The Seed of Evil

Imagine my relief to find that Professor Juker is a short, dumpy fellow with a cropped beard who doesn’t care a hang about one’s station in life. He’s only interested in what you can do. Inside ten minutes we were talking shop and enjoying it.

“Well,” he said at last, “what work have you fellows got at present?”

Jack sighed. “None,” I admitted.

“Nothing lined up?”

“We have got a lead, though it’s rather confidential. We happened to get a tip-off about a ship that passed the fringe of the Montgomery Cloudbank. As you know, the temperature inside the cloudbank is thought to be practically non-existent.”

Juker nodded.

“They detected a solid body inside the bank,” I continued. “It couldn’t be a sun, so it must be a stray planet. They even gave it a name. Celenthenis.”

“There’s always a profit in low-temperature physics,” Jack put in. “It’s just that we haven’t got the capital.”

Juker’s eyes had already started forward with interest. It transpired that low temperatures were his special province, and he agreed enthusiastically that the field was by no means exhausted. Ultimate zero is too remote to be normally obtained. The Montgomery Cloudbank is an isolated case and no one had come across anything like it before.

Juker suddenly became adamant about investigating the planet. Before we knew it he was putting up money and planning to accompany us.

We snapped up the proposal like hungry wolves. “You won’t regret it,” Jack said eagerly, getting hold of the wrong end of the stick as usual. “You’ll get your money back, all right.”

The professor scarcely seemed to hear the remark, so Jack started talking about the special equipment we would need, while Janet sat on the edge of the desk and swung her legs.

Juker also made a list of stuff he wanted to take with him. Jack glanced at it.

“I know places in San Francisco where I might get some of this cheap,” he said. “It’ll need Bob or me to swing the deal, though.”

“San Francisco?” Juker said in surprise. “Can’t you get it here in London?”

Jack shrugged his skinny shoulders. “You don’t understand. San Fran is one big junkheap, for people like us. It would be worth the fare.”

“All right, go ahead,” Juker told him.

“I’ll come with you to sign the cheques,” Janet said, speaking for the first time in half an hour.

“Er—yeah, I guess somebody ought to,” Jack muttered.

And there we were, set up. It seemed to me that Juker was being a mite too trusting, but on reflection he had nothing to lose, had he? If we didn’t play straight with him, he’d know he didn’t want me for a son-in-law.

But we did play straight. We all worked hard, collecting our gear together and fitting out our ancient ship with the drive cartridges necessary to make the jump to Montgomery. That’s what takes the money in go-getting: not the ship, since most freelancers of long standing have a crate of some description, but the cartridges to power it. The further you want to go, the more expensive the cartridges you need.

Several times Jack and Janet went on expeditions to gather equipment. One thing Jack does know better than I do is how to drive a bargain. And I felt happy for the first time in my life, thinking of how things were going to be when we got back. Looking back now, I feel slightly ashamed of the way I walked around with my head in the clouds.

There came the day when Juker, Jack and I ferried our ship out to Stand-off Station, spending a few hours there getting clearance. I enjoyed that brief wait in Stand-off as I had rarely done before. It was crowded with go-getters, as usual. The hardened and scarred, the young and inexperienced, the sly and clever, and, amazingly, the ingenuous who had managed to remain so even after years at the game. The outward-going bustle of men bent on galactic prospecting is something you never forget. The veneer of civilisation is off, but just the same some of the genuine fragments of it can be discerned.

I spoke to one old fellow there who said he was on his way to a rich seam of time-gems, the stones which refract through time instead of space. Why, that old El-Dorado has been a joke for years! Naturally he couldn’t be made to divulge where it was. Already he had said too much, for it has been known for a go-getter to set off with half a dozen others hot on his drive-trail.

Then there are the incoming teams, exuberant, disappointed, or just plain exhausted. They fill the taverns of Stand-off, to lay down their heads on the tables, fill themselves with cheap whisky, or shake it up with the bar whores.

It was not long before we left behind the blare of gaudy music, the unshaded lights and unwashed clearance officials. We were off into the galactic dark, where the stars were like electrons in a plasma and the few thousand spaceships rayed off from Stand-off Station like a scattering of invulnerable neutrinos.

After about a month we came to the edge of Montgomery Cloudbank.

It was an awesome sight.