Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (13 page)

The meters in the power station gave another jump, and the engineer on duty ordered the stand-by generators into action. He wished the big, new machine was finished; then there would be no more anxious hours like these. But he thought he could handle the load. Half an hour later the Meteorological Bureau put out a general frost warning over the radio. Within sixty seconds, more than a million electric fires were switched on in anticipation. The meters passed the danger mark and went on soaring.

With a tremendous crash three giant circuit breakers leaped from their contacts. Their arcs died under the fierce blast of the helium jets. Three circuits had opened – but the fourth breaker had failed to clear. Slowly, the great copper bars began to glow cherry-red. The acrid smell of burning insulation filled the air and molten metal dripped heavily to the floor below, solidifying at once on the concrete slabs. Suddenly the conductors sagged as the load ends broke away from their supports. Brilliant green arcs of burning copper flamed and died as the circuit was broken. The free ends of the enormous conductors fell perhaps ten feet before crashing into the equipment below. In a fraction of a second they had welded themselves across the lines that led to the new generator.

Forces greater than any yet produced by man were at war in the windings of the machine. There was no resistance to oppose the current, but the inductance of the tremendous windings delayed the moment of peak intensity. The current rose to a maximum in an immense surge that lasted several seconds. At that instant, Nelson reached the centre of the pit.

Then the current tried to stabilise itself, oscillating wildly between narrower and narrower limits. But it never reached its steady state; somewhere, the overriding safety devices came into operation and the circuit that should never have been made was broken again. With a last dying spasm, almost as violent as the first, the current swiftly ebbed away. It was all over.

When the emergency lights came on again, Nelson’s assistant walked to the lip of the rotor pit. He didn’t know what had happened, but it must have been serious. Nelson, fifty feet down, must have been wondering what it was all about.

‘Hello, Dick!’ he shouted. ‘Have you finished? We’d better see what the trouble is.’

There was no reply. He leaned over the edge of the great pit and peered into it. The light was very bad, and the shadow of the rotor made it difficult to see what was below. At first it seemed that the pit was empty, but that was ridiculous; he had seen Nelson enter it only a few minutes ago. He called again.

‘Hello! You all right, Dick?’

Again no reply. Worried now, the assistant began to descend the ladder. He was halfway down when a curious noise, like a toy balloon bursting very far away, made him look over his shoulder. Then he saw Nelson, lying at the centre of the pit on the temporary woodwork covering the turbine shaft. He was very still, and there seemed something altogether wrong about the angle at which he was lying.

Ralph Hughes, chief physicist, looked up from his littered desk as the door opened. Things were slowly returning to normal after the night’s disasters. Fortunately, the trouble had not affected his department much, for the generator was unharmed. He was glad he was not the chief engineer: Murdock would still be snowed under with paperwork. The thought gave Dr Hughes considerable satisfaction.

‘Hello, Doc,’ he greeted the visitor. ‘What brings you here? How’s your patient getting on?’

Doctor Sanderson nodded briefly. ‘He’ll be out of hospital in a day or so. But I want to talk to you about him.’

‘I don’t know the fellow – I never go near the plant, except when the Board goes down on its collective knees and asks me to. After all, Murdock’s paid to run the place.’

Sanderson smiled wryly. There was no love lost between the chief engineer and the brilliant young physicist. Their personalities were too different, and there was the inevitable rivalry between theoretical expert and ‘practical’ man.

‘I think this is up your street, Ralph. At any rate, it’s beyond me. You’ve heard what happened to Nelson?’

‘He was inside my new generator when the power was shot into it, wasn’t he?’

‘That’s correct. His assistant found him suffering from shock when the power was cut off again.’

‘What kind of shock? It couldn’t have been electric; the windings are insulated, of course. In any case, I gather that he was in the centre of the pit when they found him.’

‘That’s quite true. We don’t know what happened. But he’s now come round and seems none the worse – apart from one thing.’ The doctor hesitated a moment as if choosing his words carefully.

‘Well, go on! Don’t keep me in suspense!’

‘I left Nelson as soon as I saw he would be quite safe, but about an hour later Matron called me up to say he wanted to speak to me urgently. When I got to the ward he was sitting up in bed looking at a newspaper with a very puzzled expression. I asked him what was the matter. He answered, “Something’s happened to me, Doc.” So I said, “Of course it has, but you’ll be out in a couple of days.” He shook his head; I could see there was a worried look in his eyes. He picked up the paper he had been looking at and pointed to it. “I can’t read any more,” he said.

‘I diagnosed amnesia and thought: This is a nuisance! Wonder what else he’s forgotten? Nelson must have read my expression, for he went on to say, “Oh, I still know the letters and words – but they’re the wrong way round! I think something must have happened to my eyes.” He held up the paper again. “This looks exactly as if I’m seeing it in a mirror,” he said. “I can spell out each word separately, a letter at a time. Would you get me a looking glass? I want to try something.”

‘I did. He held the paper to the glass and looked at the reflection. Then he started to read aloud, at normal speed. But that’s a trick anyone can learn – compositors have to do it with type – and I wasn’t impressed. On the other hand, I couldn’t see why an intelligent fellow like Nelson should put over an act like that. So I decided to humour him, thinking the shock must have given his mind a bit of a twist. I felt quite certain he was suffering from some delusion, though he seemed perfectly normal.

‘After a moment he put the paper away and said, “Well, Doc, what do you make of that?” I didn’t know quite what to say without hurting his feelings, so I passed the buck and said, “I think I’ll have to hand you over to Dr Humphries, the psychologist. It’s rather outside my province.” Then he made some remark about Dr Humphries and his intelligence tests, from which I gathered he had already suffered at his hands.’

