Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (98 page)

‘Yes – swordplay. Here was a civilisation which had atomic power, death rays, spaceships, television and suchlike modern conveniences, but when it came to a fight between Captain Zoom and the evil Emperor Klugg, the clock went back a couple of centuries. A lot of soldiers stood round holding deadly looking ray guns, but they never
did
anything with them. Well, hardly ever. Sometimes a shower of sparks would chase Captain Zoom and singe his pants, but that was all. I suppose that as the rays couldn’t very well move faster than light, he could always outrun them.

‘Still, those ornamental ray guns gave everyone quite a few headaches. It’s funny how Hollywood will spend endless trouble on some minute detail in a film which is complete rubbish. The director of Captain Zoom had a thing about ray guns. Solly designed the Mark I, which looked like a cross between a bazooka and a blunderbuss. He was quite satisfied with it, and so was the director – for about a day. And then the great man came raging into the studio carrying a revolting creation of purple plastic with knobs and lenses and levers.

‘“Lookit this, Solly!” he puffed. “Junior got it down at the supermarket – they’re being given away with packets of Crunch. Collect ten lids, and you get one. Hell, they’re better than ours! And they
work
!”

‘He pressed a lever, and a thin stream of water shot across the set and diappeared behind Captain Zoom’s spaceship, where it promptly extingished a cigarette that had no right to be burning there. An angry stagehand emerged through the airlock, saw who it was had drenched him, and swiftly retreated, muttering things about his union.

‘Solly examined the ray gun with annoyance and yet with an expert’s discrimination. Yes, it was certainly much more impressive than anything
he’d
put out. He retired into his office and promised to see what he could do about it.

‘The Mark II had everything built into it, including a television screen. If Captain Zoom was suddenly confronted by a charging hickoderm, all he had to do was to switch on the set, wait for the tubes to warm up, check the channel selector, adjust the fine tuning, touch up the focus, twiddle with the Line and Frame holds – and then press the trigger. He was, fortunately, a man of unbelievably swift reactions.

‘The director was impressed, and the Mark II went into production. A slightly different model, the Mark IIa, was built for the Emperor Klugg’s diabolical cohorts. It would never do, of course, if both sides had the same weapon. I told you that Pandemic Productions were sticklers for accuracy.

‘All went well until the first rushes, and even beyond. While the cast were acting, if you can use that word, they had to point the guns and press the triggers as if something was really happening. The sparks and flashes, however, were put on the negative later by two little men in a darkroom about as well guarded as Fort Knox. They did a good job, but after a while the producer again felt twinges in his overdeveloped artistic conscience.

‘“Solly,” he said, toying with the plastic horror which had reached Junior by courtesy of Crunch, the Succulent Cereal – Not a Burp in a Barrel – “Solly, I still want a gun that
does
something.”

‘Solly ducked in time, so the jet went over his head and baptized a photograph of Louella Parsons.

‘“You’re not going to start shooting all over again!” he wailed.

‘“Noo,” replied the producer, with obvious reluctance. “We’ll have to use what we’ve got. But it
looks
faked, somehow.” He ruffled through the script on his desk, then brightened up.

‘“Now next week we start on Episode 54 – ‘Slaves of the Slug-Men’. Well, the Slug-Men gotta have guns, so what I’d like you to do is this—”

‘The Mark III gave Solly a lot of trouble. (I haven’t missed out one yet, have I? Good.) Not only had it to be a completely new design, but as you’ll have gathered it had to “do something”. This was a challenge to Solly’s ingenuity: however, if I may borrow from Professor Toynbee, it was a challenge that evoked the appropriate response.

‘Some high-powered engineering went into the Mark III. Luckily, Solly knew an ingenious technician who’d helped him out on similar occasions before, and he was really the man behind it.’ (‘I’ll say he was!’ said Mr Blumberg gloomily.) ‘The principle was to use a jet of air, produced by a small but extremely powerful electric fan, and then to spray finely divided powder into it. When the thing was adjusted correctly, it shot out a most impressive beam, and made a still more impressive noise. The actors were so scared of it that their performances became most realistic.

‘The producer was delighted – for a full three days. Then a dreadful doubt assailed him.

‘“Solly,” he said, “those damn guns are
too
good. The Slug-Men can beat the pants off Captain Zoom. We’ll have to give him something better.”

‘It was at this point that Solly realised what had happened. He had become involved in an armaments race.

‘Let’s see, this brings us to the Mark IV, doesn’t it? How did
that
work? – Oh yes, I remember. It was a glorified oxyacetylene burner, with various chemicals injected into it to produce the most beautiful flames. I should have mentioned that from Episode 50 – “Doom on Deimos” – the studio had switched over from black and white to Murkicolor, and great possibilities were thus opened up. By squirting copper or strontium or barium into the jet, you could get any colour you wanted.

‘If you think that by this time the producer was satisfied, you don’t know Hollywood. Some cynics may still laugh when the motto “Ars Gratia Artis’ flashes on the screen, but this attitude, I submit, is not in accordance with the facts. Would such old fossils as Michelangelo, Rembrandt or Titian have spent so much time, effort and money on the quest for perfection as did Pandemic Productions? I think not.

‘I don’t pretend to remember all the Marks that Solly and his ingenious engineer friend produced during the course of the serial. There was one that shot out a stream of coloured smoke rings. There was the high-frequency generator that produced enormous but quite harmless sparks. There was a particularly ingenious
curved
beam produced by a jet of water with light reflected along inside it, which looked most spectacular in the dark. And finally, there was the Mark XII.’

‘Mark XIII,’ said Mr Blumberg.

