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

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Cavor was not disheartened by this, nor by the inexplicable failure of the reactor to respond to any of its remote controls. He theorised that it had been completely drained of energy, if one can use a rather misleading term, and that little if any power was needed to maintain the antigravity field once it had been set up. This was one of the many things that could only be determined by examination on the spot. So by hook or by crook, Dr. Cavor would have to go there.

  “His first idea was to use an electrically-driven trolley, supplied with power through cables which it dragged behind it as it advanced into the field. A hundred horse-power generator, running continuously for seventeen hours, would supply enough energy to take a man of average weight on the perilous twenty-foot journey. A velocity of slightly over a foot an hour did not seem much to boast about, until you remembered that advancing one foot into the antigravity field was equivalent to a two hundred mile vertical climb.

  “The theory was sound, but in practice the electric trolley wouldn’t work. It started to push its way into the field, but began to skid after it had traversed half an inch. The reason was obvious when one started to think about it. Though the power was there, the traction wasn’t. No wheeled vehicle could climb a gradient of two hundred miles per foot.

  “This minor setback did not discourage Dr. Cavor. The answer, he realised at once, was to produce the traction at a point outside the field. When you wanted to lift a load vertically, you didn’t use a cart: you used a jack or an hydraulic ram.

  “The result of this argument was one of the oddest vehicles ever built. A small but comfortable cage, containing sufficient provisions to last a man for several days, was mounted at the end of a twenty-foot-long horizontal girder. The whole device was supported off the ground by balloon tires, and the theory was that the cage could be pushed right into the center of the field by a machine which would remain outside its influence. After some thought, it was decided that the best prime-mover would be the common or garden bulldozer.

  “A test was made with some rabbits in the passenger compartment—and I can’t help thinking that there was an interesting psychological point here. The experimenters were trying to get it both ways: as scientists they’d be pleased if their subjects got back alive, and as Australians they’d be just as happy if they got back dead. But perhaps I’m being a little too fanciful… (You know, of course, how Australians feel about rabbits.)

  “The bulldozer chugged away hour after hour, forcing the weight of the girder and its insignificant payload up the enormous gradient. It was an uncanny sight—all this energy being expended to move a couple of rabbits twenty feet across a perfectly horizontal plain. The subjects of the experiment could be observed throughout the operation: they seemed to be perfectly happy and quite unaware of their historic rôle.

  “The passenger compartment reached the centre of the field, was held there for an hour, and then the girder was slowly backed out again. The rabbits were alive, in good health, and to nobody’s particular surprise there were now six of them.

  “Dr. Cavor, naturally, insisted on being the first human being to venture into a zero-gravity field. He loaded up the compartment with torsion balances, radiation detectors, and periscopes so that he could look into the reactor when he finally got to it. Then he gave the signal, the bulldozer started chugging, and the strange journey began.

  “There was, naturally, telephone communications from the passenger compartment to the outside world. Ordinary sound waves couldn’t cross the barrier, for reasons which were still a little obscure, but radio and telephone both worked without difficulty. Cavor kept up a running commentary as he was edged forward into the field, describing his own reactions and relaying instrument readings to his colleagues.

  “The first thing that happened to him, though he had expected it, was nevertheless rather unsettling. During the first few inches of his advance, as he moved through the fringe of the field, the direction of the vertical seemed to swing around. ‘Up’ was no longer toward the sky: it was now in the direction of the reactor hut. To Cavor, it felt as if he was being pushed up the face of a vertical cliff, with the reactor twenty feet above him. For the first time, his eyes and his ordinary human senses told him the same story as his scientific training. He could see that the centre of the field was, gravity-wise, higher than the place from which he had come. However, imagination still boggled at the thought of all the energy it would need to climb that innocent-looking twenty feet, and the hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel that must be burned to get him there.

