Arthur C. Clarke and his partner Mike Wilson with diving gear in Ceylon in the late 1950s.
WINTER–SPRING 1964
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.
—ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Things were not going well at the Ceylon Astronomical Association. At their meeting on March 19, 1964, Herschel Gunawardene had been, shall we say, less than complimentary about the work that Chandra de Silva had done—for free, mind you—in composing the Quarterly Bulletin and getting it into publishable shape. For one, he’d supplied only a percentage of the ream of paper required to print the Bulletin—the exact number being subject to some rather heated debate—with the result that Harry Pereira, the vice president of the council, could produce only thirty-five or so copies of it. This was a problem, of course: eighty was the acceptable number of copies, something well established and ratified at council meetings. Adding insult to injury, Herschel insisted that he had, in fact, supplied the full ream, insinuating that it must be Harry’s fault in some way—either by going to a substandard print shop filled with amateurs, or losing it through some slipup, or via some other wastage that only Harry would know.
For his part, Harry had an entirely different understanding of events. No way was the wastage more than, say, 15 percent, and certainly not the 50 percent of the twenty-five score sheets that Herschel had allegedly supplied. Furthermore, the print shop, when questioned, had stated in no uncertain terms that it had not received a full five hundred sheets; the package, rather, had been broken. In Harry’s view, for these and other reasons, it was manifestly clear that Herschel was not a fit person to look after and account for Association funds and material, and that his behavior, in attempting to assign blame to Harry and Chandra, was—to quote Harry—quite rumbustious and irresponsible and most unpalatable.
It didn’t end there, either. For too long now, Herschel had failed to read the minutes of the council’s meetings, the excuse being poor attendance. Most likely, in Pereira’s view, he wasn’t bothering to maintain them in the first place. And Harry couldn’t help but notice that, concerning Herschel’s role in the Bulletin’s production—evidently a highly dubious role to begin with—he’d seen it fit to insert an appreciation of his, Herschel’s, own recent Booklet on Telescope Making! Clearly this was a breach of privilege, to say the least. To quote Pereira again, Herschel still had not attained the caliber of an Arthur Clarke to imagine he could use the Association as a platform for personal gain or glory, and if, in fact, he had not received the concurrence of the Association, his conduct must be considered reprehensible.
If we add the irascible Herschel’s constant interruptions of Pereira—who, after all, was the vice president, and therefore had every right to chair meetings in the president’s absence—the situation was plainly intolerable. And so Pereira, with the provision that it came entirely without any admission of personal guilt in the matter, felt compelled to enclose a sum of five Ceylon rupees, which he believed was the approximate value of the vanished percentage, whatever it might be, of the paper in question. In any case, he was—to quote him again—at best a pseudo–vice president of a spurious council, and was therefore resigning with immediate effect.
The president of the Ceylon Astronomical Association, Arthur C. Clarke, leaned back in his chair and permitted himself a small sigh. He’d only skimmed the letter—he’d been distractedly catching up on yesterday’s mail as he waited for today’s—but he’d read enough, seated at the desk of his study on Gregory’s Road, to indulge himself in a distracted meditation on the differences between interpersonal politics in the British Interplanetary Society—of which he’d been chairman twice from 1946 to 1953—and here in the port city of Colombo, Ceylon’s capital.
They certainly existed in the former, of course. The process of preparing its journal for print could occasionally lead to certain tensions and misunderstandings. But unless he was letting nostalgia distort his memory, disagreements in the BIS were on the whole less smolderingly resentful, less poisonously conspiratorial—more like parliamentary jousting, really, with a “hear, hear” and a bit of sarcasm—than on this teardrop-shaped island suspended at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal. More Question Time, in other words, than making sausage.
Clarke remembered revising his essay “The Challenge of the Spaceship,” first delivered as a lecture at St. Martin’s Technical College on Charing Cross Road in the fall of 1946, then published in one of the first postwar editions of the BIS journal. He’d taken it in, after it had been neatly typed by Dot, to deliver personally to founding editor Phil Cleator, whom he’d always seen eye to eye with. As usual his brother’s first wife had done an excellent job, flawlessly retyping his scribbled-over copy, and he’d managed to get a seat on the tube, open the folder, and reread parts of the pristine typescript with no small degree of pride. He’d really pulled it off with this one. It was a kind of mission statement or manifesto for a space age then only notional.
