Barrington Bayley - Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus - The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

Corngold, however, eased his grip slightly, turning indignantly as Watson-Smythe entered. ‘What the bloody hell do you mean barging in here?’ he bellowed. ‘Bugger off!’ His accent sounded northern to Naylor’s ears; Yorkshire, perhaps.

To Naylor’s faint surprise Watson-Smythe’s answering tone was cold and professional. ‘Walter Corngold? Late of 43 Denison Square?’

‘You heard me! Bugger off! This is private property!’

Watson-Smythe produced a slim Hasking stun beamer from inside his jacket. With his other hand he took a document from his pocket. ‘Watson-Smythe,’ he announced. ‘I have here a warrant for your arrest, Corngold. I’m taking you back to Earth.’

So that was it! Naylor wondered why he hadn’t guessed it before. Now that he thought of it, Watson-Smythe was almost a caricature of the type of young man one expected to find in the ‘infinity police’, as it was jocularly called – MI19, the branch of security entrusted with law enforcement among habitat travellers.

He felt amused. ‘What are the charges?’ he asked mildly.

‘Two charges,’ Watson-Smythe replied, turning his head slightly but still keeping the Hasking carefully trained on Corngold. ‘Theft, and more serious, the abduction of Lady Cadogan’s maid, who unless I am very much mistaken is the young lady you are now mistreating, Corngold. Take your hands off her at once.’

Corngold released the girl and shoved her roughly towards the couch. She plomped herself down on it and sat staring at the floor.

‘Ridiculous,’ he snorted, then added, in a voice heavy with irony: ‘Betty’s here of her own sweet will, aren’t you, dearest?’

She glanced up like a frightened mouse, darting what might have been a look of hope at Watson-Smythe. Then she retreated into herself again, nodding meekly.

Corngold sighed with satisfaction. ‘Well, that’s that, then. Sod off, the two of you, and leave us in peace.’ He strolled to the easel, picked up a brush and started to daub the canvas on it, as though he had banished them from existence.

Watson-Smythe laughed, showing clean white teeth. ‘They told me you were a bit of a character, Corngold. But you’re due for a court appearance in London just the same.’

He turned politely to Naylor. ‘Thanks for your assistance, Naylor old boy. You can cast off now if you’re so inclined, and I’ll take Corngold’s habitat back to Earth.’

‘Can’t,’ Corngold said, giving them a sideways glance. ‘My inertial navigator’s bust. I was stuck here, in fact, until you two turned up. Not that it bothers me at all.’

Watson-Smythe frowned. ‘Well…’

‘Is it a malfunction?’ Naylor queried. ‘Or just a faulty record?’

Corngold shrugged. ‘It’s buggered, I tell you.’

‘I might be able to do something with it,’ Naylor said to the MI19 agent. ‘I’ll have look at it, anyway. If it’s only the record we can simply take a copy of our own one.’

Corngold flung down his brush. ‘In that case you might as well stay to dinner. And put that gun away, for Chrissake. What do you think this is, a shooting gallery?’

‘After all, he can’t go anywhere,’ Naylor observed when Watson-Smythe wavered. ‘Without us he’ll never get home.’

‘All right.’ He returned his gun to its shoulder holster. ‘But don’t think you’re going to wriggle out of this, Corngold. Kidnapping’s a pretty serious offence.’

Corngold’s eyes twinkled. He pointed to a clock hung askew on the wall. ‘Dinner’s at nine. Don’t be late.’

Wearily Naylor slumped in his armchair in his own living-room. He had spent an hour on Corngold’s inertial navigator, enough to tell him that the gyros were precessing and the whole system would need to be re-tuned. It would be a day’s work at least and he had decided to make a fresh start tomorrow. If he couldn’t put the device in order they would all have to travel back to Earth in Naylor’s habitat – as an MI19 officer Watson-Smythe had the power to require his co-operation over that. At the moment the agent was in his bedroom, bringing his duty log up to date.

The business with the navigator had brought home anew to Naylor the desirability of inventing some different type of homing mechanism. He was becoming irritated that the problem was so intractable, and felt a fresh, if frustrating, urge to get to grips with it.

Remembering that he had left the vodor lecture unfinished, he switched on the machine again, listening closely to the evenly-intoned words, even though he knew them almost by heart.

‘The question of personal identity was raised by Locke, and later occupied the attentions of Hume and Butler. Latterly the so-called “theorem of universal identity” has gained some prominence. In this theorem, personal identity (or self-identity) is defined as having knowledge of one’s identity, a statement which also serves to define consciousness. Conscious beings are said to differ from inanimate objects only in that they have knowledge of their identity, while inanimate objects, though possessing their own identity, have no knowledge of it.

‘To be conscious, however, means to be able to perceive. But in order to perceive there must be an “identification” between the subject (self-identity, or consciousness) and the perceived object. Therefore there is a paradoxical “sharing” of identity between subject and object, similar, perhaps, to the exchange of identity once posited between electrons. This reasoning leads to the concept of a “universal identity” according to which all identity, both of conscious beings and of inanimate objects, belongs to the same universal transcendental identity, or “self”. This conclusion is a recurring one in the history of human thought, known at various times as “the infinite self”, “the transcendental self” and “the universal self” of Vedantic teachings. “I am you,” the mystic will proclaim, however impudently, meaning that the same basic identity is shared by everyone.

‘Such conceptions are not admitted by the empirical materialist philosophers, who subject them to the most withering criticism. To the empiricist, every occasion is unique; therefore its identity is unique. Hume declared that he could not even discover self-identity in himself; introspection yielded only a stream of objects in the form of percepts; a “person” is therefore a “bundle” of percepts. Neither can the fact that two entities may share a logical identity in any way compromise their basic separateness, since logic itself is not admitted as having any a priori foundation.

‘The modern British school rejects the concept of identity altogether as a mere verbalism, without objective application. Even the notion of electron identity exchange is now accepted to be a mathematical fiction, having been largely superseded by the concept of “unique velocity” which is incorporated in the Harkham velocitator. It is still applied, however, to a few quantum mechanical problems for which no other mathematical tools exist.’

Naylor rose and went to the window, gazing out at the blazing spiral galaxy which was visible over the humped shape of Corngold’s habitat. ‘Ah, the famous question of identity,’ he murmured.

He knew why the question continued to perplex him. It was because of the thespitron. The thespitron, with its unexpected tricks and properties, had blurred his feeling of self-identity, just as the identity of electrons had been blurred by the twentieth-century quantum equations. And at the same time, the thoughts occurring to him attacked materialist empiricism at its weakest point: the very same question of identity.

There came to him again the image of the categories of identity, proceeding and permutating down a dark, immensely long corridor. He felt dizzy, elated. Here, in his habitat living-room, his domain was small but complete; he and the thespitron reproduced between them, on a minute scale, the ancient mystical image of created universe and observing source, of phenomenon and noumenon; even without him here to watch it, the thespitron was the transcendental machine concretised, a microcosm to reflect the macrocosm, a private universe of discourse, a mirror of infinity in a veneered cabinet.