Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (3 page)

After that we went through in turns, found the experience quite painless, and decided to put the device on the market. I expect you can remember the excitement there was when we first demonstrated our little toy to the Press. Of course we had the dickens of a job convincing them that it wasn’t a fake, and they didn’t really believe it until they had been through the transporter themselves. We drew the line, though, at Lord Rosscastle, who would have blown the fuses even if we could have got him into the transmitter.

This demonstration gave us so much publicity that we had no trouble at all in forming a company. We bade a reluctant farewell to the Research Foundation, told the remaining scientists that perhaps one day we’d heap coals of fire on their heads by sending them a few millions, and started to design our first commercial senders and receivers.

The first service was inaugurated on May 10th, 1962. The ceremony took place in London, at the transmitting end, though at the Paris receiver there were enormous crowds watching to see the first passengers arrive, and probably hoping they wouldn’t. Amid cheers from the assembled thousands, the Prime Minister pressed a button (which wasn’t connected to anything), the chief engineer threw a switch (which was) and a large Union Jack faded from view and appeared again in Paris, rather to the annoyance of some patriotic Frenchmen.

After that, passengers began to stream through at a rate which left the Customs officials helpless. The service was a great and instantaneous success, as we only charged £2 per person. This we considered very moderate, for the electricity used cost quite one-hundredth of a penny.

Before long we had services to all the big cities of Europe, by cable that is, not radio. A wired system was safer, though it was dreadfully difficult to lay polyaxial cables, costing £500 a mile, under the Channel. Then, in conjunction with the Post Office, we began to develop internal services between the large towns. You may remember our slogans ‘Travel by Phone’ and ‘It’s quicker by Wire’ which were heard everywhere in 1963. Soon, practically everyone used our circuits and we were handling thousands of tons of freight per day.

Naturally, there were accidents, but we could point out that we had done what no Minister of Transport had ever done, reduced road fatalities to a mere ten thousand a year. We lost one client in six million, which was pretty good even to start with, though our record is even better now. Some of the mishaps that occurred were very peculiar indeed, and in fact there are quite a few cases which we haven’t explained to the dependants yet, or to the insurance companies either.

One common complaint was earthing along the line. When that happened, our unfortunate passenger was just dissipated into nothingness. I suppose his or her molecules would be distributed more or less evenly over the entire earth. I remember one particularly gruesome accident when the apparatus failed in the middle of a transmission. You can guess the result … Perhaps even worse was what happened when two lines got crossed and the currents were mixed.

Of course, not all accidents were as bad as these. Sometimes, owing to a high resistance in the circuit, a passenger would lose anything up to five stone in transit, which generally cost us about £1000 and enough free meals to restore the missing embonpoint. Fortunately, we were soon able to make money out of this affair, for fat people came along to be reduced to manageable dimensions. We made a special apparatus which transmitted massive dowagers round resistance coils and reassembled them where they started, minus the cause of the trouble. ‘So quick, my dear, and
quite
painless! I’m
sure
they could take off that 150 pounds you want to lose in no time! Or is it 200?’

We also had a good deal of trouble through interference and induction. You see, our apparatus picked up various electrical disturbances and superimposed them on the object under transmission. As a result many people came out looking like nothing on earth and very little on Mars or Venus. They could usually be straightened out by the plastic surgeons, but some of the products had to be seen to be believed.

Fortunately these difficulties have been largely overcome now that we use the micro-beams for our carrier, though now and then accidents still occur. I expect you remember that big lawsuit we had last year with Lita Cordova, the television star, who claimed £1,000,000 damages from us for alleged loss of beauty. She asserted that one of her eyes had moved during a transmission, but I couldn’t see any difference myself and nor could the jury, who had enough opportunity. She had hysterics in the court when our Chief Electrician went into the box and said bluntly, to the alarm of both side’s lawyers, that if anything really
had
gone wrong with the transmission, Miss Cordova wouldn’t have been able to recognise herself had any cruel person handed her a mirror.

