The Seed of Evil

by Barrington J. Bayley

  But in one important respect Julian had underestimated him, just as he had underestimated Courdon. Neverdie was watchful. He took care to get news of Julian. When that news suddenly stopped he engaged agents to get news of him from wherever in the world he might have moved to. But no news came; Julian Ferrg had disappeared.

  Neverdie was a careful being who moved slowly. His great advantage over all his enemies was that he had more time than they did. And in his chequered career he had met the suspended animation ploy before. This, in his opinion, was what Julian had done.

  Locating the surgeon’s time-vault was not a matter of urgency. Neverdie did it without making any overt enquiries. He merely collected a large number of insignificant facts over a long period of time and watched the rebuilding pattern of London over the decades. His intuition that the vault was in London was fairly quickly confirmed; and some detective work concerning the legal arrangements of several possible sites told him, roughly one hundred years after Julian’s internment, exactly where the surgeon was.

  One night a twenty-third-century-style airplat drifted into the ancient, semi-underground part of the city. The lighting system was poor in this quarter and it glinted palely over the outlines of the vehicle. At length the airplat ventured up a dusty alley and came to rest before a decaying building beneath a warehouse.

  Neverdie crept from the airplat. In his manipulatory limbs he carried a number of tools of a type which Earth did not have. Plastic and masonry gave way to make a small hole, like an enlarged rat-hole, through which he could crawl.

  The interior was pitch-black and oddly cold. With a click Neverdie brought to the scene a dim light by which a human being would scarcely have been able to see at all. In the depths of the run-down building he eventually discovered the smooth, cold exterior of the vault.

  Neverdie switched on the other cutting tool he carried. Its slim beam did not even carry enough energy to light a match, yet it neatly disassociated the bondings of the material and carved out a neat section. Inside, Neverdie found Julian pale and dead inside a cylinder of the inert gas argon.

  The Aldebaranian was not a murderer. His actions were preventive, not assaultive. He found the timing mechanism and after a minute’s study disconnected it, leaving the reviving device inactive. Julian’s suspension would never end now without outside aid. Satisfied with his work, Neverdie repaired the incision in the wall of the vault, cleared up the other evidence of his intrusion and left.

  SIX

  London crumbled and rose again. Millennia passed and even geography changed, but always a city stood where London had been, except for one period when it was replaced by a lake. And in all this time Neverdie continued to dwell on the fringe of human society, building for himself the image of the perpetual hermit, the Wise Being on the Hill, the Oracle, anything that would protect him from superstitious vindictiveness.

  There were many occasions when Julian’s time-vault came under scrutiny during the periodic rebuildings of the city. Each time when it seemed likely that the vault would be opened (and the waxing and waning technology did not always make this possible) Neverdie would intercede and persuade the authorities to leave it untouched. Under his auspices it was eventually removed to a site on a hill overlooking the city to the north.

  But at last the age of Homo sapiens itself passed.

  For a long time Neverdie had seen the end coming, but he had offered no hint of it to his long-standing hosts. Human scientists had never quite understood the laws of evolution. They had not realised that just as an individual animal had a natural life-span, so an entire species had a natural life-span which was predetermined by its hereditary genes. Nature, having made one dominant species, liked to wash it down the drain and try something different with another. For this reason evolutionary changes sometimes proceeded with suddenness. Homo sapiens had emerged from primate stock over a span of tens of thousands, rather than of millions, of years, and the death of the species was coming just as suddenly as had the birth. With the running down of the genetic clock births became fewer, society collapsed and the vitality of the human race entirely vanished.

  Even while the last remaining men died nature was already preparing their successor: Lupus sapiens, the intelligent wolf.

  In a crude hut some miles from the ruins Neverdie finished his long period of meditation. He had reached a conclusion: his host species was gone, and the arising of the new dominant species would be a turbulent period in which it would be hard to survive; therefore, the time had come to be moving on.

  As he roused himself his artificial voice-diaphragm whispered rustily. It was nearly four thousand years since its last replacement and the thing was rotting. He would discard it soon, when he could find the time.

