The Seed of Evil

They left the cinema, but didn’t go immediately back to the lounge. Brian kept Mercer talking, and headed him casually in the other direction, walking aimlessly as their fashion had been years ago.

Once they passed a Scientocrat officer. Brian felt the guilty weight of the wrench which he had hung inside his jacket.

After about half an hour he stopped. “Do you know where you are?” he said.

Mercer looked around him, recalling the design of the ship which he had memorised. The corridor was smaller than average, deserted, and without doors. He had automatically noticed the change in the paint a few hundred feet back, when the corridor had switched from the luxurious to the utilitarian.

“We must be near the periphery,” he said uneasily.

Brian went a little further and motioned him to follow with a wave of his hand. “Come on.”

Mercer became nervous. “Count me out,” he said, shaking his head.

“I just want to show you something.”

Hesitantly, Mercer followed until they came to the final turning. Brian waited for him to catch up.

“There it is, look,” he whispered. “Now just stand here and tell me if anybody comes.”

Mercer backed away. “Oh, no!”

Brian chuckled light-heartedly and touched his elbow. “For the good of science, eh, old man?” He proceeded to the end of the tunnel and left Mercer standing there.

Mercer felt ridiculous. He was being forced willy-nilly into passive assistance!

At the cover-plate, Brian measured the wrench against the first bolt, adjusted the grip, and applied leverage. Reluctantly, after a lot of effort, the bolt began to turn. Paint cracked and flaked.

The first bolt came out.

Calmly he went to work on the others. It took him about ten minutes to get them all out. At the end of that time the plate was held in place only by the layers of paint joining it to the wall.

Swiftly he used a pocket-knife to cut through the paint on the perimeter of the cover, until the plate moved in his hands.

Carefully, he eased it away.

Behind it was a recess about three feet deep, ending in a perfectly transparent blister which apparently projected above the hull. He gripped the edge of the opening.

All his guesses had been correct.

The first hint of that darkness sent a shudder throughout his whole body. Awkwardly he pulled himself into the recess and crawled towards the window blister, until he was up against the cool, nearly invisible plastic.

He looked into space.

The first direction he looked, he saw the stunning expanse of the galactic spiral edge-on, sheer coruscations of immense light. He saw the size of it, as clearly as he could have seen the size of his own hand. The spread of stars just went up, and up, and up. Here already was something so vast as to be incommensurable even with the Earth itself, so vast as to be senseless. His consciousness reeled in the first two seconds he looked at it. But even that was not what he had come for, and he turned his head to look the other way.

This direction lay beyond the galaxy. There was nothing there forever, except a few dim glimmers of other galaxies which weren’t noticed, except to accentuate the void and endlessness.

He saw at last what had so long been the subject of his search: limitless emptiness.

As he gazed, all his attention was swept into the vacuum of the awful view. From that moment he was doomed. His whole being was drawn into the empty vastness by forced attention raised to the nth degree.

The first stage was catatonia; even that was brief. His personality was being sucked into galactic space. Within a minute, his body died.

Mercer waited fretfully at the turning of the corridor. Brian had been gone some time.

He peeped along the tunnel to where the aperture was. He could see Brian’s legs poking out. For several minutes, his friend had been completely motionless and silent.

“Brian,” he called softly. “How much longer?”

No answer.

“Brian.” Then loudly, “Brian!”

Still no response. Mercer sensed that something was wrong. He stepped quickly up the tunnel and touched Brian’s leg.

It shifted limply under the pressure of his hand, and Brian made no sign that he had felt the touch. Mercer caught his breath, and wondered what to do.

Just a few more inches, and he too would have been able to peer along the recess, and out into space. But he didn’t. He backed away, in spite of the urge tugging at his mind. Soon he was running—down the tunnels, through the corridors, looking frantically for a Scientocrat officer. When he found one, he blurted out his story.

Within five minutes, he was leading a rescue party in the direction of the aperture. At least, in his ignorance he thought it was a rescue party.

He was quite mistaken.

The way the operation was tackled exploded one theory of Brian’s. Scientocrats were not allowed to look into space. The officers who removed his body from the recess and bolted the cover back in place wore all-metal helmets with television eyes which connected to a screen inside. The body was quite dead.