Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (38 page)

The Tigers were tenacious and disinclined to bargain; when their leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was described as "ruthless and elusive," I took this to mean stupid and stubborn, the sort of qualities that fuel the village fanatic's monomania. He was a grade school dropout with a fifth-grade education, famously unreasonable, impervious to logic, unmoved by sending children to their death. A more literate or imaginative man would have given up or compromised long ago. He almost never showed his face. He had emerged in 1972, when he was just eighteen, energized the Tigers, and committed his first murder in 1975—shooting a Tamil political leader for being too moderate. In the rare photographs of him, Prabhakaran was a tubby, mustached little man in too tight, too clean khaki fatigues who looked indistinguishable from any toothy bristling stallholder in the dry-goods section of the Chennai bazaar. All that was known of him was that he suffered from hypertension and high blood pressure, that he lived in an underground bunker in the north, and that he had never been to Colombo in his life.

"What are his beliefs?"

"Just Tamil, Tamil, Tamil," my friend said.

Prabakharan had no political philosophy, no economic ideas, and he stood for nothing except Tamil sovereignty and secession. The Tigers were well armed and well funded. The largest Tamil community outside
India can be found in Toronto, and Canadian Tamils (and American and Australian Tamils too) are assessed a "liberation tax" by collectors from the old country. Some are coerced, with threats to their families, but most pay happily, in the same spirit that the Irish in America gave money to Noraid, to pay for the bombs that blew up women and children in Ulster in the 1970s and '80s.

The Tamil convulsion, and all the deaths, had occurred after I had last visited, and because the violence had retarded Sri Lanka, I instantly recognized the place. It had hardly changed. Colombo was a forgotten city with little foreign investment and a failing economy, so while it was visibly faltering, it was not cursed with meretricious modernity. Because of the indifference of the money men and the speculators, Colombo's colonial buildings remained intact. No one could afford to pull them down or replace them. The sculpted stone on the shop fronts and emporiums of timeworn Victorian and Edwardian Colombo still stood, the wooden floors inside still creaked, the dust-coated ceiling fans still turned. The city was pretty much the one I'd seen three decades ago, and I spent my days before meeting Arthur C. Clarke walking its streets and browsing its arcades and applying for onward visas.

I called Sir Arthur's secretary the following morning, as I'd been directed to.

"Sir Arthur will see you."

I easily found his house. I'd been near it the day before, looking for a visa to Myanmar—the Myanmar embassy was down a nearby lane, and Sir Arthur's neighbors were the Iraqi embassy and a Sai Baba ashram. This quiet district was distinguished by its high walls and well-patrolled gates and security cameras and the occasional splash of someone diving into a pool I could not see.

Sir Arthur lived behind ten-foot walls, with wire mesh on top of them, in a big squarish house that was comfortable and spacious rather than luxurious. I announced myself, the gate swung open, and I was directed to a stairwell, its windows playfully decorated with bumper stickers from NASA, and one with a large vertical arrow and the message
Mars: 35,000,000 miles.
I entered the working wing of the house, a lobby, the secretary's office with its file drawers and paraphernalia—fax machine, computer, phones. Documents framed and hung on the wall certified that Sir Arthur had become a member of one society or another, or had won a prize—lots of these; and plaques, trophies, ceremo
nial knickknacks inscribed to him. His was a well-rewarded career. He was a serious scientist as well as an ambitious and imaginative writer, anticipating possible futures. It was an old tradition. Writing enthusiastically about Ray Bradbury's
Martian Chronicles,
Borges claimed that Ludovico Ariosto and Johannes Kepler were early sci-fi dreamers and practitioners. In her memoirs, Doris Lessing (herself a science-fiction writer at times) praised science-fiction writers as visionaries.

"Hello!"

Sir Arthur appeared in a wheelchair, the familiar, smiling, bespectacled man; upright, balding, but rather frail, even in this heat with a blanket over his skinny legs. He looked like the sort of alien he had described in his prose fantasies. Men of a certain age, and some women too, often have the watchfulness, the pop-eyed almost reptilian stare, the glowing dome, and the bone structure we attribute to extraterrestrials.

