The Seed of Evil

by Barrington J. Bayley

  And so on. Typical. A frank confession, interlarded with self-pity and promises for the future. That for five hundred pounds or so.

  When I faced him, he would say: “I didn’t think you’d mind, Bob. After all, we are brothers.”

  He was right, I didn’t really mind when it was over, even though repayment was never forthcoming. After all, we were brothers.

  Not until years later did it seem odd to me that I tacitly took Jack for a younger brother, instead of my twin. He seemed so much younger, so much more irresponsible.

  And so we stuck together, and I looked after my brother. How often, Jack, did I have to pull you off the spot? I’ve had to kill men to save your neck. Some of the quarters you frequented weren’t fussy about how they dealt with undesirables.

  Do you remember the time we cracked up on the tenth world of a star with no name, only a number? You were unconscious and I wasn’t sure you were still alive. But for twenty days I hauled you in your suit over the surface of that planet to make rendezvous with the liaison ship coming up behind us. I’ve never been through anything else as bad as that, because I didn’t believe for a minute that we were going to make it and I was glad you didn’t know what was happening.

  Would you have done the same for me? I think so. But of course you had to be the one to get hurt, and it’s been like that all along the line. You’ve never had much opportunity to do me favours.

  It’s a funny thing, Jack. As well as a predilection to be underhand, you also have the worst possible luck.

  Well, that was how we continued in life for thirty-five years. Every five years or so, I could have looked back and said that the conditions of existence were getting meaner and more desperate. Nothing satisfying ever turned up for me. There was no fulfilment. It was the same for Jack, but he never even thought of that sort of thing. Jack was born for the rat-race.

  Year by year, we became more and more enclosed in our way of life.

  Then came the time I met Janet.

  Don’t ask me how I managed to hit it off, because she, to use a phrase, is way out of our class. She is the daughter of Professor Juker, a name that means something in academic circles. But manage it I did, and then I felt I’d found something.

  It had been worth crawling out of the womb, just ahead of complaining Jack, after all.

  Soon we were planning to marry.

  There was still the question of her father, however, and I admit I felt apprehensive on the day he came with Janet to see Jack and me in our dingy office in the back room of a third floor on Stain Street. Go-getters aren’t always considered the best of choices for a well-set-up young lady.

  Imagine my relief to find that Professor Juker is a short, dumpy fellow with a cropped beard who doesn’t care a hang about one’s station in life. He’s only interested in what you can do. Inside ten minutes we were talking shop and enjoying it.

  “Well,” he said at last, “what work have you fellows got at present?”

  Jack sighed. “None,” I admitted.

  “Nothing lined up?”

  “We have got a lead, though it’s rather confidential. We happened to get a tip-off about a ship that passed the fringe of the Montgomery Cloudbank. As you know, the temperature inside the cloudbank is thought to be practically non-existent.”

  Juker nodded.

  “They detected a solid body inside the bank,” I continued. “It couldn’t be a sun, so it must be a stray planet. They even gave it a name. Celenthenis.”

  “There’s always a profit in low-temperature physics,” Jack put in. “It’s just that we haven’t got the capital.”

  Juker’s eyes had already started forward with interest. It transpired that low temperatures were his special province, and he agreed enthusiastically that the field was by no means exhausted. Ultimate zero is too remote to be normally obtained. The Montgomery Cloudbank is an isolated case and no one had come across anything like it before.

  Juker suddenly became adamant about investigating the planet. Before we knew it he was putting up money and planning to accompany us.

  We snapped up the proposal like hungry wolves. “You won’t regret it,” Jack said eagerly, getting hold of the wrong end of the stick as usual. “You’ll get your money back, all right.”

  The professor scarcely seemed to hear the remark, so Jack started talking about the special equipment we would need, while Janet sat on the edge of the desk and swung her legs.

  Juker also made a list of stuff he wanted to take with him. Jack glanced at it.

  “I know places in San Francisco where I might get some of this cheap,” he said. “It’ll need Bob or me to swing the deal, though.”

  “San Francisco?” Juker said in surprise. “Can’t you get it here in London?”

  Jack shrugged his skinny shoulders. “You don’t understand. San Fran is one big junkheap, for people like us. It would be worth the fare.”

  “All right, go ahead,” Juker told him.

  “I’ll come with you to sign the cheques,” Janet said, speaking for the first time in half an hour.

  “Er—yeah, I guess somebody ought to,” Jack muttered.

  And there we were, set up. It seemed to me that Juker was being a mite too trusting, but on reflection he had nothing to lose, had he? If we didn’t play straight with him, he’d know he didn’t want me for a son-in-law.

  But we did play straight. We all worked hard, collecting our gear together and fitting out our ancient ship with the drive cartridges necessary to make the jump to Montgomery. That’s what takes the money in go-getting: not the ship, since most freelancers of long standing have a crate of some description, but the cartridges to power it. The further you want to go, the more expensive the cartridges you need.

  Several times Jack and Janet went on expeditions to gather equipment. One thing Jack does know better than I do is how to drive a bargain. And I felt happy for the first time in my life, thinking of how things were going to be when we got back. Looking back now, I feel slightly ashamed of the way I walked around with my head in the clouds.

