something else understood? Only in further terms. And so on, along the chain, until the unknown was reckoned in terms of the unknown. The end result of all reasoning was still ignorance.
This could make a joke of the philosopher. Just the same, the yearnings of the human mind could not be abandoned. Brian had turned all his attention to the problem of finding out whether the mind could surmount its obstacle.
He had always been uncommunicative about this aspect of things. Mercer wanted to know, without overtly prying, whether any progress had been made.
“Things haven’t gone too well for me,” Brian suddenly admitted in a serious tone. “It’s pretty tedious to have to make a living. As for other things, well. …”
Mercer waited.
“So what?” Brian continued in a burst of exasperation. “All that happens is that you die in the end and that’s that.”
“Yes.” Mercer could think of no other reply.
“Come on,” Brian said after a moment, “let’s go and look at the vision screens.”
He stood up. Mercer followed him out of the lounge, across a plush foyer, and through to the vision room.
Here, on television screens, passengers could see the depths of space through which the giant starship was passing. The six screens showed fore, aft, and the four quarters, and were oval-shaped, each about three feet down the long axis.
The vision room was like a picture gallery. The screens were spaced on the walls like paintings, and it was impossible to gain an overall impression. Each screen had to be viewed separately.
The starship was travelling near the edge of the galaxy, and the pictures were awesome enough. One showed what seemed to be a huge rift in the stars, really a region of obscuring gas and dust. Another showed a clearer view of the blazing galactic lens. Yet another pointed beyond the rim, into darkness. This screen was little more than a dark blank, with a few dim points of light.
It thrilled Brian to think that these scenes were being relayed from outside the hull, but beautiful as they were, they were only images. He had seen the same, many times, in cinemas and on television on Earth.
“This is worth seeing.”
“Yes.”
Brian leaned towards Mercer confidentially. “There’s something that bothers me. All these interstellar vessels have unbroken hulls. There are no direct vision ports to the outside. Why?”
Mercer thought about it for a moment. “I suppose it’s more convenient. When I was on Kaddan II I went beneath the Sulphur Sea in one of those big submarines. There were no vision ports on that, either.”
“Under ten thousand atmospheres I wouldn’t want there to be any. There are no engineering problems like that in space.”
“I suppose it’s just convenience,” repeated Mercer.
“There’s more to it than that. Nobody’s allowed to look outside. Not even the crew. All observations are made indirectly by externally mounted instruments. Yet just you try to find out why! There must be some kind of official phobia about space, or something.”
“What difference does it make?” Mercer said. “Perception is indirect anyway. You record the outside world with your sense organs and then present the recordings somewhere inside your brain, just like television. These screens are the internal end of the ship’s senses.”
“It’s still funny,” Brian muttered stubbornly.
“Well, it’s no use complaining. There’s b
ound to be a reason. It’s a matter of design.”
Brian gave up the argument. Mercer, he realised, was solidly trained scientifically. He had faith that the starship moved implacably through the void with all its affairs perfectly arranged. Mentally he was dominated by the fateful Declaration of Moscow issued by the Final Comintern of 2150 A.D.
The Comintern, from which present civilisation had sprung, had based science firmly on the Control of Nature by Man.
Brian recognised the achievements of Scientocratic Communism established at that time, and which had governed Earth ever since. But he often wondered about that particular item of doctrine, even though it had such a firm hold on the public mind. He wondered how seriously it was taken by the Inner Scientocrats themselves, two centuries later.
They left the vision room and wandered through the corridors for half an hour or so. Then Mercer announced his decision to go to bed.
“I’ve found it’s best to have regular habits,” he explained.
Brian nodded blankly. They arranged to meet next morning in the lounge, since they would probably miss one another at breakfast.
Brian himself did not go to his room straight away. He did not have the will to keep to a time-table, and besides, he had something on his mind. He went walking through the corridors, rooms and galleries of the huge ship. The passenger section was extensive, stretching practically from hull to hull, ending aft at the Engine Section, and giving for’ard to the equally sacrosanct parts which housed the scientocrat crew quarters.
Idly, he thought about Mercer. He had noticed that the mannerisms of boyhood had only slightly altered in form. He had the same expressions, the same ways of utterance. It was odd how it all survived in a man now much older.
He soon left behind the more populated parts of the ship. Towards the hull, the corridors of the passenger section did not end abruptly; they assumed the character of tunnels, with few intersections. Cabins, reading rooms and restaurants were left behind.
The lighting became functional and austere. Stained wood and pastel plastic gave way to plated steel. The tunnel was punctuated at intervals by telephones and panels of instruments whose meters Brian only dimly understood. More rarely, there were sections of the tunnel wall apparently designed to open up by the simple operation of a clasp: lockers containing some kind of stores or apparatus.
All this was standard equipment on an interstellar vessel. Brian was near the periphery of the ship, and he understood that these tunnels were usually visited only by crew members.
His excitement mounted as he realised that he was approaching nearer and nearer to the ultimate void. He was passing through the outer wrappings which wound protectively round the passenger compartments. Perhaps only feet separated him from the final hull plating. And that was only inches away from—absolute nothing.
Was it true that no one of any rank was allowed to look into space? Or was it permitted to Scientocrats, as he suspected? Did they monopolise the sight of the outer void?
He stopped. There was no sound in the stillness of the steel corridors. The constantly acting drive, a thousand feet away, was noiseless. But he gazed along the confines of the tunnel, trying to recover in his mind the whole of his experience of life.
He hadn’t formulated exactly why he had come on this trip, or why he was exploring these corridors now. There seemed no need, since there was no one to tell it to.
