‘Aw, quit worrying! That’s what people are supposed to think! Anyway, we make it clear in the next reel that they really want her for dissection, so that’s all right.’
‘It’ll be a riot!’ gloated R.B., a faraway gleam in his eye as if he was already hearing the avalanche of dollars pouring into the box office. ‘Look—we’ll put another million into publicity! I can just see the posters—get all this down, Tony. WATCH THE SKY! THE SIRIANS ARE COMING! And we’ll make thousands of clockwork models—can’t you imagine them scuttling around on their hairy legs! People love to be scared, and we’ll scare them. By the time we’ve finished, no one will be able to look at the sky without getting the creeps! I leave it to you, boys—this picture is going to make history!’
He was right. ‘Monsters from Space’ hit the public two months later. Within a week of the simultaneous London and New York premières, there could have been no one in the western world who had not seen the posters screaming EARTH BEWARE! or had not shuddered at the photograph of the hairy horrors stalking along deserted Fifth Avenue on their thin, many-jointed legs. Blimps cleverly disguised as spaceships cruised across the skies, to the vast confusion of pilots who encountered them, and clockwork models of the Alien invaders were everywhere, scaring old ladies out of their wits.
The publicity campaign was brilliant, and the picture would undoubtedly have run for months had it not been for a coincidence as disastrous as it was unforeseeable. While the number of people fainting at each performance was still news, the skies of Earth filled suddenly with long, lean shadows sliding swiftly through the clouds….
Prince Zervashni was good-natured but inclined to be impetuous—a well-known failing of his race. There was no reason to suppose that his present mission, that of making a peaceful contact with the planet Earth, would present any particular problems. The correct technique of approach had been thoroughly worked out over many thousands of years, as the Third Galactic Empire slowly expanded its frontiers, absorbing planet after planet, sun upon sun. There was seldom any trouble: really intelligent races can always co-operate, once they have got over the initial shock of learning that they are not alone in the universe.
It was true that humanity had emerged from its primitive, warlike stage only within the last generation. This however, did not worry Prince Zervashni’s chief adviser, Sigisnin II, Professor of Astropolitics.
‘It’s a perfectly typical Class E culture,’ said the professor. ‘Technically advanced, morally rather backward. However, they are already used to the conception of space flight, and will soon take us for granted. The normal precautions will be sufficient until we have won their confidence.’
‘Very well,’ said the prince. ‘Tell the envoys to leave at once.’
It was unfortunate that the ‘normal precautions’ did not allow for Tony Auerbach’s publicity campaign, which had now reached new heights of interplanetary xenophobia. The ambassadors landed in New York’s Central Park on the very day that a prominent astronomer, unusually hard up and therefore amenable to influence, announced in a widely reported interview that any visitors from space probably would be unfriendly.
The luckless ambassadors, heading for the United Nations Building, had got as far south as 60th Street when they met the mob. The encounter was very one-sided, and the scientists at the Museum of Natural History were most annoyed that there was so little left for them to examine.
Prince Zervashni tried once more, on the other side of the planet, but the news had got there first. This time the ambassadors were armed, and gave a good account of themselves before they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Even so, it was not until the rocket bombs started climbing up toward his fleet that the prince finally lost his temper and decided to take drastic action.
It was all over in twenty minutes, and was really quite painless. Then the prince turned to his adviser and said, with considerable understatement: ‘That appears to be that. And now—can you tell me exactly what went wrong?’
Sigisnin II knitted his dozen flexible fingers together in acute anguish. It was not only the spectacle of the neatly disinfected Earth that distressed him, though to a scientist the destruction of such a beautiful specimen is always a major tragedy. At least equally upsetting was the demolition of his theories and, with them, his reputation.
‘I just don’t understand it!’ he lamented. ‘Of course, races at this level of culture are often suspicious and nervous when contact is first made. But they’d never had visitors before, so there was no reason for them to be hostile.’
‘Hostile! They were demons! I think they were all insane.’ The prince turned to his captain, a tripedal creature who looked rather like a ball of wool balanced on three knitting needles.
