She gazed around her, frightened by the alienness of everything she saw. She was completely out of her depth.
“Jack,” I said, “here’s Janet.”
There was a barely perceptible pause.
Then a voice came hoarsely through the speaker which shook even me by the intensity of its hatred and bitterness. “You finally arrived, you filthy slut, did you?” it said. “How bloody nice!”
It seemed to gather its breath, then vomited a paralysing stream of obscenity and execration. Through it all I seemed to hear the resentment, the disappointment, which Jack had harboured all this time. I realised that everything Janet meant to me, she must have meant to him. She had filled the void of his life, just as she had filled mine. And that was why Jack wanted to speak to Janet.
He never gives up. If he can’t have it one way, he’ll have it the other.
Janet let out a small, terrified cry, turned and fled. I heard her sharp heels clattering, on the stairs.
“Why did you do that?” I exploded.
“Just to give her a few nightmares,” he answered sardonically. “By the way, I’ve a confession to make. You know everything I said about taking Janet away from you? It wasn’t even true!”
That was all I got out of him. I stood there, absolutely stunned. I had never taxed Janet about her defection; I was afraid of appearing jealous.
Now that Jack had made his confession, I suddenly realised how utterly ridiculous was the notion that Janet would ever have had an affair with him, or even, at that stage, been unfaithful to me at all. She just wasn’t that sort.
And yet I had believed it. Jack had gauged exactly what would take place in my mind, even to the years-long silence. In his crooked way he had a real genius for it.
In those few seconds the full tragedy of Jack became clear to me. His envy, resulting in a cruel taunt. Then, after the unforeseen outcome, endless brooding. Poor brother, he was deranged with it!
I dashed downstairs, but Janet was already leaving. She went without even taking her beautiful clothes, her expensive jewelry. She packed a small case, slammed the front door without a word and was gone.
Next day I called on Professor Juker. Without talking much about Janet I told him about Jack.
He nodded thoughtfully, knocked the ash out of his pipe and put it away.
“You’re right,” he said. “That fact is, we can’t hope to keep him alive indefinitely. The temperature’s bound to rise, even if only marginally, and it will be no consolation to him to know that the main current is still flowing on Celenthenis. It’s only common humanity to save his life.”
Juker put up the money for the costly cartridges, and I flew the ship. As for Jack, I didn’t even ask him if he still wanted to go. I wasn’t giving him the option, because I knew that once he was gone I could have Janet back.
Landing on Celenthenis, I stood outside the airlock, took the green rock in my gloved hand and flung it as far as I could.
I didn’t even see it land.
Farewell, brother Jack, may you have a long life! The Montgomery Cloudbank is a huge affair and doesn’t move much, so it ought to be a long one. You’ll live until Celenthenis warms up, so you’ll probably still be there when Earth is gone.
Be grateful for the enclosing dark. When the stars start to shine through, your cold vigil will be over.
As for me, I’m happier with my flesh and blood. I’ll enjoy Janet for a few years, then let this body of mine gutter quietly out.
Sometimes I hear her whimpering in the night, but I reach out to her, wake her and comfort her, and it’s all right.
The Seed of Evil
ONE
Time without end.
Aeternus, being devoid of affective emotions, could not even hate those who had created him; but He knew loneliness. A uniquely solitary being, he longed for the presence of another besides Himself.
His existence was without end and without beginning. All around him the ceaseless universal vibration of creation and dissolution continued without pause as galaxies were born and died like a whirling mirage of snowflakes. As He gazed down at the never-ending activity, Aeternus could see races, empires, worlds, rise up and fall down again into the swallowing void, and He envied the myriad creatures whose lives were given meaning by the fact that those lives must end. His own existence would never end, because He knew both eternity and infinity in which all meaning and pattern disappear.
Aeternus was not material, but was printed into the fabric of space and time, and therefore He could not directly affect anything material. But He could focus His awareness anywhere, even into an atom. And He could call, appealing to souls without their knowledge and summoning them to turn unto Him.
He sought some combination of events that would lead a finite being out of the material realm and into the bodiless eternity which now only Aeternus inhabited. Only thus could He ever experience the feeling of other presence which was all He craved. Surveying the realm of existence, He saw that what was good perished, but that evil outlived all. Therefore Aeternus bent his attention to a certain persistent chain of greed and passion, and sent his summons wafting through the waves of creation and dissolution, calling, calling….
TWO
The early twenty-second century greeted the appearance in the Solar System of an extra-solar visitor with little of the amazement or shock that might have been occasioned in the twentieth. The news media gave the event front-page coverage at first, but after a few days relegated it to the back rank of items and concentrated instead on revelations of the following year’s fashions. The curiosity of the scientific establishment was, indeed, aroused; but not over-much excitement. The reason for this coolness was partly that it was fashionable, and partly that astronomy, assisted by the advances in space travel that had proceeded unevenly over the last century and a half, had long since revealed that interstellar space contained vast amounts of biochemical material. It seemed inevitable that life must arise wherever conditions were suitable for its reception, and that biology was no more unique to the planet Earth than it was to a Pacific island. With this in mind, the certainty that there would be contact with alien life at some unspecified date in the future had been an accepted fact for a hundred years or more.
Consequently, within two weeks of the alien’s having been escorted by a plasma-cruiser to the translunar space station, and from there, after appropriate bacterial investigation, to the sprawling Ignatova Hospital and Research Establishment that lay athwart London’s River Thames, the team assigned to study him were already regarding him, most of them at any rate, with equanimity. He was probably an unremarkable specimen, they reasoned, as extra-solar life-forms go.
The one team member who did not subscribe to the cult of studied scientific detachment that was so much a part of twenty-second-century life was Julian Ferrg, Surgeon. Julian felt that he had a more intimate connection with the alien than the others, because his scalpels had already explored his body on the operating table. On a day shortly after that event sunlight was filtering pleasantly into a large lounge from a ring of windows set at floor level. Julian’s gaze flicked insolently from one team member to another. There was Ralph Reed, the philologist who had already achieved the phenomenal task of teaching the alien English; Han Soku, the physicist; Courdon, in Julian’s eyes an overly-correct, formal administrator; and Hans Meyer, a cosmologist who hoped to question the visitor on what he called Basic Questions.