The Seed of Evil

From most vantage points in the galaxy you can see stars in every direction. It’s only from a few places like the Cloudbank that you find yourself confronted with a deep vast expanse of darkness. Actually the dust and gas comprising the Cloudbank is of course itself more tenuous than any vacuum we can make in the laboratory, but since it stretches for hundreds of light-years that’s easily enough to obscure the stars on the other side.

A peculiarity of the Montgomery Cloudbank is that it excludes stars anywhere within its compass. Nobody knows why. The consequence is that the interior of the cloud is not heated up, like most banks such as the Coalsack. With any luck, we might find that deep within the Cloudbank there was no thermal activity at all.

We stood at the viewplate and studied the Cloudbank from close up. Jack regarded it dourly. Juker’s eyes gleamed. “Promising!” he exclaimed. “It looks promising!”

We set up the mass detector, and after locating the pinpoint concentration of matter within the cloud, plunged right in.

At once we were in the dark, nosing through unrelieved blackness.

Juker watched the ship’s sensors anxiously. “The temperature’s going down,” he announced.

“Yeah, well, what do you expect?” Jack growled.

I should explain that after a month in transit, Jack and I were both apt to be on edge. On this occasion I was in uncommonly good humour, which probably made Jack even more irritable.

Juker frowned as the record dropped even lower. “We might have some difficulties to contend with,” he warned. “We took precautions, I know, but—well, quite frankly at sub-zero temperatures materials just don’t behave the same.”

“I know that,” Jack said. “You’re not telling us the hull is going to crumble away, are you? It’s painted with atombond.”

“That will help, admittedly. Well, we shall see. We may have to keep feeding energy into the plating to maintain its strength.”

Jack grunted, glanced at me and chuckled. “If anything happens I’ll just go to bed and pull the covers over me.”

“As for me,” I said when Juker had left the room, “if it gets cold I’ll just think of getting back and cuddling up to Janet.”

He gave me a funny look, as if the joke wasn’t appreciated. “I knew you’d say that. You’ve done nothing but talk of that girl all the trip.”

“Well, why not?” I said defensively. “You’re just jealous.” “Hmm. It’s not that. It seems to be preying on your mind, that’s all. Don’t let yourself get neurotic over it.”

I was mildly surprised, but didn’t answer. Jack sat down and started fiddling aimlessly with the knobs on the control board. He talked on for a bit, in the desultory, strained way he sometimes has, but it became more and more vague and I didn’t really listen.

Professor Juker spent most of his time monitoring the skin sensors. They didn’t all record hull conditions; many of them were long-range scanners, which he pointed in all directions. He was anxious to know just how much radiation energy did trickle through that blanket of dust and gas.

One day he came triumphantly into the control room. “I’ve been watching the sternwards detector for the past hour,” he said. “The reception in that direction is now nil!”

Nil. Along with all the other directions. We were completely cut off from the outside universe. There was a region of hundreds of light-years completely lacking in energy.

It was still some days after that announcement that we came upon Celenthenis.

Professor Juker was able to say with certainty that not one photon of energy ever touched upon that world, or ever had done so in apprehendable history, until our arrival. We cast our laser beams upon it, sweeping its dead surface from hundreds of miles away. Soon we were able to make our second assertion: not only was it out of reach of external energy, for some reason it had no internal heat of its own.

There was not one calorie, not one quantum of heat in the whole planet.

Here it was, locked away in itself, no warmth, no life, no movement. Just timeless death.

“This is it, lads!” Professor Juker said, slapping us both on the back. “The Planet of No Temperature! The matter down there has mighty different properties from the stuff we’re used to, I assure you. It’s a magic place.”

Warily, we set ourselves down on the surface.

It was as Juker had predicted: we needed extra safeguards to keep our ship in one piece. Our first hour, spent in installing a micro-heating system to all parts of the ship, was a tense period.

At last the ordeal was over and we were safe. Gathering in the control room, we turned the external television scanners to view the terrain.

Searchlights atop the ship cast a circle of illumination a hundred yards across. Beyond that we could see nothing, but only sense the dark and the cold stretching away in a vacuum.