He had that elderly and slightly unearthly appearance. The apparatus of his state-of-the-art wheelchair only emphasized his Martian look. He'd had polio about twelve years before and was suffering the serious aftermath that afflicts some polio victims years later—muscle weakness, poor breathing, cell degeneration. That too made him alien-looking, because he was cheery and welcoming.

"I'm feeling a bit cloud-nine-ish," he said as he was wheeled into his study, where there were many more plaques and trophies, framed letters from heads of state, and signed photographs—surely that beauty was Elizabeth Taylor, and wasn't that beaming fatty the late pope?

Sir Arthur's lopsided lips and slightly chewed pronunciation of the word "cloud" was from the west of England. I asked him if he was from those parts. He said he'd been born in Minehead, on the Somerset shore.

"A lovely coast—long beaches, very pretty," he said. He spoke slowly, a voice that was also whimsical and vague, with fluttery hands and an expressive frown that suggested memory loss. "How'd you get to Sri Lanka?" he asked.

"I traveled through India," I said, to spare him the details of Georgia and Turkmenistan. He didn't say anything, so I said, "Do you have any thoughts on India?"

"India. Reaching critical mass."

"Population, you mean?"

"Out of control. Too many," he said.

He pulled out a diary as wide as a ledger, opened to the day's date.
April 12
was underlined, and beneath it, in a child's scrawl in big letters,
Titanic sank 1912.

"Today is an important day," he said and tapped the page of the diary with the yellow nail of a skinny finger. The
Titanic
was on his mind. "Terrible thing! But is this the right day?"

"We can check," I said. But of course he was an expert on the sinking: fifteen years before, he'd written a novel,
The Ghost from the Grand Banks,
about two expeditions competing to raise the wreck.

"Look at this," he said and pushed a small silver tray across his desk. It was filled with little glass vials. He picked one up. "Look." The vial was labeled
Moon Dust.
"Can you see it?"

It was pale grit, like the residue of stale celery salt in a spice jar. He chose another one.

"Look." This one was labeled
Rusticle—Titanic.
A small dark scab of fungoid iron that had been scraped from the hull and presented to Sir Arthur.

"What is this?" he asked me, lifting another vial, containing a whitish blob.

"Looks like a piece of popcorn."

"It's a Styrofoam cup from the dive! Crushed by the pressure. Look how small it is."

He smiled at the silver tray and sorted the other vials and defied me to identify their contents. They were filled with rare gravel and floating organisms and crumbled souvenirs from expeditions.

"What are you writing, Sir Arthur?"

"Nothing. A few notes. I've destroyed enough trees."

"What about memoirs?"

"Done plenty of those," he said. "All my friends are gone. Look"—and he gestured to the wall of photographs.

This gave me a chance to rise and look at pictures and examine the signatures and inscriptions: a warm salutation from Liz Taylor, a scrawl from the pope, scribbles from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, from smooth-faced smilers who might have been actors, from Stanley Kubrick and others, including Darth Vader.

"Wernher von Braun," I said.

But he had gone back to tapping his diary. "You see, the
Titanic
represented triumph and disaster."

"Hubris, I suppose."

"What's that?"

When I repeated it, he said in a quoting and declamatory voice, "'Not even God can sink this ship!' Heh-heh-heh"

Now I could see the whole message on the T-shirt he was wearing under a warmer shirt. It said,
I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
It was true that he had envisaged and described satellites circling the Earth long before they were made and blasted into orbit.

"You know
Metropolis?
Lovely film," he said suddenly—by now I was getting used to his style of conversation, a kind of alienspeak: little bursts of talk, inspirational impulses, staticky delivery, and explosive memories. "What is it? 1930s? The image of a man holding the hands of a clock. Think of it—what that image says."

"Oh, yes, I remember," I said. I'd never seen it, but that didn't matter. He wasn't really listening; he kept talking. And he was still toying with the silver tray, squinting at the vials.

"One of the greatest films ever. I want to see it again."

"Were you influenced by any films when you wrote the script for
2001?"

"Loved films. Kubrick! I wrote the film, yes. Kubrick was all right."

"Wasn't he difficult?"

"I don't recall any blood on the carpet," he said. "We had disagreements, but they were amicable. Did he die? I can't remember."

