Barrington Bayley - The Seed of Evil

“Get away, Rim!” I shouted, though I was too terrified to help him myself.

For a moment he stared wonderingly at his body as it elongated and streamed, then he started up his jets and before I knew what was happening we were both hurtling towards the research ship without thought of the other. Almost blind with haste, I scrambled through the airlock to find Rim already waiting for me in the living quarters.

“Rim,” I gasped. “You made it quick. Are you all right?”

“Of course!” he snapped irritably. “Perfectly all right. It wasn’t me that was being malformed, it was just the space I occupied.”

I peered closely at his body but didn’t find one trace of any deformation. He was his usual robust, unhealthy, disgusting self.

He chewed the lid off a beer bottle and commenced to gulp the contents, allowing some of it to dribble down his chest. I helped myself to one, too, and it tasted good enough to bathe in, not that I thought of bathing.

“Don’t you see what happened?” Rim said between gargles, flopping on to a couch. “It was space—pouring through the hole. There wasn’t any space inside. Well, now we know: space behaves like a fluid.”

“I thought space was just nothing,” I replied, also gargling.

“Space has structure,” he asserted seriously. “Direction: north, south, east, west, zenith, nadir. It has distance. Good God!” His over-ripe brown eyes suddenly alive with emotion, Rim leaped from the couch and switched on all the outer view-screens. “Look! All the sidereal universe is contained in space. Everything! Except….” His voice tailed off into mutterings again. He let the empty bottle fall from his fingers and took another from one of the crates we always have piled up all over the place. Slowly he dropped back on to the couch, sullenly thoughtful.

“What I can’t understand,” I remarked conversationally, “is why that thing out there makes me think of a Greek trireme.”

I was glad to be back in our cosy living quarters. We keep the lights low and it’s comfortable, if you don’t mind the rotten food lying about the floor, and the smell. It would have suited me perfectly to forget we ever saw the alien body: all it had done was disturb our routine.

“Never mind,” I said consolingly, “we’ve had a harrowing experience. Come on, drink up and have another.”

But he wouldn’t be cheered, and presently we lapsed into a silent drinking bout. We have had many of these in the course of our career out here beyond Neptune, particularly when we muse on our memories and our misfortunes among the society of our fellow-men back on Earth; but never before had I seen Rim guzzle so solidly, and with such an air of desperation.

Some hours later he struggled to a sitting position, breathing heavily. “Don’t you see?” he uttered hoarsely, the words coming with scant coherence. “Don’t you see what that ship is? It floats on space as an ocean ship floats on water! It’s really right outside space—outside the dimensions. But it floats on them, and we see the part its weight causes to be projected below the water-line… the space-line.”

“But it doesn’t have any weight,” I objected hazily. By this time we were both pretty far gone.

“ Their kind of weight, not ours, fool. By God! If they use space for water, what do they use for air? And us, do you know what we are? Fishes in the sea. Never able to reach the surface.”

He came towards me, groping blindly until his hand clapped my shoulder. “Listen. There’ll never be another chance like this.”

“Chance for what?”

“To see what it’s like where there’s no space. I’m going inside that ship.”

“But you can’t do that—”

“What do you mean, I can’t? Are you telling me what I can do? Me, Rim, the Great Rim? Why, if it weren’t for me you wouldn’t have this job at all. You’d still be walking around the gutters on Earth.”

Even in my befuddled state I could see he’d got to the maudlin stage, and that would quickly be followed by the self-pitying stage. I couldn’t do anything to prevent it, and anyway it was a sort of entertainment. But as for any half-mad scheme he might dream up, well, that was different. It was dangerous.

“Look here,” I coaxed, “there isn’t any way you can get inside that ship. There are no openings. Now if you spent more time in the laboratory….”

“Yaah!” Big brownish tears trickled out of Rim’s eyes. “Keeping me out of all the big research! Pushing me out here where they think I won’t be able to achieve anything….”

“Genius is never tolerated,” I consoled.

“But Rim will discover something to amaze them all! Rim will find out about space itself. You watch me.”

“There’s no way inside, old chap.”

“No way? Hah! A few ounces of blasting powder will soon make a way. All I have to do is nip inside before all the space comes washing in, and observe… observe….”

The voice faded into the familiar mutter. I rose to my feet, aghast. He was really drunk! “But what about the people inside?”

Rim looked at me with a mean look I had never seen on his face before. I never knew until that moment just how much he resented the way society had treated him, even though it was his own fault. Now he wanted to assert himself against all the force of moral feeling which society represented.

“People?” he roared. “A bit of space won’t hurt them! This is for science!”

I shook my head with as much firmness as I could muster. “You’re not going.”

“You’re telling Rim what to do?” Rim shook his head shaggily and landed his fist on my nose. I reeled, ignoring the pain and trying to sort out the scenery from the streaks of light flashing across my brain, and stumbled over a chair. Rim came after me. Rolling aside to evade him, I looked desperately around for something to hit him with. A bottle! There was one lying on the floor an arm’s length away, and I grabbed it as I came to my feet.

Rim was in a half crouch, he also had a bottle in his hand. “So it’s bottles, is it?” he spat, and smashed his on the edge of the table. Neither of us had ever done that before.

“Rim!” I cried in amazement. “We’ve known each other all our lives!”

I backed against the wall, letting my own weapon fall in my surprise. Rim edged to me, displaying his jagged glass proudly and making thrusting motions. Then he threw it aside at the last moment and aimed one of his best hammerblows at my jaw.

That was when I temporarily left the scene in the living quarters, for the happier climes of unconsciousness.

When I recovered he’d suited up and left. I didn’t know how long it had been but I guessed it was five or ten minutes.

I felt too groggy to follow, though. I climbed to my feet, groaned a little, felt sorry for myself for a while, then became supine again, this time on the couch. My head felt really bad, and I don’t think it was just the beer.

For the first time in my life I felt a twinge of remorse. Why that should be, I couldn’t make out: Rim should be the one going through all that conscience stuff, not me. Still, I staggered over to a mirror and gazed long, if unsteadily, at the horrifying sight I presented.

“You look wretched,” I accused miserably. “You look as bad as him.”

I took solace in the thought that perhaps I didn’t look quite as bad as Rim, then turned my attention to what he was doing, switching on the main view-screen to show the alien ship. Bringing up the magnification a few degrees, I saw my partner puttering at the vessel’s lower aft part; soon he backed off, and a neat explosion blew a large chunk out of the fabric.

Rim darted forward immediately and slipped inside the hole. Even in those few seconds I saw him twist and waver as if he’d been caught in a swift current, but I lost interest in him in the course of the next minute, because I was so completely fascinated by what was happening to the ship.