  He lifted the door-latch. The wooden door creaked open, letting in a cold draught of air. He crept out on to the wilderness of the moor and set out for the ruins, keeping a wary watch for any predatory wolves. He lived in a state of armed truce with them, but he knew that they were liable at any time to renew their attacks on him.

  He reached the ruins without mishap. They were little changed from when he had last visited them, except that the wolves had begun to tear down the brickwork to fortify their camps. They had not yet learned to work metal, however, and the vault containing his starship was intact, though it did bear the marks of their rude tools. It looked incongruously neat amid this fallen tangle of stone, a perfect dome washed clean by the rain. The lock grated reluctantly as he made his entrance, and in the dim light within Neverdie set to work to prepare the vessel for flight.

  The starship had benefited from his servicing it every few centuries and was still in fairly good condition despite the difficulty of replacing some of its components (there were some materials that could not be obtained in the solar system at all). Within three days he deemed the vessel fit for interstellar flight, or as fit as it was ever likely to be. Now all that remained was to prepare a route from his maps: the work of hours. But first, another small matter was nudging at Neverdie’s mind. Long ago he had trapped an old enemy, Julian Ferrg, in his self-created prison. His conscience would not permit him to condemn that enemy to eternal living death. The world he would awaken to now would not be a pleasant one and it might kill him quickly, but Ferrg would have to take his chance on that.

  Neverdie readied a small aircraft he also had stored in the vault and charged up its accumulator from the starship’s power source. Then he opened the dome’s launching hatch. Night had fallen, and starlight filtered through. With a sparkle from its rear the aircraft soared aloft and headed north, passing over the wolves’ campfires. Neverdie imagined the scenes that would be taking place below, and reaffirmed his opinion that Earth was no longer an abode for him.

  On reaching Julian’s tomb Neverdie spent some time clearing away earth and vegetation, then he cut an opening as he had done long ago. Inside Julian still lay as he had on that other occasion, untouched by the passage of time. As he looked down on the parchment-white face Neverdie’s mandibles spread in the equivalent of a sad smile. He felt no resentment against the man. Julian was a courageous mite who had managed to preserve his tiny life in an attempt to challenge the long-living Aldebaranian, but the balance of his disadvantage lay too heavily against him. As for his viciousness and his greed, Neverdie hardly thought about that.

  Finding the reviving mechanism serviceable, Neverdie set the timer for a few hours hence and then flew back to his starship. The charting of a course took slightly longer than he had expected, and it was early morning by the time he aroused the star-drive from its long sleep. He took one last, nostalgic look at the planet that had harboured him for what was, to him, a brief spell, and then took off. As its propulsion unit took hold on the fabric of space the deteriorated structure groaned slightly in the ether eddies. Neverdie scanned his instruments, watching anxiously for any sign of malfunction.

  Disaster struck when he was only a few hundred feet in the air. The ship was too old, despite all th
e work he had put into her. An ominous snap came from aft. Noxious vapours filled the cabin. The ship began to fall and Neverdie struggled desperately with the controls.

  As luck would have it, Julian was already awake by the time Neverdie attempted to leave the planet.

  The suspended animation system was so effective that in a remarkably short time he had made a full recovery. With the coming of consciousness he found that the lid of the cylinder where he had slept had opened automatically, and he was already breathing air.

  His limbs were stiff at first, but he eased himself from the cylinder, his mind already racing ahead to the tasks to come. Then a quick inspection acquainted him with the unexpected state of the chamber: the hole cut neatly in the wall, the decay of some of his equipment that was not carbon-bonded into diamond-hardness, the automatic calendar, calibrated up to a thousand years, that had stopped. Lastly, what he saw through the hole in the wall: a view of trees and fresh grass sweeping downhill. The trees, and the nearby flowers, were of a type unfamiliar to him.

  A howl of torment burst from Julian’s lips. It was as easy to read as an open book: the alien had outwitted him—disconnected the reviver and left him to sleep for countless ages. By now he would already have left Earth, perhaps centuries ago.