The urge to explore, to discover, to “follow knowledge like a sinking star,” is a primary human impulse that needs, and can receive, no further justification than its own existence. The search for knowledge, said a modern Chinese philosopher, is a form of play. If this be true, then the spaceship, when it comes, will be the ultimate toy that may lead mankind from its cloistered nursery out into the playground of the stars. . . . This then is the future that lies before us, if our civilization survives the diseases of its childhood.
Alas, the Ceylon Astronomical Association was no British Interplanetary Society, and never would be, and neither could its Bulletin compete with the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. Opening a small drawer in his desk, Clarke deposited Harry’s letter with its rumpled five-rupee note in a folder marked “CAA,” and turned as his assistant Pauline entered with the mail. Clarke was more than usually alert when the post arrived these days—a kind of compound of trepidation and excitement.
For one, he’d been dealing with a cascade of bad news. His estranged American wife had finally found competent lawyers, who’d gone after Clarke’s liquid assets and future income in the United States. Although they’d separated within a few months of getting married, they had never formalized divorce proceedings more than a decade before—a situation he regretted more with every mail delivery. With some scrambling, he’d succeeded in diverting incoming royalties to his UK company, Rocket Publishing, but there was no doubt that Marilyn had put him in a serious bind. Her lawyers had sued him in a New York court for $22,000 arrears of maintenance—about $175,000 in today’s dollars—and they’d managed to seize and freeze his American account.
The United States was by far his largest source of income—he was due at the offices of Time-Life in New York later that very month, in fact, for the editing of his upcoming book, Man and Space—and although dollars went much further in Ceylon than they did in America, his financial needs had an uncanny way of matching his total income and even extending into his net worth, wherever he lived.
In this, he had a good deal of help from his partner Mike Wilson, whom he could hear on the other side of the door, pontificating rather loudly to a gathered group of Ceylonese filmmakers as he celebrated the release of his second feature film. “It’s about boat building and boat racing,” Clarke had written a friend, Major R. Raven-Hart, “with asides on the local scene and cracks at Western-oriented culture-vultures. It’s called Getawarayo, which means, as far as I can gather, much the same as The Wild Ones.” What he hadn’t said, because Raven-Hart would have assumed this, was that all the boats built to illustrate the boat building had been built with Clarke’s funds, not to mention the cameras, sound gear, film stock, processing, catering, and salaries. Even in Ceylon, film production wasn’t cheap. Still, with luck, they would earn at least some of it back from ticket sales.
Meanwhile, the mismanaged yet voracious Ceylonese tax authorities, operating from an incoherent pastiche of regulations, were effectively holding Clarke to ransom before they would allow him to leave for New York. Foreign residents always had to brace themselves for a potential collision with tax officials when planning a trip, and Clarke, a resident since 1956, was known to be a man of some means—it was no good explaining that he’d spent almost all of it on Mike’s film projects, oceangoing dive boats, Land Rovers, scuba gear, air compressors, engine parts, steaks, women, booze, funny cigarettes, and hospital bills.
While his captive-expat state of tax bondage largely had to be dealt with in person—by showing up in the sweltering halls of the tax office, pleased local barrister in tow, for another exasperating bargaining session—Clarke still braced himself mentally for more bad news every time the mail arrived, on account of Marilyn’s machinations. And yet there was more than the normal amount of anticipation as well. Because the game was afoot.
For example, just in the last month, there had been circuitously indirect indications that a young New York director—something of a wunderkind, really, by the name of Stanley Kubrick—was interested in talking to him. And recently Clarke had struck up a rather interesting correspondence with an adjunct professor at Harvard University, an astronomer named Carl Sagan. Like Clarke, Sagan was intrigued by the prospect of alien intelligence. Both thought it was certainly out there, somewhere among the stars. Sagan had the rare ability to pontificate about the subject in leading scientific journals without embarrassing himself.
