Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (101 page)

‘You can’t really mean it, Bill! Are
all
human beings like you?’

Now that was an interesting philosophical question! Bill considered it carefully – or as carefully as he could in view of the warm, rosy glow that was now beginning to envelop him. After all, things might be worse. He could get another job, if only for the pleasure of telling General Porter what he could do with his three stars. And as for Brenda – well, women were like streetcars; there’d always be another along in a minute.

Best of all, there was a second bottle of whisky in the Top Secret file. Oh, frabjous day! He rose unsteadily to his feet and wavered across the room.

For the last time, Thaar spoke to Earth.

‘Bill!’ it repeated desperately. ‘Surely all human beings can’t be like you!’

Bill turned and looked into the swirling tunnel. Strange – it seemed to be lighted with flecks of starlight, and was really rather pretty. He felt proud of himself: not many people could imagine
that
.

‘Like me?’ he said. ‘No, they’re not.’ He smiled smugly across the light-years, as the rising tide of euphoria lifted him out of his despondency. ‘Come to think of it,’ he added, ‘there are a lot of people much worse off than me. Yes, I guess I must be one of the lucky ones, after all.’

He blinked in mild surprise, for the tunnel had suddenly collapsed upon itself and the whitewashed wall was there again, exactly as it had always been. Thaar knew when it was beaten.

‘So much for
that
hallucination,’ thought Bill. ‘I was getting tired of it, anyway. Let’s see what the next one’s like.’

As it happened, there wasn’t a next one, for five seconds later he passed out cold, just as he was getting the combination of the file cabinet.

The next two days were rather vague and bloodshot, and he forgot all about the interview.

On the third day something was nagging at the back of his mind: he might have remembered if Brenda hadn’t turned up again and kept him busy being forgiving.

And there wasn’t a fourth day, of course.

Big Game Hunt

First appeared in
Adventure
, October 1956 as ‘The Reckless Ones’

Collected in
Tales from the White Hart

As I write these words, Jean-Michel Cousteau is on his way to New Zealand to look for the giant squid. I’m not sure whether to wish him luck – see ‘The Shining Ones’.

Although by general consent Harry Purvis stands unrivalled among the ‘White Hart’ clientele as a purveyor of remarkable stories (some of which, we suspect, may be slightly exaggerated) it must not be thought that his position has never been challenged. There have even been occasions when he has gone into temporary eclipse. Since it is always entertaining to watch the discomfiture of an expert, I must confess that I take a certain glee in recalling how Professor Hinckleberg disposed of Harry on his own home ground.

Many visiting Americans pass through the ‘White Hart’ in the course of the year. Like the residents, they are usually scientists or literary men, and some distinguished names have been recorded in the visitors’ book that Drew keeps behind the bar. Sometimes the newcomers arrive under their own power, diffidently introducing themselves as soon as they have the opportunity. (There was the time when a shy Nobel Prize winner sat unrecognised in a corner for an hour before he plucked up enough courage to say who he was.) Others arrive with letters of introduction, and not a few are escorted in by regular customers and then thrown to the wolves.

Professor Hinckleberg glided up one night in a vast fishtailed Cadillac he’d borrowed from the fleet in Grosvenor Square. Heavens only knows how he had managed to insinuate it through the side streets that lead to the ‘White Hart’, but amazingly enough all the fenders seemed intact. He was a large lean man, with that Henry Ford–Wilbur Wright kind of face that usually goes with the slow, taciturn speech of the sun-tanned pioneer. It didn’t in Professor Hinckleberg’s case. He could talk like an LP record on a seventy-eight turntable. In about ten seconds we’d discovered that he was a zoologist on leave of absence from a North Virginia college, that he was attached to the Office of Naval Research on some project to do with plankton, that he was tickled pink with London and even liked English beer, that he’d heard about us through a letter in
Science
but couldn’t believe we were true, that Stevenson was OK but if the Democrats wanted to get back they’d better import Winston, that he’d like to know what the heck was wrong with all our telephone call boxes and could he retrieve the small fortune in coppers of which they had mulcted him, that there seemed to be a lot of empty glasses around and how about filling them up, boys?

On the whole the Professor’s shock tactics were well received, but when he made a momentary pause for breath I thought to myself, ‘Harry’d better look out. This guy can talk rings round him.’ I glanced at Purvis, who was only a few feet away from me, and saw that his lips were pursed into a slight frown. I sat back luxuriously and awaited results.

As it was a fairly busy evening, it was quite some time before Professor Hinckleberg had been introduced to everybody. Harry, usually so forward at meeting celebrities, seemed to be keeping out of the way. But eventually he was concerned by Arthur Vincent, who acts as informal club secretary and makes sure that everyone signs the visitors’ book.

‘I’m sure you and Harry will have a lot to talk about,’ said Arthur, in a burst of innocent enthusiasm. ‘You’re both scientists, aren’t you? And Harry’s had some most extraordinary things happen to him. Tell the Professor about the time you found that U235 in your letter box….’

‘I don’t think,’ said Harry, a trifle too hastily, ‘that Professor – ah – Hinckleberg wants to listen to my little adventure. I’m sure he must have a lot to tell
us
.’

I’ve puzzled my head about that reply a good deal since then. It wasn’t in character. Usually, with an opening like this, Purvis was up and away. Perhaps he was sizing up the enemy, waiting for the Professor to make the first mistake, and then swooping in to the kill. If that was the explanation, he’d misjudged his man. He never had a chance, for Professor Hinckleberg made a jet-assisted take-off and was immediately in full flight.

‘Odd you should mention that,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been dealing with a most remarkable case. It’s one of these things that can’t be written up as a proper scientific paper, and this seems a good time to get it off my chest. I can’t often do that, because of this darned security – but so far no one’s gotten round to classifying Dr Grinnell’s experiments, so I’ll talk about them while I can.’

