The Ghost From the Grand Banks and the Deep Range Read online

  The Ghost from the Grand Banks, copyright © 1990 by Arthur C. Clarke Introduction copyright © 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke

  The Deep Range, copyright © 1957, 1985 by Arthur C. Clarke Introduction copyright © 1987, 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke

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  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2607-5

  A trade paperback edition of this book was published in 2001 by Warner Books.

  First eBook Edition: September 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prelude

  1. Summer of ’74

  2. The Colors of Infinity

  3. A Better Mousetrap

  4. The Century Syndrome

  5. Empire of Glass

  6. “A Night to Remember”

  7. Third Leader

  8. Private Venture

  9. Prophets with Some Honor

  10. “The Isle of the Dead”

  11. Ada

  12. A Mollusk of Unusual Size

  13. Pyramid Power

  14. Calling on Oscar

  15. Conroy Castle

  16. The Kipling Suite

  17. Deep Freeze

  18. In an Irish Garden

  19. “Raise the Titanic!”

  20. Into the M-Set

  21. A House of Good Repute

  22. Bureaucrat

  Preparations

  23. Phone-in

  24. Ice

  25. Jason Junior

  26. The Medici Goblet

  27. Injunction

  28. Mole

  29. Sarcophagus

  30. Pietà

  31. A Matter of Megawatts

  Operations

  32. Nobody Here But Us Robots

  33. Solar Max

  34. Storm

  35. Artifact

  36. The Last Lunch

  37. Resurrection

  Finale

  38. Richter Eight

  39. Prodigal Son

  40. Tour of Inspection

  41. Free Ascent

  42. The Villa, at Sunset

  43. Exorcism

  44. Epilogue: The Deeps of Time

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  Appendix: The Colors of Infinity

  The Deep Range

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  I. The Apprentice

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  II. The Warden

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  III. The Bureaucrat

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About the Author

  ACCLAIM FOR ONE OF THE LEGENDARY GRAND MASTERS OF SPECULATIVE FICTION—

  INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  • • •

  “Arthur Clarke is probably the most critically admired of all currently active writers of science fiction . . . awesomely informed about physics and astronomy, and blessed with one of the most astounding imaginations I ever encountered in print.”

  —New York Times

  “Our most important visionary writer.”

  —Playboy

  “Intellectually provocative.”

  —Newsday

  “Sets the standard for science fiction that is both high-tech and high-class.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Remarkable.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  Books by Arthur C. Clarke

  The Fountains of Paradise

  The City and the Stars/The Sands of Mars

  (omnibus)

  The Ghost from the Grand Banks/The Deep Range

  (omnibus)

  Cradle

  (written with Gentry Lee)

  Available from Warner Aspect

  For my old friend Bill MacQuitty—

  who, as a boy, witnessed the launch of R.M.S. Titanic,

  and, forty-five years later,

  sank her for the second time.

  INTRODUCTION

  Much has happened in the more than a decade since I wrote this book. There has been a dive to the wreck almost every year—one with paying passengers! And of course James Cameron’s magnificent movie has been seen all around the world. (Alas, the television series Michael Deakin and I wrote on my lunar version of a similar disaster, A Fall of Moondust, was turned down at the last moment.)

  As everyone knows, the world survived the “Century Syndrome” (Chapter 4). Now we have plenty of time to prepare for Y3K.

  Finally, I am indebted to Charlie Pellegrino for his latest book, Ghosts of the Titanic (William Morrow, 2000). This exhaustive coverage of the last hours of the ship, and the stories of its survivors, is packed with heartrending and often astonishing incidents. As Jim Cameron remarks on the jacket, Pellegrino brings the Titanic back to life.

  Colombo, Sri Lanka

  PRELUDE

  1

  SUMMER OF ’74

  There must be better ways, Jason Bradley kept telling himself, of celebrating one’s twenty-first birthday than attending a mass funeral; but at least he had no emotional involvement. He wondered if Operation JENNIFER’s director, or his CIA sidekicks, even knew the names of the sixty-three Russian sailors they were now consigning to the deep.

  The whole ceremony seemed utterly unreal, and the presence of the camera crew added yet another dimension of fantasy. Jason felt that he was an extra in a Hollywood movie, and that someone would shout “Action!” as the shrouded corpses slid into the sea. After all, it was quite possible—even likely—that Howard Hughes himself had been in the plane that had circled overhead a few hours before. If it was not the Old Man, it must have been some other top brass of the Summa Corporation; no one else knew what was happening in this lonely stretch of the Pacific, a thousand kilometers northwest of Hawaii.