‘Is the fleet reassembled?’
‘Yes, Sire.’
‘Then we will return to Base at optimum speed. This planet depresses me.’
On the dead and silent Earth, the posters still screamed their warnings from a thousand hoardings. The malevolent insectile shapes shown pouring from the skies bore no resemblance at all to Prince Zervashni, who apart from his four eyes might have been mistaken for a panda with purple fur—and who, moreover, had come from Rigel, not Sirius.
But, of course, it was now much too late to point this out.
Armaments Race
First published in Adventure, April 1954
Collected in Tales from the White Hart
This story was inspired by a visit to George Pal in Hollywood, while he was working on the special effects for The War of the Worlds. Bill Temple was in fact William F. Temple, the well-known writer of science fiction.
As I’ve remarked on previous occasions, no one has ever succeeded in pinning down Harry Purvis, prize raconteur of the ‘White Hart,’ for any length of time. Of his scientific knowledge there can be no doubt—but where did he pick it up? And what justification is there for the terms of familiarity with which he speaks of so many Fellows of the Royal Society? There are, it must be admitted, many who do not believe a single word he says. That, I feel, is going a little too far as I recently remarked somewhat forcibly to Bill Temple.
‘You’re always gunning for Harry,’ I said, ‘but you must admit that he provides entertainment. And that’s more than most of us can say.’
‘If you’re being personal,’ retorted Bill, still rankling over the fact that some perfectly serious stories had just been returned by an American editor on the grounds that they hadn’t made him laugh, ‘step outside and say that again.’ He glanced through the window, noticed that it was still snowing hard, and hastily added, ‘Not today, then, but maybe sometime in the summer, if we’re both here on the Wednesday that catches it. Have another of your favourite shots of straight pineapple juice?’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘One day I’ll ask for a gin with it, just to shake you. I think I must be the only guy in the “White Hart” who can take it or leave it—and leaves it.’
This was as far as the conversation got, because the subject of the discussion then arrived. Normally, this would merely have added fuel to the controversy, but as Harry had a stranger with him we decided to be polite little boys.
‘Hello, folks,’ said Harry. ‘Meet my friend Solly Blumberg. Best special-effects man in Hollywood.’
‘Let’s be accurate, Harry,’ said Mr Blumberg sadly, in a voice that should have belonged to a whipped spaniel. ‘Not in Hollywood. Out of Hollywood.’
‘Harry waved the correction aside.
‘All the better for you. Sol’s come over here to apply his talents to the British film industry.’
‘There is a British film industry?’ said Solly anxiously. ‘No one seemed very sure round the studio.’
‘Sure there is. It’s in a very flourishing condition, too. The Government piles on an entertainments tax that drives it to bankruptcy, then keeps it alive with whacking big grants. That’s the way we do things in this country. Hey, Drew, where’s the visitors’ book? And a double for both of us. Solly’s had a terrible time�
��he needs a bit of building up.’
I cannot say that, apart from his hangdog look, Mr Blumberg had the appearance of a man who had suffered extreme hardship. He was neatly dressed in a Hart Schnaffner & Marx suit, and the points of his shirt collar buttoned down somewhere around the middle of his chest. That was thoughtful of them as they thus concealed something, but not enough, of his tie. I wondered what the trouble was. Not un-American activities again, I prayed: that would trigger off our pet Communist, who at the moment was peaceably studying a chessboard in the corner.
We all made sympathetic noises and John said rather pointedly: ‘Maybe it’ll help to get it off your chest. It will be such a change to hear someone else talking around here.’
‘Don’t be so modest, John,’ cut in Harry promptly. ‘I’m not tired of hearing you yet. But I doubt if Solly feels much like going through it again. Do you, old man?’
‘No,’ said Mr Blumberg. ‘You tell them.’
(‘I knew it would come to that,’ sighed John in my ear.)
‘Where shall I begin,’ asked Harry. ‘The time Lillian Ross came to interview you?’
‘Anywhere but there,’ shuddered Solly. ‘It really started when we were making the first “Captain Zoom” serial.’
