The Seed of Evil

The interior of the Interstice looked a devil’s workshop. An image came to my mind of the old days before the world’s surface was fully mapped, and windships might spread sail before new oceans, and new lands. For us, there were no free winds, no light, no rolling waters. We had passed outside the bounds of ordinary existence, and must force our way into darkness, pressure, heat.

Obediently, the motors pushed us deeper into the Earth. In the harsh yellow light which was our only illumination, the technicians watched the changing rock formations as they showed on the screens, noting down readings from the instruments. The information for which geologists had longed for centuries was now being collected with ease.

Down we sank, with the ever-present thought of the world’s solidity and the audacity of the human intellect which had conceived the subterrene ship. There was a quiet murmur of activity in the large hall-like enclosure of the Interstice, when I next walked her length to inspect the various equipments. We had just clocked three hundred miles.

Then, without warning, there was a blamn, followed by a heavy grating noise, and a shivering in the air. I recognised it, with utter amazement. I had heard it before, in the Navy’s laboratories. It was nothing to do with the magnetic barrier we had encountered earlier.

It was the noise created by the collision of two polariser fields.

I ran through the long passageways to Command Section. In the ante-room to the control cabin, the detector crew was scanning the vicinity, and the obstruction was taking shape on the screens.

But there was more than just one field. I saw a whole panorama of them, an extended complex, full of shadowy delineations to north, south, east and west, piling up, forming groups and spacious areas. For a while, it was more than I could believe.

We had blundered into a subsurface city.

Though it sounds incredible, Nature also has learned how to make two material objects occupy the same space, and she has riddled the Earth with beings in this manner. The conurbation into which we had plunged was huge, stretching beyond detector range. The scanners tended to indicate a rather weak polarisation, and I would guess that the inhabitants, if their experience can be described in human terms, dwell in a medium like thick treacle. The Interstice must have fallen on them as a super-bright, supersolid monster of almost indestructible qualities.

I went into the control cabin, where Captain Joule was gaping at the same scene on his own monitor screens, and sat down. Joule did not bother to acknowledge me.

He flicked a communicator switch. “Power Section! Listen for my orders. And give me steerage.”

I heard the snick as the steerage of the Interstice was transferred from the propulsor room to the control console before Joule’s bucket seat. The Interstice had become lodged between the walls of a group of buildings, and his magnificent broad shoulders hunched in an attitude of fury over the steering wheel, sweat staring out from his skin, as he tried to extricate her and batter a way into deeper territory.

“Look!” I said. “Do you see?”

He paused, and gazed at the screen. Ships were approaching, a whole fleet of them, riding forward as if on a cumbersome breeze. They were odd-looking affairs, composed of long curved beams, and through the wide gaps these afforded we could vaguely distinguish crews and crude apparatus. There were also signs of flurried activity in the vicinity of the nearby buildings.

The inhabitants were clearly prepared to defend their city. I noticed that some of the ships, larger than the others, had something mounted on their prows which looked strangely familiar, and as I watched, the foremost vessel swung into action.

“It’s a catapult!” Joule shouted.

Clang! The Interstice’s galleries rang with the impact of the missile against her hull. Joule laughed. “Let them shoot away!” And he bent himself once again to the control console.

But it proved impossible to dislodge our ship, and eventually, with the subearthers’ missiles raining down on us, we resorted to our weapons. Though we used them sparingly, our torpedoes and seismo-beams caused terrible havoc before we had blown a pathway and could continue our journey. For fifty miles the fleet harried us, pounding the walls of the ship in an attempt at revenge.

“And this is at three hundred miles!” Captain Joule exclaimed. “What will we find further on?”

The possibilities were frightening. The Earth’s interior is much more spacious than its surface, and has room for a vaster variety of creatures. Here, we had come up against primitives. In the depths, might we find imposing civilisations of super-science, to whom the Interstice was a toy? Or there might be monsters in the Earth. …

But discovery had become the prime object of the dive as far as I was concerned, and no danger could be allowed to stand in the way of scientific endeavour.