‘That’s correct,’ interjected Hughes. ‘All the men are grilled by the Psychology Department before they join the company. All the same, it’s surprising what gets through,’ he added thoughtfully.

Dr Sanderson smiled, and continued his story.

‘I was getting up to leave when Nelson said, “Oh, I almost forgot. I think I must have fallen on my right arm. The wrist feels badly sprained.” “Let’s look at it,” I said, bending to pick it up. “No, the other arm,” Nelson said, and held up his left wrist. Still humouring him, I answered, “Have it your own way. But you said your right one, didn’t you?”

‘Nelson looked puzzled. “So what?” he replied. “This
is
my right arm. My eyes may be queer, but there’s no argument about that. There’s my wedding ring to prove it. I’ve not been able to get the darned thing off for five years.”

‘That shook me rather badly. Because you see, it was his left arm he was holding up, and his left hand that had the ring on it. I could see that what he said was quite true. The ring would have to be cut to get it off again. So I said, “Have you any distinctive scars?” He answered. “Not that I can remember.”

‘“Any dental fillings?”’

‘“Yes, quite a few.”’

‘We sat looking at each other in silence while a nurse went to fetch Nelson’s records. “Gazed at each other with a wild surmise” is just about how a novelist might put it. Before the nurse returned, I was seized with a bright idea. It was a fantastic notion, but the whole affair was becoming more and more outrageous. I asked Nelson if I could see the things he had been carrying in his pockets. Here they are.’

Dr Sanderson produced a handful of coins and a small leather-bound diary. Hughes recognised the latter at once as an Electrical Engineer’s Diary; he had one in his own pocket. He took it from the doctor’s hand and flicked it open at random, with that slightly guilty feeling one always has when a stranger’s – still more, a friend’s – diary falls into one’s hands.

And then, for Ralph Hughes, it seemed that the foundations of his world were giving way. Until now he had listened to Dr Sanderson with some detachment, wondering what all the fuss was about. But now the incontrovertible evidence lay in his own hands, demanding his attention and defying his logic.

For he could read not one word of Nelson’s diary. Both the print and the handwriting were inverted, as if seen in a mirror.

Dr Hughes got up from his chair and walked rapidly around the room several times. His visitor sat silently watching him. On the fourth circuit he stopped at the window and looked out across the lake, overshadowed by the immense white wall of the dam. It seemed to reassure him, and he turned to Dr Sanderson again.

‘You expect me to believe that Nelson has been laterally inverted in some way, so that his right and left sides have been interchanged?’

‘I don’t expect you to believe anything. I’m merely giving you the evidence. If you can draw any other conclusion I’d be delighted to hear it. I might add that I’ve checked Nelson’s teeth. All the fillings have been transposed. Explain that away if you can. Those coins are rather interesting, too.’

Hughes picked them up. They included a shilling, one of the beautiful new, beryl-copper crowns, and a few pence and halfpence. He would have accepted them as change without hesitation. Being no more observant than the next man, he had never noticed which way the Queen’s head looked. But the lettering – Hughes could picture the consternation at the Mint if these curious coins ever came to its notice. Like the diary, they too had been laterally inverted.

Dr Sanderson’s voice broke into his reverie.

‘I’ve told Nelson not to say anything about this. I’m going to write a full report; it should cause a sensation when it’s published. But we want to know how this has happened. As you are the designer of the new machine, I’ve come to you for advice.’

Dr Hughes did not seem to hear him. He was sitting at his desk with his hands outspread, little fingers touching. For the first time in his life he was thinking seriously about the difference between left and right.

Dr Sanderson did not release Nelson from hospital for several days, during which he was studying his peculiar patient and collecting material for his report. As far as he could tell, Nelson was perfectly normal, apart from his inversion. He was learning to read again, and his progress was swift after the initial srrangeness had worn off. He would probably never again use tools in the same way that he had done before the accident; for the rest of his life, the world would think him left-handed. However, that would not handicap him in any way.

Dr Sanderson had ceased to speculate about the cause of Nelson’s condition. He knew very little about electricity; that was Hughes’s job. He was quite confident that the physicist would produce the answer in due course; he had always done so before. The company was not a philanthropic institution, and it had good reason for retaining Hughes’s services. The new generator, which would be running within a week, was his brain-child, though he had had little to do with the actual engineering details.

Dr Hughes himself was less confident. The magnitude of the problem was terrifying; for he realised, as Sanderson did not, that it involved utterly new regions of science. He knew that there was only one way in which an object could become its own mirror image. But how could so fantastic a theory be proved?

He had collected all available information on the fault that had energised the great armature. Calculations had given an estimate of the currents that had flowed through the coils for the few seconds they had been conducting. But the figures were largely guesswork; he wished he could repeat the experiment to obtain accurate data. It would be amusing to see Murdock’s face if he said, ‘Mind if I throw a perfect short across generators One to Ten sometime this evening?’ No, that was definitely out.

It was lucky he still had the working model. Tests on it had given some ideas of the field produced at the generator’s centre, but their magnitudes were a matter of conjecture. They must have been enormous. It was a miracle that the windings had stayed in their slots. For nearly a month Hughes struggled with his calculations and wandered through regions of atomic physics he had carefully avoided since he left the university. Slowly the complete theory began to evolve in his mind; he was a long way from the final proof, but the road was clear. In another month he would have finished.

The great generator itself, which had dominated his thoughts for the past year, now seemed trivial and unimportant. He scarcely bothered to acknowledge the congratulations of his colleagues when it passed its final tests and began to feed its millions of kilowatts into the system. They must have thought him a little strange, but he had always been regarded as somewhat unpredictable. It was expected of him; the company would have been disappointed if its tame genius possessed no eccentricities.

A fortnight later, Dr Sanderson came to see him again. He was in a grave mood.