  “There was nothing else of interest to report on the journey itself, and at last, twenty hours after he had started, Cavor arrived at his destination. The wall of the reactor hut was right beside him, though to him it seemed not a wall but an unsupported floor sticking out at right angles from the cliff up which he had risen. The entrance was just above his head, like a trapdoor through which he would have to climb. This would present no great difficulty, for Dr. Cavor was an energetic young man, extremely eager to find just how he had created this miracle.

  “Slightly too eager, in fact. For as he tried to work his way into the door, he slipped and fell off the platform that had carried him there.

  “That was the last anyone ever saw of him—but it wasn’t the last they heard of him. Oh dear no! He made a very big noise indeed…

  “You’ll see why when you consider the situation in which this unfortunate scientist now found himself. Hundreds of kilowatt-hours of energy had been pushed into him—enough to lift him to the Moon and beyond. All that work had been needed to take him to a point of zero gravitational potential. As soon as he lost his means of support, that energy began to reappear. To get back to our earlier and very picturesque analogy—the poor doctor had slipped off the edge of the four-thousand-mile-high mountain he had ascended.

  “He fell back the twenty feet that had taken almost a day to climb. ‘Ah, what a fall was there, my countrymen!’ It was precisely equivalent, in terms of energy, to a free drop from the remotest stars down to the surface of the Earth. And you all know how much velocity an object acquires in that fall. It’s the same velocity that’s needed to get it there in the first place—the famous velocity of escape. Seven miles a second, or twenty-five thousand miles an hour.

  “That’s what Dr. Cavor was doing by the time he got back to his starting point. Or to be more accurate, that’s the speed he involuntarily tried to reach. As soon as he passed Mach 1 or 2, however, air-resistance began to have its little say. Dr. Cavor’s funeral pyre was the finest, and indeed, the only, meteor display ever to take place entirely at sea level.…

  “I’m sorry that this story hasn’t got a happy ending. In fact, it hasn’t got an ending at all, because that sphere of zero gravitational potential is still sitting there in the Australian desert, apparently doing nothing at all but in fact producing ever-increasing amounts of frustration in scientific and official circles. I don’t see how the authorities can hope to keep it secret much longer. Sometimes I think how odd it is that the world’s tallest mountain is in Australia—and that though it’s four thousand miles high the airliners often fly right over it without knowing it’s there.”

  You will hardly be surprised to hear that H. Purvis finished his narration at this point: even he could hardly take it much further, and no-one wanted him to. We were all, including his most tenacious critics, lost in admiring awe. I have since detected six fallacies of a fundamental nature in his description of Dr. Cavor’s Frankensteinian fate, but at the time they never even occurred to me. (And I don’t propose to reveal them now. They will be left, as the mathematics text-books put it, as an exercise for the reader.) What had earned our undying gratitude, however, was the fact that at some slight sacrifice of truth he had managed to keep Flying Saucers from invading the White Hart. It was almost closing time, and too late for our visitor to make a counter attack.

  That is why the sequel seems a little unfair. A month later, someone brought a very odd publication to
one of our meetings. It was nicely printed and laid out with professional skill, the misuse of which was sad to behold. The thing was called FLYING SAUCER REVELATIONS—and there on the front page was a full and detailed account of the story Purvis had told us. It was printed absolutely straight—and what was much worse than that, from poor Harry’s point of view, was that it was attributed to him by name.

  Since then he has had 4,375 letters on the subject, most of them from California. Twenty-four called him a liar; 4,205 believed him absolutely. (The remaining ones he couldn’t decipher and their contents still remain a matter of speculation.)

  I’m afraid he’s never quite got over it, and I sometimes think he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to stop people believing the one story he never expected to be taken seriously.

  There may be a moral here. For the life of me I can’t find it.

  Sleeping Beauty

  It was one of those half-hearted discussions that is liable to get going in the “White Hart” when no-one can think of anything better to argue about. We were trying to recall the most extraordinary names we’d ever encountered, and I had just contributed “Obediah Polkinghorn” when—inevitably—Harry Purvis got into the act.

