Barrington Bayley: The Seed of Evil

On the evening of 18 July 2109, Julian and his comrades struck. An airplat glinted in and out of light and shade in the approaches to the northern suburbs and entered the habitat jungle.

Julian was flying, with four others in the seats behind him. The airplat drifted through the three-dimensional maze, surrounded on all sides by lavishly decorated walls, windows, doors and ceilings and the gardens that hung profusely from almost every roof. After a short while they arrived at Neverdie’s dwelling.

Although lights shone already from most of the surrounding windows, Neverdie’s house was in darkness. Julian parked the airplat on the flat, bare roof, close to the roof door. He got out, stepped to the door and tested it. The door was unlocked.

He had previously had the house cased for alarms in the guise of a magazine interview. Apparently, there was none, which to Julian’s mind was an extraordinary oversight. He beckoned to the others. They padded after him and the group descended into the dim interior.

Julian paused briefly to enjoy the elegance of the rooms. Neverdie certainly had good taste. But for the strangeness of the furniture, which was built to serve his form and not the human, this could have been the home of a cultured, educated Englishman.

They found the alien in the downstairs drawing room, apparently asleep. Julian knew that he would sometimes sleep for a week without waking. He drew a small cylinder from his pocket, releasing from it an invisible gas. To the humans in the room it did nothing; in the Aldebaranian, however, it induced a deep unconsciousness. Neverdie would not wake now.

Julian had learned that trick in the course of his previous medical attendance on Neverdie. They lifted the body on to a stretcher; it was surprisingly light.

Back at the roof door Julian glanced quickly around. He did not think they were observed. Impatiently he waved the team on. In seconds their cargo was safely aboard the airplat.

Nosing out of the habitat region, they flashed into the open air again, and went planing southwards.

At almost the same time Courdon received a call.

Five years ago, sensitive to Julian’s purposefulness, he had taken precautions. Neverdie’s dwelling was bugged.

After all this time the surveillance service was slow to respond to the announcement that uninvited persons were present in the apartments. Following a procedure already laid down, their first move was to contact the administrator.

In his own home, Courdon took the news with astonishment and, at first, disbelief.

“Can you give me a picture of them?”

The surveillance operator spoke calmly. “They have already left the house. We are tracking them in an airplat, flying towards Greenwich. We can pick them up at any time you like.”

“No, not yet. If they have the nerve to kidnap Neverdie then this is a planned conspiracy. Let’s wait to see where they lead us.”

The kidnap party disappeared into the ascending tiers on the south side of the city. Police plats, nosing like fish in an undersea coral bed, cruised after them at a calculated distance.

In the interlocking complexity they soon lost their quarry, but were not worried. In the next few minutes they would find it again, probably at its destination.

And so they did. But in those few minutes they were already too late. They found the airplat, as well as the house where it was parked, deserted. Their reaction was to search the neighbouring buildings and to think in terms of a switch to another airplat. It did not occur to them until some time later to think of an ocean-boat mingling with the river traffic beneath their feet and heading rapidly into the open sea.

Watching from his home, Courdon cursed.

In the Mediterranean, aboard the piano yacht Rudi Dutschke, Julian faced a vacillating situation.

In short his colleagues had got cold feet.

“C’est dangereux, mon ami,” André said glumly. “By now they will be looking for him. What if they should guess he is at sea?”

“How would they guess, you fool?” Julian retorted. “They might think of it as a remote possibility, that’s all. And as for a sea search—well, have you any idea just how many ships are on the oceans at any one time? Damn near a million, I should think.”

“Just the same,” David Aul put in carefully, “we won’t be safe until that creature below decks is washed over the side, or what will be left of him. How long is all this going to take?”

“It will take months at the very least, so stop panicking. And you’re never going to be safe, get that through your head. And for God’s sake try to work up a little backbone!”

I’ll ditch this lot as soon as it’s convenient, he told himself. When it comes to it they’re nothing but a bunch of nuts who get jittery the moment their fantasies start to turn into reality. Except Ursula, no sense in wasting her. She’s got more guts than the rest of them put together. Funny thing about some of these women.

Actually the research to be done on Neverdie was only the first stage. Then would come the problem of learning how to apply the knowledge gained. That would almost certainly take years.

His plan was to pass through the Suez Canal and into the Indian Ocean, where West-European influence was slight and the chances of their being apprehended correspondingly reduced. Once they were finished with Neverdie he would switch to the land for the longer stages of the work. India was a delightfully corrupt place and he knew where he could be kept indefinitely from view of the law, with full research facilities, until his programme was complete.

When he felt he was sufficiently rested, Julian began.

Taking with him David Aul, who was a trained biochemist, he descended to the space amidships that had been equipped to fulfil all the functions he thought would be necessary.

There was enough here to take the alien apart muscle by muscle, nerve by nerve and molecule by molecule.

They both stared at Neverdie as he lay strapped to the operating table. Surrounding him were the electronic pantos that would do all the cutting and manipulating—Julian didn’t trust this job to manual dexterity, and besides he would be working at the cellular and molecular levels. One half of the working area was devoted to biochemical analysis and the mapping of the nervous system. If they found that they needed any extra equipment, Julian was confident that they could get it in India.

“What if it’s something that we can’t find out?” Aul commented.

“I don’t think it will be. I’m more than half certain that Neverdie’s immortality isn’t natural to his species. That just wouldn’t make sense, would it? Any biological organism has to die, otherwise the ecology it lives in couldn’t work. I think he acquired everlasting life by artificial means and if that’s the case then we should be able to find out how.”

Julian flicked a switch and brought the hum of power to the workroom. “To begin with, let’s see if our friend has had a change of heart that would make all our work unnecessary.”

Using a dropper, he administered a few cc’s of a pungent-smelling liquid to an organ just beneath Neverdie’s carapace. The alien, who was strapped upside down to reveal a mass of appendages, opened milky translucent eyes and stirred feebly.

The eyes swivelled and focused on Julian. “You are making a mistake…” the voice diaphragm said weakly.

“It’s you who has made the mistake,” Julian said. “You know what we want: give it and we’ll spare you.”

“No… I cannot.”

Julian paused. “I would like to put a few questions to you,” he said finally. “Are you willing to answer?”

“Yes.”