Grinnell, it seemed, was one of the many scientists trying to interpret the behaviour of the nervous system in terms of electrical circuits. He had started, as Grey Walter, Shannon and others had done, by making models that could reproduce the simpler actions of living creatures. His greatest success in this direction had been a mechanical cat that could chase mice and could land on its feet when dropped from a height. Very quickly, however, he had branched off in another direction owing to his discovery of what he called ‘neural induction’. This was, to simplify it greatly, nothing less than a method of actually
controlling
the behaviour of animals.

It had been known for many years that all the processes that take place in the mind are accompanied by the production of minute electric currents, and for a long time it has been possible to record these complex fluctuations – though their exact interpretation is still unknown. Grinnell had not attempted the intricate task of analysis; what he had done was a good deal simpler, though its achievement was still complicated enough. He had attached his recording device to various animals, and thus been able to build up a small library, if one could call it that, of electrical impulses associated with their behaviour. One pattern of voltage might correspond to a movement to the right, another with travelling in a circle, another with complete stillness, and so on. That was an interesting enough achievement, but Grinnell had not stopped there. By ‘playing back’ the impulses he had recorded, he could compel his subject to repeat their previous actions – whether they wanted to or not.

That such a thing might be possible in theory almost any neurologist would admit, but few would have believed that it could be done in practice owing to the enormous complexity of the nervous system. And it was true that Grinnell’s first experiments were carried out on very low forms of life, with relatively simple responses.

‘I saw only one of his experiments,’ said Hinckleberg. ‘There was a large slug crawling on a horizontal piece of glass, and half a dozen tiny wires led from it to a control panel which Grinnell was operating. There were two dials – that was all – and by suitable adjustments he could make the slug move in any direction. To a layman, it would have seemed a trivial experiment, but I realised that it might have tremendous implications. I remember telling Grinnell that I hoped his device could never be applied to human beings. I’d been reading Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and I could just imagine what Big Brother would do with a gadget like this.

‘Then, being a busy man, I forgot all about the matter for a year. By the end of that time, it seems, Grinnell had improved his apparatus considerably and had worked up to more complicated organisms, though for technical reasons he had restricted himself to invertebrates. He had now built up a substantial store of “orders” which he could then play back to his subjects. You might think it surprising that such diverse creatures as worms, snails, insects, crustaceans and so on would be able to respond to the same electrical commands, but apparently that was the case.

‘If it had not been for Dr Jackson, Grinnell would probably have stayed working away in the lab for the rest of his life, moving steadily up the animal kingdom. Jackson was a very remarkable man – I’m sure you must have seen some of his films. In many circles he was regarded as a publicity-hunter rather than a real scientist, and academic circles were suspicious of him because he had far too many interests. He’d led expeditions into the Gobi Desert, up the Amazon, and had even made one raid on the Antarctic. From each of these trips he had returned with a best-selling book and a few miles of Kodachrome. And despite reports to the contrary, I believe he
had
obtained some valuable scientific results, even if they were slightly incidental.

‘I don’t know how Jackson got to hear of Grinnell’s work, or how he talked the other man into co-operating. He could be very persuasive, and probably dangled vast appropriations before Grinnell’s eyes – for he was the sort of man who could get the ear of the trustees. Whatever happened, from that moment Grinnell became mysteriously secretive. All we knew was that he was building a much larger version of his apparatus, incorporating all the latest refinements. When challenged, he would squirm nervously and say, “We’re going big game hunting.”

‘The preparations took another year, and I expect that Jackson – who was always a hustler – must have been mighty impatient by the end of that time. But at last everything was ready. Grinnell and all his mysterious boxes vanished in the general direction of Africa.

‘
That
was Jackson’s work. I suppose he didn’t want any premature publicity, which was understandable enough when you consider the somewhat fantastic nature of the expedition. According to the hints with which he had – as we later discovered – carefully misled us all, he hoped to get some really remarkable pictures of animals in their wild state, using Grinnell’s apparatus. I found this rather hard to swallow, unless Grinnell had somehow succeeded in linking his device to a radio-transmitter. It didn’t seem likely that he’d be able to attach his wires and electrodes to a charging elephant….

‘They’d thought of that, of course, and the answer seems obvious now. Sea water is a good conductor. They weren’t going to Africa at all, but were heading out into the Atlantic. But they hadn’t lied to us. They were after big game, all right. The biggest game there is …

‘We’d never had known what happened if their radio operator hadn’t been chattering to an amateur friend over in the States. From his commentary it’s possible to guess the sequence of events. Jackson’s ship – it was only a small yacht, bought up cheaply and converted for the expedition – was lying not far from the Equator off the west coast of Africa, and over the deepest part of the Atlantic. Grinnell was angling: his electrodes had been lowered into the abyss, while Jackson waited impatiently with his camera.

‘They waited a week before they had a catch. By that time, tempers must have been rather frayed. Then, one afternoon on a perfectly calm day, Grinnell’s meters started to jump. Something was caught in the sphere of influence of the electrodes.

‘Slowly, they drew up the cable. Until now, the rest of the crew must have thought them mad, but everyone must have shared their excitement as the catch rose up through all those thousands of feet of darkness until it broke surface. Who can blame the radio operator if, despite Jackson’s orders, he felt an urgent need to talk things over with a friend back on the safety of dry land?

‘I won’t attempt to describe what they saw, because a master has done it before me. Soon after the report came in, I turned up my copy of
Moby Dick
and reread the passage; I can still quote it from memory and don’t suppose I’ll ever forget it. This is how it goes, more or less: