Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (124 page)

Hans Muller’s workshop consisted of a large room at the back of a deserted warehouse, no more than a vigorous stone’s throw from the Queensborough Bridge. Most of the building had been boarded up awaiting demolition, and sooner or later Hans would have to move. The only entrance was across a weed-covered yard used as a parking place during the day, and much frequented by the local juvenile delinquents at night. They had never given Hans any trouble, for he knew better than to cooperate with the police when they made their periodic inquiries. The police fully appreciated his delicate position and did not press matters, so Hans was on good terms with everybody. Being a peaceable citizen, that suited him very well.

The work on which Hans was now engaged would have deeply puzzled his Bavarian ancestors. Indeed, ten years ago it would have puzzled Hans himself. And it had all started because a bankrupt client had given him a TV set in payment for services rendered …

Hans had accepted the offer reluctantly, not because he was old-fashioned and disapproved of TV, but simply because he couldn’t imagine where he would find time to look at the darned thing. Still, he thought, at least I can always sell it for fifty dollars. But before I do that, let’s see what the programmes are like …

His hand had gone out to the switch: the screen had filled with moving shapes – and, like millions of men before him, Hans was lost. He entered a world he had not known existed – a world of battling spaceships, of exotic planets and strange races – the world, in fact, of Captain Zipp, Commander of the Space Legion.

Only when the tedious recital of the virtues of Crunche, the Wonder Cereal, had given way to an almost equally tedious boxing match between two muscle-bound characters who seemed to have signed a nonaggression pact, did the magic fade. Hans was a simple man. He had always been fond of fairy tales – and
this
was the modern fairy tale, with trimmings of which the Grimm Brothers had never dreamed. So Hans did not sell his TV set.

It was some weeks before the initial naïve, uncritical enjoyment wore off. The first thing that began to annoy Hans was the furniture and general décor in the world of the future. He was, as has been indicated, an artist – and he refused to believe that in a hundred years taste would have deteriorated as badly as the Crunche sponsors seemed to imagine.

He also thought very little of the weapons that Captain Zipp and his opponents used. It was true that Hans did not pretend to understand the principles upon which the portable proton disintegrator was based, but however it worked, there was certainly no reason why it should be
that
clumsy. The clothes, the spaceship interiors – they just weren’t convincing. How did he know? He had always possessed a highly developed sense of the fitness of things, and it could still operate even in this novel field.

We have said that Hans was a simple man. He was also a shrewd one, and he had heard that there was money in TV. So he sat down and began to draw.

Even if the producer of Captain Zipp had not lost patience with his set designer, Hans Muller’s ideas would certainly have made him sit up and take notice. There was an authenticity and realism about them that made them quite outstanding. They were completely free from the element of phonyness that had begun to upset even Captain Zipp’s most juvenile followers. Hans was hired on the spot.

He made his own conditions, however. What he was doing he did largely for love, notwithstanding the fact that it was earning him more money than anything he had ever done before in his life. He would take no assistants, and would remain in his little workshop. All that he wanted to do was to produce the prototypes, the basic designs. The mass production could be done somewhere else – he was a craftsman, not a factory.

The arrangement had worked well. Over the last six months Captain Zipp had been transformed and was now the despair of all the rival space operas. This, his viewers thought, was not just a serial about the future. It
was
the future – there was no argument about it. Even the actors seemed to have been inspired by their new surroundings: off the set, they sometimes behaved like twentieth-century time travellers stranded in the Victorian Age, indignant because they no longer had access to the gadgets that had always been part of their lives.

But Hans knew nothing about this. He toiled happily away, refusing to see anyone except the producer, doing all his business over the telephone – and watching the final result to ensure that his ideas had not been mutilated. The only sign of his connection with the slightly fantastic world of commercial TV was a crate of Crunche in one corner of the workshop. He had sampled one mouthful of this present from the grateful sponsor and had then remembered thankfully that, after all, he was not paid to eat the stuff.

He was working late one Sunday evening, putting the final touches to a new design for a space helmet, when he suddenly realised that he was no longer alone. Slowly he turned from the workbench and faced the door. It had been locked – how could it have been opened so silently? There were two men standing beside it, motionless, watching him. Hans felt his heart trying to climb into his gullet, and summoned up what courage he could to challenge them. At least, he felt thankfully, he had little money here. Then he wondered if, after all, this was a good thing. They might be annoyed …

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing here?’

One of the men moved toward him while the other remained watching alertly from the door. They were both wearing very new overcoats, with hats low down on their heads so that Hans could not see their faces. They were too well dressed, he decided, to be ordinary holdup men.

‘There’s no need to be alarmed, Mr Muller,’ replied the nearer man, reading his thoughts without difficulty. ‘This isn’t a holdup. It’s official. We’re from – Security.’

‘I don’t understand.’

The other reached into a portfolio he had been carrying beneath his coat, and pulled out a sheaf of photographs. He riffled through them until he had found the one he wanted.

‘You’ve given us quite a headache, Mr Muller. It’s taken us two weeks to find you – your employers were so secretive. No doubt they were anxious to hide you from their rivals. However, here we are and I’d like you to answer some questions.’

‘I’m not a spy!’ answered Hans indignantly as the meaning of the words penetrated. ‘You can’t do this! I’m a loyal American citizen!’

The other ignored the outburst. He handed over the photograph.

‘Do you recognise this?’ he said.

‘Yes. It’s the inside of Captain Zipp’s spaceship.’

‘And you designed it?’

‘Yes.’

Another photograph came out of the file.

