The Seed of Evil

On hearing this, Wizard Wazo committed the indiscretion that, to judge by what Madders had just said, was probably no indiscretion at all. Determined to get at the truth, he entered Madders’ mind.

And the truth was roughly as stated. Madders had no connection with the group founded by Wizard Wazo at all. He had done no more than commandeer the empty shell of the order, preserved by writings stored in some dusty archive. Of the order itself, nothing remained. It had failed to maintain itself, had perished, Wizard Wazo’s precious words scattered before the winds as its last adepts turned to dust!

As for Madders himself, he was no magician at all! For all he knew about magic, he might barely have made the grade as a pot-boy in the restaurant here! His knowledge was all cant, useless tittle-tattle picked up here and there, from blathering books, from self-deluding nonentities, from playing-cards, from idle doodles masquerading as cosmic sigils, from the drivellings of, to use a phrase in the current repertoire, senile Jews!!!

And as for his possessing words of power, he could put no more conscious force into any word whatsoever than was enough to induce the waitress yonder to fetch him a cup of tea, and barely that!!!

The words lost! Even for this miserable and unadmired planet, such incompetence was beyond belief. Wizard Wazo surged to his feet. His whole body was shaking, and his face had turned purple.

“WHAT??? Can I trust NO ONE??!! I make the most straightforward of arrangements to preserve my property, and what happens? I return here and am cheated, spurned and insulted, my requirements are completely ignored, and in the end I find that my valuable property has been discarded and lost like dirty old rags!!! WHAT AM I TO MAKE OF IT ALL??!!!”

He kicked over the table, and Arnold Madders fell back in terror as Wizard Wazo’s displeasure exploded across the restaurant. For an instant Madders received a memory flash: the picture of a dynamic Christ throwing the money-changers out of the temple. Wizard Wazo raged, upturning table after table, scattering customers and chairs like chaff, and mouthing a ceaseless stream of vituperation.

Before he could reach the door a tall figure clad in dark blue had entered the restaurant to bar his path. Though Wizard Wazo tried to brush this obstacle aside the policeman skilfully detained him, twisting his arm up behind his back.

“You’ll have to leave, sir.”

“Leave?” Wizard Wazo brayed in the policeman’s grip. “With pleasure! Indeed I will leave!”

Such abominable treatment as he had received here deserved retribution several times more severe than that he had visited upon Nekferus. He quit Earth; but while pausing to direct himself to distant regions, he also created upon that despicable planet, which he wished never to see again, a world ocean, covering all but the tips of the highest mountains. All across the surface of the Earth the human population abruptly found itself placed under water. On streets, on farms, in rooms, in buildings, in ships, in aircraft and even in submarines, four thousand million people stumbled and threshed, gurgled in bewilderment, were unable to draw another breath of air. In buildings people floundered or swam to doors and windows, only to discover that in the street, too, there was nothing but water. Because of the suddenness of the change, which meant at first that the new ocean’s pressure was uniform from top to bottom, no crushing weight was anywhere felt, and some were thus deluded into supposing that only a few feet separated them from fresh air; they struck vainly upwards, for a surface that was too, too far overhead.

Most, however, lacked the presence of mind to do anything. Children died first, squirming and kicking, watched by agonised parents who were themselves to live for only tens of seconds longer. In minutes it was all over. Henceforth only marine creatures would swarm in the shells of civilisation, oblivious of harm, picking mammalian bones on the floor of the galaxy’s newest panthalassa.

The Infinite Searchlight

“The materialist view,” the radio lecturer said, “is that no entities exist in the universe other than entities as they are understood by the science of physics. The only major obstacle to this view lies in the problem posed by the experience of consciousness. Opponents of materialism are able, with justification, to point to the absence of any convincing physical description of consciousness, and will claim that it is impossible to give consciousness such a description. This objection has never been enough to overthrow the materialist school, however, for the reason that in ascribing consciousness to a non-physical agency the non-materialist then puts himself in the position of having to explain how such an agency interacts with a physical brain. This he has never been able to do.