‘“Captain Zoom”?’ said someone ominously. ‘Those are two very rude words in this place. Don’t say you were responsible for that unspeakable rubbish!’
‘Now boys!’ put in Harry in his best oil-on-troubled-waters voice. ‘Don’t be too harsh. We can’t apply our own high standards of criticism to everything. And people have got to earn a living. Besides, millions of kids like Captain Zoom. Surely you wouldn’t want to break their little hearts—and so near Xmas, too!’
‘If they really liked Captain Zoom, I’d rather break their little necks.’
‘Such unseasonable sentiments! I really must apologise for some of my compatriots, Solly. Let’s see, what was the name of the first serial?’
‘“Captain Zoom and the Menace from Mars”’
‘Ah yes, that’s right. Incidentally, I wonder why we always are menaced by Mars? I suppose that man Welles started it. One day we may have a big interplanetary libel action on our hands—unless we can prove that the Martians have been equally rude about us.
‘I’m very glad to say that I never saw “Menace from Mars”.’ (‘I did,’ moaned somebody in the background. ‘I’m still trying to forget it.’) ‘But we are not concerned with the story, such as it was. That was written by three men in a bar on Wilshire Boulevard. No one is sure whether the Menace came out the way it did because the script-writers were drunk, or whether they had to keep drunk in order to face the Menace. If that’s confusing, don’t bother. All that Solly was concerned with were the special effects that the director demanded.
‘First of all, he had to build Mars. To do this he spent half an hour with The Conquest of Space, and then emerged with a sketch which the carpenters turned into an overripe orange floating in nothingness, with an improbable number of stars around it. That was easy. The Martian cities weren’t so simple. You try and think of completely alien architecture that still makes sense. I doubt if it’s possible—if it will work at all, someone’s already used it here on Earth. What the studio finally built was vaguely Byzantine with touches of Frank Lloyd Wright. The fact that none of the doors led anywhere didn’t really matter, as long as there was enough room on the sets for the swordplay and general acrobatics that the script demanded.
‘Yes—swordplay. Here was a civilisation which had atomic power, death rays, spaceships, television and suchlike modern conveniences, but when it came to a fight between Captain Zoom and the evil Emperor Klugg, the clock went back a couple of centuries. A lot of soldiers stood round holding deadly looking ray guns, but they never did anything with them. Well, hardly ever. Sometimes a shower of sparks would chase Captain Zoom and singe his pants, but that was all. I suppose that as the rays couldn’t very well move faster than light, he could always outrun them.
‘Still, those ornamental ray guns gave everyone quite a few headaches. It’s funny how Hollywood will spend endless trouble on some minute detail in a film which is complete rubbish. The director of Captain Zoom had a thing about ray guns. Solly designed the Mark I, which looked like a cross between a bazooka and a blunderbuss. He was quite satisfied with it, and so was the director—for about a day. And then the great man came raging into the studio carrying a revolting creation of purple plastic with knobs and lenses and levers.
‘“Lookit this, Solly!” he puffed. “Junior got it down at the supermarket—they’re being given away with packets of Crunch. Collect ten lids, and you get one. Hell, they’re better than ours! And they work!”
‘He pressed a lever, and a thin stream of water shot across the set and disappeared behind Captain Zoom’s spaceship, where it promptly extinguished a cigarette that had no right to be burning there. An angry stagehand emerged through the airlock, saw who it was had drenched him, and swiftly retreated, muttering things about his union.
‘Solly examined the ray gun with annoyance and yet with an expert’s discrimination. Yes, it was certainly much more impressive than anything he’d put out. He retired into his office and promised to see what he could do about it.
‘The Mark II had everything built into it, including a television screen. If Captain Zoom was suddenly confronted by a charging hickoderm, all he had to do was to switch on the set, wait for the tubes to warm up, check the channel selector, adjust the fine tuning, touch up the focus, twiddle with the Line and Frame holds—and then press the trigger. He was, fortunately, a man of unbelievably swift reactions.
‘The director was impressed, and the Mark II went into production. A slightly different model, the Mark IIa, was built for the Emperor Klugg’s diabolical cohorts. It would never do, of course, if both sides had the same weapon. I told you that Pandemic Productions were sticklers for accuracy.
