Sitting down again, he switched on the thespitron.
Naylor’s sense of having duplicated the logical development of the universe was further heightened by the inclusion of the ‘credible sequence’ button. This optional control engaged circuits which performed, in fact, no more than the last stage of the plotting process, arranging that the machine’s presentations, in terms of construction, settings and event structure, were consonant, if not quite with the real world, at least with a dramatist’s imitation of it.
With the button disengaged, however, the criterion of mundane credibility vanished. The thespitron proceeded to construct odd, abbreviated worlds, sometimes from only a small number of dramatic elements. Worlds in which processes, once begun, were apt to continue for ever, without interruption or exhaustion; in which actions, once embarked upon, became a binding force upon the actor, requiring permanent reiteration.
The world of Frank Nayland, private investigator, was one of these: a world put together from the bare components of the Hollywood thriller genre, bereft of any wider background, moving according to an obsessive, abstract logic. A compact world with only a small repertoire of events; the terse fictional world of the private dick, a world in which rain was unceasing.
Summoning up Nayland from store, Naylor watched him pursue his investigations, his gaberdine raincoat permanently damp, rain dripping from the brim of his slouch hat. So absorbed did he become in the dick’s adventures that he failed to notice the entry of Watson-Smythe until the MI19 officer tapped him on the shoulder.
‘It’s nine o’clock,’ Watson-Smythe said. ‘Time we were calling on Corngold.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Naylor rose, rubbing his eyes. He left the thespitron running as they went through the connecting tunnel, tapping on Corngold’s door before going in.
A measure of camaraderie had grown up during the hour they had spent with the artist earlier. Naylor had come to look on him more as an eccentric rascal than a real villain, and even Watson-Smythe had mollified his hostility a little. He had still tried to persuade Betty Cooper, the maid allegedly abducted from the home of Lady Cadogan (from whom Corngold had also stolen a valuable antique bracelet), to move in with them pending the journey back to Earth, but so great was Corngold’s hold over her (the hold of a sadist, Watson-Smythe said) that she would obey only him.
There was no sign of the promised dinner party. Corngold stood before his easel, legs astraddle, while Betty posed in the nude, sitting demurely on a chair. Though still a sullen frump, Naylor thought that when naked she had some redeeming features; her body tended to flop, and was pale and too fleshy, but it was pleasantly substantial, in a trollopy sort of way.
Corngold turned his head. ‘Well?’ he glared.
Watson-Smythe coughed. ‘You invited us to dinner, I seem to remember.’
‘Did I? Oh.’ Corngold himself didn’t seem to remember. He continued plying the paint on to the canvas, a square palette of mingled colour in his other hand. Naylor was fascinated. The man was an artist after all. His concentration, his raptness, were there, divided between the canvas and the living girl.
Naylor moved a few paces so he could get a glimpse of the portrait. But he did not see what he had expected. Instead of a nude, Corngold had painted an automobile.
Corngold looked at him, his eyes twinkling with mirth. ‘Well, it’s how I see her, you see.’
Naylor was baffled. He could not see how in any way the picture could represent Betty, not even as a metaphor. The auto was sleek and flashy, covered with glittering trim; quite the opposite of Betty’s qualities, in fact.
He strolled to the other end of the egg-shaped room, glancing at the stacked canvases. Corngold had a bit of a following, he believed, among some of the avant-garde. Naylor took no interest in art, but even he could see the fellow was talented. The paintings were individualistic, many of them in bright but cleverly-toned colours.
Corngold laid down his brush and moved aside the easel, gesturing to Betty to rise and dress. ‘Dinner, then,’ he said, in the tone of one whose hospitality may be presumed upon. ‘Frankly I’d hoped you two would have got tired of hanging around by now and cleared off.’
‘That would have left you in a bit of a spot,’ Naylor said. ‘You have no way of finding your way home.’
‘So what? Who the hell wants to go to Earth anyway. I’ve got everything I need here – eh?’ Corngold winked at him obscenely, and, to the extreme embarrassment of both Naylor and Watson-Smythe, stuck his finger in Betty’s vulva, wiggling it vigorously. Betty became the picture of humiliation, looking distressfully this way and that. But she made no move to draw back.
Naylor bristled. ‘I say!’ he protested heatedly. ‘You are British, aren’t you?’
