The Seed of Evil

A second badly-directed volley followed the first. To fire back, Juble had had to abandon the controls. The vehicle veered to the left, rapidly passing to one side and just underneath of the other car, about thirty yards away. Upset by the crazy motion, Juble got in one shot which took away part of the hull.

The other car dropped to get even with him. Juble saw that there were other heads in it, besides the driver’s—puzzlingly small heads with curly golden hair. He let off another couple of wild shots, then his car smashed sideways into the wall of the skyscraper.

He and Joe were hurled bodily against the concrete and nearly tumbled to their deaths on the sidewalk below. Somehow they managed to stay in the half-wrecked but still floating vehicle while heat-packets scarred and blackened the wall surface around them.

Badly shaken, Juble gripped his rifle and let off shot after desperate shot. To his relief he heard screams—high-pitched screams—and the attacking car rolled over to fall smoking to the ground five hundred feet beneath.

For some seconds they sat getting their breath back. “There were a couple of kids in that car,” Joe gasped. “Cute little girls with golden hair. Crazy to come out like that!” He shook his head. “He must have been trying to get them blooded.”

Juble experimented with the controls. “Well, he has,” he said briefly.

“A bad business,” Joe muttered to himself. “He ought to have had more sense—”

Juble managed to nurse the car back to Joe’s roof and unloaded the equipment. Joe was still muttering to himself. Occasionally he cast Juble a reproving, accusing stare.

Juble himself was surprised to find that he was still shaking in reaction to the incident. “Look,” he said, trying to command his quavering voice. “Don’t you go looking at me like that, you crazy coot. Ah saved our lives! And even if he had tried to get away, Ah would still have hunted him and shot him down! He attacked us. There’s only one thing counts in this world—Ah am me, mahself! Ah am nothing else but mahself, and Ah aim to keep mah personal integrity against all comers.”

His trembling quietened as his voice grew more assured in the statement of his personal philosophy. It had taken him several years to work it out, and he always drew strength from it. A man needed something like that even to stay alive in Free America.

Joe cast no more glances. He lit an electric fire beneath a metal pan. “What’re you gonna do?” Juble asked, curious for the first time.

“Expand the conscious world! Get it, boy?”

Juble shook his head.

“Ignorant young brat!” Joe scratched himself energetically. “Well, it comes to the fact that we can only see so much, and our personal world is made up of what we can see.” He wondered how he could explain that he planned to bypass the sensory organs and feed information direct to the brain by means of a vibrating magnetic field. “Well, by the time I’ve finished I’ll be able to see things that were never seen before. Get it now, boy, eh?”

“Sounds clever,” Juble said admiringly. “Is it going to need all this junk?”

“Most of it.”

“How long’s it going to take?”

“Hmm. A long time; maybe all afternoon. So I’ll need you to help me, son.” He stirred the soft metal melting in the pan. “You can do some of this here soldering.”

But Juble didn’t know how. Patiently Joe taught him the use of a soldering iron, and made meticulous inspections of all his work. Actually he used his assistant very sparingly, for the device he planned was extremely complex. Juble made about five hundred connections in all, guided by Joe’s coloured chalk marks.

Before sundown it was ready. With typical lack of ceremony Joe jammed an untidy arrangement of coils and crystallites on his head, wearing it like a hat. Casually he experimented with a couple of rheostats.

A new world opened up.

Presided over by the watchful, imperative neurones, billions laboured. The neurones’ prodigiously long axons were everywhere, forming a net of total communication throughout all the districts and systems of the stupendous community. Thousands upon thousands of orders issued continually from a lofty, mysterious department which existed more as an ideal than a personal fact—an ideal to which all were bound—and these orders were rigidly obeyed. Any defection or slackness among the labouring masses meant—death and annihilation as waste matter!

The scale of complete slavery was colossal.

Joe gaped. He was looking at Juble.