Tales from the White Hart (Arthur C. Clarke Collection: Short Stories)

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Major Fotheringham, looking a little puzzled, turned to the prosecution lawyer.

  “Mr. Whiting,” he said, “have you any questions to ask the witness?”

  “I certainly have, your Honor. I’ve never heard such a ridiculous—”

  “You will please confine yourself to questions of fact.”

  “Very good, your Honor. May I ask the witness how he accounts for the large quantity of alcohol vapor immediately after the explosion?”

  “I rather doubt if the inspector’s nose was capable of accurate quantitative analysis. But admittedly there was some alcohol vapor released. The solution used in the bomb contained about 25 percent. By employing dilute alcohol, the mobility of the inorganic ions is restricted and the osmotic pressure raised—a desirable effect, of course.”

  That should hold them for a while, thought Harry. He was right. It was a good couple of minutes before the second question. Then the prosecution’s spokesman waved one of the pieces of copper tubing in the air.

  “What function did these carry out?” he said, in as nasty a tone of voice as he could manage. Harry affected not to notice the sneer.

  “Manometer tubing for the pressure gauges,” he replied promptly.

  The Bench, it was clear, was already far out of its depth. This was just where Harry wanted it to be. But the prosecution still had one card up its sleeve. There was a furtive whispering between the exciseman and his legal eagle. Harry looked nervously at Uncle Homer, who shrugged his shoulders with a “Don’t ask me!” gesture.

  “I have some additional evidence I wish to present to the Court,” said the Customs lawyer briskly, as a bulky brown paper parcel was hoisted on to the table.

  “Is this in order, your Honor?” protested Harry. “All evidence against my—ah—colleague should already have been presented.”

  “I withdraw my statement,” the lawyer interjected swiftly. “Let us say that this is not evidence for this case, but material for later proceedings.” He paused ominously to let that sink in. “Nevertheless, if Mr. Ferguson can give a satisfactory answer to our questions now, this whole business can be cleared up right away.” It was obvious that the last thing the speaker expected—or hoped for—was such a satisfactory explanation.

  He unwrapped the brown paper, and there were three bottles of a famous brand of whiskey.

  “Uh-huh,” said Uncle Homer. “I was wondering—”

  “Mr. Ferguson,” said the Chairman of the Bench. “There is no need for you to make any statement unless you wish.”

  Harry Purvis shot Major Fotheringham a grateful glance. He guessed what had happened. The prosecution had, when prowling through the ruins of Uncle’s laboratory, acquired some bottles of his home-brew. Their action was probably illegal, since they would not have had a search-warrant—hence the reluctance in producing the evidence. The case had seemed sufficiently clear-cut without it.

  It certainly appeared pretty clear-cut now.…

  “These bottles,” said the representative of the Crown, “do not contain the brand advertised on the label. They have obviously been used as convenient receptacles for the defendent’s—shall we say—chemical solutions.” He gave Harry Purvis an unsympathetic glance. “We have had these solutions analyzed, with most interesting results. Apart from an abnormally high alcohol concentration, the contents of these bottles are virtually indistinguishable from—”

  He never had time to finish his unsolicited and certainly unwanted testimonial to Uncle Homer’s skill. For at that moment, Harry Purvis became aware of an ominous whistling sound. At first he thought it was a falling bomb—but that seemed unlikely, as there had been no air raid warning. Then he realized that the whistling came from close at hand; from the courtroom table, in fact.…

  “Take cover!” he yelled.

  The Court went into recess with a speed never matched in the annals of British law. The three justices disappeared behind the dais; those in the body of the room burrowed into the floor or sheltered under desks. For a protracted, anguished moment nothing happened, and Harry wondered if he had given a false alarm. Then there was a dull, peculiarly muffled explosion, a great tinkling of glass—and a smell like a blitzed brewery. Slowly, the Court emerged from shelter.

  The Osmotic Bomb had proved its power. More important still, it had destroyed the evidence for the prosecution.