There had been something refreshing about his recent paper in the journal Planetary and Space Science on direct contact between galactic civilizations—subject matter that until just recently had been exclusively the preserve of science fiction, here couched in the cool language of a scientific paper. Sagan was only thirty, almost two decades younger than Clarke. He was a complete unknown, and yet he wrote with a cool analytical authority as he advanced the argument that any estimate of the number of advanced technical civilizations on planets of other stars depends on our knowledge of star formation, the frequency of favorably situated worlds, the probability of life originating in the first place—let alone intelligence—and the lifetimes of those civilizations. It was a remarkably assured performance, particularly given the riskiness of the subject.
“Those parameters are poorly known,” Sagan had written with considerable understatement. Such back-of-the-envelope calculations had been worked out before, of course, most famously by astronomer Frank Drake as an analytical tool for the first meeting in 1961 of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—a meeting that Sagan had attended. After a lot of debate, the SETI group had produced a figure of between a thousand and a hundred million civilizations in the Milky Way alone—a rather wide spread, to be sure, but on the other hand, either figure would be extraordinary. In his paper, Sagan had attempted to refine this, working up an estimate of something on the order of 106 extant advanced technical civilizations in the Milky Way alone—a round million—and had even hazarded that the most likely distance to the nearest such community was several hundred light years. Rather close, given the 180,000-light-year diameter of the galaxy.
But it was section three of the paper, “Feasibility of Interstellar Spaceflight,” that had really gotten Clarke’s attention. After pointing out that if we relied on radio signals to do the job, it would take a thousand or more years for even the most simple exchange of views between galactic civilizations—say, on the inclement weather—Sagan had outlined the difficulty of being on the same wavelength in the first place. Quite literally: the question of what signal frequency to use, after all, was hardly a given even among scientists disposed to consider such questions.
“Finally,” Sagan had written, brushing aside the equations for an exhilarating moment, “electromagnetic communication does not permit two of the most exciting categories of interstellar contact—namely, contact between an advanced civilization and an intelligent but pretechnical society, and the exchange of artifacts and biological specimens among the various communities.” Clarke found himself nodding in approval at the sentence. He had also been advancing the possibility that contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization may have occurred within recorded history.
Actually, Clarke had already mooted most of these thoughts in both fiction and nonfiction, and it’s easy to imagine the writer reaching for his IBM Selectric soon after arriving at Sagan’s conclusion.
It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist, or even that some kind of base is maintained (possibly automatically) within the solar system to provide continuity for successive expeditions. Because of weathering and the possibility of detection and interference by the inhabitants of the Earth, it would be preferable not to erect such a base on the Earth’s surface. The Moon seems one reasonable alternative.
But in fact, he’d first read a summary of Sagan’s automatic lunar base idea in a review written by his friend, the prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, in the September 1963 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s what had prompted him to write the astronomer in the first place. If there was one thing Clarke didn’t like, it was not being cited when an idea he’d come up with first saw the light of day under somebody else’s name—particularly in a scientific journal. Accordingly, that November, he’d written Sagan his first letter.
I was particularly interested in your suggestion that there might already be an automatic base in the solar system. I developed this idea in a short story called “The Sentinel” . . . The analogy I used here was that of the fire alarm, and I suggested that since advanced races would only be interested in a species that had reached a fairly high level of technology, they would put their station on the Moon so that it would not react until we got there.
Clarke found it entertaining, and also redeeming—yet somehow simultaneously disturbing—that this concept, which he had indeed come up with first, was being mooted these days in credible scientific journals rather than in pulp magazines with garish pictures of bikini-clad damsels in distress being rescued by caped crusaders from bearded bad guys wielding bullwhips. “The Sentinel” had been written in 1948 for a BBC story competition, where it failed to even place—he sometimes wondered what did win—and then had subsequently seen print in the sole issue ever published of the pulp rag 10 Story Fantasy. Cover story: “Tyrant & Slave-Girl on Planet Venus.” Twenty-five cents, please.
“The Sentinel” had subsequently been published in two of Clarke’s anthologies. One had to wonder if scientists were taking material they’d read in their teenaged years—or even last Thursday—and giving it a wash, rinse, and scaffolding of equations before printing it under their own name in top journals. To his credit, though, young Sagan had responded almost immediately with a warm letter referencing two of Clarke’s works of nonfiction, The Exploration of Space and Interplanetary Flight, which had provided him “with some stimulation towards my present line of work.”
