And if I failed to catch up with Clarke by computer? Well, I supposed it would be like a train journey to Outer Mongolia; I at least could write of the experience of trying to get there and of the people I met along the way.
I’d cop out in one more respect. Rather than ask Clarke the usual reporterish questions, I would turn the job over to others. The first was Eric Meyer, twelve years old, who was learning assembly language, a feat at any age, and who planned to start a software company called New Technologies.[[83]] The second was a Fortune 500 man named Jerry terHorst, head of Ford Motor’s public affairs office in Washington, D.C., and former press secretary to Gerald Ford. The third was Margaret Phanes, assistant to David Kay, vice-president of the company that had made my computer; the fourth, Seymour Rubinstein, a science-fiction fan and the developer of WordStar. The fifth was Rob Barnaby, the WordStar writer. The sixth was James Watt, co-owner of the Haunted Book Shop in Annapolis, Maryland, and a descendant of the eighteenth-century Scottish inventor. The seventh, Lynn Wilson, a former railroad telegrapher, had taught me some amateur radio theory when I was twelve.
Eric himself had just passed his novice examination for an amateur license, and over the phone, with a push button, I tapped out my idea in international Morse code.
“How,” I inquired, “would you like to ask Arthur Clarke some questions?”
“Who’s Arthur Clarke?” Eric replied by voice.
It was a pardonable response. Clarke’s 2001—the book and movie for which he’s most famous—had come out several years before Eric’s birth. And yet as much as anything, Eric’s reply showed where we were headed in this age of specialization. He might someday be programming the future equivalents of HAL, developing new forms of artificial intelligence, and yet he apparently had not heard of HAL’s creator.
I told Eric who Clarke was. “No, thanks,” Eric tapped.
“But he’s the most famous science-fiction writer in the world,” I said, and explained the kind of issues that he might ask about.
Eric, however, still wasn’t completely impressed. “Does he understand technical things?”
I assured Eric that Arthur Clarke was technical enough to be worth his time. “We’re going to do this by computers over the phone lines,” I said. “In fact, I’d like you to send your questions to me by computer. Then I’ll store them inside mine. And then I’ll shoot them by computer to Arthur Clarke there in Sri Lanka. You’ll be communicating machine to machine, sort of.”