  There came the day when Juker, Jack and I ferried our ship out to Stand-off Station, spending a few hours there getting clearance. I enjoyed that brief wait in Stand-off as I had rarely done before. It was crowded with go-getters, as usual. The hardened and scarred, the young and inexperienced, the sly and clever, and, amazingly, the ingenuous who had managed to remain so even after years at the game. The outward-going bustle of men bent on galactic prospecting is something you never forget. The veneer of civilisation is off, but just the same some of the genuine fragments of it can be discerned.

  I spoke to one old fellow there who said he was on his way to a rich seam of time-gems, the stones which refract through time instead of space. Why, that old El-Dorado has been a joke for years! Naturally he couldn’t be made to divulge where it was. Already he had said too much, for it has been known for a go-getter to set off with half a dozen others hot on his drive-trail.

  Then there are the incoming teams, exuberant, disappointed, or just plain exhausted. They fill the taverns of Stand-off, to lay down their heads on the tables, fill themselves with cheap whisky, or shake it up with the bar whores.

  It was not long before we left behind the blare of gaudy music, the unshaded lights and unwashed clearance officials. We were off into the galactic dark, where the stars were like electrons in a plasma and the few thousand spaceships rayed off from Stand-off Station like a scattering of invulnerable neutrinos.

  After about a month we came to the edge of Montgomery Cloudbank.

  It was an awesome sight.

  From most vantage points in the galaxy you can see stars in every direction. It’s only from a few places like the Cloudbank that you find yourself confronted with a deep vast expanse of darkness. Actually the dust and gas comprising the Cloudbank is of course itself more tenuous than any vacuum we can make in the laboratory, but since it stretches for hundreds of light-years that’s easily enough to obscure the stars on the o
ther side.

  A peculiarity of the Montgomery Cloudbank is that it excludes stars anywhere within its compass. Nobody knows why. The consequence is that the interior of the cloud is not heated up, like most banks such as the Coalsack. With any luck, we might find that deep within the Cloudbank there was no thermal activity at all.

  We stood at the viewplate and studied the Cloudbank from close up. Jack regarded it dourly. Juker’s eyes gleamed. “Promising!” he exclaimed. “It looks promising!”

  We set up the mass detector, and after locating the pinpoint concentration of matter within the cloud, plunged right in.

  At once we were in the dark, nosing through unrelieved blackness.

  Juker watched the ship’s sensors anxiously. “The temperature’s going down,” he announced.

  “Yeah, well, what do you expect?” Jack growled.

  I should explain that after a month in transit, Jack and I were both apt to be on edge. On this occasion I was in uncommonly good humour, which probably made Jack even more irritable.

  Juker frowned as the record dropped even lower. “We might have some difficulties to contend with,” he warned. “We took precautions, I know, but—well, quite frankly at sub-zero temperatures materials just don’t behave the same.”

  “I know that,” Jack said. “You’re not telling us the hull is going to crumble away, are you? It’s painted with atombond.”

  “That will help, admittedly. Well, we shall see. We may have to keep feeding energy into the plating to maintain its strength.”

  Jack grunted, glanced at me and chuckled. “If anything happens I’ll just go to bed and pull the covers over me.”

  “As for me,” I said when Juker had left the room, “if it gets cold I’ll just think of getting back and cuddling up to Janet.”

  He gave me a funny look, as if the joke wasn’t appreciated. “I knew you’d say that. You’ve done nothing but talk of that girl all the trip.”

  “Well, why not?” I said defensively. “You’re just jealous.” “Hmm. It’s not that. It seems to be preying on your mind, that’s all. Don’t let yourself get neurotic over it.”

  I was mildly surprised, but didn’t answer. Jack sat down and started fiddling aimlessly with the knobs on the control board. He talked on for a bit, in the desultory, strained way he sometimes has, but it became more and more vague and I didn’t really listen.

  Professor Juker spent most of his time monitoring the skin sensors. They didn’t all record hull conditions; many of them were long-range scanners, which he pointed in all directions. He was anxious to know just how much radiation energy did trickle through that blanket of dust and gas.

  One day he came triumphantly into the control room. “I’ve been watching the sternwards detector for the past hour,” he said. “The reception in that direction is now nil!”

  Nil. Along with all the other directions. We were completely cut off from the outside universe. There was a region of hundreds of light-years completely lacking in energy.

  It was still some days after that announcement that we came upon Celenthenis.

  Professor Juker was able to say with certainty that not one photon of energy ever touched upon that world, or ever had done so in apprehendable history, until our arrival. We cast our laser beams upon it, sweeping its dead surface from hundreds of miles away. Soon we were able to make our second assertion: not only was it out of reach of external energy, for some reason it had no internal heat of its own.

  There was not one calorie, not one quantum of heat in the whole planet.

  Here it was, locked away in itself, no warmth, no life, no movement. Just timeless death.

  “This is it, lads!” Professor Juker said, slapping us both on the back. “The Planet of No Temperature! The matter down there has mighty different properties from the stuff we’re used to, I assure you. It’s a magic place.”