As for the Kubrick approach, so far it had been frustratingly inconclusive. First he’d received a tantalizing cable on February 17 from his New York friend Roger Caras, a publicist with Columbia Pictures. He’d first met Roger when French undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau introduced them at the Boston launch of Cousteau’s 1953 book The Silent World, and they’d hit it off immediately. Caras had conveyed that Kubrick was interested in working with Clarke, but thought he was “a recluse.” At this, Clarke had laughed hollowly—if the director only knew that he was in effect living in a small beatnik commune comprised of filmmakers, writers, hangers-on, secretaries, servants, boyfriends, and girlfriends. A gay, bisexual, straight, Anglo, Asian group ensconced in a sunny bungalow in the capital of this former English colony. If a recluse, he’d failed spectacularly.
In any case, he’d sat up straight at Roger’s telex, immediately cabling back “frightfully interested in working with enfant terrible.” Asking Caras to contact his agent, he wrote, “What makes Kubrick think I’m a recluse?”
Caras’s first message was followed by an airmail letter delivered just under a week later, but evidently written the same day as the cable. “I was talking with Stanley Kubrick today, and he indicated that he would like to be in touch with you in the not too distant future,” he wrote. “I have taken the liberty of giving him your address, and you will probably be hearing from him.” Under Columbia Pictures letterhead and in the practiced patter of a PR flack, Caras continued:
Since you insist on escaping the rigors of civilization by residing in your palm-fringed paradise, it is conceivable you’re not fully conversant with Mr. Kubrick’s latest phenomenal accomplishment. I’m enclosing for your edification a set of reviews of Mr. Kubrick’s latest film—a true masterpiece with the extremely unlikely title of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Mike Wilson’s local Sinhalese-language productions aside, Clarke had been trying to break into film for years, and was very aware that sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein had done so more than a decade before with his script for the 1950 feature Destination Moon, which had been followed by a novella of the same name. Another friend, Ray Bradbury, had also done film work, such as writing the script of Moby Dick for John Huston—though he’d had a terrible time of it, because the director had proven to be such an abusive, mean-spirited egomaniac.
Just recently, Clarke had written his writer friend Sam Youd (better known by his pen name, John Christopher), “I remain the most successful writer in the world who’s never had a movie made.” True, his novel Childhood’s End—which had covered the arrival in giant starships of an extraterrestrial master race who imposed peace on warring humanity—had been optioned by neophyte producer Arthur Lyons in 1958. Lyons had hired screenwriter Howard Koch, an Oscar winner for Casablanca, and Koch had done a creditable job, but the project had gone nowhere—though allegedly MGM was now looking at it.
As for Kubrick, Clarke had seen Lolita at the Regal, one of Colombo’s colonial-era movie palaces, and been duly impressed. And as a daily listener to the BBC World Service, he was well aware that Dr. Strangelove was making waves internationally. In fact, just days before Caras’s letter, he’d received one from his rocket engineer friend Val Cleaver—designer of the Blue Streak missile that was supposed to serve as Britain’s nuclear deterrent but was now suffering a slow death due to budget cuts. Cleaver had just seen Kubrick’s new film.
Dr. Strangelove is, in a word, a masterpiece. I’d never have believed it possible, and went into the cinema quite hostile and convinced it must be in the worst possible taste; merely curious because of the universal critical praise . . . Well, it comes off. You must see it. I guess maybe it was a stroke of genius, and that’s the only way to make a film about this subject.
He responded to Roger’s letter as well, mentioning that he’d seen Lolita and looked forward to seeing Dr. Strangelove as well. “Kubrick is obviously an astonishing man,” he observed, before proudly filling in Caras on Mike’s second feature, which was “passed by the censors with acclamation yesterday, and it’s released in twenty cinemas next week. It’s in black and white this time and is a social satire, with an exciting speedboat race ending, right out of Ben-Hur.”
Since then, however, not much had happened. It was a bit frustrating waiting for further word, and Clarke had spent some of the time working on revisions to his book for the Time-Life imprint Life Science Library and filling in his New York lawyer, Bob Rubinger, on his rather serious case of “matrimonial trouble.” Before getting into how he hoped to end the currently intolerable situation—in which his literary agent, Scott Meredith, was required by law to put all his earnings into escrow, and his New York account had been frozen pending a hearing—Clarke explained the background of the case. “To put you into the picture, I was married in New York in 1953,” he wrote. “The marriage was fraudulently contracted, as my wife did not inform me that she had undergone a hysterectonomy [sic] as a result of her first marriage: she did not inform me of this until several days after we were married.”
