The Seed of Evil

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 factory. 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.”