  The desolation and disappointment that overtook Julian Ferrg with that realisation were almost enough to destroy him. Only one thing saved him from permanent emotional damage. He stepped to the opening, finding that the vault was actually buried in the hillside, and looked out, sniffing the air and smelling unfamiliar scents. He glanced upwards and saw something descending through the air leaving a trail of smoke. As it headed for a crash-landing he recognised Neverdie’s starship and everything changed for him in an instant. He paused only to mark the landing place of the ship, then snatched up weapons and instruments from their sealed caskets and set off in wild pursuit.

  The crashed starship was about three miles from the vault. Julian arrived there to find that Neverdie had crawled out and lost consciousness. He lay on a bank of green-and-purple flowers.

  Julian was adapting quickly to his situation. To his senses the ages he had lain in the time-vault took on the subjective value of a few minutes only, and he required no lengthy reorientation. He took out the anaesthetic spray in case Neverdie should awaken and prove troublesome; but its contents had either denatured or leaked away and no spray issued. Tossing it to one side, he considered the problem of transporting Neverdie to his time-vault and hit on the idea of making a sledge.

  Taking out his knife he cut down some nearby saplings and after one or two false starts fashioned a rough vehicle that, he thought, would serve. Then he ventured inside the creaking starship to see what he could find.

  Tumbled about the small cabin were a number of objects that were strange to him. He would come back for them later, he promised himself. Luck was once again with him, for there was also a kind of rope-like harness that would be ideal for lashing his prisoner to the improvised sledge, and Julian set to work again with gusto, heaving the alien on to the shafts he had bound together with long grass and securing him in place. Once or twice Neverdie nearly came round and his diaphragm buzzed weakly. Julian ignored him.

  Strapped to the underneath of his carapace Neverdie had an instrument with a narrow foot-long barrel that looked as though it might be a weapon. Julian took it from him and examined it. Though it was not designed for the human hand, his thumb found a stud. He pointed the barrel at a tree and pressed the stud. A dull red beam the colour of glowing iron traversed the space between and the tree suddenly changed colour and collapsed into fragments.

  He smiled and thrust the weapon into the belt of his utility garment along with the other guns he already carried.

  Hauling the load along the rough turf to his time-vault soon had him sweating, but he kept at it. He calculated that he had less than a mile to go when he was interrupted, first by a loud rustling in a nearby clump of vegetation, and then by the appearance of two of the inheritors of the Earth.

  In a way they were grotesquely manlike. They could walk almost as easily upright as they could on all fours. Their forepaws were adapted for grasping, the toes having developed into tough, stubby fingers. In one of those paws the leading wolf carried a stone axe.

  Julian looked at them, stunned. In like manner they stared back at him. Then the leader crouched, snarled and came at him in a bounding run with the axe upraised. Frantically Julian dropped the staves of the sledge and clawed at the pistol he carried in his belt. Gleaming yellow eyes stabbed into his brain. Then Julian drew and fired.

  The shot rang out loudly. The wolf hurtled to the ground and lay there panting, blood beginning to ooze from the wound. The second creature paused for a moment, then turned and fled with a loping gait.

  Taking careful aim, Julian squeezed the trigger again. The round failed to fire. Cursing, he pulled out Neverdie’s weapon and destroyed the fleeing animal with its red beam.

  Experiment revealed that every other round in his gun was dead. He had unknowingly played a game of Russian Roulette in reverse, and had come up with the only bullet that could have saved him. Luck was indeed with him today. And with Neverdie’s weapon he would have no trouble in defending himself—if its charge lasted long enough.

  Keeping a wary look-out, he continued on his way. Already he had identified his attackers as being descended from some wolf-like ancestor, but he wasted no time in thinking out the implications of that. The task in hand required all his concentration.

  He encountered no more wolves before reaching the time-vault. Once inside, he first attended to making himself secure, finding the piece of vault wall that Neverdie had excised and using it, together with a workbench, to close the opening up again. It wouldn’t hold against a determined assault, but he still had the alien gun.

