Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke

by C. , Clarke, Arthur

  This demonstration gave us so much publicity that we had no trouble at all in forming a company. We bade a reluctant farewell to the Research Foundation, told the remaining scientists that perhaps one day we’d heap coals of fire on their heads by sending them a few millions, and started to design our first commercial senders and receivers.

  The first service was inaugurated on May 10th, 1962. The ceremony took place in London, at the transmitting end, though at the Paris receiver there were enormous crowds watching to see the first passengers arrive, and probably hoping they wouldn’t. Amid cheers from the assembled thousands, the Prime Minister pressed a button (which wasn’t connected to anything), the chief engineer threw a switch (which was) and a large Union Jack faded from view and appeared again in Paris, rather to the annoyance of some patriotic Frenchmen.

  After that, passengers began to stream through at a rate which left the Customs officials helpless. The service was a great and instantaneous success, as we only charged £2 per person. This we considered very moderate, for the electricity used cost quite one-hundredth of a penny.

  Before long we had services to all the big cities of Europe, by cable that is, not radio. A wired system was safer, though it was dreadfully difficult to lay polyaxial cables, costing £500 a mile, under the Channel. Then, in conjunction with the Post Office, we began to develop internal services between the large towns. You may remember our slogans ‘Travel by Phone’ and ‘It’s quicker by Wire’ which were heard everywhere in 1963. Soon, practically everyone used our circuits and we were handling thousands of tons of freight per day.

  Naturally, there were accidents, but we could point out that we had done what no Minister of Transport had ever done, reduced road fatalities to a mere ten thousand a year. We lost one client in six million, which was pretty good even to start with, though our record is even better now. Some of the mishaps that occurred were very peculiar indeed, and in fact there are quite a few cases which we haven’t explained to the dependants yet, or to the insurance companies either.

  One common complaint was earthing along the line. When that happened, our unfortunate passenger was just dissipated into nothingness. I suppose his or her molecules would be distributed more or less evenly over the entire earth. I remember one particularly gruesome accident when the apparatus failed in the middle of a transmission. You can guess the result … Perhaps even worse was what happened when two lines got crossed and the currents were mixed.

  Of course, not all accidents were as bad as these. Sometimes, owing to a high resistance in the circuit, a passenger would lose anything up to five stone in transit, which generally cost us about £1000 and enough free meals to restore the missing embonpoint. Fortunately, we were soon able to make money out of this affair, for fat people came along to be reduced to manageable dimensions. We made a special apparatus which transmitted massive dowagers round resistance coils and reassembled them where they started, minus the cause of the trouble. ‘So quick, my dear, and quite painless! I’m sure they could take off that 150 pounds you want to lose in no time! Or is it 200?’

  We also had a good deal of trouble through interference and induction. You see, our apparatus picked up various electrical disturbances and superimposed them on the object under transmission. As a result many people came out looking like nothing on earth and very little on Mars or Venus. They could usually be straightened out by the plastic surgeons, but some of the products had to be seen to be believed.

  Fortunately these difficulties have been largely overcome now that we use the micro-beams for our carrier, though now and then accidents still occur. I expect you remember that big lawsuit we had last year with Lita Cordova, the television star, who claimed £1,000,000 damages from us for alleged loss of beauty. She asserted that one of her eyes had moved during a transmission, but I couldn’t see any difference myself and nor could the jury, who had enough opportunity. She had hysterics in the court when our Chief Electrician went into the box and said bluntly, to the alarm of both side’s lawyers, that if anything really had gone wrong with the transmission, Miss Cordova wouldn’t have been able to recognise herself had any cruel person handed her a mirror.

  Lots of people ask us when we’ll have a service to Venus or Mars. Doubtless that will come in time, but of course the difficulties are pretty considerable. There is so much sun static in space, not to mention the various reflecting layers everywhere. Even the micro-waves are stopped by the Appleton ‘Q’ layer at 100,000 km, you know. Until we can pierce that, Interplanetary shares are still safe.

