Earth Cult by Trevor Hoyle

surface show, literally skin-deep, and that the actual living core of the planet is shut away from their sight, trillions of tons of it upon which a humanoid form of life is permitted to crawl.
    And what would they say if he told them that thousands of neutrinos and antineutrinos were passing through their bodies at this instant of time? Equally unreal, of course, because they couldn’t see or feel them. This was the
real
world (they could see it and feel it) and anything that didn’t affect them might just as well not exist. But the interesting question – which Frank Kersh would have liked to have put to them – was on what basis does one judge reality? The thin envelope of the biosphere was one limited and severely restricted slice of reality; the inner hidden core of the planet was another, much greater one; and the invisible neutrinos and antineutrinos moving at the speed of light were a form of reality which pervaded all space – every single cubic centimetre of space throughout the Universe. So what, in reality, constituted the real?
    These people living out their tiny lives inhabited a stratum of spacetime which was so incredibly insignificant as to be almost ethereal. Had they been granted an extension to their feeble range of sensory perceptions they might have gained an inkling of what lay beyond this narrow plane of existence which they called reality. And not only beyond them in the sense of being ‘out there’, but all around them, occupying the same space and time … the waves of cosmic radiation washing over them from space, the subnuclear particles passing through their ‘real world’ as if it were a patch of mist, the entire array of microwaves, infra-red rays, X-rays, ultra-violet rays, gamma rays, particles and antiparticles for which this sunny street with its people, stores, cars and copulating dogs had less basis in reality than a momentary passing dream and no more substance than images projected on to a blank wall.
    It was a truism that people couldn’t stand too much reality, but in truth they experienced hardly any reality at all. They possessed a smaller range of perception of the Universe around them than did a blind burrowing mole of its dark earthy environment. They looked out at the world with blind eyes, listened to its whisperings with deaf ears, and all along believed themselves to be the focal point of consciousness, the arbiter of intelligence, the only true and valid constant against which to measure objective reality.
    And what of himself? Frank thought wryly. Perhaps he was blind too, in a different sense. He glanced around him,suddenly apprehensive, feeling he was being observed. There was no one watching, his instincts had deceived him. Then it hit him: he raised his eyes above the rooftops and there was the presence of the mountain, remarkably near in the clear morning light, the flimsiest wisp of cloud, like a brushstroke, obscuring the peak. The Tellurians believed the Mount of the Holy Cross to possess some kind of dynamic force. He had scoffed at their beliefs but now he understood how continually living in its shadow could evoke such strange and powerful emotions. The rational man of science, he mocked himself. He was no better than the people in the street; at least their ignorance excused them, but being aware of his own ignorance should have made him a wiser person. He doubted that it did.
    The office of the
Roaring Fork Bulletin
was farther along the main street, indistinguishable from the store-fronts either side – a gunsmith’s and a dry-cleaner’s – except for the absence of a window display and instead the front page of last week’s issue taped inside a glass-fronted frame:
Recreation Resort for Great Eagle Dam? Lightning Kills Dot-sero Farmworker. Rifle Wins Rio Blanco County League.
    Still wearing the creased white cotton suit, which Frank reckoned must be the newspaper editor’s badge of office in