  The Bench was none too happy about dismissing the case; it felt, with good reason, that its dignity had been assailed. Moreover, each one of the justices would have to do some fast talking when he got home: the mist of alcohol had penetrated everything. Though the Clerk of the Court rushed round opening windows (none of which, oddly enough, had been broken) the fumes seemed reluctant to disperse. Harry Purvis, as he removed pieces of bottle-glass from his hair, wondered if there would be some intoxicated pupils in class tomorrow.

  Major Fotheringham, however, was undoubtedly a real sport, and as they filed out of the devastated courtroom, Harry heard him say to his Uncle: “Look here, Ferguson—it’ll be ages before we can get those Molotov Cocktails we’ve been promised by the War Office. What about making some of these bombs of yours for the Home Guard? If they don’t knock out a tank, at least they’ll make the crew drunk and incapable.”

  “I’ll certainly think about it, Major,” replied Uncle Homer, who still seemed a little dazed by the turn of events.

  He recovered somewhat as they drove back to the Vicarage along the narrow, winding lane with their high walls of unmortared stone.

  “I hope, Uncle,” remarked Harry, when they had reached a relatively straight stretch and it seemed safe to talk to the driver, “that you don’t intend to rebuild that still. They’ll be watching you like hawks and you won’t get away with it again.”

  “Very well,” said Uncle, a little sulkily. “Confound these brakes! I had them fixed only just before the War!”

  “Hey!” cried Harry, “Watch out!”

  It was too late. They had come to a cross-roads at which a brand-new HALT sign had been erected. Uncle braked hard, but for a moment nothing happened. Then the wheels on the left seized up, while those on the right continued gaily spinning. The car did a hairpin bend, luckily without turning over, and ended in the ditch pointing in the direction from which it had come.

  Harry looked reproachfully at his Uncle. He was about to frame a suitable reprimand when a motor-cycle came out of the side-turning and drew up to them.

  It was not going to be their lucky day, after all. The village police-sergeant had been lurking in ambush, waiting to catch motorists at the new sign. He parked his machine by the roadside and leaned in through the window of the Austin.

  “You all right, Mr. Ferguson?” he said. Then his nose wrinkled up, and he looked like Jove about to deliver a thunderbolt. “This won’t do,” he said. “I’ll have to put you on a charge. Driving under the influence is a very serious business.”

  “But I’ve not touched a drop all day!” protested Uncle, waving an alcohol-sodden sleeve under the sergeant’s twitching nose.

  “Do you expect me to believe that?” snorted the irate policeman, pulling out his note-book. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come to the station with me. Is your friend sober enough to drive?”

  Harry Purvis didn’t answer for a moment. He was too busy beating his head against the dash-board.

  “Well,” we asked Harry. “What did they do to your Uncle?”

  “Oh, he got fined five pounds and had his license endorsed for drunken driving. Major Fotheringham wasn’t in the Chair, unfortunately, when the case came up, but the other two justices were still on the Bench. I guess they felt that even if he was innocent this time, there was a limit to everything.”

  “And did you ever get any of his money?”

  “No fear! He was very grateful, of course, and he’s told me that I’m mentioned in his will. But when I saw him last, what do you think he was doing? He was searching for the Elixir of Life.”

  Harry sighed at the overwhelming
injustice of things.

  “Sometimes,” he said gloomily, “I’m afraid he’s found it. The doctors say he’s the healthiest seventy-year-old they’ve ever seen. So all I got out of the whole affair was some interesting memories and a hangover.”

  “A hangover?” asked Charlie Willis.

  “Yes,” replied Harry, a faraway look in his eye. “You see, the excise men hadn’t seized all the evidence. We had to—ah—destroy the rest. It took us the best part of a week. We invented all sorts of things during that time—but we never discovered what they were.”

  The Man Who Ploughed the Sea

  The adventures of Harry Purvis have a kind of mad logic that makes them convincing by their very improbability. As his complicated but neatly dove-tailed stories emerge, one becomes lost in a sort of baffled wonder. Surely, you say to yourself, no-one would have the nerve to make that up—such absurdities only occur in real life, not in fiction. And so criticism is disarmed, or at any rate discomfitted, until Drew shouts, “Time, gentlemen, pleeze!” and throws us all out into the cold hard world.