He didn’t mention, of course, that there had been another level of fraudulence at work: namely, that Clarke was gay. In short, a complete fiasco. In any case, he’d agreed to a separation agreement soon after the marriage. But he’d done so without legal advice, and had been paying her a monthly allowance ever since, or, at least, until he had become “completely incapacitated by polio (or a spinal injury—the specialists disagree) in March 1962. As my earnings ability was then zero, and I discovered soon after that my wife had left England and was no longer in a position to harass my family, I stopped payment.”
This had led to the current situation, which Clarke was hoping to resolve with a final settlement and, if possible, a divorce. In fact, he wrote Rubinger, there may well be other good reasons to settle.
There is also a possibility that a really big deal may come up at any time: several of my books are under discussion with film companies, and only last week I heard that Stanley Kubrick (whose Dr. Strangelove seems to be breaking all critical records) was anxious to get in touch with me. So I am prepared to consider a reasonable settlement.
Meanwhile, the weeks had passed, and by now he’d almost given up—he knew from experience how tenuous such film-world approaches usually were—when Pauline entered, nodded without a word, and left the latest mail in a neat pile.
Clarke seized it and riffled through, grimly noting one from Rubinger, but then arriving at what he’d been hoping to see for weeks: another New York return address, this one from Polaris Productions Inc., 120 East Fifty-Sixth Street. Could it be Kubrick? He reached for the small Ceylonese dagger he used as a letter opener, slit the envelope from corner to corner with practiced precision, and deftly extracted the paper inside.
• • •
Years after collaborating with Mike Wilson on three films in the early 1960s, Sri Lankan director Tissa Liyanasuriya retained a vivid memory of Arthur C. Clarke at work in the house he shared with Wilson on Gregory’s Road. Liyanasuriya had been assistant director on Mike’s first feature, Ran Muthu Duwa (“The Island of Treasures”). Packed with action, catchy songs, and underwater scenes, it had been a huge success, with more than a million people seeing it in 1962 and 1963—approximately one-tenth of the country’s population. Its songs are still popular today. However, no prints appear to have survived.
Tissa had then worked even more closely with Mike on a second feature, Getawarayo. After directing its village scenes himself and also being called upon to take the director’s chair by the exasperated producer, Sheha Palihakkara, on the frequent occasions when Wilson left the set early “to relax,” Mike had generously insisted that Liyanasuriya receive codirector credit. In part due to this boost, Tissa went on to a long and distinguished directing career. Getawarayo, which ended with a prodigious boat race across the glittering green surface of Bolgoda Lake, was released in February 1964. It was also a success, though a bit less so than Ran Muthu Duwa. It, too, has vanished.
Liyanasuriya had many opportunities to observe Clarke, who’d provided most of the funding for both films, because the office of Clarke, Wilson, and Palihakkara’s production company, Serendib, was adjacent to the writer’s study on the ground floor of the house, and when things were reasonably calm, Clarke would leave his door partially open. More than a half century later, Tissa still clearly remembered the tik-tik-tik of the typewriter keys issuing forth through that door, with a muted ding signaling the end of each line—that long-gone sound of authorial industry. Curious to observe the great man at work, he positioned himself discreetly at the correct angle to peek inside.
“I saw he starts writing like this,” said Liyanasuriya, hunching over an invisible typewriter to demonstrate. “And then all of a sudden, he stops writing. He takes the specs, cleans the specs a little, puts them back, and then starts writing again. At the desk. At the typewriter. He was working on it. And then what he does is, all of a sudden, he gets up. And then he walks into the garden.”
Tall, balding, and with an earnest manner leavened by his quick wit and sense of humor, Clarke had adopted the Ceylonese male habit of wearing a brightly colored sarong with no shirt in the daily tropical swelter. Only he hadn’t really gotten the hang of tying it at the waist, instead tucking the cloth over the elastic band of his briefs. As a result, his sarong usually started falling off as he loped to the garden door, and he was forced to grab it and shove it back under the elastic. “He was not used to wearing the sarong,” Tissa said, tittering gleefully at the memory.