‘Of course – how stupid of me! What other number
could
it have been! The Mark XIII was not actually a portable weapon – though some of the others were portable only by a considerable stretch of the imagination. It was the diabolical device to be installed on Phobos in order to subjugate Earth. Though Solly has explained them to me once, the scientific principles involved escape my simple mind…. However, who am I to match my brains against the intellects responsible for “Captain Zoom”? I can only report what the ray was supposed to do, not how it did it. It was to start a chain reaction in the atmosphere of our unfortunate planet, making the nitrogen and the oxygen in the air combine – with highly deleterious effects to terrestrial life.

‘I’m not sure whether to be sorry or glad that Solly left all the details of the fabulous Mark XIII to his talented assistant. Though I’ve questioned him at some length, all he can tell me is that the thing was about six feet high and looked like a cross between a two-hundred-inch telescope and an antiaircraft gun. That’s not very helpful, is it?

‘He also says that there were a lot of radio tubes in the brute, as well as a thundering great magnet. And it was definitely supposed to produce a harmless but impressive electric arc, which could be distorted into all sorts of interesting shapes by the magnet.
That
was what the inventor said, and, despite everything, there is still no reason to disbelieve him.

‘By one of those mischances that later turn out to be providential, Solly wasn’t at the studio when they tried out the Mark XIII. To his great annoyance, he had to be down in Mexico that day. And wasn’t that lucky for you, Solly! He was expecting a long-distance call from one of his friends in the afternoon, but when it came through it wasn’t the kind of message he’d anticipated.

‘The Mark XIII had been, to put it mildly, a success. No one knew exactly what had happened, but by a miracle no lives had been lost and the fire department had been able to save the adjoining studios. It was incredible, yet the facts were beyond dispute. The Mark XIII was supposed to be a phony death ray – and it had turned out to be a real one.
Something
had emerged from the projector, and gone through the studio wall as if it wasn’t there. Indeed, a moment later it wasn’t. There was just a great big hole, beginning to smoulder round the edges. And then the roof fell in….

‘Unless Solly could convince the F.B.I. that it was all a mistake, he’d better stay the other side of the border. Even now the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission were converging upon the wreckage….

‘What would you have done in Solly’s shoes? He was innocent, but how could he prove it? Perhaps he would have gone back to face the music if he hadn’t remembered that he’d once hired a man who’d campaigned for Harry Wallace, back in ’48.
That
might take some explaining away: besides, Solly was a little tired of Captain Zoom. So here he is. Anyone know of a British film company that might have an opening for him? But historical films only, please. He won’t touch anything more up to date than crossbows.’

The Deep Range

First published in
Argosy (UK)
, April 1954

Collected in
Tales from Planet Earth

The concept of whale-herding is an idea whose time has not yet come, and I wonder if it ever will. Over the last decade, whales have had such excellent P.R. that most Europeans and Americans would sooner eat dog- or catburgers. I
did
tackle whalemeat once, during World War Two: it tasted like rather tough beef.

In 1957 I expanded this story into the novel of the same name.

There was a killer loose on the range. A ’copter patrol, five hundred miles off Greenland, had seen the great corpse staining the sea crimson as it wallowed in the waves. Within seconds, the intricate warning system had been alerted: men were plotting circles and moving counters on the North Atlantic chart – and Don Burley was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he dropped silently down to the twenty-fathom line.

The pattern of green lights on the tell-tale was a glowing symbol of security. As long as that pattern was unchanged, as long as none of those emerald stars winked to red, all was well with Don and his tiny craft. Air – fuel – power – this was the triumvirate which ruled his life. If any of them failed, he would be sinking in a steel coffin down toward the pelagic ooze, as Johnnie Tyndall had done the season before last. But there was no reason why they should fail; the accidents one foresaw, Don told himself reassuringly, were never the ones that happened.

He leaned across the tiny control board and spoke into the mike. Sub 5 was still close enough to the mother ship for radio to work, but before long he’d have to switch to the sonics.

‘Setting course 255, speed 50 knots, depth 20 fathoms, full sonar coverage…. Estimated time to target area, 70 minutes…. Will report at 10-minute intervals. That is all…. Out.’

The acknowledgement, already weakening with range, came back at once from the
Herman Melville
.

‘Message received and understood. Good hunting. What about the hounds?’

Don chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. This might be a job he’d have to handle alone. He had no idea, to within fifty miles either way, where Benj and Susan were at the moment. They’d certainly follow if he signalled for them, but they couldn’t maintain his speed and would soon have to drop behind. Besides, he might be heading for a pack of killers, and the last thing he wanted to do was to lead his carefully trained porpoises into trouble. That was common sense and good business. He was also very fond of Susan and Benj.

‘It’s too far, and I don’t know what I’m running into,’ he replied. ‘If they’re in the interception area when I get there, I may whistle them up.’

The acknowledgement from the mother ship was barely audible, and Don switched off the set. It was time to look around.

He dimmed the cabin lights so that he could see the scanner screen more clearly, pulled the polaroid glasses down over his eyes, and peered into the depths. This was the moment when Don felt like a god, able to hold within his hands a circle of the Atlantic twenty miles across, and to see clear down to the still-unexplored depths, three thousand fathoms below. The slowly rotating beam of inaudible sound was searching the world in which he floated, seeking out friend and foe in the eternal darkness where light could never penetrate. The pattern of soundless shrieks, too shrill even for the hearing of the bats who had invented sonar a million years before man, pulsed out into the watery night: the faint echoes came tingling back as floating, blue-green flecks on the screen.

Through long practice, Don could read their message with effortless ease. A thousand feet below, stretching out to his submerged horizon, was the scattering layer – the blanket of life that covered half the world. The sunken meadow of the sea, it rose and fell with the passage of the sun, hovering always at the edge of darkness. But the ultimate depths were no concern of his. The flocks he guarded, and the enemies who ravaged them, belonged to the upper levels of the sea.