  Consider, for example, the unlikely chain of events which involved Harry in the following adventure. If he’d wanted to invent the whole thing, surely he could have managed it a lot more simply. There was not the slightest need, from the artistic point of view, to have started at Boston to make an appointment off the coast of Florida.…

  Harry seems to have spent a good deal of time in the United States, and to have quite as many friends there as he has in England. Sometimes he brings them to the “White Hart,” and sometimes they leave again under their own power. Often, however, they succumb to the illusion that beer which is tepid is also innocuous. (I am being unjust to Drew: his beer is not tepid. And if you insist, he will give you, for no extra charge, a piece of ice every bit as large as a postage-stamp.)

  This particular saga of Harry’s began, as I have indicated, at Boston, Mass. He was staying as a house-guest of a successful New England lawyer when one morning his host said, in the casual way Americans have: “Let’s go down to my place in Florida. I want to get some sun.”

  “Fine,” said Harry, who’d never been to Florida. Thirty minutes later, to his considerable surprise, he found himself moving south in a red Jaguar saloon at a formidable speed.

  The drive in itself was an epic worthy of a complete story. From Boston to Miami is a little matter of 1,568 miles—a figure which, according to Harry, is now engraved on his heart. They covered the distance in 30 hours, frequently to the sound of ever-receding police sirens as frustrated squad-cars dwindled astern. From time to time considerations of tactics involved them in evasive manoeuvres and they had to shoot off into secondary roads. The Jaguar’s radio tuned in to all the police frequencies, so they always had plenty of warning if an interception was being arranged. Once or twice they just managed to reach a state line in time, and Harry couldn’t help wondering what his host’s clients would have thought had they known the strength of the psychological urge which was obviously getting him away from them. He also wondered if he was going to see anything of Florida at all, or whether they would continue at this velocity down US 1 until they shot into the ocean at Key West.

  They finally came to a halt sixty miles south of Miami, down on the Keys—that long, thin line of island hooked on to the lower end of Florida. The Jaguar angled suddenly off the road and weaved a way through a rough track cut in the mangroves. The road ended in a wide clearing at the edge of the sea, complete with dock, 35 foot cabin cruiser, swimming pool, and modern ranch-type house. It was a quite a nice little hideaway, and Harry estimated that it must have cost the best part of a hundred thousand dollars.

  He didn’t see much of the place until the next day, as he collapsed straight into bed. After what seemed far too short a time, he was awakened by a sound like a boiler factory in action. He showered and dressed in slow motion, and was reasonably back to normal by the time he had left his room. There seemed to be no one in the house, so he went outside to explore.

  By this time he had learned not to be surprised at anything, so he barely raised his eyebrows when he found his host working down at the dock, straightening out the rudder on a tiny and obviously home-made submarine. The little craft was about twenty feet long, had a conning tower with large observation windows, and bore the name “Pompano” stencilled on her prow.

  After some reflection, Harry decided that there was nothing really very unusual about all this. About five million visitors come to Florida every year, most of them determined to get on or into the sea. His host happened to be one of those fortunate enough to indulge in his hobby in a big way.

  Harry looked at the “Pompano” for some time, and then a disturbing thought struck him. “George,” he said, “do you expect me to go down in that thing?”

  “Why, sure,” answered George, giving a final bash at the rudder. “What are you worried about? I’ve taken her out lots of times—she’s safe as houses. We won’t be going deeper than twenty feet.”

  “There are circumstances,” retorted Harry, “when I should find a mere six feet of water more than adequate. And didn’t I mention my claustrophobia? It always comes on badly at this time of year.”

  “Nonsense!” said George. “You’ll forget all about that when we’re out on the reef.” He stood back and surveyed his handiwork, then said with a sigh of satisfaction, “Looks O.K. now. Let’s have some breakfast.”

  During the next thirty minutes, Harry learned a good deal about the “Pompano.” George had designed and built her himself, and her powerful little diesel could drive her at five knots when she was fully submerged. Both crew and engine breathed through a snorkle tube, so there was no need to bother about electric motors and an independent air supply. The length of the snorkle limited dives to twenty-five feet, but in these shallow waters this was no great handicap.