Corngold’s manner became suddenly aggressive. He withdrew his finger, whereupon Betty turned and snatched for her clothes. ‘And why shouldn’t I be?’ he challenged.
‘Well, dammit, no proper Englishman would treat a woman this way!’
There was a pause. Corngold gave a peculiar open-mouthed grin which grew broader and broader as he looked first at Betty and then back and forth between Naylor and Watson-Smythe.
‘Fuck me, I must be a Welshman!’
‘Perhaps the best thing would be to leave you here, Corngold,’ Watson-Smythe commented, his tone one of coldest disapproval. ‘It might be the punishment you deserve.’
‘Do it, then! You’d never have got to me at all, you bastards, if I’d found a way to turn off the fucking beacon.’
‘It can’t be done,’ Naylor informed him. It would be typical of such a character, he thought, not to know that. The beacon signal was imprinted on every velocitator manufactured, as a legal requirement. Otherwise habitats would never be able to vector in on one another.
Corngold grunted, and dragged the board table to the centre of the room. Around it he arranged the three chairs his dwelling boasted, and with a casual gesture invited his guests to sit down.
‘What’s all this “Corngold”, anyway?’ he demanded as they took their places. ‘Have I agreed that I am Corngold? Establish the identity of the culprit – that’s the first thing in law!’
‘I am satisfied that you are Walter Corngold,’ Watson-Smythe said smoothly.
Corngold banged on the tabletop, shouting. ‘Supposition, supposition! Establish the identity!’
He laughed, then turned to Betty, who was clothed now and stood by in the attitude of a waitress. ‘Well, let’s eat. Indian curry suit you? How do you like it? Mine’s good and hot.’
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.
‘I thought I had dropped plenty of hints,’ Corngold emphasised, ‘that I don’t really want to come back to Earth. Betty and I want nothing more than to remain here, thank you.’
Watson-Smythe smiled. ‘I’m afraid the law isn’t subject to your whims, Corngold.’
‘No?’ Corngold’s expression was bland. He raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought I might be able to bribe you. How would you both like to screw Betty here? She’s all right in her way – just lies there like a piece of putty and lets you do which and whatever to her.’
Watson-Smythe snorted.
‘What is it you want, then?’ Corngold asked in sudden annoyance. ‘The fucking bracelet? Here – take it!’ He went to the mattress on the floor, lifted it and took a gold ornament from underneath, flinging it at Watson-Smythe. ‘It’s a piece of sodding crap anyway – I only took it because Betty had a fancy for it.’
Watson-Smythe picked up the bracelet, examined it briefly, then wrapped it in a handkerchief and tucked it away in an inside pocket. ‘Thanks for the evidence.’
Corngold sighed again, resignedly. He reached for the flagon of wine and drained the dregs, finishing with a belch.
‘Well, it’s not the end of the world. I expect Betty will be glad to see London again. But before you retire for the night, gentlemen, let me answer your earlier question – how I make the transition between here and Zordem. It’s quite simple, really – done by zom rays again, but a different brand this time.’
‘Why, it’s a matter transmitter!’ Naylor exclaimed.
‘As good as.’
Already Watson-Smythe had guessed his danger and was reaching for his gun. But Corngold was too quick for him. He trained the camera-like device on the agent and pressed a lever. The black frontal plate flickered, exactly as if a shutter had operated – as indeed one probably had. Watson-Smythe vanished.
Naylor staggered back aghast. ‘Christ! You’ve murdered him!’
‘Yes! For trying to disturb our domestic harmony!’
Naylor stuttered: ‘You’ve gone too far this time, Corngold. You won’t get away with this … too far.’
Scared and flustered, he scrambled for the exit. He scampered through the tunnel, slammed shut the outer doors and disengaged the clutches so that the two habitats drifted apart. Then, slamming shut the inner door, he rushed to the control board.
In the egg-shaped room, Corngold had quickly set up the Zordem projector on a tripod. He aligned the instrument carefully, focusing it through the wall, on to the intruding habitat a few yards away. He opened the shutter for an instant. Naylor and his habitat were away, projected out into the matterless lake.
A faint voice came from the communicator on the nearly-buried control board. ‘I’m falling, Corngold. Help me!’
‘I’ll help you,’ Corngold crowed, grinning his peculiar open-mouthed grin. ‘I’ll help you fall some more!’
Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis Page 47