The Seed of Evil

Mercer watched in a state of horror from the turning of the corridor. Disconsolately he followed in the wake of the stretcher as Brian’s corpse was carried away.

Head down, with his hands folded on his desk, Captain Brode meditated sombrely. He was thinking of what his passenger Brian Denver had done. He was thinking of why he had done it.

Like any other ship’s captain, he couldn’t help having occasional thoughts of out there. No Scientocrat was ever more aware of how little man could do, for all his science, to hold his own when faced with the naked universe.

More than ever he felt the abstraction, the separation from the common folk which Scientocratic Communism had thrust upon him; a separation which he sometimes regretted, but now that it was done could not avoid.

He shook his head. Just what had the experience been like for his dead passenger?

The face of God is like unto a countenance vast and terrible.

Someone knocked on the door of his office. He pressed a button, and the panel slid open.

Mercer Stone stood on the threshold.

“Come in, Mr Stone,” he said without preamble. “Please sit down.”

Mercer entered and took the proffered chair. Surreptitiously he made a study of the captain’s heavy-boned, sturdy face while the officer spent some moments placing some papers in a drawer.

Brode looked up. “Well, what can I do for you, Mr Stone?”

“I would have thought that was obvious, Captain. I want to know why my friend died.”

“He died because he broke ship’s regulations,” Brode answered heavily.

“I know that,” Mercer said shortly, though the strain of the interview was already beginning to grow in him. “In the circumstances, I hardly care about that.”

“Yes, of course.” Brode placed his hands on his desk and dropped his gaze. Mercer saw that he was genuinely sympathetic.

Brode said: “You have had a very lucky escape.”

Mercer turned several degrees paler than he already was.

“Escape—from what?”

Brode debated within himself, uncertain and disturbed. Was he going to have to tell Stone what he himself had learned only after fifteen years of special education under constant surveillance? He felt that the fellow had some right to it, and he had already checked his Citizen Dependency Rating. And yet. …

He rose.

“Are you sure you want to know?” he asked, trying to drive the question home.

“No,” said Mercer after a moment. “I feel torn. But after that. …” He tailed off.

“If you insist, I will admit you into the secret, since you already know part of it.”

Mercer nodded.

Captain Brode turned and took a heavy, black leather-bound volume from a shelf: The Table of Physical Constants. Letting Mercer see the gold-lettered title, he placed it on the desk.

Understanding, Mercer placed his hand upon it.

“Do you swear by All that exists to communicate to no person what you are about to learn?” the captain intoned.

“I so swear.”

The captain replaced the book on its shelf. He turned to face Stone again, feeling slightly embarrassed about what he had to say.

“The simple fact is,” he began, “that any man who looks into space immediately dies.”

Since the hideous event at the aperture, Mercer had been feeling his mental world begin to revolve upside-down. Now he felt a premonition of something that was the complete inversion of the world-picture he had always carried with him. He tried to look straight into the captain’s steady, comforting face.

“But how?”

“That is the part we do not know. In fact, it only is known partly. We think it is because he sees the universe too nakedly, too incomprehensibly vast. He loses himself in it, and his consciousness is whisked away into space like a fly would be if we opened the main port.

“As for the technicality of it, we’re not sure Probably he loses his point of reference.”

“No one ever came to harm in interplanetary flights,” Mercer pointed out.

Brode nodded. “For some reason it doesn’t happen inside a solar system. Something to do with the sun: it provides a mental anchor. That’s what I meant by a point of reference. Once you get out there—make no mistake, there’s nothing to hang on to. You’re lost. Nowhere to go, and if there were anywhere, nowhere to start from.”

There went the second half of Brian’s theory, Mercer thought. The ruling was not a jealous monopoly on the part of the Scientocrats. It was a sacred trust. “It frightens me,” he muttered.

Captain Brode looked hard at the pale, worried face of Mercer Stone. “Space does it,” he said. “There’s too much of it out there. It would swallow us all, swallow any number, without making any difference. It’s the worst possible way to die.”

He turned away. His voice dropped. “But you know, I don’t think it’s worth dying any other way.”

Life Trap