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

Against the yielding rock wall the big vibro-drill was working well, despite its age. Tremoring invisibly, the rotating blades sliced through the basalt at a steady rate, shoving the finely divided rubble to the rear to be dealt with by a follow-up machine – which, since this was only a demonstration run, was in this case absent.

Erfax, Keeper of the Machine Museum, flicked a switch and the drill died with a protesting whine. His friend Erled nodded. He was impressed. In a few minutes the drill had already buried half its length in the rock wall, carving out the commencement of a six-foot diameter tunnel.

‘So this is how they tunnelled in the old days,’ he said.

‘That’s right. The ancients may have been primitive in some ways, but technologically they weren’t bad, not bad at all. This type of machine made possible the great epic explorations – the migratory ones. If one is to believe history – and personally I do – with such drills they tunnelled hundreds of thousands of miles. These days we could do better, of course. They must have spent an awful long time travelling those distances with a vibro-drill, apart from wearing out God knows how many machines in the process.’

Erled smiled wistfully. ‘A few centuries was nothing to those people. They had will-power.’ He watched as the drill was withdrawn from the dent-like cavity it had made and was turned round for the short journey to its resting place in the Museum. Behind it a packing machine moved into place, scooping up the rock that had been thrown out and ramming it expertly back into the hole. He tried to imagine the drill spinning out a tunnel thousands of miles into the infinite rock, pushing relentlessly forward on a vain search for other worlds. He imagined thousands of people passing along that tunnel as their home cavity gradually filled up with the rock from the excavation – until, eventually, they gave up the search, filled up the tunnel itself and settled in the new cavity they were thus able to hollow out – this cavity in which Erled had been born. Yes, he thought, those ancestors of ours had a quality we have lost.

‘I should congratulate you,’ he told Erfax. ‘It looks as good as new.’

Erfax laughed shyly. ‘Part of my duties is to keep the machines entrusted to me in working condition,’ he said. ‘Ostensibly that drill is five hundred years old, the last of its type – but between you and me it’s had so many parts replaced it might just as well have been made yesterday.’

Erled nodded again, smiling. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Well, thanks for showing it to me, Erfax. It’s helped – seeing how they did it in the old days, I mean. I feel encouraged, now. If they had the nerve to explore the universe with relatively primitive equipment like this, then we can certainly do it with what we have available. Maybe we will succeed where they failed.’

Erfax’s assistants were guiding the vibro-drill under its own power down a broad, even-ceilinged corridor. He and Erled followed, turning away from the rock perimeter and walking Inwards. Erled was a tall, sharp-eyed man, a few years beyond the freshness of youth but still fairly young. Erfax, rather older, was a shorter, rounder man who walked with short, quick strides and he had to hurry to keep up with the other.

A short while later, at the gates of the Machine Museum, Erfax turned to Erled.

‘You are very confident, friend. But whatever the hazards of the voyage might be, the greatest hurdle you will have to overcome is still here, in the Cavity. You still have to gain the assent of the Proctors. However, I wish you luck.’

‘The Proctors?’ Erled answered lightly. ‘They will be no trouble at all, you can depend on it. Why, Ergrad, the Proctor Enforcer, is the father of Fanaleen, my betrothed. This is practically a family affair!’

Erfax merely smiled uncertainly, waved farewell and disappeared through the gates of his Museum in the wake of the whining, elephantine vibro-drill. Erled went on down the low passage whose ceiling, as everywhere in the Cavity, was barely six or eight inches overhead. He was not discomforted by this pressing closeness; it was the condition of life he had always known, that everyone had always known.