  “I’ve put a lot of novel ideas into her,” said George enthusiastically. “Those windows, for instance—look at their size. They’ll give you a perfect view, yet they’re quite safe. I use the old Aqualung principle to keep the air-pressure in the ‘Pompano’ exactly the same as the water-pressure outside, so there’s no strain on the hull or the ports.”

  “And what happens,” asked Harry, “if you get stuck on the bottom?”

  “I open the door and get out, of course. There are a couple of spare Aqualungs in the cabin, as well as a life-raft with a waterproof radio, so that we can always yell for help if we get in trouble. Don’t worry—I’ve thought of everything.”

  “Famous last words,” muttered Harry. But he decided that after the ride down from Boston he undoubtedly had a charmed life: the sea was probably a safer place than US 1 with George at the wheel.

  He made himself thoroughly familiar with the escape arrangements before they set out, and was fairly happy when he saw how well designed and constructed the little craft appeared to be. The fact that a lawyer had produced such a neat piece of marine engineering in his spare time was not in the least unusual. Harry had long ago discovered that a considerable number of Americans put quite as much effort into their hobbies as into their professions.

  They chugged out of the little harbour, keeping to the marked channel until they were well clear of the coast. The sea was calm and as the shore receded the water became steadily more and more transparent. They were leaving behind the fog of pulverized coral which clouded the coastal waters, where the waves were incessantly tearing at the land. After thirty minutes they had come to the reef, visible below them as a kind of patchwork quilt above which multicolored fish pirouetted to and fro. George closed the hatches, opened the valve of the buoyancy tanks, and said gaily, “Here we go!”

  The wrinkled silk veil lifted, crept past the window, distorting all vision for a moment—and then they were through, no longer aliens looking into the world of waters, but denizens of that world themselves. They were floating above a valley carpeted with white sand, and surrounded by low hills of coral. The valley itself was barren
but the hills around it were alive with things that grew, things that crawled and things that swam. Fish as dazzling as neon signs wandered lazily among the animals that looked like trees. It seemed not only a breathtakingly lovely but also a peaceful world. There was no haste, no sign of the struggle for existence. Harry knew very well that this was an illusion, but during all the time they were submerged he never saw one fish attack another. He mentioned this to George, who commented: “Yes, that’s a funny thing about fish. They seem to have definite feeding times. You can see barracuda swimming around and if the dinner gong hasn’t gone the other fish won’t take any notice of them.”

  A ray, looking like some fantastic black butterfly, flapped its way across the sand, balancing itself with its long, whiplike tail. The sensitive feelers of a crayfish waved cautiously from a crack in the coral; the exploring gestures reminded Harry of a soldier testing for snipers with his hat on a stick. There was so much life, of so many kinds, crammed in this single spot that it would take years of study to recognize it all.

  The “Pompano” cruised very slowly along the valley, while George gave a running commentary.

  “I used to do this sort of thing with the Aqualung,” he said, “but then I decided how nice it would be to sit in comfort and have an engine to push me around. Then I could stay out all day, take a meal along, use my cameras and not give a damn if a shark was sneaking up on me. There goes a tang—did you ever see such a brilliant blue in your life? Besides, I could show my friends around down here while still being able to talk to them. That’s one big handicap with ordinary diving gear—you’re deaf and dumb and have to talk in signs. Look at those angelfish—one day I’m going to fix up a net to catch some of them. See the way they vanish when they’re edge-on! Another reason why I built the ‘Pompano’ was so that I could look for wrecks. There are hundreds in this area—it’s an absolute graveyard. The ‘Santa Margarita’ is only about fifty miles from here, in Biscayne Bay. She went down in 1595 with seven million dollars of bullion aboard. And there’s a little matter of sixty-five million off Long Cay, where fourteen galleons sank in 1715. The trouble is, of course, that most of these wrecks have been smashed up and overgrown with coral, so it wouldn’t do you a lot of good even if you did locate them. But it’s fun to try.”