Why not? Kaypro itself had once suggested that to me. It could do worse than to be able to say that Clarke and an MGM/UA director had used Kaypros to communicate during the creation of the 2010 film. I, in turn, might reach Clarke more easily if he was tapping away on a machine like mine. Besides, he eventually could give his Kaypro to the new Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies. The center was to promote high tech in the Third World, and Joseph Pelton, who was rounding up U.S. backers for the organization, liked the Kaypro idea. So did Clarke. And so did Peter Hyams at MGM/UA.
Hyams wasn’t just a well-known director with such credits as Capricorn One and The Star Chamber. He was the kind of person for whom I was writing this book—he had a problem open to possible solution by computer.
The problem was the need to consult closely with Clarke during the adaptation of the 2010 novel; how to overcome the time difference between Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Culver City, California?
“Some things work brilliantly when read but aren’t well suited to the screen,” Hyams said, and as a conscientious scriptwriter he didn’t want to make arbitrary changes to Clarke’s story. “I was interested in finding out what the author was thinking when he wrote certain things. And secondly I thought it was very, very important that Arthur C. Clarke be made to feel an important part of the making of this movie.” With rapport might come a greater understanding of the man and his books. Hearing of Hyams’s proposal to work together via[via] computer, however, Clarke was skeptical. I could imagine why. Hyams would need a dependable link, not just the capability to exchange occasional messages. It might be 1983, satellites might be old hat by now, but the quality of the phone transmissions didn’t belie the fact that Clarke was on an island in the Indian Ocean. Could computers deal reliably with the electronic echoes, with the delays from the signal traveling more than 45,000 miles on earth and in space? What about Sri Lanka’s primitive phone system?
And yet Clarke’s location—some 9,350 miles from Culver City—also helped the struggle seem all the more worthwhile.
“Because he’s twelve or thirteen hours away in time, it almost makes normal conversation impossible,” Hyams said. “Someone is always going to be speaking at a very inconvenient hour for them. And there are some times when you don’t want to talk, and sometimes when you’re asking somebody for something, you want to think about something. It requires more than a quick answer.” Letters, though, just wouldn’t do: “I’ve gotten mail from him that’s almost a month old.” Hyams might have used telex or a similar system, but the costs would still be greater than a direct computer-to-computer link. Ideally, he could tap out memos on a computer, then whisk them to Clarke without a secretary taking the time to type them into another machine. Hyams was already comfortable with a Xerox 860 word processor. Like me, however, he realized that the link had more chance of succeeding with the two ends using the same computer systems—Kaypros in this case. Two hardworking Kaypro employees, Margaret Phanes and Clifford Odendhal, pushed through the project at their company. Within a week or so a Kaypro II was on the way to Clarke, and the company installed another in Hyams’s office; at long last, the Great Modeming seemed at hand.
Then, however, rioting broke out in Sri Lanka: fighting between two ethnic groups, the Singhalese and the minority Tamils, who were seeking a separate state. Somehow Clarke’s Kaypro reached the airport. But he couldn’t pick it up because of the rioting, during which an arsonist burned down the house of one of his technical assistants.
“They’re swinging the jawbone again,” said an acquaintance of mine, alluding to a scene in 2001 where a man-ape kills another with the high tech of his era. It was not a slur on Sri Lanka—just general disgust over violence of any kind. News stories appeared, then stories about the island trying to censor reporters so there wouldn’t be any more stories.
Just when every circumstance seemed to be conspiring against me, I enjoyed a miraculous fluke. Arthur Clarke’s neighbor Susan Hayes, the wife of an American official in Colombo, was visiting Washington and would return to Sri Lanka soon; and through a member of the Kaypro writers group, Marcia Tyson, I passed on to her the written questions for Clarke to answer by phone if need be. I wasn’t cheating. It was perfectly in line with both the Marco Polo tradition and the spirit of this book; don’t ever shy away from paper backups.
I also supplied Clarke a disk of MODEM7, the public-domain program that I used—so that we needn’t worry about software differences if my program didn’t work with the one that Kaypro gave him.