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

While Corngold discussed the details of the meal Betty went to the matter-bank and returned with a large flagon of bright red wine and four glasses. Corngold sloshed out the wine, indicating to her that she should knock hers straight back. As soon as she had done so he emptied his own glass, instantly refilling it.

‘One good hot vindaloo, one lamb biriani and a lamb korma,’ he instructed curtly.

Betty moved back to the matter-bank and twisted dials. Spicy aromas filled the room as she transferred bowls of food from the delivery transom to a tray. Naylor turned to Corngold.

‘You can’t seriously contemplate spending the rest of your life in this habitat? Cut off from humanity?’

‘Humanity can go jump in the lake.’ Corngold jerked his thumb towards the great nothingness that lay beyond the local galaxy. ‘Anyway, who says I’m habitat-bound? You forget there are other races, other worlds. As a matter of fact I have a pretty good set-up here. I’ve discovered a simply fascinating civilisation on a planet of a nearby star. Here, let me show you.’

Rising, he pushed aside a pile of cardboard cartons to reveal the habitat’s control board. A small golden ring of stars appeared, glowing like a bracelet, as he switched on an opal-surfaced viewscreen.

Corngold pointed out the largest of the stars. ‘This is the place. A really inventive life-form, not hard to get to know, really, and with the most extraordinary technology. I commute there regularly.’

‘And yet you always bring your habitat back out here again?’ Naylor remarked. ‘You must love solitude.’

‘I do love it indeed, but you misunderstand me. The habitat stays here. I commute to Zordem by means of a clever little gadget the natives gave me.’

Heavily he sat down at the table, licking his lips. His visitors tried to ask him more about these revelations, their curiosity intensely aroused; but when the food was served he became deaf to all their questions.

Taking up a whole spoonful of the pungent-smelling curry Betty served him, and without even tempering it with rice, he rolled it thoughtfully round his mouth. Then suddenly he spluttered and spat it all out.

‘This isn’t vindaloo, you shitty-arsed cow! It’s fucking Madras!’

With a roar Corngold picked up the bowl and flung it at Betty, missing her and hitting the wall. The brown muck made a dribbling trail down the yellow.

‘You must excuse my common-law wife,’ he said to Naylor, his expression turning from fury to politeness. ‘Unfortunately she is a completely useless pig.’

‘But I don’t dare dial vindaloo,’ Betty protested in a whining, tearful voice. ‘The bank’s been going funny again. On vindaloo—’

‘Get me my dinner!’ Corngold’s bellow cut off her explanations. Submissively she returned to the machine, operating it again. As she turned the knobs an acrid blue smoke rose from the matter-bank, coming not from the transom but from the seams of the casing.

Naylor, with a glance at Watson-Smythe, started to his feet with the intention of beating a retreat to his own habitat and casting off with all haste. But Corngold sprang up with a cry of exasperation, marched over to the ailing bank and gave it a hefty kick, at which the smoke stopped.

‘It’s always giving trouble,’ he exclaimed gruffly as he rejoined them. ‘That’s what comes of buying second-hand junk.’

‘You do realise, don’t you,’ Watson-Smythe said, in a tone Naylor found admirably calm and even, ‘that that thing can go off like a nuclear bomb?’

‘So can my arse after one of these curries. Ah, here it comes. Better be right this time.’

Corngold’s vindaloo was very hot. The sweat started out on his forehead as he ate it, grunting and groaning, deep in concentration. He was a man of lusty nature, Naylor decided, carrying his enjoyment of life to the limit. Afterwards he sat panting like a dog, calling for more wine and swallowing it in grateful gulps.

Then, the meal over, Corngold became expansive. With a wealth of boastful detail he began to describe his contacts with the inhabitants of the planet Zordem.

‘Their whole science is based on the idea of a certain kind of ray,’ he explained. ‘They call them zom rays. They have some quite remarkable effects. Let me show you, for instance—’

He opened one of the egg-shaped room’s four doors, disclosing a cupboard whose shelves contained several unfamiliar objects. Corngold picked one up. It was smooth, rounded in shape with a flat underside, easily held in one hand, and about three times as long as it was broad. He carried it to the viewscreen and slapped it against the side of the casing, where it stuck as if by suckers.

On the screen, the ring of stars vanished. In its place was intergalactic space, and in the foreground a long, fully-equipped spaceship of impressive size, the ring-like protuberance about her middle indicating the massiveness of her velocitator armature. They all recognised her as a Royal Navy cruiser, one of several on permanent patrol.

‘Rule Britannia!’ crowed Corngold. ‘It’s the Prince Andrew , ostensibly seeing that we habitat travellers don’t mistreat the natives. But really, of course, having a go at a second British Empire. I should ko-ko.’

‘It’s no joking matter,’ Watson-Smythe said sternly. ‘There have been quite a few incidents. I dare say your relations with Zordem will come under scrutiny in good time, Corngold.’

‘Is she close?’ Naylor asked.

‘No, she’s quite a way off,’ Corngold said, taking a look at a meter. ‘Roughly a googol olbers.’

‘Your gadget can see that far? But good God – how do you find a single object at that distance?’

‘The Zordems put a trace on her the day I arrived. To make me feel at home, I suppose. Don’t ask me how. They did it with zom rays!’

Naylor was stunned. ‘Then these are the people who are masters of infinity!’ he breathed.

Corngold sighed, strolled back to the table and sat down placing his bare, fat arms among the empty dishes. He wiped up a trace of curry sauce with his finger and licked it. Then he looked up at Naylor.

‘You really are a clown,’ he said. ‘Masters of infinity! That’s a lot of crap newspaper talk. The Zordems are nowhere into infinity, any more than we are. If you’re going to talk about infinity , well then, the whole spread anyone’s gone from Earth, or anywhere else for that matter, is no more than a dot. Okay, build a velocitator armature a light year across and ride it for a billion years. You’ve still only gone the length of a dot on the face of infinity. That’s what infinity means, isn’t it? That however far you go it’s still endless? For Crissake,’ he ended scathingly, ‘you ought to know that.’

‘Just the same, you’ve misled us with this talk of being stranded,’ Watson-Smythe accused him. ‘With equipment like this you can obviously find your way to anywhere.’

‘Afraid not. This gadget gives the range but not the direction. And even the range is limited to about fifty googol olbers. The Zordems have hit on a lot of angles we’ve missed, but they’re not that much in advance of us overall.’

‘Still, it must be based on a completely new principle,’ Naylor said intensely. ‘Don’t you see, Corngold? This might give us what everybody’s been looking for – a reliable homing device! It might even ,’ he added shyly, ‘mean a reduction in sentence for you.’

He stopped, blushing at the emerald malevolence that brimmed for a moment from Corngold’s eyes. If he were honest, he was beginning to find the man frightening. There was something dangerous, something solid and immovable about him. His knowledge of an alien technology, and his obvious intelligence which came through despite his outrageous behaviour, had dispelled the earlier impression of him as an amusing crank. All Watson-Smythe’s trained smoothness had failed to make the slightest dent in his self-confidence; Betty remained his slave, and Naylor privately doubted whether the charge of abduction could be made to stick. There was something ritualistic in Corngold’s treatment of her, and in her corresponding misery. It looked to Naylor as though they were matched souls.