“And so he goes into the garden, where he has this armchair. He sits on the armchair like this.” Liyanasuriya imitated Clarke leaning back, legs akimbo, looking up, lost in thought. “And he’s looking at the sky. Thinking. Thinking. Looking at the sky for some time; maybe five or ten minutes. And then he gets up, comes running into the room, and starts writing. So I liked this very much. He was very lovable; he was a very lovable person.”
• • •
Clarke unfolded the two-page letter, which was dated March 31, and saw that it was indeed from Kubrick. Fairly brief, quite to the point, it seemingly had two clear agendas. One was picking his brain about a possible telescope purchase (the director mentioned a Questar telescope in the first and last sentences). The other was his desire to discuss “the possibility of doing the proverbial ‘really good’ science fiction movie.” This line—the second after the Questar bit—would become well known, and certainly served as the initial aim of the nascent project Kubrick was proposing.
“My main interest lies along these broad areas, naturally assuming great plot and character,” Kubrick wrote. “1. The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. 2. The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on Earth in the near future. 3. A space probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars.” Caras, Kubrick continued, had made him aware that Clarke was intending to come to New York soon, and he wondered if he might perhaps be able to come a bit early “with a view to a meeting, the purpose of which would be to determine whether an idea might exist or arise which would sufficiently interest both of us enough to want to collaborate on a screenplay.” Should that “most agreeable event” occur, he was “reasonably certain” that an understanding concerning Clarke’s services could then be reached. And he concluded with his second Questar reference—asking what model medium-sized scope the writer might recommend.
Clarke loved being in the position of an expert, and to be consulted about telescopes by an internationally recognized director—a subject he could discuss all day—was an unexpected bonus to the main thrust of the letter. He didn’t necessarily agree that good science fiction movies hadn’t been made already but certainly was aware that most were utter bilge, and Clarke was prepared to concede that a really good one hadn’t been made yet. More to the point, he had been chafing for the chance to break into movies for a very long time. If not now, when—and who better than Kubrick?
Having concluded this rumination, Clarke put a blank sheet of letterhead—“Arthur C. Clarke; Clarke-Wilson Associates,” cable address: “Undersea, Colombo”—into his typewriter carriage. After some prefatory sentences covering Roger Caras, his interest in seeing Dr. Strangelove, and his having already seen Lolita, he continued with information about his arrival in only ten days in New York, and suggested that his work at the Time-Life book department shouldn’t interfere with getting together to discuss the proposed collaboration.
He also informed Kubrick that he would have to return to Ceylon “pretty promptly; that is, probably around the middle of June, as I have a big organization here with lots of problems.” In fact, he had spent nearly every rupee, pound, and dollar he possessed on Mike’s film. “Also, as I owe the local tax department incomputable thousands of rupees, they have only let me out of the country on condition I am back in two months. To ensure this, they have injected me with a mysterious Oriental drug, unknown to Western science, which will cause me to die in convulsions on June 15, unless I am back at the Tax Department (with cheque), to receive the antidote.” Having transmitted something of his financial situation and devastating sense of humor, he circled back to the subject at hand.
As to the main point of your letter, I also feel, as you obviously do, that the “really good” science fiction movie is a great many years overdue. The only ones that came anywhere near qualifying for this were The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Forbidden Planet, and, of course, those classic documentaries, Destination Moon and Things to Come The War of the Worlds and When Worlds Collide also had their moments, catastrophe-wise.
There: despite the caveats, he’d gone and done it—he couldn’t help himself. He’d listed not one, or two, but six science fiction films he approved of. (Why he’d identified two of them as documentaries is a mystery; all are features. Clarke’s predecessor, the influential British science fiction writer H. G. Wells, had written both Things to Come and The War of the Worlds.) He continued by citing Childhood’s End—“which everybody agrees is my best book, and . . . deals with the impact of a superior race on humanity”—repeated that he would really have to “hurry back to Ceylon,” and extended an invitation. In the event that they did “get a worthwhile idea cooked up in New York,” he hoped Kubrick could come work further on it with him in Ceylon: “We have our own organization here, having produced two films in the last year, including the first Technicolor Sinhalese movie ever made. I think I could promise you a very interesting time.”
