Tales From the White Hart by Arthur C Clarke

Author:Arthur C Clarke [Clarke, Arthur C]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Collections & Anthologies, Science Fiction, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780795325878
Google: JY4qAAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17987075
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 1957-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Man Who Ploughed the Sea

The adventures of Harry Purvis have a kind of mad logic that makes them convincing by their very improbability. As his complicated but neatly dove-tailed stories emerge, one becomes lost in a sort of baffled wonder. Surely, you say to yourself, no-one would have the nerve to make that up—such absurdities only occur in real life, not in fiction. And so criticism is disarmed, or at any rate discomfitted, until Drew shouts, “Time, gentlemen, pleeze!” and throws us all out into the cold hard world.

Consider, for example, the unlikely chain of events which involved Harry in the following adventure. If he’d wanted to invent the whole thing, surely he could have managed it a lot more simply. There was not the slightest need, from the artistic point of view, to have started at Boston to make an appointment off the coast of Florida.…

Harry seems to have spent a good deal of time in the United States, and to have quite as many friends there as he has in England. Sometimes he brings them to the “White Hart,” and sometimes they leave again under their own power. Often, however, they succumb to the illusion that beer which is tepid is also innocuous. (I am being unjust to Drew: his beer is not tepid. And if you insist, he will give you, for no extra charge, a piece of ice every bit as large as a postage-stamp.)

This particular saga of Harry’s began, as I have indicated, at Boston, Mass. He was staying as a house-guest of a successful New England lawyer when one morning his host said, in the casual way Americans have: “Let’s go down to my place in Florida. I want to get some sun.”

“Fine,” said Harry, who’d never been to Florida. Thirty minutes later, to his considerable surprise, he found himself moving south in a red Jaguar saloon at a formidable speed.

The drive in itself was an epic worthy of a complete story. From Boston to Miami is a little matter of 1,568 miles—a figure which, according to Harry, is now engraved on his heart. They covered the distance in 30 hours, frequently to the sound of ever-receding police sirens as frustrated squad-cars dwindled astern. From time to time considerations of tactics involved them in evasive manoeuvres and they had to shoot off into secondary roads. The Jaguar’s radio tuned in to all the police frequencies, so they always had plenty of warning if an interception was being arranged. Once or twice they just managed to reach a state line in time, and Harry couldn’t help wondering what his host’s clients would have thought had they known the strength of the psychological urge which was obviously getting him away from them. He also wondered if he was going to see anything of Florida at all, or whether they would continue at this velocity down US 1 until they shot into the ocean at Key West.

They finally came to a halt sixty miles south of Miami, down on the Keys—that long, thin line of island hooked on to the lower end of Florida.

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