‘And what about this?’

‘That’s the Martian city of Paldar, as seen from the air.’

‘Your own idea?’

‘Certainly,’ Hans replied, now too indignant to be cautious.

‘And
this
?’

‘Oh, the proton gun. I was quite proud of that.’

‘Tell me, Mr Muller – are these all your own ideas?’

‘Yes,
I
don’t steal from other people.’

His questioner turned to his companion and spoke for a few minutes in a voice too low for Hans to hear. They seemed to reach agreement on some point, and the conference was over before Hans could make his intended grab at the telephone.

‘I’m sorry,’ continued the intruder. ‘But there has been a serious leak. It may be – uh – accidental, even unconscious, but that does not affect the issue. We will have to investigate you. Please come with us.’

There was such power and authority in the stranger’s voice that Hans began to climb into his overcoat without a murmur. Somehow, he no longer doubted his visitors’ credentials and never thought of asking for any proof. He was worried, but not yet seriously alarmed. Of course, it was obvious what had happened. He remembered hearing about a science fiction writer during the war who had described the atom bomb with disconcerting accuracy. When so much secret research was going on, such accidents were bound to occur. He wondered just what it was he had given away.

At the doorway, he looked back into his workshop and at the men who were following him.

‘It’s all a ridiculous mistake,’ he said. ‘If I
did
show anything secret in the programme, it was just a coincidence. I’ve never done anything to annoy the FBI.’

It was then that the second man spoke at last, in very bad English and with a most peculiar accent.

‘What is the FBI?’ he asked.

But Hans didn’t hear him. He had just seen the spaceship.

The Man Who Ploughed the Sea

First published in
Satellite
, June 1957

Collected in
Tales from the White Hart

This story was written in Miami, in 1954. Despite the lapse of time, many of the themes of this story are surprisingly up-to-date, and a few years ago I was amazed to read a description in a scientific journal of a ship-borne device to extract uranium from sea water! I sent a copy of the story to the inventors, and apologised for invalidating their patent.

The adventures of Harry Purvis have a kind of mad logic that makes them convincing by their very improbability. As his complicated but neatly dovetailed stories emerge, one becomes lost in a sort of baffled wonder. Surely, you say to yourself, no one would have the nerve to make
that
up – such absurdities only occur in real life, not in fiction. And so criticism is disarmed, or at any rate discomfited, until Drew shouts, ‘Time gentlemen,
pleeze
!’ and throws us all out into the cold hard world.

Consider, for example, the unlikely chain of events which involved Harry in the following adventure. If he’d wanted to invent the whole thing, surely he could have managed it a lot more simply. There was not the slightest need, from the artistic point of view, to have started at Boston to make an appointment off the coast of Florida …

Harry seems to have spent a good deal of time in the United States, and to have quite as many friends there as he has in England. Sometimes he brings them to the ‘White Hart’, and sometimes they leave again under their own power. Often, however, they succumb to the illusion that beer which is tepid is also innocuous. (I am being unjust to Drew: his beer is
not
tepid. And if you insist, he will give you, for no extra charge, a piece of ice every bit as large as a postage stamp.)

This particular saga of Harry’s began, as I have indicated, at Boston, Mass. He was staying as a house guest of a successful New England lawyer when one morning his host said, in the casual way Americans have: ‘Let’s go down to my place in Florida. I want to get some sun.’

‘Fine,’ said Harry, who’d never been to Florida. Thirty minutes later, to his considerable surprise, he found himself moving south in a red Jaguar saloon at a formidable speed.

The drive in itself was an epic worthy of a complete story. From Boston to Miami is a little matter of 1,568 miles – a figure which, according to Harry, is now engraved on his heart. They covered the distance in thirty hours, frequently to the sound of ever-receding police sirens as frustrated squad cars dwindled astern. From time to time considerations of tactics involved them in evasive manoeuvres and they had to shoot off into secondary roads. The Jaguar’s radio tuned in to all the police frequencies, so they always had plenty of warning if an interception was being arranged. Once or twice they just managed to reach a state line in time, and Harry couldn’t help wondering what his host’s clients would have thought had they known the strength of the psychological urge which was obviously getting him away from them. He also wondered if he was going to see anything of Florida at all, or whether they would continue at this velocity down US 1 until they shot into the ocean at Key West.

They finally came to a halt sixty miles south of Miami, down on the Keys – that long, thin line of islands hooked on to the lower end of Florida. The Jaguar angled suddenly off the road and weaved a way through a rough track cut in the mangroves. The road ended in a wide clearing at the edge of the sea, complete with dock, thirty-five-foot cabin cruiser, swimming pool, and modern ranch-type house. It was quite a nice little hideaway, and Harry estimated that it must have cost the best part of a hundred thousand dollars.

He didn’t see much of the place until the next day, as he collapsed straight into bed. After what seemed far too short a time, he was awakened by a sound like a boiler factory in action. He showered and dressed in slow motion, and was reasonably back to normal by the time he had left his room. There seemed to be no one in the house, so he went outside to explore.

By this time he had learned not to be surprised at anything so he barely raised his eyebrows when he found his host working down at the dock, straightening out the rudder on a tiny and obviously homemade submarine. The little craft was about twenty feet long, had a conning tower with large observation windows, and bore the name
Pompano
stencilled on her prow.

After some reflection, Harry decided that there was nothing really very unusual about all this. About five million visitors come to Florida every year, most of them determined to get on or into the sea. His host happened to be one of those fortunate enough to indulge in his hobby in a big way.