The Seed of Evil

Joe watched, straining with concentration. Inexorably the fragment of wood diminished and disappeared from the compass of his consciousness.

“Goddam!” he shrieked, jumping up and jerking his fists. “Goddam, goddam!”

A shadow swept across the roof where he was conducting his experiment. Squinting against the glare of sky and skyscrapers he saw the boat shape of a car swinging around to land. Joe scampered across the roof and grabbed his shoulder holster. The visitor was probably friendly … but you never knew.

The pilot was a naked, yellow-headed young fellow who touched down deftly and stepped on to the concrete. Uneasy, slightly shy, but a handsome young buck, shoulder holster firmly clasped against his muscles. Joe scrutinised the face: the lad was vaguely familiar. After a few moments he recognised him: Fell’s son, Juble.

“Hy, Joe,” Juble began cautiously.

“Who the hell are you and what d’you want?”

“Aw, you know me, Joe. Ah’m Juble.”

“Never heard of you,” Joe snapped. “Get out.”

“You do know me, Joe.”

Seeing that the youth’s hands were nervously alert in the direction of his gun, Joe more reasonably asked: “Well, what do you want?”

Juble explained carefully about his dislike of the Annual Tax for the Upkeep of Public Buildings and Institutions. “Ah thought … Ah might be able to help you, maybe, and pay in currency,” he finished.

Joe regarded him acidly, silent for several seconds. Then he snapped: “Idle scrounger! What about doing right by the community?”

That was something in which Juble had no interest, but he replied: “Ah’m still paying, ain’t Ah? Money is still used in some towns out west, so Ah hear.”

Joe grunted in disgust. “Know any electronics?”

“No … but car engines, Ah can do nearly anything with.”

“What about generators? Got one?”

“No … but they’re about the same as car engines, aren’t they?”

“Just about.” He gestured to a running motor on the far side of the roof. “Mine’s getting a bit cranky. Take a look, tell me if you can fix it.”

Juble walked over and tinkered with the generator, adjusting its speed. “Easy,” he called. “Just needs going over.”

“All right, you’re hired,” said Joe, crossing the roof and still wearing his look of disgust. “It’s only because you’re the son of my old friend Fell, young man, that I’ll do this. I want you to regard it as a personal favour.”

Juble nodded thankfully, and stood wondering what to do.

Joe left him to wonder for a few seconds. “Well, what are you doing standing there?” he questioned finally.

“… Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Joe screamed, “I pay you to work, not for nothing. Work!” Juble scrambled for his tool kit.

Taking another block of wood, Joe threw it under the knife and squatted down to watch. Once again he strained and strained, putting everything he had into an attempt to keep sight of the rapidly diminishing object.

The block became a speck, then passed out of his conscious world.

This time he took the failure more calmly and cast around for analysis. He began to catalogue: sky, sun, air, asphalt, all these things he could see and feel, and involve in his consciousness. But what about things very small, very big, things very far away? When he tried to grasp a direct knowledge of something inestimably huge, he found he couldn’t. It didn’t exist in the agglomeration of concepts comprising Joe’s conscious world.

He could contemplate it in an abstract imaginary way, of course, but that wasn’t the same as experiencing it. And as for things very small, at the other end of the scale, they were beyond the pale altogether.

Picking up a pebble lying in the sunlight, he looked at it and felt its bright smoothness. It was perception, sensory perception, that decided the limits of his world. Damn, he thought, damn, it’s intolerable! To be confined to this band of reality, which must be ridiculously narrow compared with the total spectrum! There has to be a way out, there’s gotta be a way!

He clumped around the room moodily, yelled insults at Juble, scratched his haunches, then got down to serious thinking again.

Then, as he desperately forced his intellectual faculty to its utmost, he had a sudden flash of inspiration in which he realised that there was no cause for dismay. He had just remembered some very interesting work he had done in an apparently unrelated field.

Some time earlier Joe had made the remarkable discovery that it was possible to produce high-frequency vibrations in a magnetic field without recourse to or effect on its associated electrical component. Furthermore, such vibrations impinged directly on the brain without passing through sense organs. It had long been established that fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field, brought about by the Moon, influenced the brain. Now, with his technique of magnetic vibration, Joe posited that he might have a powerful tool for extending the range of perception.