The Seed of Evil

We scrambled through the airlock, took off our helmets and went to the control room. Rim soon got the object on the view-screen and took a few instrument sightings. “She’s moving about thirty miles an hour,” he told me as he started up the manoeuvring jets. “We’ll go and have a look.”

“Thirty miles an hour? That’s not very fast, is it?”

“Relative to us.” Through the matted hair and whiskers that all but covered his face, I discerned a slight frown. “I expect it’s in orbit, same as us.”

“Then why has it got a velocity difference of thirty miles per hour? It ought to have the same velocity.”

Rim didn’t answer. He had a bottle to his lips. But when we got closer to the asteroid, he started tapping the massometer impatiently. Finally he gave it a brutal kick.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” I demanded.

“The massometer,” he mumbled, “it’s not working.”

“What d’you mean? It must be working.”

“Don’t be a damn fool, that thing out there’s got to have some mass! Anyway, we’re close enough now, let’s get outside and have a first-hand view.”

Well, it wasn’t an asteroid.

I supposed it was about half a mile long, and about a seventh of that across the beam. Overlapping strips of a dull substance covered it, running lengthwise. To say there was something funny about it would be a polite underestimation.

For one thing, I couldn’t seem to estimate its shape, except that it was longer than it was broad. Every time I cast my attention at it to make a visual assessment, it seemed to evade me by sliding away without moving. Slippery as a fish, as far as the mind goes. But dammit, every time I looked at that thing I felt I was looking up at it. I kept wanting to climb up it to see what was on top.

In fact, we both tried to. We coasted all round it on our suit jets, trying to work out what was wrong. But it was no good: from every angle it presented the same appearance, the same maddening impression that we were looking at it from below, that there was something else to see on the upper side.

Also, there was another funny thing. In space, you don’t have any sense of up or down. There’s only here and there.

Eventually we gave up and landed on the body itself. Flipping on my intercom, I heard Rim scratching himself inside his suit.

“Well,” he ventured, “it isn’t a natural object. It’s an artifact.”

“Oh, daddy,” I sniggered, “I would never have known if you hadn’t told me.”

“All right, shut up.” Sulkily he moved away, muttering to himself as he bent to examine the strange hull. A minute later his voice sounded again, loud and friendly now that he had found something else to divert him.

“Say, this material is queer stuff,” he said. “I can’t get any sound out of it.”

“Well, what sort of sound do you expect in space?”

“I mean I can’t get any conducted sound when I strike it with my glove. It doesn’t even feel as though it offers resistance to my hand—yet my hand stops short, as it should, when I press against it. Do you know something? I think our massometer was working after all. This thing hasn’t got any mass!”

“Big deal!” I offered sardonically.

He straightened up and came closer. “I’m out of beer,” he told me. “Got a bottle?”

Silently I handed him one and listened to his unsavoury gurglings as he squeezed the ale into his headpiece and straight down his throat.

The excitement must have given him a thirst. He finished the pint in forty seconds, slung the bottle into the void, and blinked, peering with his weak beery gaze at our discovery. I could practically see the stuff oozing out of his eyeballs.

“It’s a ship,” he said. “It can’t be anything else. If it’s a ship it must be hollow. I’d like to take a look inside.”

“I’d rather you stuck to nuclear particles.”

“Aah. …” Rim went limp inside his suit, which in the absence of gravity is the equivalent of flinging oneself into an armchair. He gets very depressed at times, and I could see he had a mood coming on.

“Stay here,” he instructed after a while. “I’m going to get my tool kit.”

He nearly blew me into space with a fountain of poorly controlled propellant, and rocketed over to the research ship. I imagined him thumping around inside, cursing and turning the place upside down. Since he hadn’t entered the laboratory for six months he would have forgotten where everything was. However, he appeared twenty minutes later with a tool bag and auxiliary power pack swinging from his neck.

“Yippee, here I come!” he yelled as he came streaking across the ten-mile distance to the alien ship. By the time I got to where he landed he had clamped himself against the side and was fitting together a power drill.

“What are you going to do?” I queried.

“Drill a hole.”

“Are you crazy—” I began. Then I lowered my voice. “Look, if whatever’s inside there wanted to meet us he’d have come out by now. Where’s your tact? Besides, you can’t just go drilling a hole in somebody else’s ship! You might let all the air out.”