The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [1]
Anyway, the camera worked fine and when I took it into the crystalline waters of Weeki-Wachi Springs the first subject I encountered was a fair-sized alligator, hanging languidly in the vertical position with its nostrils just breaking the surface. I’d never met one before, and assumed (correctly) that it wouldn’t attack a strange, bubble-blowing creature heading confidently towards it. So I got half a dozen excellent shots before it became camera-shy and fled up the nearest creek.
The remainder of the roll wasn’t so exciting: it merely showed a lot of fish apparently suspended in mid-air. The trouble with Weeki-Wachi (visibility approx. 200 feet) is that you can’t see the water: and this may explain a mysterious comment by that excellent and otherwise intelligent author Alfred Bester (The Demolished Man, The Stars my Destination etc.) which has baffled and infuriated me for over a decade.
In the volume of essays by SF writers, Hell’s Cartographers (edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, 1975), Alfie reports meeting me in London soon after my baptism by immersion. I quote:
I thought Arthur rather strange… utterly devoid of a sense of humour and I’m always ill at ease with humourless people … He pledged us all to come to the meeting the following week; he would show slides of some amazing underwater photographs he had taken … After looking at a few I called, “Damn it Arthur, these aren’t underwater shots. You took them in an aquarium. I can see the reflection in the plate glass.”
We’ll ignore the comment about my sense of humour*, even though I rate it almost as highly as my modesty. But I indignantly refute Alfie’s suggestion that I’ve ever taken aquarium photos and tried to pass them off as underwater shots: that must have been quite some aquarium, to hold a Florida alligator.
(My God—was Alfie pulling my leg, just to see if I did have a sense of humour? Thirty years later, neither of us will ever know.)
Shortly thereafter (December, 1954) I left the Northern Hemisphere for the Great Barrier Reef, where I encountered my first whales, as well as the justly-famed Australian sharks. After completing The Coast of Coral (1956), I realised that I now had the background for a whole novel, which was written in Ceylon during the spring of 1956 and published the next year. Still later, I used the same Heron Island background for another book, Dolphin Island (1963). Both novels have been purchased by optimistic movie-makers: I wish them luck with their casting problems.
Back in 1957 (the year the Space Age opened!) only a few people were interested in whales, and the idea of ranching them was still quite novel, though not original: I suspect I got it from Jacques Cousteau. Now they—and the cetaceans in general—are among mankind’s most favorite animals, and the ecological points I attempted to make thirty years ago are widely accepted.
I would like to think that, in some small way, The Deep Range helped to bring these changes about.
Colombo, Sri Lanka,
20 August 1986
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
* Anyone wishing to put it to the test is referred to my volume of allegedly humorous stories, Tales from the White Hart. In “No Morning After” (see The Other Side of the Sky) I also claim to have written the only funny story about the End of the World; but perhaps that is a dubious qualification.
PART ONE
THE APPRENTICE
CHAPTER I
THERE WAS A killer loose on the range. The South Pacific air patrol had seen the great corpse staining the sea crimson as it wallowed in the waves. Within seconds, the intricate warning system had been alerted; from San Francisco to Brisbane, men were moving counters and drawing range circles on the charts. And Don Burley, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, was hunched over the control board of Scoutsub 5 as it dropped down to the twenty-fathom line.
He was glad that the alert was in his area; it was the first real excitement for months. Even as he watched the instruments on which his life depended, his mind was ranging far ahead. What could have