  For that matter, not even Glomar Explorer’s operations team—carefully insulated from the rest of the ship’s crew—knew anything about the mission until they were already at sea. That they were attempting an unprecedented salvage job was obvious, and the smart money favored a lost reconnaissance satellite. No one dreamed that they were going to lift an entire Russian submarine from water two thousand fathoms deep—with its nuclear warheads, its codebooks, and its cryptographic equipment. And, of course, its crew. . . .

  Until this morning—yes, it had been quite a birthday!—Jason had never seen Death. Perhaps it was morbid curiosity that had prompted him to volunteer, when the medics had asked for help to bring the bodies up from the morgue. (The planners in Langley had thought of everything; they had provided refrigeration for exactly one hundred cadavers.) He had been astonis
hed—and relieved—to find how well preserved most of the corpses were, after six years on the bed of the Pacific. The sailors who had been trapped in sealed compartments, where no predators could reach them, looked as if they were sleeping. Jason felt that, if he had known the Russian for “Wake up!” he would have had an irresistible urge to shout it.

  There was certainly someone aboard who knew Russian, and spoke it beautifully, for the entire funeral service had been in that language; only now, at the very end, was English used as Explorer’s chaplain came on line with the closing words for burial at sea.

  There was a long silence after the last “Amen,” followed by a brief command to the Honor Guard. And then, as one by one the lost sailors slid gently over the side, came the music that would haunt Jason Bradley for the rest of his life.

  It was sad, yet not like any funeral music that he had ever heard; in its slow, relentless beat was all the power and mystery of the sea. Jason was not a very imaginative young man, but he felt that he was listening to the sound of waves marching forever against some rocky shore. It would be many years before he learned how well this music had been chosen.

  The bodies were heavily weighted, so that they entered the water feet first, with only the briefest of splashes. Then they vanished instantly; they would reach their final resting place intact, before the circling sharks could mutilate them.

  Jason wondered if the rumor was true, and that in due course the film of this ceremony would be sent to Moscow. It would have been a civilized gesture—but a somewhat ambiguous one. And he doubted that Security would approve, however skillfully the editing was done.

  As the list of the sailors returned to the sea, the haunting music ebbed into silence. The sense of doom that had hung over Explorer for so many days seemed to disperse, like a fog-bank blown away by the wind. There was a long moment of complete silence; then the single word “Dismiss” came from the PA system—not in the usual brusque manner, but so quietly that it was some time before the files of men standing at attention broke up and began to drift away.

  And now, thought Jason, I can have a proper birthday party. He never dreamed that one day he would walk this deck again—in another sea, and another century.

  2

  THE COLORS OF INFINITY

  Donald Craig hated these visits, but he knew that they would continue as long as they both lived; if not through love (had it ever really been there?), at least through compassion and a shared grief.

  Because it is so hard to see the obvious, it had been months before he realized the true cause of his discomfort. The Torrington Clinic was more like a luxury hotel than a world-famous center for the treatment of psychological disorders. Nobody died here; trolleys never rolled from wards to operating theaters; there were no white-robed doctors making Pavlovian responses to their beepers; and even the attendants never wore uniforms. But it was still, essentially, a hospital; and a hospital was where the fifteen-year-old Donald had watched his father gasping for breath, as he slowly died from the first of the two great plagues that had ravaged the twentieth century.

  “How is she this morning, Dolores?” he asked the nurse after he had checked in at Reception.

  “Quite cheerful, Mr. Craig. She asked me to take her shopping—she wants to buy a new hat.”

  “Shopping! That’s the first time she’s even asked to go out!”

  Donald should have been pleased, yet he felt a twinge of resentment. Edith would never speak to him; indeed, she seemed unaware of his presence, looking through him as if he did not even exist.

  “What did Dr. Jafferjee say? Is it okay for her to leave the clinic?”

  “I’m afraid not. But it’s a good sign: she’s starting to show interest in the world around her again.”

  A new hat? Thought Craig. That was a typically feminine reaction—but it was not at all typical of Edith. She had always dressed. . . well, sensibly rather than fashionably, and had been quite content to order her clothes in the usual fashion, by teleshopping. Somehow, he could not imagine her in some exclusive Mayfair shop, surrounded by hatboxes, tissue paper, and fawning assistants. But if she felt that way, so be it; anything to help her escape from the mathematical labyrinth which was, quite literally, infinite in extent.

  And where was she now, in her endless explorations? As usual, she was sitting crouched in a swivel chair, while an image built up on the meter-wide screen that dominated one wall of her room. Craig could see that it was in hi-res mode—all two thousand lines—so even the supercomputer was going flat out to paint a pixel every few seconds. To a casual observer, it would have seemed that the image was frozen in a partly completed state; only close inspection would have shown that the end of the bottom line was creeping slowly across the screen.

  “She started this run,” whispered Nurse Dolores, “early yesterday morning. Of course, she hasn’t been sitting here all the time. She’s sleeping well now, even without sedation.”