  Well, I see it’s nearly 22, so I’d best be leaving. I have to be in New York by midnight. What’s that? Oh no, I’m going by plane. I don’t travel by wire! You see, I helped invent the thing!

  Rockets for me! Good night!

  How We Went to Mars

  First published in Amateur Science Fiction Stories, March 1938

  Not previously collected in book form

  This story was first published in the third and final issue of Amateur Science Fiction Stories, edited by Douglas W. F. Mayer.

  (N.B. All characters in this story are entirely fictitious and only exist in the Author’s subconscious. Psychoanalysts please apply at the Tradesmens’ Entrance.)

  It is with considerable trepidation that I now take up my pen to describe the incredible adventures that befell the members of the Snoring-in-the-Hay Rocket Society in the Winter of 1952. Although we would have preferred posterity to be our judge, the members of the society of which I am proud to be President, Secretary and Treasurer, feel that we cannot leave unanswered the accusations – nay, calumnies – made by envious rivals as to our integrity, sobriety and even sanity.

  In this connection I would like to take the opportunity of dealing with the fantastic statements regarding our achievements made in the ‘Daily Drool’ by Prof. Swivel and in the ‘Weekly Washout’ by Dr Sprocket, but unfortunately space does not permit. In any case, I sincerely hope that no intelligent reader was deceived by these persons’ vapourings.

  No doubt most of you will recollect the tremendous awakening of public interest in the science of rocketry caused by the celebrated case in 1941 of ‘Rex v. British Rocket Society’, and its still more celebrated sequel, ‘British Rocket Society v. Rex.’ The first case, which was started when a five ton rocket descended in the Houses of Parliament upon Admiral Sir Horatio ffroth-ffrenzy, M.P., K.C.B., H.P., D.T., after a most successful stratosphere flight, may be said to have resulted in a draw, thanks to the efforts of Sir Hatrick Pastings, K.C., whom the B.R.S. had managed to brief as a result of their success in selling lunar real estate at exorbitant prices. The appeal brought by the B.R.S. against the restrictions of the 1940 (Rocket Propulsion) Act was an undoubted victory for the society, as the explosion in court of a demonstration model removed all opposition and most of Temple Bar. Incidently, it has recently been discovered after extensive excavations that there were no members of the B.R.S. in the court at the time of the disaster – rather an odd coincidence. Moreover, both the survivors state that a few minutes before the explosion, Mr Hector Heptane, the President of the Society, passed very close to the rocket and then left the court hurriedly. Although an enquiry was started, it was then too late as Mr Heptane had already left for Russia, in order, as he put it, ‘to continue work unhampered by the toils of capitalist enterprise, in a country where workers and scientists are properly rewarded by the gratitude of their comrades’. But I digress.

  It was not until the repeal of the 1940 Act that progress could continue in England, when a fresh impetus was given to the movement by the discovery in Surrey of a large rocket labelled ‘Property of the USSR. Please return to Omsk’ – obviously one of Mr Heptane’s. A flight from Omsk to England (though quite understandable) was certainly a remarkable achievement, and not until many years later was it discovered that the rocket had been dropped from an aeroplane by the members of the Hickleborough Rocket Association, who even in those days were expert publicity hunters.

 
; By 1945 there were a score of societies in the country, each spreading destruction over rapidly widening areas. My society, though only founded in 1949, already has to its credit one church, two Methodist chapels, five cinemas, seventeen trust houses, and innumerable private residences, some as far away as Weevil-in-the-Wurzle and Little Dithering. However, there can be no doubt in unprejudiced minds that the sudden collapse of the lunar crater Vitus was caused by one of our rockets, in spite of the claims of the French, German, American, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Swiss and Danish Societies (to mention only a few), all of whom, we are asked to believe, dispatched rockets moonwards a few days before the phenomenon was witnessed.