  Then he carried Neverdie into the vault’s second chamber and strapped him to the main worktable. That done, he took time to rest, during which Neverdie awoke.

  He could see that the alien had recovered, though no word came from him. Instead, Neverdie seemed to be looking around him, as if assessing his position. Finally Julian got up and began to inspect his equipment. At last Neverdie addressed a question, his voice slightly ragged through the diaphragm.

  “I suppose it is no good trying to dissuade you?”

  “Absolutely no good.”

  Privately Julian was worried. Much of his equipment was still in good order—that part of it made of non-decaying material, like the surgical instruments. But much of it was useless. He no longer had any reagents, for instance, and would be hard put to make any chemical investigations. Almost all the research he could do was surgical anatomy.

  The depressing fear of failure began to overcome him once again, but he made an effort to pull himself together. Perhaps torture would be the most effective method, he told himself, of finding out what he wanted to know.

  He walked over to Neverdie and began laying out instruments. “I haven’t any anaesthetic,” he said in an apologetic tone. “Unfortunately your species has a rather high nervous sensitivity, hasn’t it? Make it easy on yourself, Neverdie. Co-operate and it will be quicker and less painful.”

  As he spoke he wondered how much pain would induce him to give up an immortality he had already gained. Not any amount, in his opinion. Doubtless Neverdie was similarly motivated.

  Nevertheless he got to work on the alien, who was strapped upside down like a huge overturned beetle. Some of his manipulations were torture, pure and simple, but some of them were a survey of Neverdie’s anatomical and nervous systems. Neverdie gave vent to recurrent strangled shrieks and squirmed a good deal as far as his bonds would allow; but that was all. Julian remained aware of the need not to kill his subject and proceeded with care, but he did not feel over-anxious on that score. An immortal being must be physically capable of surviving quite drastic bodily disorder, he reasoned. After a while he absentmindedly left off torture for its own sake and gave himself u
p to the enjoyment of study.

  Nestling just below the brain was a spherical object, like a pearl two inches in diameter.

  A massive nerve ganglion surrounded the shining ball, but no nerves, either axons or dendrites, appeared to be actually attached to it. The arrangement was like a nest containing a beautiful, perfect egg. To Julian’s mind the sphere was an artificial object, not native to Neverdie’s body, and he spent some time examining it.

  “What will happen if I remove that pearly sphere just below your brain?” he asked, making sure that the alien was conscious.

  There was no answer, so Julian, slowly and cautiously, did as he had threatened. He held the pearl up to the light in a pair of calipers and stared at it in fascination. He felt entranced, attracted, drawn on. The sphere seemed to radiate something into his mind, like a candle in otherwise absolute darkness.

  A shuddering sigh whispered from Neverdie’s voice diaphragm. “It’s done, then,” he said slowly, as though through a mist of pain.

  “Is this what I was seeking?” murmured Julian.

  “The Seed. … The Seed of Evil.”

  Julian placed the pearl on the palm of his hand. It felt smooth and cool.

  “You have nothing to defend any longer,” he said. “Why not explain it all? I would appreciate it.”

  With great effort Neverdie replied. “It was not myself I sought to protect, but you. Let me make one last effort to dissuade you. The Seed you hold in your hand is the means to immortality, as you call it. Properly speaking it is biological permanence. All that is necessary is for the Seed to enter your body. To swallow it will be enough, for it will migrate to the most appropriate place, whereupon it will undertake to readjust all the body’s functions with such perfection that it achieves … biological perpetual motion. All the processes which normally cause decay are rendered null and void. The Seed’s properties are even more remarkable than that. It will repair the most appalling injuries to its host; even if the body is completely destroyed it will lie quiescent until coming in contact with biological material, even if only humus, when it will endeavour to reconstruct that body, and usually it will succeed. Thus it is almost impossible to die, impossible even to commit suicide. The only way the arrangement can end is for the Seed to be taken away and given to someone else, whereupon it will forsake the old body and serve the new, for it is able to adapt itself to any conceivable living form in the universe.”