  “It’s easy enough to dig up odd names,” he said, reprimanding us for our levity, “but have you ever stopped to consider a much more fundamental point—the effects of those names on their owners? Sometimes, you know, such a thing can warp a man’s entire life. That is what happened to young Sigmund Snoring.”

  “Oh, no!” groaned Charles Willis, one of Harry’s most implacable critics. “I don’t believe it!”

  “Do you imagine,” said Harry indignantly, “that I’d invent a name like that? As a matter of fact, Sigmund’s family name was something Jewish from Central Europe; it began with SCH and went on for quite a while in that vein. ‘Snoring’ was just an anglicised précis of it. However, all this is by the way; I wish people wouldn’t make me waste time on such details.”

  Charlie, who is the most promising author I know (he has been promising for more than twenty-five years) started to make vaguely protesting noises, but someone public-spiritedly diverted him with a glass of beer.

  “Sigmund,” continued Harry, “bore his burden bravely enough until he reached manhood. There is little doubt, however, that his name preyed upon his mind, and finally produced what you might call a psycho-somatic result. If Sigmund had been born of any other parents, I am sure that he would not have become a sterterous and incessant snorer in fact as well as—almost—in name.

  “Well, there are worse tragedies in life. Sigmund’s family had a fair amount of money, and a sound-proofed bedroom protected the remainder of the household from sleepless nights. As is usually the case, Sigmund was quite unaware of his own nocturnal symphonies, and could never really understand what all the fuss was about.

  “It was not until he got married that he was compelled to take his affliction—if you can call it that, for it only inflicted itself on other people—as seriously as it deserved. There is nothing unusual in a young bride returning from her honeymoon in a somewhat distracted condition, but poor Rachel Snoring had been through a uniquely shattering experience. She was red-eyed with lack of sleep, and any attempt to get sympathy from her friends only made them dissolve into peals of laughter. So it was not surprising that she gave Sigmund an ultimatum; unless he did something about his snoring, the marriage was off.

  “Now this was a very serious matter both for Sigmund and his family. They were fairly well-to-do, but by no means rich—unlike Grand-uncle Reuben, who had died last year leaving a rather complicated will. He had taken quite a fancy to Sigmund, and had left a considerable sum of money in trust for him, which he would receive when he was thirty. Unfortunately, Grand-uncle Reuben was very old-fashioned and strait-laced, and did not altogether trust the modern generation. One of the conditions of the bequest was that Sigmund should not be divorced or separated before the designated date. If he was, the money would go to found an orphanage in Tel Aviv.

  “It was a difficult situation, and there is no way of guessing how it would have resolved itself had not someone suggested that Sigmund ought to go and see Uncle Hymie. Sigmund was not at all keen on this, but desperate predicaments demanded desperate remedies; so he went.

  “Uncle Hymie, I should explain, was a very distinguished professor of physiology, and a Fellow of the Royal Society with a whole string of papers to his credit. He was also, at the moment, somewhat short of money, owing to a quarrel with the trustees of his college, and had been compelled to stop work on some of his pet research projects. To add to his annoyance, the Physics Department had just been given half a million pounds for a new synchrotron, so he was in no pleasant mood when his unhappy nephew called upon him.

  “Trying to ignore the all-pervading smell of disinfectant and livestock, Sigmund followed the lab steward along rows of incomprehensible equipment, and past cages of mice and guinea-pigs, frequently averting his eyes from the revolting coloured diagrams which occupied so much wall-space. He found his uncle sitting at a bench, drinking tea from a beaker and absent-mindedly nibbling sandwiches.

  “‘Help yourself,’ he said ungraciously. ‘Roast hamster—delicious. One of the litter we used for some cancer tests. What’s the trouble?’

  “Pleading lack of appetite, Sigmund told his distinguished uncle his tale of woe. The professor listened without much sympathy.

  “‘Don’t know what you got married for,’ he said at last. ‘Complete waste of time.’ Uncle Hymie was known to possess strong views on this subject, having had five children but no wives. ‘Still, we might be able to do something. How much money have you got?’