  At first we contented ourselves with firing large models to considerable heights. These test rockets were fitted with recording baro-thermographs, etc. and our lawyers kept us fully informed as to their landing places. We were progressing very favourably with this important work when the unwarrantable defection of our insurance company forced us to start work on a large, man-carrying space-ship. We already had a sufficiently powerful fuel, details of which I cannot divulge here, save to say that it was a complex hydro-carbon into which our chemist, Dr Badstoff, had with great ingenuity introduced no less than sixteen quadruple carbon bonds. This new fuel was so violent that at first it caused a rapid change in our personnel, but by continued research it had been stabilised until the explosion took place when expected on 97½ occasions out of 100 – in which it showed its immense superiority over Dr Sprocket’s triple heavy hyper-hyzone (20 occasions in 100) and Prof. Swivel’s nitrogen heptafluoride (probability of non-explosion incommensurable).

  The ship itself was thirty metres long and was made of moulded neo-bakelite with crystallux windows, and consisted of two steps, which were ample thanks to our new fuel. The whole thing would have cost a great deal of money had we intended to pay for it. The rocket motors were made of one of the new boro-silicon alloys and had an operating time of several minutes. Apart from these features, our ship did not differ materially from any other designed previously, except in so far that it had actually been constructed. We had no intention of venturing far out into space on our first flight, but circumstances of which I shall relate altered our plans in an unforeseen manner.

  On the lst of April, 1952, everything was ready for a preliminary flight. I broke the customary vacuum flask on the prow of the ship, christened it the ‘Pride of the Galaxy’, and we (this is, myself and the five surviving members of the council of twenty-five) entered the cabin and carefully sealed the door, squeezing chewing gum into all the cracks.

  The ship itself was resting on a balloon-type undercarriage and we had a straight run of two miles over various people’s lawns and gardens. We intended to rise to a height of a few hundred miles and then to glide back to earth, landing as best we could with little regard to life or property save our own.

  I seated myself at the controls and the others lay in the compensating hammocks which we hoped might save us from the shock of the take-off. In any case every space-ship has them and we could hardly do otherwise. With an expression of grim determination, which I had to assume several times before Ivan Schnitzel, our official photographer, was satisfied, I pressed the starting button and – rather to our surprise – the ship began to move.

  After leaving our grounds it tore through a fence into a vegetable garden which it rapidly converted into a ploughed field, and then passed over a large lawn doing comparatively little damage apart from setting fire to a few greenhouses. By now we were nearing a row of buildings which might offer some resistance, and as we had not yet lifted, I turned the power full on. With a tremendous roar, the ship leapt into the air, and amid the groans of my companions I lost consciousness.

  When I recovered, I realised that we were in space and jumped to my feet to see if we were falling back to earth. But I had forgotten my weightless condition and crashed head first against the ceiling, once more losing consciousness.

  When I recovered, I very carefully made my way to the window and with relief saw that we were now floating back to earth. My relief was short-lived when I found that the earth was nowhere in sight! I at once realised that we must have been unconscious for a very long time – my less robust companions still lay in a coma, or rather several comas, at the end of the cabin, the hammocks having given way under the strain, to the detriment of their occupants.

  I first inspected the machinery, which so far as I could tell seemed intact, and then set about reviving my companions. This I readily did by pouring a little liquid air down their necks. When all were conscious (or as nearly so as could be expected in the circumstances), I rapidly outlined the situation and explained the need for complete calm. After the resulting hysteria had subsided, I asked for volunteers to go outside in a space suit and inspect the ship. I am sorry to say that I had to go myself.

  Luckily, the exterior of the ship seemed quite intact, though there were bits of branches and a ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’ notice stuck in the rudder. These I detached and threw away, but unluckily they got into an orbit round the ship and returned round the back, catching me a resounding whack on the head.

