With a small sharp explosion a section of the Imperator fell away to reveal a neat concavity. ‘Long ago I equipped myself for this task. Fit the distorter into this space. Jack into me the output leads from your archival computers. Quickly, there is little time! I will re-create all the original conditions, the starting point from which the empire will burgeon! All will be foreordained! The war with Humlu must continue eternally!’
Inpriss Sorce gave a little cry. ‘Must I go through it all again?’ she quavered.
‘There may be variations,’ the resonant voice said in a near-whisper. ‘Perhaps next time you will live in peace. Perhaps, too, some other officer of the Time Service, not Captain Mond Aton, will become familiar with the strat and be called upon to fight the Minion. Only one thing is certain; if the empire falls and cannot be reformed, then mankind falls to Hulmu, and monsters crawl out of the deeps of potential time to claim the Earth.’
While the machine spoke, the archivists were busy doing its bidding; the Imperator’s word was law.
And when at last the time-distorter was triggered and mighty energies began issuing from its mouth, and when at the same time they all began to fade out of existence, Aton, holding Inpriss’s hand, felt in the depths of his being that this was not the end, that he would be called on, once more, to be a servant of the empire, and that the war, truly, was eternal.
ELEVEN
‘These pi-mesons certainly are tricky fellers,’ said Dwight Rilke.
‘Tricky as hell,’ agreed Humbart.
Rilke threw down his pencil and leaned back. Vague thoughts and ideas drifted through his mind, all related to the main problem: how to isolate pi-mesons in a stable state, for long enough and in sufficient quantity to do something with them.
His gaze fell on the computer across the room. Its unusual bulk was due to the fact that it incorporated its own compact nuclear power unit as insurance against the erratic electricity supply. The civil disturbances were becoming more pronounced of late and the computer did most of the administrative work for the branch.
Rilke had decided on a nickname for the machine, because of the imperious way it delivered data.
He would call it Imperator.
The door opened. One of the staff girls came in with a sheaf of reports.
‘Thank you, Miss Sorce,’ Absol Humbart said.
Also by Barrington J. Bayley
Age of Adventure
Annihilation Factor
Collision with Chronos
Empire of Two Worlds
Sinners of Erspia
Star Winds
The Fall of Chronopolis
The Forest of Peldain
The Garments of Caean
The Grand Wheel
The Great Hydration
The Pillars of Eternity
The Rod of Light
The Soul of the Robot
The Star Virus
The Zen Gun
The Knights of the Limits
The Seed of Evil
About the Author
Barrington J. Bayley (1937–2008)
Barrington J. Bayley was born in Birmingham and began writing science fiction in his early teens. After serving in the RAF, he took up freelance writing on features, serials and picture strips, mostly in the juvenile field, before returning to straight SF. He was a regular contributor to the influential New Worlds magazine and an early voice in the New Wave movement.
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Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Barrington J. Bayley 2014
The Soul of the Robot copyright © Barrington J. Bayley 1974
The Knights of the Limits copyright © Barrington J. Bayley 1979
The Fall of Chronopolis copyright © Barrington J. Bayley 1974
Introduction copyright © SFE Ltd 2014
All rights reserved.
The right of Barrington J. Bayley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2014 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 473 20194 1
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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