The Seed of Evil

After that there was a short period of unconsciousness. When Ruiger came round again, his transformation was complete.

It was a little like being a snail. He could move about on the podium on which he squatted. He was covered with a gelatinous layer which protected his vulnerable tissue. And he could see. But he could not, of course, hear, or feel, or smell. The podium did, however, support other small organs which comprised a partial life-support. He could breathe and, after a fashion, feed, though on somewhat specialised food.

He had been put down outside the Chid hut, amid the coarse broad-bladed grass. Not far from him he saw another part-animal like himself. He knew it was Brand. And ahead, already striding away towards the cliff’s edge by means of vestigial motor functions, were two human bodies. One was Brand’s. The other was his.

Ruiger experienced a terrible hunger for the body that went walking away from him. He knew that he could possess it again, but to do so he must catch up with it before it fell over the cliff, and so he set off, sliding over the uneven ground with all his puny strength.

This, he realised, was the Chid’s brain-race. The Chid had placed bets on whether he or Brand, who also was straining not far away, would recover his body first. Already Ruiger was gaining on his body. If it should fall but once, he told himself, he would be able to catch up with it.

But the minutes passed and the body did not fall. Instead, Ruiger himself became entangled in a clump of grass. By the time he freed himself it was far too late. Desperately he lunged forward, only to see his body, striated by blades of grass, walk straight over the edge of the cliff, to fall on the rocks and the sea below.

It was gone. His body was gone. Numb with failure, Ruiger turned round. The Brand body, too, had disappeared, and of the Brand brain there was no sign. He made out the Chid hut. Near it was Wessel, standing casually, his brain out of his skull again and clinging to the side of his neck like an enormous slug. Beyond that, he dimly saw the Chid spaceship, not far from the little wood.

He saw his own spaceship, too, but that was no use to him now. Ruiger’s gaze settled on the wood. The dark patch, the motionless copse, was like an island amid the tawny bush. Curious … he was already forgetting what it was like to have a body … The burning hunger faded, his humanity receded from him as if he had lost it, not minutes ago, but decades ago, and the little wood was no longer gruesome or grotesque. It was a lush, gentle, sheltering place to part-animals like himself. It protected and nurtured them. In the wood he could live—after a fashion. And life, he remembered dimly, was worth hanging on to at any cost.

The sun and stars were burning down on him. He was naked and helpless here in the open. He could not live here. Steadily, pushing his way through the stiff grass, thinking of the welcoming pool of blood, of the enclosing black foliage, of the pulsing warmth, he crawled towards the still, dark hollow.

The God-Gun

It might seem improbable that my friend Rodrick (the spelling is his) could be the perpetrator of the world’s ultimate evil. His everyday conduct is neither more nor less reprehensible than the average man’s, and indicates no propensity for extreme villainy. Yet philosophically his depravity is profound, and has led him to commit the supreme crime, a crime of such magnitude as even to put him beyond the reach of divine retribution (or so he claims, and I, his only confidant, believe him).

The event of which I speak took place late one summer evening, in the final quarter of this century. It is thanks to Rodrick’s vanity that I witnessed the deed—that and our habit of drinking together in various bars in the town where we both live. I believe these meetings are for Rodrick almost his only social activity. For me, they provide the kind of stimulating conversation that is not always easy to come by in a small town. In the course of an evening our discussion might range through particle physics, organic chemistry, metallurgy, magic, magnetism, senology, cosmology, comparative religion, systematics, computer design, and on what would be the proper classification of human types. But always it has been a somewhat one-sided debate, for there has never been any question of my being equal to Rodrick. Always he outdistances me, always I am the pupil being talked to by a master who holds in his memory every fact and idea known to man.