Tales From the White Hart

by Arthur C. Clarke

  'Of course, there were endless practical problems to be solved. It would take several days of steady freezing to

  : ate Freda, and she must be launched as near her objective as possible. That meant that the submarine—which we'll call the Marlin—would have to use a base not too far from Miami.

  'The Florida Keys were considered but at once rejected. There was no privacy down there any more; the fishermen now outnumbered the mosquitoes and a submarine would be spotted almost instantly. Even if the Marlin pretended she was merely smuggling, she wouldn't be able to get away with it. So that plan was out.

  "There was another problem that the Commander had to consider. The coastal waters round Florida are extremely shallow, and though Freda's draught would only be a couple of feet, everybody knew that an honest-to-goodness iceberg was nearly all below the waterline. It wouldn't be very realistic to have an impressive-looking berg sailing through two feet of water. That would give the show away at once.

  "I don't know exactly how the Commander overcame these technical problems, but I gather that he carried out several tests in the Atlantic, far from any shipping routes. The iceberg reported in the news was one of his early productions. Incidentally, neither Freda nor her brethren would have been a danger to shipping—being hollow, they would have broken up on impact.

  Finally, all the preparations were complete. The Martin lay out in the Atlantic, some distance north of Miami, with her ice-manufacturing equipment going full blast. It was a beautiful clear night, with a crescent moon sulking in the west. The Marlin had no navigation lights, but Commander Dawson was keeping a very strict watch for other ships. On a night like this, he'd be able to avoid them without being spotted himself.

  "Freda was still in an embryonic stage. I gather that the technique used was to inflate a large plastic bag with super-cooled air, and spray water over it until a crust of ice formed. The bag could be removed when the ice was thick enough to stand up under its own weight. Ice is not a very good structural material, but there was no need for Freda to be very big. Even a small iceberg would be as disconcerting to the Florida Chamber of Commerce as a small baby to an unmarried lady.

  "Commander Dawson was in the conning tower, watching his crew working with their sprays of ice-cold water and jets of freezing air. They were now quite skilled at this unusual occupation, and delighted hi little artistic touches. However, the Commander had had to put a stop to attempts to reproduce Marilyn Monroe in ice—though he filed the idea for future reference.

  "Just after midnight he was startled by a flash of light in the northern sky, and turned in tune to see a red glow die away on the horizon.

  " 'There's a plane down skipper!' shouted one of the lookouts. 'I just saw it crash!' Without hesitation, the Commander shouted down to the engine room and set course to the north. He'd got an accurate fix on the glow, and judged that it couldn't be more than a few miles away. The presence of Freda, covering most of the stern of his vessel, would not affect his speed appreciably, and in any case there was no way of getting rid of her quickly. He stopped the freezers to give more power to the main diesels, and shot ahead at full speed.

  "About thirty minutes later the lookout, using powerful night-glasses, spotted something lying in the water. 'It's still afloat, ' he said. 'Some kind of airplane all right—but I can't see any sign of life. And I think the wings have come off. '

  "He had scarcely finished speaking when there was an urgent report from another watcher.

  " 'Look, skipper—thirty degrees to starboard! What's that?'

  "Commander Dawson swung around and whipped up his glasses. He saw, just visible above the water, a small oval object spinning rapidly on its axis.

  " 'Uh-huh, ' he said, 'I'm afraid we've got company. That's a radar scanner—there's another sub here. ' Then he brightened considerably. 'Maybe we can keep out of this after all, ' he remarked -to his second in command. We'll watch to see that they start rescue operations, then sneak away. '

  " 'We may have to submerge and abandon Freda. Remember they'll have spotted us by now on their radar. Better slacken speed and behave more like a real iceberg. '

  "Dawson nodded and gave the order. This was getting complicated, and anything might happen in the next few minutes. The other sub would have observed the Marlin merely as a blip on its radar screen, but as soon as it upped periscope its commander would start investigating. Then the fat would be in the fire...

  "Dawson analyzed the tactical situation. The best move, he decided, was to employ his unusual camouflage to the full. He gave the order to swing the Marlin around 118 so that her stern pointed towards the still submerged stranger. When the other sub surfaced, her commander would be most surprised to see an iceberg, but Dawson hoped he would be too busy with rescue operations to bother about Freda.

  "He pointed his glasses towards the crashed plane— and then had his second shock. It was a very peculiar type of aircraft indeed—and there was something wrong—

  " 'Of course!' said Dawson to his Number One. 'We] should have thought of this—that thing isn't an airplane at all. It's a missile from the range over at Cocoa—look, you can see the floatation bags. They must have inflated on impact, and that sub was waiting out here to take it back. '

  "He'd remembered that there was a big missile launching range over on the east coast of Florida, at a pi; with the unlikely name of Cocoa on the still more improbable Banana River. Well, at least there was nobody in danger, and if the Marlin sat tight there was a sporting chance that they'd be none the worse for this diversion.