  The image flickered briefly, as one scan line was completed and a new one started creeping from left to right across the screen. More than ninety percent of the picture was now displayed; the lower portion still being generated would show little more of interest.

  Despite the dozens—no, hundreds—of times that Donald Craig had watched these images being created, they had never lost their fascination. Part of it came from the knowledge that he was looking at something that no human eye had ever seen before—or ever would see again, if its coordinates were not saved in the computer. Any random search for a lost image would be far more futile than seeking one particular grain of sand in all the deserts of the world.

  And where was Edith now, in her endless exploring? He glanced at the small display screen below the main monitor, and checked the magnitude of the enormous numbers that marched across it, digit after implacable digit. They were grouped in fives to make it easier for human eyes to grasp, though there was no way that the human mind could do so.

  . . . Six, seven, eight clusters—forty digits all told. That meant—

  He did a quick mental calculation—a neglected skill in this day and age, of which he was inordinately proud. The result impressed, but did not surprise him. On this scale, the original basic image would be much bigger than the Galaxy. And the computer could continue expanding it until it was larger than the Cosmos, though at that magnification, computing even a single image might take years.

  Donald could well understand why Georg Cantor, the discoverer (or was it inventor?) of the numbers beyond infinity, had spent his last years in a mental home. Edith had taken the first steps on that same endless road, aided by machinery beyond the dreams of any nineteenth-century mathematician. The computer generating these images was performing trillions of operations a second; in a few hours, it would manipulate more numbers than the entire human race had ever handled, since the first Cro-Magnon started counting pebbles on the floor of his cave.

  Though the unfolding patterns never exactly repeated themselves, they fell into a small number of easily recognized categories. There were multipointed stars of six-, eight-fold, and even higher degrees of symmetry; spirals that sometimes resembled the trunks of elephants, and at other times the tentacles of octopods; black amoebae linked by networks of contorted tendrils; faceted, compound insect eyes. . . . Because there was absolutely no sense of scale, some of the figures being created on the screen could have been equally well interpreted as bizarre galaxies—or the microfauna in a drop of ditchwater.

  And ever and again, as the computer increased the degree of magnification and dived deeper into the geometric depths it was exploring, the original strange shape—looking like a fuzzy figure eight lying on its side—that contained all this controlled chaos would reappear. Then the endless cycle would begin again, though with variations so subtle that they eluded the eye.

  Surely, thought Donald, Edith must realize, in some part of her mind, that she is trapped in an endless loop. What had happened to the wonderful brain that had conceived and designed the ’9
9 Phage which, in the early hours of 1 January 2000, had briefly made her one of the most famous women in the world?

  “Edith,” he said softly, “this is Donald. Is there anything I can do?”

  Nurse Dolores was looking at him with an unfathomable expression. She had never been actually unfriendly, but her greetings always lacked warmth. Sometimes he wondered if she blamed him for Edith’s condition.

  That was a question he had asked himself every day, in the months since the tragedy.

  3

  A BETTER MOUSETRAP

  Roy Emerson considered himself, accurately enough, to be reasonably good-natured, but there was one thing that could make him really angry. It had happened on what he swore would be his last TV appearance, when the interviewer on a Late, Late Show had asked, with malice aforethought: “Surely, the principle of the Wave Wiper is very straightforward. Why didn’t someone invent it earlier?” The host’s tone of voice made his real meaning perfectly clear: “Of course I could have thought of it myself, if I hadn’t more important things to do.”

  Emerson resisted the temptation of replying: “If you had the chance, I’m sure you’d ask Einstein, or Edison, or Newton, the same sort of question.” Instead, he answered mildly enough: “Well, someone had to be the first. I guess I was the lucky one.”

  “What gave you the idea? Did you suddenly jump out of the bathtub shouting ‘Eureka’?”

  Had it not been for the host’s cynical attitude, the question would have been fairly innocuous. Of course, Emerson had heard it a hundred times before. He switched to automatic mode and mentally pressed the PLAY button.

  “What gave me the idea—though I didn’t realize it at the time—was a ride in a high-speed Coast Guard patrol boat off Key West, back in ’03 . . .”

  Though it had led him to fame and fortune, even now Emerson preferred not to recall certain aspects of that trip. It had seemed a good idea at the time—a short pleasure cruise through Hemingway’s old stomping grounds, at the invitation of a cousin in the Coast Guard. How amazed Ernest would have been at the target of their antismuggling activities—blocks of crystal, about the size of a matchbox, that had made their way from Hong Kong via Cuba. But these TIMs—Terabyte Interactive Microlibraries—had put so many U.S. publishers out of business that Congress had dusted off legislation that dated back to the heydays of Prohibition.