‘All went well until the first rushes, and even beyond. While the cast were acting, if you can use that word, they had to point the guns and press the triggers as if something was really happening. The sparks and flashes, however, were put on the negative later by two little men in a darkroom about as well guarded as Fort Knox. They did a good job, but after a while the producer again felt twinges in his overdeveloped artistic conscience.
‘“Solly,” he said, toying with the plastic horror which had reached Junior by courtesy of Crunch, the Succulent Cereal—Not a Burp in a Barrel—“Solly, I still want a gun that does something.”
‘Solly ducked in time, so the jet went over his head and baptized a photograph of Louella Parsons.
‘“You’re not going to start shooting all over again!” he wailed.
‘“Noo,” replied the producer, with obvious reluctance. “We’ll have to use what we’ve got. But it looks faked, somehow.” He ruffled through the script on his desk, then brightened up.
‘“Now next week we start on Episode 54—‘Slaves of the Slug-Men’. Well, the Slug-Men gotta have guns, so what I’d like you to do is this—”
‘The Mark III gave Solly a lot of trouble. (I haven’t missed out one yet, have I? Good.) Not only had it to be a completely new design, but as you’ll have gathered it had to “do something”. This was a challenge to Solly’s ingenuity: however, if I may borrow from Professor Toynbee, it was a challenge that evoked the appropriate response.
‘Some high-powered engineering went into the Mark III. Luckily, Solly knew an ingenious technician who’d helped him out on similar occasions before, and he was really the man behind it.’ (‘I’ll say he was!’ said Mr Blumberg gloomily.) ‘The principle was to use a jet of air, produced by a small but extremely powerful electric fan, and then to spray finely divided powder into it. When the thing was adjusted correctly, it shot out a most impressive beam, and made a still more impressive noise. The actors were so scared of it that their performances became most realistic.
‘The producer was delighted—for a full three days.
Then a dreadful doubt assailed him.
‘“Solly,” he said, “those damn guns are too good. The Slug-Men can beat the pants off Captain Zoom. We’ll have to give him something better.”
‘It was at this point that Solly realised what had happened. He had become involved in an armaments race.
‘Let’s see, this brings us to the Mark IV, doesn’t it? How did that work?—Oh yes, I remember. It was a glorified oxyacetylene burner, with various chemicals injected into it to produce the most beautiful flames. I should have mentioned that from Episode 50—“Doom on Deimos”—the studio had switched over from black and white to Murkicolor, and great possibilities were thus opened up. By squirting copper or strontium or barium into the jet, you could get any colour you wanted.
‘If you think that by this time the producer was satisfied, you don’t know Hollywood. Some cynics may still laugh when the motto “Ars Gratia Artis” flashes on the screen, but this attitude, I submit, is not in accordance with the facts. Would such old fossils as Michelangelo, Rembrandt or Titian have spent so much time, effort and money on the quest for perfection as did Pandemic Productions? I think not.
‘I don’t pretend to remember all the Marks that Solly and his ingenious engineer friend produced during the course of the serial. There was one that shot out a stream of coloured smoke rings. There was the high-frequency generator that produced enormous but quite harmless sparks. There was a particularly ingenious curved beam produced by a jet of water with light reflected along inside it, which looked most spectacular in the dark. And finally, there was the Mark XII.’
‘Mark XIII,’ said Mr Blumberg.
‘Of course—how stupid of me! What other number could it have been! The Mark XIII was not actually a portable weapon—though some of the others were portable only by a considerable stretch of the imagination. It was the diabolical device to be installed on Phobos in order to subjugate Earth. Though Solly has explained them to me once, the scientific principles involved escape my simple mind…. However, who am I to match my brains against the intellects responsible for “Captain Zoom”? I can only report what the ray was supposed to do, not how it did it. It was to start a chain reaction in the atmosphere of our unfortunate planet, making the nitrogen and the oxygen in the air combine—with highly deleterious effects to terrestrial life.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke Page 27