  Warily, we set ourselves down on the surface.

  It was as Juker had predicted: we needed extra safeguards to keep our ship in one piece. Our first hour, spent in installing a micro-heating system to all parts of the ship, was a tense period.

  At last the ordeal was over and we were safe. Gathering in the control room, we turned the external television scanners to view the terrain.

  Searchlights atop the ship cast a circle of illumination a hundred yards across. Beyond that we could see nothing, but only sense the dark and the cold stretching away in a vacuum.

  Inside the circle the ground was fairly level, but broken and uneven, forming slabs and runs which seemed to be leading away into their own mysteries. I saw that at one point near the perimeter it broke into a shallow crevice. Add to this its colour: a dull, dark green.

  And the sky? We just couldn’t see anything above. Remember that in the ordinary sense of the word Celenthenis has no sky, in that nothing reaches it from outside, so that for practical purposes nothing exists for it above its own surface.

  Summing up my impressions of it, I can only say that it looked sullen and suicidal.

  Needless to say, none of us took time to gawp, or to be poetical about it, or even excited, because now we had to get down to a serious job of work, which we did without delay or question.

  Juker was happy to take charge of most of the experiments, and I must say he made a more thorough job of it than we would have done. That’s how it should be, of course, he being a professor, but I couldn’t help reflecting how many go-getters had received only a fragment of what a planet’s actually worth through having an inadequate knowledge of some field or other. Watching the professor at work, I got an insight into a real scientific mind, instead of just hit-and-miss merchants like us.

  His enthusiasm was enormous. Piece by piece we manhandled equipment outside, bringing it back inside when it looked like being damaged by the lack of temperature. Eventually we rigged up minimal heaters for all of it, but until then Jack and I had some pretty heavy work to do.

  Then we just helped Juker in the dozens of experiments he had planned. He had brought specimens of every conceivable material with him, and was investigating their properties in null-heat conditions. We had to leave the samples outside for a while before absolutely all their heat leaked away, but when we began testing Juker became more and more pleased.

  “Boys,” he said, “this is where the study of matter should begin. Up to now its nature has been obscured by always being in a state of heat. For the first time I have an opportunity to study it in a state of rest.”

  It was soon after this that he discharged the million volts into the planet. For some hours he built up an accumulation from the ship’s generator, then let it all rip in a millisecond. Hours later, it hadn’t dropped one volt. The planet was full of electricity, zipping round in a world where all materials were super-conductive and there was zero resistance.

  Jack’s imagination was caught by it. “What do you think of that!” he said. “It’ll still be here in a million years!”

  Personally, I began to look forward to the hour when we would take off. You do begin to feel the deadness of the place, as the guest at my party said. If you think the Moon is lifeless, you should go to Celenthenis.

  By the third day I was making definite plans for the future. “What are you going to do when Janet and I are married?” I asked Jack once when the professor was in the storeroom. “You can stay with us if you like. We’ll probably buy a big house, what with the money we’ll make on this trip and all.”

  He made evasive gestures with his hands. “Maybe. You never can tell how things will work out, though.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked, watching him closely.

  “Nothing.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “you’re welcome.” Perhaps it was overgenerous of me, but I was feeling expansive and forgetful of past difficulties. I sat down to read while he paced aimlessly about.

  Suddenly he said: “Come on, the prof wants us to take some more readings off the voltmeter. Let’s go outside.”

  “Just
one of us can do that.”

  “Yeah, but—come on, it’ll do you good to go outside for a while.”

  I stood up and we went to the lock, got into our space-suits and cycled ourselves outside.

  Briefly I gazed around me at the circle of light. When you’re aware of how empty, airless and cold everything is outside your suit you can hear every tiny sound of its working, the air system especially. Then we walked over to read the voltmeter which Juker had left in contact with the ground to keep a check on the superconducting discharge.

  It still read exactly what it had read hours before. Something like one million volts.

  “Well, that’s that,” I said in satisfaction.

  “Bob,” Jack said nervously. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it’s about me and Janet.”

  An icy feeling passed through my stomach. “What do you mean, you and Janet?”

  “She’s not going to marry you. She and I—we sort of got together.”

  I didn’t take it in for a minute. Then it trickled through and thoughts whirled round in my head.

  I didn’t answer, but I looked at him.

  “Honest, I didn’t mean to,” he said quickly. “It just happened, that’s all. It was on the trip to San Francisco. There was nothing we could do about it.”

  He was avoiding my gaze. “You don’t mean,” I said in a whisper, “you two are married—and didn’t tell me?”

  “Well, no, not exactly, but as good as.”

  He edged away as fury began to mount in me. “It just happened—”

  “Happened, hell!” I snarled. “You mean you saw a chance and pushed it for all you were worth; I’ll bet you really worked on it!” He looked wretched, like he always does when he’s caught out.

  “But this time,” I said, my breath coming short, “this time—”

  As I spoke, I saw how clever Jack had been. When he confesses, he has to do it from a distance, or at least be able to stay out of the way for a while. But where could he go on board our ship?