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

‘Look!’

Furious ripples were appearing on the tremorscope, threatening to break out at any moment into a maelstrom of violence. ‘Definitely not a cavity,’ Erled mused. ‘To me it suggests only one thing: a natural quake – and a big one! Furthermore it’s directly ahead!’

‘A natural quake?’ said Ereton wonderingly. Theoretically they were possible but none had ever been observed. It was calculated that the violence of such phenomena, if they did actually occur, would be simply colossal – enough to wipe out in an instant any cavity luckless enough to be caught in them. Erled knew that they would not survive even for seconds in the giant rock storm that lay ahead.

‘If we’re to get out of its way we’re going to have to turn ninety degrees or more,’ Erled said. ‘Preferably to the right.’

‘Do you think we can?’

‘We’d better have a damned good try.’

Both were having a hard time to stay alert in the foul air. Cautiously they put their temporary steering system into operation. Reluctantly the ship turned a little. Then a little more. There was the sound of something snapping and an alarm sounded. Gritting his teeth, Ereton forced a little more pressure from the collapsing valves that were supposed to bring the head of the ship round in the rock. The ship turned a few degrees more, then the whole system gave way under the strain.

‘Ninety degrees,’ said Ereton, breathing deeply. ‘Just about!’

But they were without steering of any kind, and both knew that they did not have the strength to try to jury-rig the system again. Leaving the ship on automatic, they returned to their bunks.

Their morale was now falling rapidly. Whenever they could either Erled or Ereton attended to the recycling plant, but the rest of the time, completely debilitated, they simply lay on their narrow bunks and waited for whatever fate would bring.

Four months after their departure from the Cavity Erled was awakened from a deep slumber by the ringing of an alarm. He was perplexed to find that the engines were silent and that the ship was apparently motionless. Dragging himself from his bunk, he saw that the emptiness indicator was flashing – and, he guessed, had been flashing for some time.

Feverishly he shook Ereton to awareness and coaxed him to the control panel. The instruments told their own story: with no one at the controls to heed the ‘emptiness ahead’ warning, the solidity ship had plunged straight on until encountering that emptiness, upon which the automatic cutout had brought the vessel to a stop.

The two friends did not even speak to one another. Wordlessly they broke open a locker containing oxygen masks which were included in the ship’s kit in case the air of alien cavities proved unbreathable. Thus equipped, Erled summoned up his last remaining strength to force open the hull door.

The solidity ship had emerged halfway from a sheer rock wall. As luck would have it, it had struck emptiness only a couple of feet above one of the many rock ledges jutting from the cliff face. After testing the ledge for firmness, Erled and Ereton stumbled down and looked about them.

The new emptiness was faintly illumined by streaks of luminescent stone in the otherwise inert rock. These streaks occurred in the home cavity, also, and were held to be one of the prerequisites for the primeval development of life. The two men, having spent long periods inside the solidity ship in total darkness, adapted to this faint light with little difficulty. At first a terrible cosmic fear gripped Erled; for although he saw the great rock wall stretching unevenly away in all directions nearby, and below he could dimly discern floors, boulders and plateaux, ahead of him there seemed to be nothing but unending void. Was Ereton’s wild notion true? Had they come to the edge of solidity, to look out on an infinity of emptiness? But as he peered harder Erled saw that the impossible dream was not to be. He saw a dim film of something hanging, like a curtain, far away in the distance, and he knew that this was a cavity such as the one in which he had been born. Except that this cavity apparently contained no life.

‘So it’s true!’ he declaimed in a cracked voice, the words coming muffled through his mask. ‘There are other cavities in the rock! Some of them must be inhabited! Our faith is justified – we are not alone in the universe!’

At that moment his strength failed him. He felt Ereton’s aim around him, helping him back into the solidity ship, where they both lay down for the last time.

Well, Asmravaar, what do you think of that? A sad tale in some respects – but above all, I think, a triumphant victory for the spirit of intelligent life.

There is one tiny aspect of the narrative that may strike you as suspicious. I mean the part in which Erled and Ereton were turned aside from their course, and thereby enabled to find the new cavity, by the intervention of a rock quake. Did this smack of providence? Well, there, I confess, I failed to play fair and concealed the truth: – it was providence – my providence. The rock in which these creatures dwell is scattered with caverns at intervals too infrequent to hit upon by sheer luck, and the antronoscopes they use are so primitive that they are only effective over a range of two or three miles. So, seeing a suitable cavern lying quite close to their route, I could not resist helping them out a bit by causing a minor disturbance with an effector beam.

How the bipeds came to exist in their rock environment is something of a mystery. Since the surface of the planet, a thousand miles over their heads, is desolate and airless, I surmise that they might have retreated millennia ago from a natural catastrophe or, what amounts to the same thing, from a war of annihilation.

It might seem surprising that the bipeds have never guessed that they live in the interior of a spherical planet, until one remembers that there is nothing in their environment to suggest the fact. The rock stratum in which they live is a variety of basalt and is roofed over by a somewhat rare phenomenon – a five-hundred-mile thick stratum of extremely hard carbon-bonded iron and granite. It would take some really advanced expertise to penetrate this particular lithosphere and when the bipeds took refuge below it, afterwards allowing their science to deteriorate, they effectively imprisoned themselves inside their planet for ever.

The stories about the epic voyages of ancient times are literally true, by the way. They really did journey hundreds of thousands of miles, never suspecting that they were simply travelling round the planet’s gravity radius (at that depth a circumference of roughly eighteen thousand miles) again and again.

In a way I feel glad that they never knew.

And where is my ‘philosophic victory’, you want to know? As you are too blockheaded to see it yourself, I shall have to explain. I have discovered a solid universe of infinite rock! But, you protest, the bipeds only think they live in such a universe – in actuality they dwell in a completely unremarkable, average planet, leaving aside one or two details of geological interest.

Yet, Asmravaar, are imagination and reality so very much different, really? If the mind is able to entertain some state of affairs as though it were real, then perhaps somewhere in the transfinite universe it is real.

As it happens I have a little more than just fancy to support this contention of mine. There is a puzzling little coincidence in the tale I have just related. Ereton, the theoretician, made a calculation of the hypothetical ratio of ‘emptiness’ to ‘solidity’ in his (imaginary) universe. I was astonished when I realized that the figures he produced come close to describing the actually existing converse case in the real universe – namely the average ratio of matter to empty space . I cannot help wondering, therefore, whether this is something more than a coincidence.