The Seed of Evil

My heart sank at the words. Our discoveries had intrigued me enough to want desperately to continue, and the danger, and the strangeness we had encountered, only gave me an overpowering urge to journey further.

I knew Captain Joule secretly agreed with my attitude, for he is one of the best of men, the finest of officers. There are some who find blame with our generation, saying that it has become ultraconservative and rigid; but I claim that this is no fault, only an inevitable era of civilisation. The spirit of our nation was never stronger than it is now. We are producing great men, fabulous engineers. Captain Joule knew the tacit dictum of our engineers—never to know fear, never to draw back—but he had a duty to his command, which I, though it saddens me now to confess it, did not feel.

“Why turn back?” I asked intensely. “We must carry on! The puzzle will resolve itself—and anything we encounter in the Earth, we will deal with!”

We had no opportunity to argue further, for the decision was taken out of our hands. As the communicator bleeped the alarm call, all monitor screens came to life.

The detector crews had found a second species of intra-Earth intelligence approaching from a distance of some miles, and we had several minutes in which to prepare.

Their fleet came up from below and arrayed itself about us, while we took to our battle stations. They were long, portly craft which swayed slightly due to some invisible phenomenon of the depths, and they gathered slowly, as if getting our measure, closing in with a menacing air.

Then, either on general principle, or because they considered us enemies, they attacked.

I was exultant. Now the Interstice, previously untried in full-scale combat, would use her full capacity, and the temper of our expedition would crystallise, one way or the other. For these adversaries of ours were not the primitives of the higher levels. Their ships moved under their own power, and their weapons could do us damage.

Yet still they were not our technological equals. They fired flashing arrow-like projectiles which could penetrate our armour, and they skilfully deployed their large numbers in an attempt to compensate for our superior armament. But the Interstice bulked huge above them, bristling with torpedo tubes and seismo-beam turrets; we were a match for them.

It was a running fight. Power Section strained the propulsors to their utmost, and we pressed down like a whale surrounded by a cloud of sharks. Captain Joule gave up trying to evade the enemy missiles, and left our defence to the wicked power of Weapons Section.

When I entered the main body of the ship to keep a watch on the performance of our equipment, the galleries were booming like bells from enemy strikes, and shuddering from the explosions of our own torpedoes as they flashed out of polarisation and caused titanic convulsions in the Earth—I’ll warrant the subearthers never heard of that trick! I could hear the surging rush of their launching, and from the alcoves set high in the walls came the buzzing of seismo-beams.

Just ahead of me, a twenty-foot lance lunged through the side of the wall and hurtled aslant the spacious central well. A gunner fell from the wall, his head cleft open. The seismo-beamer he had been operating was a ruined mess.

Thirty times their projectiles broke our hull, and we lost eight men. But what of it? We were an invincible dreadnought. The Interstice was truly a battleship.

Eventually they withdrew, with heavy losses. Perhaps we had passed outside their domain.

There was a drumming of power tools as the crewmen applied themselves to repairs amid the fumes of our own weapons. I returned to the control cabin, where Captain Joule was checking Polariser, Weapons and Power Sections. He turned to me as I entered.

“Steering’s gone,” he said gloomily. “There’s no choice about what we do now. I wouldn’t like to try to turn the ship on the main drive; the polarisers would blow, no doubt about that.”

I made no answer. The Interstice, unable to turn aside without the elaborate gear necessary to change the direction of a polarised field, could do nothing but journey on, and on.

We had gained a victory, but lost control over our destiny. It was in this helpless mood that the officers of the Interstice directed her even deeper into the solid Earth.

For a month we sank down under the force of the motors. Every day I anxiously studied the instrument readings. In all that time, the nature of the external rock showed no change.

Everything, with the exception of the second mass-meter reading and the plain fact that we were moving downwards, indicated that we were still at rest ten miles below the surface.

Joule and I gave all our thought to the problem. Sometimes, he shuddered. Was this the bottomless gulf of which poets speak in terror?