Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"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."

"Yes. In one of them, The Mosquito Coast, there's an unattributed quote from you about technology and magic."

"Clarke's Third Law!" he said and rubbed his hands. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"What is Clarke's First Law?" I asked.

"First Law," he said, hardly hesitating. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond the impossible."

"Second Law?"

"There is no Second Law, only first and third. Heh-heh" He became playful and animated. He began to recite a poem he said he'd written long ago. Perhaps his numbered laws put him in mind of it.

The two-legged lama's a priest,

The four-legged llama's a beast.

Alas, for cosmic melodrama

There isn't any three-legged lama.

"I didn't realize you were a poet."

"I write poetry occasionally," he said, and then an expression strained his features. I had seen this off and on during my visit, his trying to remember something. He said with difficulty, "Did I ever tell you the story of how I shared bed and breakfast with the czar of Russia?"

He was addressing me as though speaking to an old and valued friend. I said, "No. I'd love to hear it."

"Oh, yes." He smiled. "We were only a few weeks old! You see—" He gripped his head with his fingers like a soothsayer trying to force a vision, and then in a convulsive way said, "They were in exile in England in 1918. We had an English nanny, a Miss Hinckley, and she"—he paused and pressed his head again—"she'd been to Russia." His voice trailed off and he seemed out of breath. "Royal family, yes." He had lost the thread of the story and was murmuring Miss Hinckley's name. At last he said, "What stories she could tell."

He went silent, drifting into a private reverie. I sat wondering if I should excuse myself and leave, but Sir Arthur seemed content. I covertly made notes, a sort of inventory of the framed pictures and what trophies I could read. There was a shelf of model planes—jet planes, and toy rockets.

"You asked if I wrote poems," he said and brightened. "I wrote a poem when I was young. It ended, 'I rose and fled, afraid to be alone.'"

He became sad, seeming to remember. I said, "What were the circumstances?"

"I was being evacuated to America. Sent away." He was staring into space. With feeling, he quoted again, "I rose and fled, afraid to be alone."

His secretary knocked and opened the study door. "It's time," she said. To me, she said, "Sir Arthur's tired. He needs his lunch and his nap."

But Sir Arthur was still in his posture of recitation, his back straight, his head upright. I thought he was going to say some more lines of his poem. He said, "I dedicated it to the boy I was in love with."

His secretary winced. She had started wheeling him out, but Sir Arthur was smiling wistfully, and I felt I'd had a glimpse of his passion and sadness.*

* Sir Arthur died on March 22, 2008, as I was correcting these pages. He was buried in Colombo, his tombstone bearing an epitaph he wrote himself: "Here lies Arthur C. Clarke. He never grew up and never stop growing."

***

THE NEXT MORNING I WENT to Fort Station in Colombo. The station had not changed, except that it was very crowded because of Avurudu, the Sinhalese New Year, the occasion of the full moon. Paul Bowles, who spent time on this coast, once wrote, "New Years here is not a day but a season." True—even a week later there were rituals and high jinks and reduced service on buses and trains, most people regarding the holiday as a reason to stay home, eating the specified meals and obeying the astrological directives.