Lots of people ask us when we’ll have a service to Venus or Mars. Doubtless that will come in time, but of course the difficulties are pretty considerable. There is so much sun static in space, not to mention the various reflecting layers everywhere. Even the micro-waves are stopped by the Appleton ‘Q’ layer at 100,000 km, you know. Until we can pierce that, Interplanetary shares are still safe.

Well, I see it’s nearly 22, so I’d best be leaving. I have to be in New York by midnight. What’s that? Oh no, I’m going by plane.
I
don’t travel by wire! You see, I helped invent the thing!

Rockets for me! Good night!

How We Went to Mars

First published in
Amateur Science Fiction Stories
, March 1938

Not previously collected in book form

This story was first published in the third and final issue of
Amateur Science Fiction Stories
, edited by Douglas W. F. Mayer.

(N.B. All characters in this story are entirely fictitious and only exist in the Author’s subconscious. Psychoanalysts please apply at the Tradesmens’ Entrance.)

It is with considerable trepidation that I now take up my pen to describe the incredible adventures that befell the members of the Snoring-in-the-Hay Rocket Society in the Winter of 1952. Although we would have preferred posterity to be our judge, the members of the society of which I am proud to be President, Secretary and Treasurer, feel that we cannot leave unanswered the accusations – nay, calumnies – made by envious rivals as to our integrity, sobriety and even sanity.

In this connection I would like to take the opportunity of dealing with the fantastic statements regarding our achievements made in the ‘Daily Drool’ by Prof. Swivel and in the ‘Weekly Washout’ by Dr Sprocket, but unfortunately space does not permit. In any case, I sincerely hope that no intelligent reader was deceived by these persons’ vapourings.

No doubt most of you will recollect the tremendous awakening of public interest in the science of rocketry caused by the celebrated case in 1941 of ‘Rex v. British Rocket Society’, and its still more celebrated sequel, ‘British Rocket Society v. Rex.’ The first case, which was started when a five ton rocket descended in the Houses of Parliament upon Admiral Sir Horatio ffroth-ffrenzy, M.P., K.C.B., H.P., D.T., after a most successful stratosphere flight, may be said to have resulted in a draw, thanks to the efforts of Sir Hatrick Pastings, K.C., whom the B.R.S. had managed to brief as a result of their success in selling lunar real estate at exorbitant prices. The appeal brought by the B.R.S. against the restrictions of the 1940 (Rocket Propulsion) Act was an undoubted victory for the society, as the explosion in court of a demonstration model removed all opposition and most of Temple Bar. Incidently, it has recently been discovered after extensive excavations that there were no members of the B.R.S. in the court at the time of the disaster – rather an odd coincidence. Moreover, both the survivors state that a few minutes before the explosion, Mr Hector Heptane, the President of the Society, passed very close to the rocket and then left the court hurriedly. Although an enquiry was started, it was then too late as Mr Heptane had already left for Russia, in order, as he put it, ‘to continue work unhampered by the toils of capitalist enterprise, in a country where workers and scientists are properly rewarded by the gratitude of their comrades’. But I digress.

It was not until the repeal of the 1940 Act that progress could continue in England, when a fresh impetus was given to the movement by the discovery in Surrey of a large rocket labelled ‘Property of the USSR. Please return to Omsk’ – obviously one of Mr Heptane’s. A flight from Omsk to England (though quite understandable) was certainly a remarkable achievement, and not until many years later was it discovered that the rocket had been dropped from an aeroplane by the members of the Hickleborough Rocket Association, who even in those days were expert publicity hunters.

