The Seed of Evil

Rodrick moved around the workbench to examine the lasers from all angles and began to check the alignments of his contraption with a digitised micrometer. While working he kept up a continuous low-toned monologue. “It’s obvious, once you think about it. The tool God used to construct solid matter, to unroll space and time, was light. That’s why it has such peculiar properties—why its velocity is constant for all observers, contrary to the expectations of Michelson and Morley, and also why it’s the basis of all energy exchange. But we don’t want the ordinary light that just goes zipping endlessly through space; that’s no good to us at all. We need light that can reverse its direction, as it were, that can become intense enough to implode, so to speak, and cross the threshold back into the pre-creation state … At this point we come to the fact, which is very interesting, that while the velocity of light is constant for all observers, it is not constant for all media. Inside a material environment it slows down. In diamond, for instance, its velocity is a mere seventy-seven thousand miles per hour—a bare two-fifths of its velocity in vacuo. What velocity, I asked myself, would light adopt in a medium composed entirely of light? The answer is that it would have no velocity at all, since it would only have itself to measure that velocity by.”

He switched on an oscilloscope. “Well, the next step is to arrange this special environment: an environment of pure light. It should be possible, I reasoned, to bring about a self-reflecting pattern of coherent light which would reinforce itself indefinitely, and that would transcend the space-time barrier. I admit I made some use here of certain mystical diagrams such as the Kabbala, which incidentally also describes existence as proceeding from out of light—‘limitless light’. The enneagram, an old Sufi symbol, was even more useful; it possesses cybernetic properties the Kabbala lacks. Be all that as it may, I can now announce the problem to be essentially solved. I have light that can hurtle back to its original source—very special, very dense light. You find the adjective incongruous? To us, of course, light is the most tenuous of substances, but to God it must seem solid and palpable. It is, after all, what he used to manufacture everything else. And if it comes to that, natural light only seems tenuous to us because it is constantly dispersing. Do you know there are lasers now that can produce a light pressure of two and a half million atmospheres? The ray gun is already with us.”

Having delivered this feverish lecture and finished his adjustments, Rodrick straightened and stared at me triumphantly. “I calculate that this device will produce a rod of radiation which will strike God like a bolt of hardened steel. What we have here is also a ray gun of sorts, Harry. The ultimate gun!”

Believing that I was only humouring Rodrick in his little fantasy, I asked: “But why should anyone want to do such a thing?”

Rodrick’s lips quirked. “Because it’s never been done, perhaps? No, that’s being facetious. Perhaps it’s to end the fawning ingratiation towards God one sees in people. The universe should exist on its own, should be independent. I’ll feel better knowing it’s broken free of the father-figure. I am by inclination, you see, emphatically an atheist.”

Rodrick said this light-heartedly. But suddenly, to my bewilderment, his tone changed and his expression became a sneer. “No, I’ll tell you why it is,” he said quickly. “It’s because God is far from being the source of all that’s good in the world, if you want my opinion. Life is a sordid business, all pain, frustration, disappointment and misery. What chance has anybody got to accomplish anything? Just look around you—children dying of cancer … everything going wrong. … I’ll tell you something: this world’s been put together like a Mickey Mouse watch! It’s a shoddy, botched-up job! I tell you, He deserves everything He’s going to get!”

This outburst, so astonishing from my point of view, was the first hint I had ever received that Rodrick felt so bitter about the moral aspects of existence, or indeed that he functioned on the level of feeling at all. He thrust a pair of goggles at me and told me to put them on. When I had done so he switched on his machine and the lasers began to discharge.

Even through the darkened shades the intricate display they projected was dazzling. The maze of light grew brighter and brighter as the beams traced out their endlessly returning path. The glow seemed to expand, to slowly engulf the mirrors and prisms that bent and reflected the light. For a while it all grew hazy, like a picture of a distant star cluster. Then it seemed to become more strongly defined, to solidify, until finally it became so bright that I could no longer bear it and I turned away.