  “‘Why?’ asked Sigmund, somewhat taken aback. The professor waved his arms around the lab.

  “‘Costs a lot to run all this,’ he said.

  “‘But I thought the university—’

  “‘Oh yes—but any special work will have to be under the counter, as it were. I can’t use college funds for it.’

  “‘Well, how much will you need to get started?’

  “Uncle Hymie mentioned a sum which was rather smaller than Sigmund had feared, but his satisfaction did not last for long. The scientist, it soon transpired, was fully acquainted with Grand-uncle Reuben’s will; Sigmund would have to draw up a contract promising him a share of the loot when, in five years’ time, the money became his. The present payment was merely an advance.

  “‘Even so, I don’t promise anything, but I’ll see what can be done,’ said Uncle Hymie, examining the cheque carefully. ‘Come and see me in a month.’

  “That was all that Sigmund could get out of him, for the professor was then distracted by a highly decorative research student in a sweater which appeared to have been sprayed on her. They started discussing the domestic affairs of the lab’s rats in such terms that Sigmund, who was easily embarrassed, had to beat a hasty retreat.

  “Now, I don’t really think that Uncle Hymie would have taken Sigmund’s money unless he was fairly sure he could deliver the goods. He must, therefore, have been quite near the completion of his work when the university had slashed his funds; certainly he could never have produced, in a mere four weeks, whatever complex mixture of chemicals it was that he injected into his hopeful nephew’s arm a month after receiving the cash. The experiment was carried out at the professor’s own home, late one evening; Sigmund was not too surprised to find the lady research student in attendance.

  “‘What will this stuff do?’ he asked.

  “‘It will stop you snoring—I hope,’ answered Uncle Hymie. ‘Now, here’s a nice comfortable seat, and a pile of magazines to read. Irma and I will take turns keeping an eye on you in case there are any side-reactions.’

  “‘Side-reactions?’ said Sigmund anxiously, rubbing his arm.

  “‘Don’t worry—just take it easy. In a couple of hours we’ll know if it works.’

  “So Sigmund waited for sleep to come, while the t
wo scientists fussed around him (not to mention around each other) taking readings of blood-pressure, pulse, temperature and generally making Sigmund feel like a chronic invalid. When midnight arrived, he was not at all sleepy, but the professor and his assistant were almost dead on their feet. Sigmund realised that they had been working long hours on his behalf, and felt a gratitude which was quite touching during the short period while it lasted.

  “Midnight came and passed. Irma folded up and the professor laid her, none too gently, on the couch. ‘You’re quite sure you don’t feel tired yet?’ he yawned at Sigmund.

  “‘Not a bit. It’s very odd; I’m usually fast asleep by this time.’

  “‘You feel perfectly all right?’

  “‘Never felt better.’

  “There was another vast yawn from the professor. He muttered something like, ‘Should have taken some of it myself,’ then subsided into an armchair.

  “‘Give us a shout,” he said sleepily, ‘if you feel anything unusual. No point in us staying up any longer.’ A moment later Sigmund, still somewhat mystified, was the only conscious person in the room.

  “He read a dozen copies of Punch, stamped ‘Not to be Removed from the Common Room’ until it was 2 a.m. He polished off all the Saturday Evening Posts by 4. A small bundle of New Yorkers kept him busy until 5, when he had a stroke of luck. An exclusive diet of caviar soon grows monotonous, and Sigmund was delighted to discover a limp and much-thumbed volume entitled ‘The Blonde Was Willing’. This engaged his full attention until dawn, when Uncle Hymie gave a convulsive start, shot out of his chair, woke Irma with a well-directed slap, and then turned his full attention towards Sigmund.

  “‘Well, my boy,’ he said, with a hearty cheerfulness that at once alerted Sigmund’s suspicions, ‘I’ve done what you wanted. You passed the night without snoring, didn’t you?’