  "Their engines were just turning over, so that they had enough control to keep hiding behind their camouflage. Freda was quite large enough to conceal their conning tower, and from a distance, even in better light than this, the Marlin would be totally invisible. There was one horrid possibility, though. The other sub might start shelling them on general principles, as a menace to navigation. No: it would just report them by radio to coast-guards, which would be a nuisance but would interfere with their plans.

  " 'Here she comes!' said Number One. 'What class is! she?'

  "They both stared through their glasses as the sub-] marine, water pouring from its sides, emerged from the faintly phosphorescent ocean. The moon had now almost set, and it was difficult to make out any details. The radar scanner, Dawson was glad to see, had stopped its rotation and was pointing at the crashed missile. There was son thing odd about the design of that conning though...

  "Then Dawson swallowed hard, lifted the mike to his mouth, and whispered to his crew in the bowels of the ! Marlin: 'Does anyone down there speak Russian.... ?' "There was a long silence, but presently the engineer officer climbed up into the conning tower.

  " I know a bit, skipper, ' he said. 'My grandparents I came from the Ukraine. What's the trouble?'

  " 'Take a look at this, ' said Dawson grimly. "There's an [interesting piece of poaching going on here. I think we [ought to stop it... ' "

  Harry Purvis has a most annoying habit of breaking off i just when a story reaches its climax, and ordering another beer—or, more usually, getting someone else to buy him lone. I've watched him do this so often that now I can just when the climax is coming by the level in his glass. We had to wait, with what patience we could, while refueled.

  "When you think about it, " he said thoughtfully, "it was [jolly hard luck on the commander of that Russian submarine. I imagine they shot him when he got back to Vladivostock, or wherever he came from. For what court of inquiry would have believed his story? If he was fool I enough to tell the truth, he'd have said 'We were just off [the Florida coast when an iceberg shouted at us in Russian, "Excuse me—I think that's our property!"' Since would be a couple of MVD men aboard the ship, poor guy would have had to make up some kind of story, but whatever he said wouldn't be very convincing...

  "As Dawson had calculated, the Russian sub simply for it as soon as it knew it had been spotted. And remembering that he was an officer on the reserve, and ! that his duty
to his country was more important than his contractual obligations to any single state, the commander the Marlin really had no choice in his subsequent actions. He picked up the missile, defrosted Freda, and set for Cocoa—first sending a radio message that a great flurry hi the Navy Department and started destroyers racing out into the Atlantic. Perhaps Inquisitive never got back to Vladivostock after all....

  "The subsequent explanations were a little embarrassing, but I gather that the rescued missile was so important that no one asked too many questions about the Martin's private war. The attack on Miami Beach had to be called off, however, at least until the next season. It's satisfactory to relate that even the sponsors of the project, though they had sunk a lot of money into it, weren't too 3 disappointed. They each have a certificate signed by the Chief of Naval Operations, thanking them for valuable but unspecified services to their country. These cause i such envy and mystification to all their Los Angeles friends that they wouldn't part with them for anything —i

  "Yet I don't want you to think that nothing more will] ever come of the whole project; you ought to know American publicity men better than that. Freda may be in suspended animation, but one day she'll be revived. All ] the plans are ready, down to such little details as the dental presence of a Hollywood film unit on Miami Beach when Freda comes sailing in from the Atlantic.

  "So this is one of those stories I can't round off to a nice, neat ending. The preliminary skirmishes have taken place, but the main engagement is still to come. And this; is the thing I often wonder about—what will Florida do to the Californians when it discovers what's going on? Any suggestions, anybody?"

  WHAT GOES UP

  ONE OF THE reasons why I am never too specific about the exact location of the "White Hart" is frankly, because we want to keep it to ourselves. This is not merely a dog-in-the-manger attitude: we have to do it in pure self-protection. As soon as it gets around that scientists, editors and science-fiction writers are forgathering at some locality, the weirdest collection of visitors is likely to turn up. Peculiar people with new theories of the universe, characters who have been "cleared" by Dianetics (God knows what they were like before), intense ladies who are liable to go all clairvoyant after the fourth gin—these are the less exotic specimens. Worst of all, however, are the Flying Sorcerers: no cure short of mayhem has yet been discovered for them.

  It was a black day when one of the leading exponents of the Flying Saucer religion discovered our hideout and fell upon us with shrill cries of delight. Here, he obviously told himself, was fertile ground for his missionary activities. People who were already interested in spaceflight, and even wrote books and stories about its imminent achievement, would be a pushover. He opened his little black bag and produced the latest pile of sauceriana.

  It was quite a collection. There were some interesting photographs of flying saucers made by an amateur astronomer who lives right beside Greenwich Observatory, and whose busy camera has recorded such a remarkable variety of spaceships, in all shapes and sizes, that one wonders what the professionals next door are doing for their salaries. Then there was a long statement from a gentleman in Texas who had just had a casual chat with the occupants of a saucer making a wayside halt on route to Venus. Language, it seemed, had presented no difficulties: it had taken about ten minutes of arm-waving to get from "Me—Man. This—Earth" to highly esoteric information about the use of the fourth dimension in space-travel.