But the history of it was long. Though it was important to him, it was difficult to explain this importance to anyone else, even Mercer. He felt that the possibility of a fundamental experience lay beyond the curving enclosure of those steel walls.
Long ago, his attempts to think objectively had brought him up against a strange fact. It was not only human thinking that was subjective. Sight itself was subjective.
On Earth, the horizon set a boundary on vision which was never broken, even by gazing into the night sky. In addition, space was divided up and apportioned into a close-pressed multiplicity of objects: buildings, trees, people, hills, cloud and sky. The variegated and bounded environment seemed to occlude vision, distort it.
Brian was aware of this firm imprisonment of his consciousness. All his efforts to free perception from the objects around him had been of no avail. Only by peering into the uncluttered gulf beyond all worlds, in his belief, would his life come to a satisfactory conclusion.
At first, it had only been a stray thought. Then he had discovered the injunction against seeing beyond the hull of a starship. The strange ruling had endowed his notion with mystery. It was forbidden knowledge, promising to reveal unguessed secrets.
Perhaps it was fanciful, perhaps poetic, but it had a compelling effect on him.
He stepped forward again. Any time now, he should be hard up against the outer hull, which as far as most people knew, consisted of unbroken sheeting.
But Brian was banking on the principle that no system in a starship would be built without safety factors. The possibility of breakdown must be taken into account.
Abruptly, the tunnel turned a sharp angle and came to an end after running up a short, steep incline. The termination was crudely engineered; a roof curved overhead at an awkward angle, symmetrical with the rest of the construction, and reached down to within two feet of the floor.
It was clearly a larger wall which the tunnel had run into. Staring down from the roof, just above head-height, a heavy disc-plate stood out an inch and a half from the surrounding surface, studded with bolt-heads and painted over.
This was it. Brian placed first his cheek, then his ear against the roof-wall. The outer hull—or at least an inner lamination of it.
Reaching up, he tried to turn one of the bolt-heads. Naturally, it was quite immovable.
As he turned to go back the way he had come, he heard footsteps.
Freezing, he listened. They weren’t as near as he had thought at first—but they were quite near. He darted forward, back round the bend, then listened again. They became louder.
About twenty yards down the corridor, a figure appeared from an intersecting tunnel, crossed the corridor, then disappeared on the other side. Slowly, the footsteps faded away.
He hadn’t been seen, but it did show that the starship’s outer layers were not altogether deserted. He needed to be careful.
Quickly, he regained the populated parts of the ship and made his way to his own cabin. There, in a state of nervous exhaustion, he went to bed and immediately fell straight to sleep.
Brian met Mercer again in the main lounge the next day. When Mercer walked in, he was already waiting there, sitting quietly and watching the people around him.
Superficially, he seemed more cheerful, but talked less. It did not take Mercer long to realise that the apparent good humour was more nerves than anything else. Underneath, Brian was just as subdued, but something had been added. Usually, he gave the impression of purposelessness; today, he had tapped his inner resources and seemed to be going about something.
Mercer found the phenomenon vaguely sinister.
He followed Brian’s line of talk cautiously, almost unwillingly. It seemed inconsequential at first, but its very oddness told Mercer that his friend was clumsily trying to lead up to some subject he was reluctant to approach directly.
Mercer could not help smiling to himself. He had no idea what the matter was, but if he knew Brian it was bound to be something that could not possibly be approached indirectly. When the subject was finally broached, it would jar even more on the casual talk than if it had been offered as an opening gambit.
Eventually it came. Brian coughed.
“There’s something very interesting about these starships,” he said in a tone different from before.
“Yes?” Mercer said, glad to take the bait. “What’s that?”
Brian leaned forward, and seemed to be searching for words.
“Have you ever wondered,” he said in a low voice, “why interstellar ships are always officered by Scientocrats?”
&n
bsp; Mercer considered the unexpected, though perfectly reasonable, question.
At that moment three technical crew officers happened to pass by, and he watched them speculatively. Tall, austere, aloof, they swept by without seeming to notice anything of their surroundings. On the fronts of their white shirts and the backs of their yellow cloaks was emblazoned the prime scientific diagram: three vectors interlocked with three others, portraying the structure of space and matter.
Slowly, he said, “No.”
“I have. Why should they be? Spaceships aren’t so difficult to handle. Much more complicated jobs are left to common technicians like yourself. Why are the precious Scientocrats forced into such a menial business?”
“I don’t know.”
Still speaking low, Brian continued: “I know something not many people do. These Scientocrats have to visit the Innermost Chamber before they are given command of their first ship and receive some kind of information.”
Mercer looked at him in mild astonishment. “What is it?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
“You make it sound very mysterious.”
“I don’t think so. But it must be something real. To keep it from public knowledge, it must be something. …” He sought for a word.
“Deep?” Mercer suggested.
“If you like. At any rate, it must be highly unusual. I think it’s something to do with why these ships have no direct outside view.”
“Why?”
“Doesn’t it strike you as strange that tens of thousands of people take journeys on these marvellous, safe ships, without ever getting a glimpse of space?”
“You mean out there is something … different—”
“Different.” Brian joined him on the last word.
“Not what we thought. Hmm.” Mercer sat back, his face puckered pensively. Brian could see in that face the sixteen-year-old boy suddenly confronted by a new scientific puzzle.
“It might be something political,” Mercer surmised. “Perhaps another space-travelling race is hostile. The government could well decide to keep quiet about that, and leave passengers in the dark if they should hove to or attack. For that matter there might be a space battle going on right now and we wouldn’t know about it.”
The Seed of Evil Page 13
