Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (50 page)

The ground was quite flat again, and the road drove on straight as an arrow. There was one gleam of consolation: Port Sanderson could not be much more than two miles away. Armstrong had no idea how long he had been on the road. Unfortunately his watch was not illuminated and he could only guess at the passage of time. With any luck, the ‘Canopus’ should not take off for another two hours at least. But he could not be sure, and now another fear began to enter his mind – the dread that he might see a vast constellation of lights rising swiftly into the sky ahead, and know that all this agony of mind had been in vain.

He was not zigzagging so badly now, and seemed to be able to anticipate the edge of the road before stumbling off it. It was probable, he cheered himself by thinking, that he was travelling almost as fast as if he had a light. If all went well, he might be nearing Port Sanderson in thirty minutes – a ridiculously small space of time. How he would laugh at his fears when he strolled into his already reserved stateroom in the ‘Canopus’, and felt that peculiar quiver as the phantom drive hurled the great ship far out of this system, back to the clustered starclouds near the centre of the Galaxy – back toward Earth itself, which he had not seen for so many years. One day, he told himself, he really must visit Earth again. All his life he had been making the promise, but always there had been the same answer – lack of time. Strange, wasn’t it, that such a tiny planet should have played so enormous a part in the development of the Universe, should even have come to dominate worlds far wiser and more intelligent than itself!

Armstrong’s thoughts were harmless again, and he felt calmer. The knowledge that he was nearing Port Sanderon was immensely reassuring, and he deliberately kept his mind on familiar, unimportant matters. Carver’s Pass was already far behind, and with it that thing he no longer intended to recall. One day, if he ever returned to this world, he would visit the pass in the daytime and laugh at his fears. In twenty minutes now, they would have joined the nightmares of his childhood.

It was almost a shock, though one of the most pleasant he had ever known, when he saw the lights of Port Sanderson come up over the horizon. The curvature of this little world was very deceptive: it did not seem right that a planet with a gravity almost as great as Earth’s should have a horizon so close at hand. One day, someone would have to discover what lay at this world’s core to give it so great a density. Perhaps the many tunnels would help – it was an unfortunate turn of thought, but the nearness of his goal had robbed it of terror now. Indeed, the thought that he might really be in danger seemed to give his adventure a certain piquancy and heightened interest. Nothing could happen to him now, with ten minutes to go and the lights of the Port already in sight.

A few minutes later, his feelings changed abruptly when he came to the sudden bend in the road. He had forgotten the chasm that caused his detour, and added half a mile to the journey. Well, what of it? he thought stubbornly. An extra half-mile would make no difference now – another ten minutes, at the most.

It was very disappointing when the lights of the city vanished. Armstrong had not remembered the hill which the road was skirting; perhaps it was only a low ridge, scarcely noticeable in the daytime. But by hiding the lights of the port it had taken away his chief talisman and left him again at the mercy of his fears.

Very unreasonably, his intelligence told him, he began to think how horrible it would be if anything happened now, so near the end of the journey. He kept the worst of his fears at bay for a while, hoping desperately that the lights of the city would soon reappear. But as the minutes dragged on, he realised that the ridge must be longer than he imagined. He tried to cheer himself by the thought that the city would be all the nearer when he saw it again, but somehow logic seemed to have failed him now. For presently he found himself doing something he had not stooped to, even out in the waste by Carver’s Pass.

He stopped, turned slowly round, and with bated breath listened until his lungs were nearly bursting.

The silence was uncanny, considering how near he must be to the Port. There was certainly no sound from behind him. Of course there wouldn’t be, he told himself angrily. But he was immensely relieved. The thought of that faint and insistent clicking had been haunting him for the last hour.

So friendly and familiar was the noise that did reach him at last that the anticlimax almost made him laugh aloud. Drifting through the still air from a source clearly not more than a mile away came the sound of a landing-field tractor, perhaps one of the machines loading the ‘Canopus’ itself. In a matter of seconds, thought Armstrong, he would be around this ridge with the Port only a few hundred yards ahead. The journey was nearly ended. In a few moments, this evil plain would be no more than a fading nightmare.

It seemed terribly unfair: so little time, such a small fraction of a human life, was all he needed now. But the gods have always been unfair to man, and now they were enjoying their little jest. For there could be no mistaking the rattle of monstrous claws in the darkness
ahead of him
.

Silence Please

First published in
Science-Fantasy
, Winter 1950 as ‘Silence Please!’ as by ‘Charles Willis’

Collected in
Tales from the White Hart

Negative feedback noise eliminators are now on the market – and already have many engineering applications. I recently purchased a pair of earphones that were supposed to eliminate ambient sound: however, I doubt if anything as versatile as the Fenton Silencer will ever be on the market.

You come upon the ‘White Hart’ quite unexpectedly in one of these anonymous little lanes leading down from Fleet Street to the Embankment. It’s no use
telling
you where it is: very few people who have set out in a determined effort to get there have ever actually arrived. For the first dozen visits a guide is essential: after that you’ll probably be all right if you close your eyes and rely on instinct. Also – to be perfectly frank – we don’t want any more customers, at least on
our
night. The place is already uncomfortably crowded. All that I’ll say about its location is that it shakes occasionally with the vibration of newspaper presses, and that if you crane out of the window of the gents’ room you can just see the Thames.

From the outside, it looks like any other pub – as indeed it is for five days of the week. The public and saloon bars are on the ground floor: there are the usual vistas of brown oak panelling and frosted glass, the bottles behind the bar, the handles of the beer engines … nothing out of the ordinary at all. Indeed, the only concession to the twentieth century is the jukebox in the public bar. It was installed during the war in a laughable attempt to make G.I.s feel at home, and one of the first things we did was to make sure there was no danger of its ever working again.

