In the morning, Mr. Ordz called in his secretary and said, “It’s in defense bonds, savings stamps and cash, but it works out to six thousand dollars and I want my wife to get it.”
“So just give it to her then,” said the girl. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I want you to know that it’s for her if something happens to me.”
“Don’t you feel well, Mr. Ordz?” asked the girl. “You’re supposed to put that in a will and it doesn’t mean anything if you just tell it to a person.”
“I’m not bothering around with any wills. I told it to you and you know it and that’s all.”
“But I can’t enforce anything,” said the girl.
“Don’t argue with me. You just know.”
The m.c. was wearing an intern’s costume when the show came on much later, and was blowing his nose. “It was a pip all right. I used to get one a winter and I guess I still get them. All right then, now that it’s come down to the wire I’d be teasing if I didn’t admit it had crossed my mind that your heart might not stop and here I’d be without a sponsor. Research did tell me about the pain in the belly though, and of course that did relax me. You’re on your way. I get your life tonight, Ordz. Now look, this is the equivalent of your smoking a last cigarette. You’re sick of me, I’m sick of you. If you go upstairs right this second and drink a bottle of iodine, the deal is you don’t have to sit through the whole damned show. Fair enough?”
Mr. Ordz dropped his cheesettes and said, “So help me God I’m getting mad.”
“And believe me,” said the m.c., “the show stinks tonight. I do a whole series of morbid parodies of songs, real bad ones like Ghoul That I Am, and we’ve got a full hour of on-the-spot coverage of a children’s school bus combination fire and explosion. Go upstairs, get yourself a regimental tie or two . . .”
“I’m getting to the crazy point where I can spit in death’s eye,” said Mr. Ordz, rising from his chaise.
“. . . Rig them up noose-style to the shower nozzle, slip your head in there snugly and we’ll all go home early.”
“I’ll get you,” shouted Mr. Ordz. And with that he smashed his hand through the television screen, obliterating the picture and opening something stringy in his wrist. Blood spurted out across Mr. Ordz’ six volumes of Churchill’s war memoirs, sprinkling The Gathering Storm and completely drenching Their Finest Hour. Mr. Ordz studied his wrist and, until he began to feel faint, poked at it, watching it pour forth with renewed frenzy at each of the pokes. On hands and knees then, he went up to his sleeping wife and clutched at her nightgown. “I erupt, I erupt,” she said, in a stupor, and then opened her eyes. “Jeez,” she said, “are they open at the hospital?” She got on a robe, and by this time Mr. Ordz had lost consciousness. Blood soaked Mrs. Ordz’ nightgown as she gathered her husband up in her stocky arms and said, “God forgive me, but even this is sexy.” She got him into the car, relieved to see some twitching going on in his neck, and at the hospital a young doctor said, “Get him right in here. I’ve treated bee bites before. Oh, isn’t he the bee-bite man?”
Mrs. Ordz said, “I could just give interns a good pinch. That’s how cute they are to me.”
The doctor finally got a tourniquet and bandage on Mr. Ordz, who miraculously regained consciousness for a brief moment and peeked quickly under the bandage. “There are still people I have to get,” he said. But then a final jet of blood whooshed forward onto the hospital linoleum and then Mr. Ordz closed his eyes and said no more.
When he began to see again, people were patting lotions on his face. “You’re getting me ready for a pine box,” he said, but there was no reply. More solutions were patted on his face. He was helped into a tuxedo and then lugged somewhere.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw his m.c. and two distinguished executive-type gentlemen soar out of the top of the building or enclosure he was in. The executives were holding the m.c. by the elbows and all three had sprouted wings. Then Mr. Ordz was shoved forward. Hot lights were brought down close to his face and cameras began to whir. A giant card with large words on it was lowered before his eyes and one of the lotion people said, “Smile at all times. All right, begin reading.”
“I don’t want to,” said Mr. Ordz, “and I’m getting angry enough to spit in all your eyes, even if I am dead.” But no sound came from his mouth. The lights got hotter. Then he looked at the card, felt his mouth force into an insincere smile and heard himself saying to a strange man who sat opposite him in a kind of living room, munching on some slices of protein bread, “All right now, Simons, I’ve got exactly one week to kill you. And I’m not using entertainment talk or anything. I really mean take your life, stop you from breathing. There’s nothing personal about all this. It’s just that I’ve got to get a sponsor. But before we go any further, for your viewing entertainment, the Tatzo Trapeze Twins.”
<
~ * ~
I REMEMBER BABYLON
BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Arthur C. Clarke is a pleasantly schizoid Englishman: one side of him writes strictly factual material on astrophysics, missiles and rocketry (example: “The Exploration of Space,” a Book-of-the-Month Club selection); the other writes imaginative science fiction about the shape of things to come (example: “Childhood’s End,” a classic in the field). He succeeded in merging his two professional personalities in the following story, a disturbing piece in which fact and fiction are inextricably mingled. It is told in the first-person singular by a man named Arthur C. Clarke. It takes place in Ceylon, where Clarke lives. In it, a couple named Mike and Liz appear —Clarke knows such a couple. When “I Remember Babylon” first appeared, in the May 1960 playboy, the editors remarked, “We call Clarke’s piece ‘fiction,’ though it may be only a matter of time—and a short time, at that—before it becomes disastrous fact.” In July of 1962, it did become fact, if not as yet disastrous (touch wood)—for that month saw the launching of Telstar.
~ * ~
My name is Arthur C. Clarke, and I wish I had no connection with the whole sordid business, but as the moral— repeat, moral—integrity of the United States is involved, I must first establish my credentials. Only thus will you understand how, with the aid of the late Dr. Alfred Kinsey, I have unwittingly triggered an avalanche that may sweep away much of western civilization.
Back in 1945, while a radar officer in the Royal Air Force, I had the only original idea of my life. Twelve years before the first Sputnik started beeping, it occurred to me that an artificial satellite would be a wonderful place for a television transmitter, since a station several thousand miles in altitude could broadcast to half the globe. I wrote up the idea the week after Hiroshima, proposing a network of relay satellites 22,000 miles above the equator; at this height, they’d take exactly one day to complete a revolution, and so would remain fixed over the same spot on the Earth.
The piece appeared in the October 1945 issue of Wireless World; not expecting that celestial mechanics would be commercialized in my lifetime, I made no attempt to patent the idea, and doubt if I could have done so anyway. (If I’m wrong, I’d prefer not to know.) But I kept plugging it in my books, and today the idea of communication satellites is so commonplace that no one knows its origin.
I did make a plaintive attempt to put the record straight when approached by the House of Representatives Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration; you’ll find my evidence on page 32 of its report, The Next Ten Years in Space. And as you’ll see in a moment, my concluding words had an irony I never appreciated at the time: “Living as I do in the Far East, I am constantly reminded of the struggle between the western world and the U.S.S.R. for the uncommitted millions of Asia...When line-of-sight TV transmissions become possible from satellites directly overhead, the propaganda effect may be decisive....”
I still stand by those words, but there were angles I hadn’t thought of—and which, unfortunately, other people have.
It all began during one of those offi
cial receptions which are such a feature of social life in eastern capitals. They’re even more common in the west, of course, but in Colombo there’s little competing entertainment. At least once a week, if you are anybody, you get an invitation to cocktails at an embassy or legation, the British Council, the U.S. Operations Mission, L’Alliance Française, or one of the countless alphabetical agencies the UN has begotten.
At first, being more at home beneath the Indian Ocean than in diplomatic circles, my partner and I were nobodies and were left alone. But after Mike godfathered Dave Brubeck’s tour of Ceylon, people started to take notice of us— still more so when he married one of the island’s best-known beauties. So now our consumption of cocktails and canapés is limited chiefly by reluctance to abandon our comfortable sarongs for such western absurdities as trousers, dinner jackets and ties.
It was the first time we’d been to the Soviet Embassy, which was throwing a party for a group of Russian oceanographers who’d just come into port. Beneath the inevitable paintings of Lenin and Stalin, a couple of hundred guests of all colors, religions and languages were milling around, chatting with friends, or single-mindedly demolishing the vodka and caviar. I’d been separated from Mike and Elizabeth, but could see them at the other side of the room. Mike was doing his “There was I at fifty fathoms” bit to a fascinated audience, while Elizabeth watched him quizzically, and more people watched Elizabeth.
Ever since I lost an eardrum while pearl diving on the Great Barrier Reef, I’ve been at a considerable disadvantage at functions of this kind; the surface noise is about 6 db too much for me to cope with. And this is no small handicap, when being introduced to people with names like Dharmasirawardene, Tissaverasinghe, Goonetilleke and Jayawickrame. When I’m not raiding the buffet, therefore, I usually look for a pool of relative quiet where there’s a chance of following more than fifty percent of any conversation in which I may get involved. I was standing in the acoustic shadow of a large ornamental pillar, surveying the scene in my detached or Somerset Maugham manner, when I noticed that someone was looking at me with that “Haven’t we met before?” expression.
I’ll describe him with some care, because there must be many people who can identify him. He was in the mid-thirties, and I guessed he was American; he had that well-scrubbed, crew-cut, man-about-Rockefeller-Center look that used to be a hallmark until the younger Russian diplomats and technical advisers started imitating it so successfully. He was about six feet in height, with shrewd brown eyes and black hair, prematurely gray at the sides. Though I was fairly certain we’d never met before, his face reminded me of someone. It took me a couple of days to work it out: remember John Garfield? That’s who it was, as near as makes no difference.
When a stranger catches my eye at a party, my standard operating procedure goes into action automatically. If he seems a pleasant enough person, but I don’t feel like introductions at the moment, I give him the Neutral Scan, letting my eyes sweep past him without a flicker of recognition, yet without positive unfriendliness. If he looks a creep, he receives the coup d’oeil, which consists of a long, disbelieving stare followed by an unhurried view of the back of my neck; in extreme cases, an expression of revulsion may be switched on for a few milliseconds. The message usually gets across.
