The Seed of Evil

The hebetude into which my parents sank claims me also. I shall not live much longer now. Most of my time, when not sleeping, I spend gazing through the fuselage window. At night the unbreakable glass becomes a mirror which returns my tired face. To be honest it is a handsome face. The nose is strong, the lips are full, the eyes are sensitive—but withdrawn. And the hair, brushed neatly back, is prematurely white. In fact the whole face looks about thirty years older than it really is and its calmness, one sees after a while, is a forced, resigned calmness. Anyway, now that, with a frank feeling of relief, I contemplate my approaching death, I will go through the formality of setting forth final arrangements. To anyone who can use it I bequeath the legacy left to me by my father: two second-class one-way air tickets from Nairobi to London, still valid. For my epitaph I choose yet another quotation from that prophetic New Testament, and one which demonstrates even more clearly the applicability of the gospels to our time: “The birds have their nests, the foxes have their holes, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

Wizard Wazo’s Revenge

Wizard Wazo was angry and exasperated as he quit the planet Nekferus. A Mighty One of the Galactic Observance was accustomed to being obeyed; yet the benighted inhabitants of that infernal place seemed not even to understand what it meant to face a galactic wizard!

No member of his order could have been active in the region recently, for there would have been no question about it a few millennia ago. As it was he had intended only a short stay, to carry out an experiment that on the prompting of the moment had suddenly occurred to him, and he had made no excessive demands. All he required was a hundred or so female concubines, premises and provisions consistent with his comfort, and the instruments necessary for the experiment itself, which would not have engaged more than a third of the planet’s industrial capacity. Yet his modest requests had met with incredulity and laughter! It had not at first penetrated to him that these wretches were actually refusing his demands. When it did his temper had broken, and he had laid a curse on them for their recalcitrance.

“I cast a mental screen around this world,” he had mouthed. “Henceforth nothing that is original in thought shall reach this planet. Your children, and their children, and so ad infinitum, shall live in the greyness of thought already much used, shall never discover a new idea, for this screen is impassable to ideas and all new perceptions, which come, though you know it not, from outermost space. Thus I punish you for the absence of your imagination!”

And in a sputter of sparks he had disappeared from their view.

So it was that Wizard Wazo was already bad-tempered when, upon dismissing the experiment from his mind (it was not important), he instead decided to visit various places so as to collect the property he had left in safekeeping before embarking on his pilgrimage.

In space now, a glance at the surrounding stars located his first destination: the planet Earth. With the immediacy of directed thought, faster than light, faster than causality, he set forth. Transient bodies formed and dissipated about his presence as he entered first the nimbus of Earth’s sun and then the nimbus of the planet itself: bodies of light, of magnetism, of radioactivity, of air and vapour. Speeding down through the atmosphere, he saw below him some pyramidal structures erected during his last stay here, and while pleased to see that they still stood, he remarked grumpily to himself that it would have been a simple matter to keep their original limestone dressings in good order. But Egypt, as it happened, was not his destination, for it was not where his property was currently to be found. He materialised instead on the sidewalk of a busy city street, somewhere to the north-west.

All around him was an irregular roaring, confused and continuous. This noise was accompanied by copious exhalations of carbonised fumes and was created, he saw, by a steady stream of automotive conveyances that passed through the central concourse.

At least it was no worse, he told himself, than the stink expelled from the rear of that execrable Earth animal the horse, that had made the streets of Memphis almost unendurable.

Terraces of tall buildings, many of them glass-fronted, lined the avenue. Behind the transparent panes goods and services were on offer. One could, for instance, repose for a while and consume food and drink. He would take up this offer, Wizard Wazo told himself, but first he must find the custodian of his property.