The Seed of Evil

Ruiger and Brand stared in fascination. Was this, Ruiger wondered, a pleasant little paradise to the Chid mind? He took his eyes from the gleaming crimson surface of the lake. The wood, with its covering of slime, its slick trees, its gibbous growths and pulsing python pipes that seemed neither animal nor vegetable, no longer looked to him like a wood in the Earthly sense. Its totally enclosed, self-absorbed nature put him in mind of what it might be like inside his own body.

He grunted, and nudged Brand. “Let’s go.”

Slowly they made their way up the bowl-shaped slope, towards the open starlight.

Minutes after they returned to the ship, the first of the Chid gifts arrived.

They did not know, at the time, that it was meant to be a gift, and if they had known, they still wouldn’t have known what they were supposed to do with it. It was an animal that came bounding from the Chid hut to prance about in front of the Earthmen’s ship. It was vaguely dog-like and about the size of a Great Dane, with hairless yellow skin.

Ruiger focused the external scanner on it, magnifying the image. There were slits in the animal’s body; as it moved, these opened, revealing its internal organs.

Brand was nauseated. He turned away.

For a while the creature snuffled about the ship’s port, and leaped this way and that. “I didn’t see this beast in the Chid hut,” Brand remarked.

“Perhaps they made it.” Ruiger watched until the animal apparently wearied of what it was doing and loped back the way it had come, disappearing inside the hut.

“I’m tired,” Ruiger said. “I’d like to get some sleep.”

“O.K.”

But Brand himself could not sleep. He felt restless and uneasy. Nervously he settled down with a full percolator of coffee and kept his eye on the external viewer.

From time to time other animals left the hut and approached the ship. None were particularly alien-looking, except, that was, that they were all apt to expose their innards to view as they moved. One vaguely resembled a pig, another a hairless llama, another a kangaroo. Were they all, perhaps, one animal, made over and over from the same bits and pieces?

The Chid had better not fix Wessel up that way, Brand thought aggressively. He wondered if he and Ruiger were expected to respond to these sorties. But when one didn’t know, it was safer to do nothing.

Steadily the stars, illuminating the landscape with shadowless light, moved across the sky. A short time after the pale sun had risen, Ruiger came stumbling back into the room.

“Anything happen?”

Brand gave him some coffee and told him about the animals. Ruiger sat down, staring at the viewscreen and sipping from his cup.

By now Brand felt tired himself, but his nervousness had not decreased. “You think it will be all right?” he asked Brand anxiously.

“Sure it will be all right,” Ruiger said gruffly. “Don’t be put off by that wood. Probably the whole Chid planet is like that.”

It was the first time either of them had mentioned the wood. “Listen,” Brand said, “I’ve been thinking about those animals they keep sending—”

Ruiger gave a shout. On the screen, Wessel had appeared in the open door of the Chid hut. He stood there uncertainly, and then took a step forward.

“There he is!” Ruiger crowed. “They’ve delivered the goods!”

He jumped to his feet and swept from the room. Brand followed him down to the port and out onto the coarse grass. Wessel was walking towards them. But it was not his usual walk. He plodded rather than strode, moving leadenly and awkwardly, his arms hanging loose, his face slack.

Nevertheless they both loped out to meet him. And then, as they came closer, the grin on Ruiger’s face froze. Wessel’s eye-sockets were empty. The eyelids framed nothing; even the orbital bones had been removed. And Brand now realised that this eyeless Wessel wasn’t even walking towards the ship. He was making for the cliff a short distance away.

“Wessel,” he called softly. And then something else caught his attention. Crawling some yards behind Wessel there came a rounded greyish object no larger than his boot. The thing had a wrinkled, convoluted surface, with a deep crevice running down its back, and glistened as if encased in a transparent jelly.

The creature moved after the manner of a snail, on a single splayed podium. It followed after Wessel with every appearance of effort, just managing to keep up with his erratic pace. Brand and Ruiger watched the procession dumbly. The crawling creature’s front end supported a pair of white balls, their whiteness broken by neat circles of colour. These white balls were obviously human eyes, the same eyes that were missing from Wessel’s eye-sockets. The grey mass, however improbable it seemed logically, was without doubt Wessel’s own brain, alive but without a body, given its own means of locomotion.