But this character seemed interesting, and I was getting bored, so I gave him the Affable Nod. A few minutes later he drifted through the crowd and I aimed my good ear toward him.
“Hello,” he said (yes, he was American), “my name’s Gene Hartford. I’m sure we’ve met somewhere.”
“Quite likely,” I answered, “I’ve spent a good deal of time in the States. I’m Arthur Clarke.”
Usually that produces a blank stare, but sometimes it doesn’t. I could almost see the IBM cards flickering behind those hard brown eyes, and was flattered by the brevity of his access time.
“The science writer?”
“Correct.”
“Well, this is fantastic.” He seemed genuinely astonished. “Now I know where I’ve seen you. I was in the studio once, when you were on the Dave Garroway show.”
(This lead may be worth following up, though I doubt it; and I’m sure that “Gene Hartford” was phony—it was too smoothly synthetic.)
“So you’re in TV?” I said. “What are you doing here— collecting material, or just on vacation?”
He gave me the frank, friendly smile of a man who has plenty to hide.
“Oh, I’m keeping my eyes open. But this really is amazing; I read your Exploration of Space when it came out back in, ah—”
“1952; the Book-of-the-Month Club’s never been quite the same since.”
All this time I had been sizing him up, and though there was something about him I didn’t like, I was unable to pin it down. In any case, I was prepared to make substantial allowances for someone who had read my books and was also in TV; Mike and I are always on the lookout for markets for our underwater movies. But that, to put it mildly, was not Hartford’s line of business.
“Look,” he said eagerly. “I’ve a big network deal cooking that will interest you—in fact, you helped to give me the idea.”
This sounded promising, and my co-efficient of cupidity jumped several points.
“I’m glad to hear it. What’s the general theme?”
“I can’t talk about it here, but could we meet at my hotel, around three tomorrow?”
“Let me check my diary; yes, that’s O.K.”
There are only two hotels in Colombo patronized by Americans, and I guessed right first time. He was at the Mount Lavinia, and though you may not know it, you’ve seen the place where we had our private chat. Around the middle of The Bridge on the River Kwai, there’s a brief scene at a military hospital, where Jack Hawkins meets a nurse and asks her where he can find Bill Holden. We have a soft spot for this episode, because Mike was one of the convalescent naval officers in the background. If you look smartly you’ll see him on the extreme right, beard in full profile, signing Sam Spiegel’s name to his sixth round of bar-chits. As the picture turned out, Sam could afford it.
It was here, on this diminutive plateau high above the miles of palm-fringed beach, that Gene Hartford started to unload—and my simple hopes of financial advantage started to evaporate. What his exact motives were, if indeed he knew them himself, I’m still uncertain. Surprise at meeting me, and a twisted feeling of gratitude (which I would gladly have done without) undoubtedly played a part, and for all his air of confidence he must have been a bitter, lonely man who desperately needed approval and friendship.
He got neither from me. I have always had a sneaking sympathy for Benedict Arnold, as must anyone who knows the full facts of the case. But Arnold merely betrayed his country; no one before Hartford ever tried to seduce it.
What dissolved my dream of dollars was the news that Hartford’s connection with American TV had been severed, somewhat violently, in the early Fifties. It was clear that he’d been bounced out of Madison Avenue for Party-lining, and it was equally clear that his was one case where no grave injustice had been done. Though he talked with a certain controlled fury of his fight against asinine censorship, and wept for a brilliant—but unnamed—cultural series he’d had kicked off the air, by this time I was beginning to smell so many rats that my replies were distinctly guarded. Yet as my pecuniary interest in Mr. Hartford diminished, so my personal curiosity increased. Who was behind him? Surely not the BBC ...
He got round to it at last, when he’d worked the self-pity out of his system.
“I’ve some news that will make you sit up,” he said smugly. “The American networks are soon going to have some real competition. And it will be done just the way you predicted; the people who sent a TV transmitter behind the Moon can put a much bigger one in orbit round the Earth.”
“Good for them,” I said cautiously. “I’m all in favor of healthy competition. When’s the launching date?”
“Any moment now. The first transmitter will be parked
due south of New Orleans—on the equator, of course. That puts it way out in the open Pacific; it won’t be over anyone’s territory, so there’ll be no political complications on that score. Yet it will be sitting up there in the sky in full view of everybody from Seattle to Key West. Think of it— the only TV station the whole United States can tune into! Yes, even Hawaii! There won’t be any way of jamming it; for the first time, there’ll be a clear channel into every American home. And J. Edgar’s Boy Scouts can’t do a thing to block it.”
So that’s your little racket, I thought; at least you’re being frank. Long ago I learned not to argue with Marxists and Flat-Earthers, but if Hartford was telling the truth I wanted to pump him for all he was worth.
“Before you get too enthusiastic,” I said, “there are a few points you may have overlooked.”
“Such as?”
“This will work both ways. Everyone knows that the Air Force, NASA, Bell Labs, I.T.&T. and a few dozen other agencies are working on the same project. Whatever Russia does to the States in the propaganda line, she’ll get back with compound interest.”
The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 18