By 1945 there were a score of societies in the country, each spreading destruction over rapidly widening areas. My society, though only founded in 1949, already has to its credit one church, two Methodist chapels, five cinemas, seventeen trust houses, and innumerable private residences, some as far away as Weevil-in-the-Wurzle and Little Dithering. However, there can be no doubt in unprejudiced minds that the sudden collapse of the lunar crater Vitus was caused by one of our rockets, in spite of the claims of the French, German, American, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Swiss and Danish Societies (to mention only a few), all of whom, we are asked to believe, dispatched rockets moonwards a few days before the phenomenon was witnessed.

At first we contented ourselves with firing large models to considerable heights. These test rockets were fitted with recording baro-thermographs, etc. and our lawyers kept us fully informed as to their landing places. We were progressing very favourably with this important work when the unwarrantable defection of our insurance company forced us to start work on a large, man-carrying space-ship. We already had a sufficiently powerful fuel, details of which I cannot divulge here, save to say that it was a complex hydro-carbon into which our chemist, Dr Badstoff, had with great ingenuity introduced no less than sixteen quadruple carbon bonds. This new fuel was so violent that at first it caused a rapid change in our personnel, but by continued research it had been stabilised until the explosion took place when expected on 97½ occasions out of 100 – in which it showed its immense superiority over Dr Sprocket’s triple heavy hyper-hyzone (20 occasions in 100) and Prof. Swivel’s nitrogen heptafluoride (probability of non-explosion incommensurable).

The ship itself was thirty metres long and was made of moulded neo-bakelite with crystallux windows, and consisted of two steps, which were ample thanks to our new fuel. The whole thing would have cost a great deal of money had we intended to pay for it. The rocket motors were made of one of the new boro-silicon alloys and had an operating time of several minutes. Apart from these features, our ship did not differ materially from any other designed previously, except in so far that it had actually been constructed. We had no intention of venturing far out into space on our first flight, but circumstances of which I shall relate altered our plans in an unforeseen manner.

On the lst of April, 1952, everything was ready for a preliminary flight. I broke the customary vacuum flask on the prow of the ship, christened it the ‘Pride of the Galaxy’, and we (this is, myself and the five surviving members of the council of twenty-five) entered the cabin and carefully sealed the door, squeezing chewing gum into all the cracks.

The ship itself was resting on a balloon-type undercarriage and we had a straight run of two miles over various people’s lawns and gardens. We intended to rise to a height of a few hundred miles and then to glide back to earth, landing as best we could with little regard to life or property save our own.

I seated myself at the controls and the others lay in the compensating hammocks which we hoped
might
save us from the shock of the take-off. In any case every space-ship has them and we could hardly do otherwise. With an expression of grim determination, which I had to assume several times before Ivan Schnitzel, our official photographer, was satisfied, I pressed the starting button and – rather to our surprise – the ship began to move.

After leaving our grounds it tore through a fence into a vegetable garden which it rapidly converted into a ploughed field, and then passed over a large lawn doing comparatively little damage apart from setting fire to a few greenhouses. By now we were nearing a row of buildings which might offer some resistance, and as we had not yet lifted, I turned the power full on. With a tremendous roar, the ship leapt into the air, and amid the groans of my companions I lost consciousness.

When I recovered, I realised that we were in space and jumped to my feet to see if we were falling back to earth. But I had forgotten my weightless condition and crashed head first against the ceiling, once more losing consciousness.

When I recovered, I very carefully made my way to the window and with relief saw that we were now floating back to earth. My relief was short-lived when I found that the earth was nowhere in sight! I at once realised that we must have been unconscious for a very long time – my less robust companions still lay in a coma, or rather several comas, at the end of the cabin, the hammocks having given way under the strain, to the detriment of their occupants.

I first inspected the machinery, which so far as I could tell seemed intact, and then set about reviving my companions. This I readily did by pouring a little liquid air down their necks. When all were conscious (or as nearly so as could be expected in the circumstances), I rapidly outlined the situation and explained the need for complete calm. After the resulting hysteria had subsided, I asked for volunteers to go outside in a space suit and inspect the ship. I am sorry to say that I had to go myself.