At this point I had better explain who ‘we’ are. That is not as easy as I thought it was going to be when I started, for a complete catalogue of the ‘White Hart’s’ clients would probably be impossible and would certainly be excruciatingly tedious. So all I’ll say at this point is that ‘we’ fall into three main classes. First there are the journalists, writers and editors. The journalists, of course, gravitated here from Fleet Street. Those who couldn’t make the grade fled elsewhere; the tougher ones remained. As for the writers, most of them heard about us from other writers, came here for copy, and got trapped.

Where there are writers, of course, there are sooner or later editors. If Drew, our landlord, got a percentage on the literary business done in his bar, he’d be a rich man. (We suspect he is a rich man, anyway.) One of our wits once remarked that it was a common sight to see half a dozen indignant authors arguing with a hard-faced editor in one corner of the ‘White Hart’, while in another, half a dozen indignant editors argued with a hard-faced author.

So much for the literary side: you will have, I’d better warn you, ample opportunities for close-ups later. Now let us glance briefly at the scientists. How did
they
get in here?

Well, Birkbeck College is only across the road, and King’s is just a few hundred yards along the Strand. That’s doubtless part of the explanation, and again personal recommendation had a lot to do with it. Also, many of our scientists are writers, and not a few of our writers are scientists. Confusing, but we like it that way.

The third portion of our little microcosm consists of what may be loosely termed ‘interested laymen’. They were attracted to the ‘White Hart’, by the general brouhaha, and enjoyed the conversation and company so much that they now come along regularly every Wednesday – which is the day when we all get together. Sometimes they can’t stand the pace and fall by the wayside, but there’s always a fresh supply.

With such potent ingredients, it is hardly surprising that Wednesday at the ‘White Hart’ is seldom dull. Not only have some remarkable stories been told there, but remarkable things have
happened
there. For example, there was the time when Professor—, passing through on his way to Harwell left behind a briefcase containing – well, we’d better not go into that, even though we did so at the time. And most interesting it was, too…. Any Russian agents will find me in the corner under the dartboard. I come high, but easy terms can be arranged.

Now that I’ve finally thought of the idea, it seems astonishing to me that none of my colleagues has ever got round to writing up these stories. Is it a question of being so close to the wood that they can’t see the trees? Or is it lack of incentive? No, the last explanation can hardly hold: several of them are quite as hard up as I am, and have complained with equal bitterness about Drew’s ‘NO CREDIT’ rule. My only fear, as I type these words on my old Remington Noiseless, is that John Christopher or George Whitley or John Beynon are already hard at work using up the best material. Such as, for instance, the story of the Fenton Silencer …

I don’t know when it began: one Wednesday is much like another and it’s hard to tag dates onto them. Besides, people may spend a couple of months lost in the ‘White Hart’ crowd before you first notice their existence. That had probably happened to Harry Purvis, because when I first became aware of him he already knew the names of most of the people in our crowd. Which is more than I do these days, now that I come to think of it.

But though I don’t know
when
, I know exactly
how
it all started. Bert Huggins was the catalyst, or, to be more accurate, his voice was. Bert’s voice would catalyse anything. When he indulges in a confidential whisper, it sounds like a sergeant major drilling an entire regiment. And when he lets himself go, conversation languishes elsewhere while we all wait for those cute little bones in the inner ear to resume their accustomed places.

He had just lost his temper with John Christopher (we all do this at some time or other) and the resulting detonation had disturbed the chess game in progress at the back of the saloon bar. As usual, the two players were surrounded by backseat drivers, and we all looked up with a start as Bert’s blast whammed overhead. When the echoes died away, someone said: ‘I wish there was a way of shutting him up.’

It was then that Harry Purvis replied: ‘There is, you know.’

Not recognising the voice, I looked round. I saw a small, neatly dressed man in the late thirties. He was smoking one of those carved German pipes that always make me think of cuckoo clocks and the Black Forest. That was the only unconventional thing about him: otherwise he might have been a minor Treasury official all dressed up to go to a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

He took no notice, but made some delicate adjustments to his pipe. It was then that I noticed that it wasn’t, as I’d thought at first glance, an elaborate piece of wood carving. It was something much more sophisticated – a contraption of metal and plastic like a small chemical engineering plant. There were even a couple of minute valves. My God, it
was
a chemical engineering plant….

I don’t goggle any more easily than the next man, but I made no attempt to hide my curiosity. He gave me a superior smile.

‘All for the cause of science. It’s an idea of the Biophysics Lab. They want to find out exactly what there is in tobacco smoke – hence these filters. You know the old argument –
does
smoking cause cancer of the tongue, and if so, how? The trouble is that it takes an awful lot of – er – distillate to identify some of the obscurer byproducts. So we have to do a lot of smoking.’

‘Doesn’t it spoil the pleasure to have all this plumbing in the way?’

‘I don’t know. You see, I’m just a volunteer. I don’t smoke.’

‘Oh,’ I said. For the moment, that seemed the only reply. Then I remembered how the conversation had started.

‘You were saying,’ I continued with some feeling, for there was still a slight tinnitus in my left ear, ‘that there was some way of shutting up Bert. We’d all like to hear it – if that isn’t mixing metaphors somewhat.’

‘I was thinking,’ he replied, after a couple of experimental sucks and blows, ‘of the ill-fated Fenton Silencer. A sad story – yet, I feel, one with an interesting lesson for us all. And one day – who knows? – someone
may
perfect it and earn the blessings of the world.’