Tales from the White Hart (Arthur C. Clarke Collection: Short Stories)

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “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 place 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 the coast-guards, which would be a nuisance but would not interfere with their plans.

  “‘Here she comes!’ said Number One. ‘What class is she?’

  “They both stared through their glasses as the submarine, 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 something odd about the design of that conning tower, 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 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 just when a story reaches its climax, and ordering another beer—or, more usually, getting someone else to buy him one. I’ve watched him do this so often that now I can tell just when the climax is coming by the level in his glass. We had to wait, with what patience we could, while he 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 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 there would be a couple of MVD men aboard the ship, the 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 ran 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 of the Marlin really had no choice in his subsequent actions. He picked up the missile, defrosted Freda, and set course for Cocoa—first sending a radio message that caused a great flurry in the Navy Department and started destroyers racing out into the Atlantic. Perhaps Inquisitive Ivan never got back to Valdivostock 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 Marlin’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 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 such envy and mystification to all their Los Angeles friends that they wouldn’t part with them for anything…

  “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 accidental 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 l
ines 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 times 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 time.

  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 discovered.

  “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 criticality—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.

  “The reactor building was completely unchanged: it sat out there in the desert, a commonplace cube of brick holding a million pounds worth of fissile material and several years of careful design and development. Cavor wasted no time: he grabbed the jeep, switched on a portable Geiger counter, and hurried off to see what had happened.

  “He recovered consciousness in hospital a couple of hours later. There was little wrong with him apart from a bad headache, which was nothing to the one his experiment was going to give him during the next few days. It seemed that when he got to within twenty feet of the reactor, his jeep had hit something with a terrific crash. Cavor had got tangled in the steering wheel and had a nice collection of bruises: the Geiger counter, oddly enough, was quite undamaged and was still clucking away quietly to itself, detecting no more than the normal cosmic-ray background.

  “Seen from a distance, it had looked a perfectly normal sort of accident, that might have been caused by the jeep going into a rut. But Cavor hadn’t been driving all that fast, luckily for him, and anyway there was no rut at the scene of the crash. What the jeep had run into was something quite impossible. It was an invisible wall, apparently the lower rim of a hemispherical dome, which entirely surrounded the reactor. Stones thrown up in the air slid back to the ground along the surface of this dome, and it also extended underground as far as digging could be carried out. It seemed as if the reactor was at the exact center of an impenetrable, spherical shell.

  “Of course, this was marvellous news and Cavor was out of bed in no time, scattering nurses in all directions. He had no idea what had happened, but it was a lot more exciting than the humdrum piece of nuclear engineering that had started the whole business.

  “By now you’re probably all wondering what the devil a sphere of force—as you science-fiction writers would call it—has to do with antigravity. So I’ll jump several days and give you the answers that Cavor and his team discovered only after much hard work and the consumption of many gallons of that potent Australian beer.

  “The reactor, when it had been energised, had somehow produced an antigravity field. All the matter inside a twenty-foot-radius sphere had been made weightless, and the enormous amount of energy needed to do this had been extracted, in some utterly mysterious manner, from the uranium in the pile. Calculations showed that the amount of energy in the reactor was just sufficient to do the job. Presumably the sphere of force would have been larger still if there had been more ergs available in the power-source.

  “I can hear someone just waiting to ask a question, so I’ll anticipate them. Why didn’t this weightless sphere of earth and air float up into space? Well, the earth was held together by its cohesion, anyway, so there was no reason why it should go wandering off. As for the air, that was forced to stay inside the zone of zero-gravity for a most surprising and subtle reason which leads me to the crux of this whole peculiar business.

  “Better fasten your seat-belts for the next bit: we’ve got a bumpy passage ahead. Those of you who know something about potential theory won’t have any trouble, and I’ll do my best to make it as easy as I can for the rest.

  “People who talk glibly about antigravity seldom stop to consider its implications, so let’s look at a few fundamentals. As I’ve already said, weight implies energy—lots of it. That energy is entirely due to Earth’s gravity field. If you remove an object’s weight, that’s precisely equivalent to taking it clear outside Earth’s gravity. And any rocket engineer will tell you how much energy that requires.”
<
br />   Harry turned to me and said: “There’s an analogy I’d like to borrow from one of your books, Arthur, that puts across the point I’m trying to make. You know—comparing the fight against Earth’s gravity to climbing out of a deep pit.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “I pinched it from Doc Richardson, anyway.”

  “Oh,” replied Harry. “I thought it was too good to be original. Well, here we go. If you hang on to this really very simple idea, you’ll be O.K. To take an object clear away from the Earth requires as much work as lifting it four thousand miles against the steady drag of normal gravity. Now the matter inside Cavor’s zone of force was still on the Earth’s surface, but it was weightless. From the energy point of view, therefore, it was outside the Earth’s gravity field. It was inaccessible as if it was on top of a four thousand mile high mountain.

  “Cavor could stand outside the anti-gravity zone and look into it from a point a few inches away. To cross those few inches, he would have to do as much work as if he climbed Everest seven hundred times. It wasn’t surprising that the jeep stopped in a hurry. No material object had stopped it, but from the point of view of dynamics it had run smack into a cliff four thousand miles high…

  “I can see some blank looks that are not entirely due to the lateness of the hour. Never mind: if you don’t get all this, just take my word for it. It won’t spoil your appreciation of what follows—at least, I hope not.

  “Cavor had realised at once that he had made one of the most important discoveries of the age, though it was some time before he worked out just what was going on. The final clue to the anti-gravitational nature of the field came when they shot a rifle bullet into it and observed the trajectory with a high-speed camera. Ingenious, don’t you think?

  “The next problem was to experiment with the field’s generator and to find just what had happened inside the reactor when it had been switched on. This was a problem indeed. The reactor was there in plain sight, twenty feet away. But to reach it would require slightly more energy than going to the Moon.…