A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke
Authors: Arthur C. Clarke
Tags: Speculative Fiction
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his neck.
Two hours later I was climbing over the Alps, saying goodbye to the family by radio, and wondering why, like every other sensible Swiss, I hadn’t become a banker or gone into the watch business. It was all the fault of the Picards and Hannes Keller, I told myself moodily: why did they have to start this deep see tradition, in Switzerland of all countries? Then I settled down to sleep, knowing that I would have little enough in the days to come.
We landed at Trincomalee just after dawn, and the huge, complex harbour—whose geography I’ve never quite mastered—was a maze of capes, islands, interconnecting waterways, and basins large enough to hold all the navies of the world. I could see the big white control building, in a somewhat flamboyant architectural style, on a headland overlooking the Indian Ocean. The site was pure propaganda—though of course if I’d been Russian I’d have called it ‘public relations’.
Not that I really blamed my clients; they had good reason to be proud of this, the most ambitious attempt yet made to harness the thermal energy of the sea. It was not the first attempt. There had been an unsuccessful one by the French scientist Georges Claude in the 1930s, and a much bigger one at Abidjan, on the west coast of Africa, in the 1950s.
All these projects depended on the same surprising fact: even in the tropics the sea a mile down is almost at freezing point. Where billions of tons of water are concerned, this temperature difference represents a colossal amount of energy—and a fine challenge to the engineers of power-starved countries.
Claude and his successors had tried to tap this energy with low-pressure steam engines; the Russians had used a much simpler and more direct method. For over a hundred years it had been known that electric currents flow in many materials if one end is heated and the other cooled, and ever since the 1940s Russian scientists had been working to put this ‘thermoelectric’ effect to practical use. Their earliest devices had not been very efficient—though good enough to power thousands of radios by the heat of kerosene lamps. But in 1974 they had made a big, and still-secret, breakthrough. Though I fixed the power elements at the cold end of the system, I never really saw them; they were completely hidden in anticorrosive paint. All I know is that they formed a big grid, like lots of old-fashioned steam radiators bolted together.
I recognised most of the faces in the little crowd waiting on the Trinco airstrip; friends or enemies, they all seemed glad to see me—especially Chief Engineer Shapiro.
‘Well, Lev,’ I said, as we drove out in the station wagon, ‘what’s the trouble?’
‘We don’t know,’ he said frankly. ‘It’s your job to find out—and to put it right.’
‘Well, what happened ?’
‘Everything worked perfectly up to the full-power tests,’ he answered. ‘Output was within five per cent of estimate until 0134 Tuesday morning.’ He grimaced; obviously that time was engraved on his heart. ‘Then the voltage started to fluctuate violently, so we cut the load and watched the meters. I thought that some idiot of a skipper had hooked the cables—you know the trouble we’ve taken to avoid that happening—so we switched on the searchlights and looked out to sea. There wasn’t a ship in sight. Anyway, who would have tried to anchor just outside the harbour on a clear, calm night?
‘There was nothing we could do except watch the instruments and keep testing; I’ll show you all the graphs when we get to the office. After four minutes everything went open circuit. We can locate the break exactly, of course—and it’s in the deepest part, right at the grid. It would be there, and not at this end of the system,’ he added gloomily, pointing out the window.
We were just driving past the Solar Pond—the equivalent of the boiler in a conventional heat engine. This was an idea that the Russians had borrowed from
Two hours later I was climbing over the Alps, saying goodbye to the family by radio, and wondering why, like every other sensible Swiss, I hadn’t become a banker or gone into the watch business. It was all the fault of the Picards and Hannes Keller, I told myself moodily: why did they have to start this deep see tradition, in Switzerland of all countries? Then I settled down to sleep, knowing that I would have little enough in the days to come.
We landed at Trincomalee just after dawn, and the huge, complex harbour—whose geography I’ve never quite mastered—was a maze of capes, islands, interconnecting waterways, and basins large enough to hold all the navies of the world. I could see the big white control building, in a somewhat flamboyant architectural style, on a headland overlooking the Indian Ocean. The site was pure propaganda—though of course if I’d been Russian I’d have called it ‘public relations’.
Not that I really blamed my clients; they had good reason to be proud of this, the most ambitious attempt yet made to harness the thermal energy of the sea. It was not the first attempt. There had been an unsuccessful one by the French scientist Georges Claude in the 1930s, and a much bigger one at Abidjan, on the west coast of Africa, in the 1950s.
All these projects depended on the same surprising fact: even in the tropics the sea a mile down is almost at freezing point. Where billions of tons of water are concerned, this temperature difference represents a colossal amount of energy—and a fine challenge to the engineers of power-starved countries.
Claude and his successors had tried to tap this energy with low-pressure steam engines; the Russians had used a much simpler and more direct method. For over a hundred years it had been known that electric currents flow in many materials if one end is heated and the other cooled, and ever since the 1940s Russian scientists had been working to put this ‘thermoelectric’ effect to practical use. Their earliest devices had not been very efficient—though good enough to power thousands of radios by the heat of kerosene lamps. But in 1974 they had made a big, and still-secret, breakthrough. Though I fixed the power elements at the cold end of the system, I never really saw them; they were completely hidden in anticorrosive paint. All I know is that they formed a big grid, like lots of old-fashioned steam radiators bolted together.
I recognised most of the faces in the little crowd waiting on the Trinco airstrip; friends or enemies, they all seemed glad to see me—especially Chief Engineer Shapiro.
‘Well, Lev,’ I said, as we drove out in the station wagon, ‘what’s the trouble?’
‘We don’t know,’ he said frankly. ‘It’s your job to find out—and to put it right.’
‘Well, what happened ?’
‘Everything worked perfectly up to the full-power tests,’ he answered. ‘Output was within five per cent of estimate until 0134 Tuesday morning.’ He grimaced; obviously that time was engraved on his heart. ‘Then the voltage started to fluctuate violently, so we cut the load and watched the meters. I thought that some idiot of a skipper had hooked the cables—you know the trouble we’ve taken to avoid that happening—so we switched on the searchlights and looked out to sea. There wasn’t a ship in sight. Anyway, who would have tried to anchor just outside the harbour on a clear, calm night?
‘There was nothing we could do except watch the instruments and keep testing; I’ll show you all the graphs when we get to the office. After four minutes everything went open circuit. We can locate the break exactly, of course—and it’s in the deepest part, right at the grid. It would be there, and not at this end of the system,’ he added gloomily, pointing out the window.
We were just driving past the Solar Pond—the equivalent of the boiler in a conventional heat engine. This was an idea that the Russians had borrowed from
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