The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Clarke is a curiously free man. There is a detachment about him which seems less a traditional “British reserve” than a sort of disassociation from the gravity-ridden surface world—as if his true home were in free-fall space, or perhaps in free-floating oceanic deeps. He approaches his multiple interests with a sort of visitor-on-Earth enthusiasm: I have seen him display, with equal delight, gold coins from a treasure-hunt diving trip; a new press release on the Kubrick collaboration; a hotel-window view of New York’s skyline through his new Questar telescope; and the plastic-label-maker with which he was turning out stick-ups for his one-man campaign: HELP STAMP OUT POP ART!

He is, generally, a vigorous man with an opinion. In an article in Playboy last year, “The Meddlers,” he wrote: “A certain amount of meddling is an excellent thing. It laid the foundations of experimental science and modern technology. But the intelligent meddler must abide by a few commonsense rules, of which the most important are: (1) Do not attempt the unforseeable; (2) do not commit the irrevocable.”

“Intelligent meddler” is probably as good a description of “experimental scientist” as any other. And certain qualities are necessary for the job: a capacity for detailed research; a faculty for accurate extrapolation (or hunch, or precognition); and (for intelligent meddling) a recognition of the human values involved.

In a survey conducted by the fan magazine Double Bill, Clarke gave as his reason for writing science fiction: “Because most other literature isn’t concerned with reality.”

And of course it is also true that certain qualities are essential to the good science-fiction writer; the ability to project future hunches (or precognitions, or extrapolations) must rest on a capacity for detailed, accurate research; and it cannot be good fiction of any sort unless the author has a deep awareness of the human (or other) elements involved.

When the switchboard said that the Soviet Embassy was on the line, my first reaction was: “Good—another job!” But the moment I heard Goncharov’s voice, I knew there was trouble.

“Klaus? This is Mikhail. Can you come over at once? It’s very urgent, and I can’t talk on the phone.”

I worried all through the 20-minute drive to Geneva, marshaling my defenses in case anything had gone wrong at our end. But I could think of nothing; at the moment, we had no outstanding contracts with the Russians. The last job had been completed six months before, on time, and to their entire satisfaction.

Well, they were not satisfied with it now, as I discovered quickly enough. Mikhail Goncharov, the commercial attaché, was an old friend of mine; he told me all he knew, but it was not very much.

“We’ve just had an urgent cable from Ceylon,” he said.

“They want you out there immediately. There’s serious trouble at the hydrothermal project.”

“What sort of trouble?” I asked. I knew at once, of course, that it would be the deep end, for that was the only part of the installation that had concerned us. The Russians themselves had done all the work on land—but they had had to call on us to fix those grids, 3,000 feet down in the Indian Ocean. There is no other firm in the world that can live up to our motto: “any job, any depth.”

“All I know,” said Goncharov, “is that the site engineers report a complete breakdown, that the Prime Minister of Ceylon is opening the plant three weeks from now and that Moscow will be very, very unhappy if it’s not working then.”

My mind went rapidly through the penalty clauses in our contract. The firm seemed to be covered, because the client had signed the take-over certificate, thereby admitting that the job was up to specification. However, it was not as simple as that; if negligence on our part were proved, we might be safe from legal action, but it would be very bad for business. And it would be even worse for me, personally; for I had been project supervisor in Trinco Deep.

Don’t call me a diver, please; I hate the name. I’m a deep-sea engineer, and I use diving gear about as often as an airman uses a parachute. Most of my work is done with TV and remote-controlled robots; when I do have to go down myself, I’m inside a minisub with external manipulators. We call it a lobster because of its claws; the standard model works down to 5,000 feet, but there are special versions that will operate at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. I’ve never been there myself, but will be glad to quote terms if you’re interested. At a rough estimate, it will cost you a dollar a foot plus a thousand an hour on the job itself.

I realized that the Russians meant business when Goncharov said that a jet was waiting at Zurich, and could I be at the airport within two hours?

“Look,” I said. “I can’t do a thing without equipment— and the gear needed even for an inspection weighs tons. Besides, it’s all at Spezia.”

“I know,” Mikhail answered implacably. “We’ll have another jet transport there. Cable from Ceylon as soon as you know what you want: it will be on the site within twelve hours. But please don’t talk to anyone about this; we prefer to keep our problems to ourselves.”

I agreed with this, for it was my problem, too. As I left the office, Mikhail pointed to the wall calendar, said “Three weeks,” and ran his finger across his throat. And I knew he wasn’t thinking of his neck.

Two hours later I was climbing over the Alps, saying goodbye to the family by radio and wondering why, like every other sensible Swiss, I hadn’t become a banker or gone into the watch business. It was all the fault of the Piccards and Hannes Keller, I told myself moodily; why did they have to start this deep-sea tradition, in Switzerland of all countries? Then I settled down to sleep, knowing that I would have little enough in the days to come.

We landed at Trincomalee just after dawn, and the huge, complex harbor—whose geography I’ve never quite mastered—was a maze of capes, islands, interconnecting waterways and basins large enough to hold all the navies of the world. I could see the big white control building, in a somewhat flamboyant architectural style, on a headland overlooking the Indian Ocean. The siting was pure propaganda—though of course if I’d been Russian I’d have called it “public relations.”

Not that I really blamed my clients; they had good reason to be proud of this, the most ambitious attempt yet made to harness the thermal energy of the sea. It was not the first attempt; there had been an unsuccessful one by the French scientist Georges Claude in the 1930’s and a much bigger one at Abidjan, on the west coast of Africa, in the 1950’s.

All these projects depended on the same surprising fact —that even in the tropics the sea a mile down is almost at freezing point. Where billions of tons of water are concerned, this temperature difference represents a colossal amount of energy and a fine challenge to the engineers of power-starved countries.

Claude and his successors had tried to tap this energy with low-pressure steam engines; the Russians had used a much simpler and more direct method. For over a hundred years it had beep known that electric currents flow in many materials if one end is heated and the other cooled; and ever since the 1940’s Russian scientists had been working to put this “thermoelectric” effect to practical use. Their earliest devices had not been very efficient—though good enough to power thousands of radios by the heat of kerosene lamps—but in 1974 they had made a big, and still secret, breakthrough. Though I fixed the power elements at the cold end of the system, I never really saw them; they were completely hidden in anticorrosive covering. All I know is that they formed a big grid like lots of old-fashioned steam radiators bolted together.