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

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.