He closed by advising Kubrick that the Questar was indeed the best small scope, and told him he was bringing his own to New York for reconditioning and would happily show him how to use it. Off the letter went that afternoon, and there it might have remained until their meeting in New York, but that night Clarke fell to thinking. The sun always sets around six in Ceylon, and though he typically went to bed early, that still left a few hours of consciousness, during which he considered the question of making “the proverbial ‘really good’ science fiction movie” and his potential involvement. Which of his ideas could best serve as basis?
As if on cue, the Moon rose over the palms fringing their property—on its side as always in the tropics, its poles not vertical but horizontal. Clarke could hear a faint Buddhist chanting coming from an open window in a neighboring lot, issuing from some hidden speaker system somewhere—an oddly soothing sing-song-sing-sing-song-sang-sang. Practicing Buddhists left this chanting on all night, some of them, a live feed from the temples of Kandy, and there were radio stations that played nothing but. Even if he couldn’t share the faith behind it, it didn’t bother him. In fact, it humanized the evening.
Anyway, Clarke reflected, at least Buddhism and Hinduism, of all the Earth’s religions, had somehow managed to intuit an approximate sense of the vast scale of space and time that science had demonstrated—the infinity on either side of that thin flash of light constituting an individual lifetime. Mike and his wife, Liz, had gone out. Having seen to Arthur’s needs, surveyed the scuba tanks, oiled the air compressor in the garage, and wheeled out his trishaw, Clarke’s body man Hector Ekanayake had motored off to the gym and was doubtless now pounding on a sandbag with gloved hands. Arthur’s loyal shepherd, Laika—named after the dog the Soviets sent into Earth orbit in 1957, never to return—had settled down comfortably on the grass near his feet, with only her ears pinioning occasionally toward some distant car backfire. The house was otherwise silent.
It should really be “The Sentinel,” Clarke realized.
• • •
The next day he rose early, made a pot of tea, seated himself back at the typewriter, and inserted another blank sheet into the carriage roller. It was a time of day he valued above all others. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but the fox-like Ceylonese fruit bats had all returned to their trees and were hanging upside down, snoozing peacefully like nightmarish Christmas ornaments, their immense leather wings folded.
Kubrick had mentioned the Moon and clearly was interested in extraterrestrial intelligence as the core of his film. His short story “The Sentinel” killed two birds already. Maybe they could add Mars later. Or not. He began to type:
Opening: Screen full of stars. A completely black disc slowly drifts in from the left until it fills the center of the screen, eclipsing the stars. Its right-hand edge lightens, the glow of the corona appears, and the sun rises. As it does so, we realize that we are looking down on the night side of the Moon and are racing around, as if on a close satellite, to the daylight side.
He stopped and meditated for a minute: not too bad. The black disc was a nicely graphic touch. This was a movie, after all.
The crater-filled crescent expands steadily from a thin bow to a half moon. As it does so, voices come up on the soundtrack. They are American, Russian, British—the various lunar bases and exploring parties, talking to each other, asking for supplies, exchanging information, joking, grumbling . . .
Also okay. International competition. Let’s keep the Brits in the game.
We hear the end of a countdown, and there is a brilliant, moving glare against the darkened face of the Moon as an outward-bound ship takes off for Mars.
He wanted Mars. I’ll give him Mars.
The soundtrack singles out one exploring party, driving a tractor across the Mare Crisium. The camera moves down onto it, and the other voices fade out. We can tell from the rising excitement and incoherent phrases that the survey team has found something—something which, even on the Moon, is quite out of the ordinary.
Okay, maybe that was just about enough—a kind of teaser. But what would Kubrick make of it, without any further explanation? Typing a line of dots below the short prose sketch, Clarke added another paragraph, steering the director to “The Sentinel” and describing briefly the essence of the story, in which a survey team discovers a diamond-hard crystal pyramid of alien origin, which has clearly been on the lunar surface for millions of years. When broken open after great effort, its signal to the stars ceases. “Some of the scientists in the resulting debate decide, correctly, that it can only be a monitor—the equivalent of a celestial fire alarm.”
Then he wrote a cover letter: “I have thought of a nice opening for a space movie . . . It might lead into a great number of situations, not only the one described in Childhood’s End.”
And he sent that off as well; two letters in two days.