  The impact knocked me off the ship, and to my horror I found myself floating in space. I did not, of course, lose my head but immediately looked around for some method by which I could return. In the pouch on the exterior of the space-suit I found a safety-pin, two tram tickets, a double-headed penny, a football-pool coupon covered with what seemed to be orbital calculations, and a complimentary ticket to the Russian ballet. After a careful scrutiny of these, I came to the reluctant conclusion that they offered little hope. Even if I could bring myself to throw away the penny, its momentum would, I rapidly calculated, be insufficient to return me to the ship. The tickets I did throw away, rather as a gesture than anything else, and I was about to throw the safety-pin after them – it would have given me a velocity of .000001 millimetres an hour, which was better than nothing (by, in fact, .000001 mm/hour.) – when a splendid idea occurred to me. I carefully punctured my space-suit with the pin, and in a moment the escaping jet of air drove me back to the ship. I entered the air-lock just as the suit collapsed, not a moment too soon.

  My companions crowded round me, eager for news, though there was little that I could tell them. It would take prolonged measurements to discover our position and I commenced this important work at once.

  After ten minutes’ observations of the stars, followed by five hours intensive calculations on our specially lubricated multiple slide-rules, I was able to announce, to the relief of all present, that we were 5,670,000 miles from the earth, 365,000 miles above the ecliptic, travelling towards Right Ascension 23 hours 15 mins. 37.07 secs., Declination 153° 17’ 36”. We had feared that we might have been moving towards, for example, R.A. 12 hours 19 mins. 7.3 secs, Dec. 169° 15’ 17” or even, if the worst had happened, R.A. 5 hours 32 mins. 59.9 secs, Dec. 0° 0’ 0”.

  At least, we were doing this when we took our observations, but as we had moved several million miles in the meantime, we had to start all over again to find where we were now. After several trials, we succeeded in finding where we were only two hours before we found it, but in spite of the greatest efforts we could not reduce the time taken in calculation to less than this value. So with this we had to be content.

  The earth was between us and the sun, which was why we could not see it. Since we were travelling in the direction of Mars, I suggested that we could continue on our present course and try to make a landing on the planet. I had grave doubts, in fact, as to whether there was anything else we could do. So for two days we cruised on towards the red planet, my companions relieving the tedium with dominoes, poker and three-dimensional billiards (which, of course, can only be played in the absence of gravity). However, I had little time for these pursuits, as I had to keep constant check on the ship’s position. In any case, I was completely fleeced on the first day, and was unable to obtain any credit from my grasping companions.
<
br />   All the time Mars was slowly growing larger, and as we drew nearer and nearer many were the speculations we made as to what we should find when we landed on the mysterious red planet.

  ‘One thing we can be certain of,’ remarked Isaac Guzzbaum, our auditor, to me as we were looking through the ports at the world now only a few million miles away. ‘We won’t be met by a lot of old johnnies with flowing robes and beards who will address us in perfect English and give us the freedom of the city, as in so many science-fiction stories. I’ll bet our next year’s deficit on that!’

  Finally we began our braking manoeuvres and curved down towards the planet in a type of logarithmic spiral whose first, second and third differential coefficients are in harmonic ratio – a curve on which I hold all patents. We made a landing near the equator, as close to the Solis Lacus as possible. Our ship slid for several miles across the desert, leaving a trail of fused quartz behind it where the blast touched the ground, and ended up with its nose in a sand dune.

  Our first move was to investigate the air. We decided unanimously (only Mr Guzzbaum dissenting), that Mr Guzzbaum should be detailed to enter the air-lock and sample the Martian atmosphere. Fortunately for him, it proved fit for human consumption, and we all joined Isaac in the air-lock. I then stepped solemnly out onto Martian soil – the first human being in history to do so – while Ivan Schnitzel recorded the scene for the benefit of history. As a matter of fact, we later found that he had forgotten to load the camera. Perhaps this was just as well, for my desire for strict accuracy compels me to admit that no sooner did I touch the ground then it gave way beneath my feet, precipitating me into a sandy pit from which I was with difficulty rescued by my companions.