  The masterpiece, however, was an excited letter from a character in South Dakota who had actually been offered a lift in a flying saucer, and had been taken for a spin round the Moon. He explained at some length how the saucer travelled by hauling itself along magnetic lines of force, rather like a spider going up its thread.

  It was at this point that Harry Purvis rebelled. He had been listening with a professional pride to tales which even he would never have dared to spin, for he was an expert at detecting the yield-point of his audience's credulity. At the mention of lines of magnetic force, however, his scientific training overcame his frank admiration of these latter-day Munchausens, and he gave a snort of disgust.

  "That's a lot of nonsense, " he said. "I can prove it to you—magnetism's my speciality"

  "Last week, " said Drew sweetly, as he filled two glasses of ale at once, "you said that crystal structure was your speciality. "

  Harry gave him a superior smile.

  "I'm a general specialist, " he said loftily. "To get back to where I was before that interruption, the point I want to make is that there's no such thing as a line of magnetic force. It's a mathematical fiction—exactly on a par with lines of longitude or latitude. Now if anyone said they'd invented a machine that worked by pulling itself along parallels of latitude, everybody would know that they were talking drivel. But because few people know much about magnetism, and it sounds rather mysterious, crackpots like this guy in South Dakota can get away with the tripe we've just been hearing. "

  There's one charming characteristic about the "White Hart"—we may fight among each other, but we show an impressive solidarity in tunes of crisis. Everyone felt that something had to be done about our unwelcome visitor: for one thing, he was interfering with the serious business of drinking. Fanaticism of any kind casts a gloom over the most festive assembly, and several of the regulars had shown signs of leaving despite the fact that it was still two hours to closing tune.

  So when Harry Purvis followed up his attack by concocting the most outrageous story that even he had ever; presented in the "White Hart", no one interrupted him or tried to expose the weak points in his narrative. We knew that Harry was acting for us all—he was fighting fire. with fire, as it were. And we knew that he wasn't expecting us to believe him (if indeed he ever did) so we just sat back and enjoyed ourselves.

  "If you want to know how to propel spaceships, " began! Harry, "and mark you, I'm not saying anything one way, or the other about the existence of flying saucers—then, you must forget magnetism. You must go straight to gravity—that's the basic force of the universe, after all. But it's going to be a tricky force to handle, and if you don't believe me just listen to what happened only last year to a scientist down in Australia. I shouldn't really tell you this, I suppose, because I'm not sure of its security classification, but if there's any trouble I'll swear that I never said a word.

  "The Aussies, as you may know, have always been pretty hot on scientific research, and they had one team working on fast reactors—those house-broken atomic bombs which are so much more compact than the old uranium piles. The head of the group was a bright but rather impetuous young nuclear physicist I'll call Dr. Cavor. That, of course, wasn't his real name, but it's a very appropriate one. You'll all recollect, I'm sure, the scientist Cavor in Wells' FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, and the wonderful gravity-screening material Cavorite he discovered?

  "I'm afraid dear old Wells didn't go into the question of Cavorite very thoroughly. As he put it, it was opaque to gravity just as a sheet of metal is opaque to light. Anything placed above a horizontal sheet of cavorite, therefore, became weightless and floated up into space.

  "Well, it isn't as simple as that. Weight represents energy—an enormous amount of it—which can't just be destroyed without any fuss. You'd have to put a terrific amount of work into even a small object in order to make it weightless. Antigravity screens of the cavorite type, therefore, are quite impossible—they're in the same class as perpetual motion. "

  "Three of my friends have made perpetual motion machines, " began our unwanted visitor rather stuffily. Harry didn't let him get any further: he just steamed on and ignored the interruption.

  "Now our Australian Dr. Cavor wasn't searching for antigravity, or anything like it. In pure science, you can be pretty sure that nothing fundamental is ever discovered by anyone who's actually looking for it—that's half the fun of the game. Dr. Cavor was interested in producing atomic power: what he found was antigravity. And it was quite some time before he realised that was what he'd discove
red.

  "What happened, I gather, was this: The reactor was of a novel and rather daring design, and there was quite a possibility that it might blow up when the last pieces of fissile material were inserted. So it was assembled by remote control in one of Australia's numerous convenient deserts, all the final operations being observed through TV sets.

  "Well, there was no explosion—which would have caused a nasty radio-active mess and wasted a lot of money, but wouldn't have damaged anything except a lot of reputations. What actually happened was much more, unexpected, and much more difficult to explain.

  "When the last piece of enriched uranium was inserted, the control rods pulled out, and the reactor brought up to critically—everything went dead. The meters in the remote control room, two miles from the reactor, all dropped back to zero. The TV screen went blank. Cavor and his colleagues waited for the bang, but there wasn't one. They looked at each other for a moment with many wild surmises: then, without a word, they climbed up out of the buried control chamber.