"He died a few years ago."

"Is Conrad Hilton alive?" Now he was tapping the vial of moon dust.

"I believe Conrad Hilton is dead."

"Do you play table tennis? Table tennis is the one sport that I excel in. My greatest hobby, my only sport."

"I'll play you anytime, but I'm sure I'd lose."

"Look," he said. He had put the moon dust down and snatched up an old photograph. A woman with light hair and a pale dress, on a sunny day in a garden that was probably English, was surrounded by three androgynous children. "That's my mother. Which one is me?"

I chose the wrong one. He was the more girlish and subdued child in the frilly outfit.

"That was taken in Taunton or Minehead. I was about six." He smiled at this scene from the 1920s—the sunshine, the flowers, his beautiful mother.

I said, "Is there a film of
Day After Tomorrow?"

"I think so. I think I walked out."

"
Childhood's End
is one of my favorites."

"'I Remember Babylon' is mine," he said. "Wonderful story. It won a prize in
Best Ever.
Where is it?" He fossicked in a stack of books and found a copy of his
Collected Stories.
"In here somewhere. 'Dog Star' is another one I like."

"
Childhood's End
could be a good film," I said.

"Should be a film, but it's too downbeat from the human point of view." He was trying to find "I Remember Babylon" in the thick book of stories. In front of him, in all the clutter, was a typed poem, Shelley's "Ozymandias."

"I love this poem," I said.

He put the
Collected Stories
down and picked up the poem. "I wanted to reread it." He looked closely and read, "'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Heh-heh."

"Maybe the earth will end up like the scene in 'Ozymandias.'"

"If you wait long enough, oh, yes," he said. Then he looked directly at me and said, "Did I mention how I saved the life of the man who made the atom bomb? I'm trying to remember the details. And then there's this other matter." He pulled the diary out of the clutter. "When did the
Titanic
sink? Was it today? I think I wrote something about it."

We found a reference book and the facts: the
Titanic
hit the iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank early on the morning of the fifteenth.

As I was noting this, Sir Arthur said, "The plane came low down the runway"—he was describing how he had saved the life of the man who invented the A-bomb. After this scattered recollection, which I found hard to visualize, he said, "It should be in my biography. It's somewhere in my writings. It's very spooky. And the other film I'd like to see again is
The Lost World,
about 1930. First film I ever saw."

The hero of that Conan Doyle story and some others ("The Day the Earth Screamed") is Professor Challenger—bold scientist, man of action and adventure. It was easy to imagine an aged and infirm Professor Challenger as someone like Sir Arthur, surrounded by books and trophies, faltering and fugitive in his memories.

"Conan Doyle, well, he went nutty," Sir Arthur said. "It was spiritualism."

"Wasn't it the death of his wife that unhinged him?"

Sir Arthur was frowning. He said, "I'm trying to remember the name of the astronomer who said, 'Flying is impossible. I've proved it beyond all argument.' And the Wright brothers had already taken off! Heh-heh."

"What's the next big thing in science?"

He didn't hesitate. He said, "Matter transfer."

"'Travel by Wire' is one of your stories. That's matter transfer."

"Did I write that? I can't recall." He thumped the desk and became stern. "What I need is to draw up a chronology! The main events. The books. The places. People. Friends. The scripts. See," and now he leaned over and faced me, "scriptwriting is not very inspirational. It's a hard slog." He began trawling at the side of his desk. In a stack of books he found the one he was looking for. "Here it is.
The Ghost from the Grand Banks. Titanic
—all of it."

He turned the book over in his trembling hands.

"If she could be raised, what a tourist attraction!" he said.

I smiled at his sudden excitement. He was a scientist, but he was also a showman, and spectacle, the glamorous, the stupendous, the Professor Challenger exploits, were essential aspects of his literary imagination, and perhaps of his science too, wowing the reader, dreaming of the undreamed of, in the literature of astonishment.

Still holding his book, he said sadly, "I'm spooked by the man in the lifeboat handing over his child. 'Goodbye, my little son.'" He paused. He was tearful. He said, "Died of exposure! Sister ship came along. Too late! Disaster!" After swallowing a little, he said tentatively, "You wrote some books."