In Imperial Earth a man from a moon of Saturn visits Washington in 2276 to celebrate the U.S. quincentennial and cultivate his family’s terrestrial political contacts. Wreckers have razed the original Watergate complex—over the objections of the Democrats, who wanted it saved as a national monument—but in many ways politicians and statesmen are the same as in the darkest twentieth century. They seek personal contact with each other. “Only after that contact, with its inevitable character evaluation, had been made, and the subtle links of mutual understanding and common interest established,” writes Clarke, “could one do business by long-distance communication with any degree of confidence.”
A booster of telecommuting might nod. He’d insisted that we meet face-to-face, and I suspected I could have enjoyed slightly better cooperation from a few other interviewees for this book if we had been in the same rooms. Wires and satellites could never eliminate travel.
Granted, some researchers might say the next year that people tended to use stronger words in computer conferences, perhaps to make up for the lack of body language and other visual clues. Reportedly, the decisions from such conferences tended to be more radical—involving much more risk or not enough—than those made face-to-face.
Just the same, computer “meetings” could greatly reduce travel once the people at the various ends had established the basic trust. Clarke had written two decades ago, “The business lunch of the future could be conducted perfectly well with the two halves of the table ten thousand miles apart; all that would be missing would be the handshakes and exchange of cigars.”[[92]]
That might or not be with television contact. The absence of it, however, wouldn’t be the ultimate disaster. In concentrating on the other person’s message, you might be less vulnerable to misleading clues from facial expression, body movement, or clothing. Clarke himself enjoyed creating different personae for different audiences; once his sarong had shaken up an IBM convention. A Washington reporter described him at another time as “a paunchy fellow” with thinning hair, “math-teacher glasses, discreet hearing aid ... red velvet slippers and unbelted pants” who looked “like some kind of GS-12 from the Bureau of Poultry Audits. And he wants you to see his Kermit the Frog doll.”[[93]] Yet this same man could don dark suits for book jackets and deliver august speeches to statesmen.
Beyond reducing the opportunity for visual distractions, long-distance contact by phone or computer offered another advantage in my opinion. You could reach more people in a given time to confirm their facts; you weren’t twiddling your thumbs in cabs and airport lobbies or wearily working the horn locally from a hotel room with a bed fit for a steel-spined dwarf.
That still left the question of what kind of office you would talk to the world from. Margaret Phanes of Kaypro wanted to know. The week Margaret asked about the office of 2001, she said she was in the middle of reading Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama. In her opinion, Clarke brought about “synchronicity.” He himself, in fact, had once told of “preposterous” coincidences in his own life, and he’d peopled Imperial Earth with characters like “George Washington,” a twenty-third-century Virginian who lived on a museum’s plantation named Mt. Vernon. If “synchronicity” or other coincidences had worked for Dickens, then why not Clarke and Phanes? Or Rothman? Trying to puzzle out some technical details of my computer-to-computer link with Clarke, I’d run into two noncelebrities who had met him. And what about his neighbor—visiting Washington—through whom I’d passed the questions from Margaret and the others? Coincidence needn’t be mystical. I was happy enough for it simply to be useful.
Replying to Margaret’s questions about what the office would be like in 2001, Clarke had a problem. For decades he had been working at home. “My ‘office,’ if you can call it that—it looks like a snake-pit with all the cables on the floor—is just ten feet from my bedroom. I can appreciate your questions are very important, but they’re outside my frame of reference.”
Clarke may have replied in a limited way to Phanes, however, when he answered a question from Seymour Rubinstein.
He’d asked Clarke about the possibility of briefcase computer tapping into worldwide networks to do complicated processing of information. Just how would that affect people?