A Clockwork Lemon
by A. Bertram Chandler
Captain
Chandler writes that (as of August,1981), he is still working on the
Australian novel, but hopes to get it finished before the end of 1981.
Then Commodore Grimes will be recalled from his Long Service Leave and
signed on for another series of misadventures.
As
the twentieth century lurched towards its close, the Power Crisis
steadily worsened. Fossil fuels were almost as extinct as the living
organisms whose tissues had been converted, millennia ago, into oil and
coal. After a series of disasters, not unconnected with sabotage and
terrorism, the use of nuclear fission as a power source had been
abandoned throughout the world. Nuclear fusion was still just around the
corner. Solar power would be practicable only after the skies were
clear of the dust flung up during the planetwide outbreak of vulcanism.
All
industry was hard hit. Hardest hit of all were the automobile
manufacturers. Desperate and ingenious expedients were tried in the
endeavour to keep wheels on the road. There were the sailmobiles—but few
motorists possessed yachtsmanlike skills.
There
were the pedalmobiles—but as nutritional standards had been steadily
declining, few men or women had the strength and endurance to propel
even a lightweight construction of aluminum and plastic for more than a
kilometre.
It
was the Japanese who came up with what was hoped to be a solution to
the problem. A very old man, the great grandfather of a vice president
of one of the major Nipponese automobile manufacturers, remembered a car
that had been made in Japan in the late 1920s. It had been intended for
export to what was then British India. It was to be a runabout in which
the mem-sahib could
do
her shopping or make her social calls. It had a clockwork motor. In a
country such as India was in those days there would be no shortage of
cheap coolie labor to keep the thing wound up. And, said the
centenarian, with unemployment rife in every country there would be no
shortage of labor for such a task today.
Plans
and specifications were unearthed in the Patents Office. The original
design was improved upon. The prototype was built and performed
successfully. It would be ideal for use in most big cities. (It was
realized, though, that it would never sell in San Francisco.)
Soon
traffic jams—which, for a few years, had been almost forgotten—returned
to the streets of Tokyo. Soon other countries were expressing interest
in the clockwork vehicle.
Australia
was the first nation to place large orders for the new car. But the
vehicles could not be imported on the hoof and would have to be
assembled by local labor. Nonetheless arrangements were made and
contracts signed. The first consignment of completely disassembled
clockwork cars was loaded aboard Japan Airlines' big cargo-carrying
dirigible Ferdinand Maru. (Named after the Graf Ferdinand von
Zeppelin, not that other Ferdinand.) The great ship lifted from Narita
and commenced her voyage south to Sydney. Although, by this time,
airships were once again a familiar sight in the skies, a sizable party
of journalists—press, radio and TV—gathered at Townsville, on the
Queensland coast, over which city the ship would pass. It was the nature
of her cargo that made this a newsworthy event.
Meanwhile the captain of the airship was having his troubles.
Slow
leaks had developed in two of the helium gas cells. He endeavoured to
maintain altitude by aerodynamic lift but his ship was falling. He
dumped all his water ballast and, for a while, thought that he would be
able to reach Sydney. But the leaks worsened. He ordered the dumping of
consumable stores, even to the last grain of rice, and stood on. Again
he was losing altitude. The personal possessions of the entire crew were
the next to be sacrificed.
As he approached Townsville he made his Big Decision. He would
have
to jettison cargo. Good airshipman that he was, he realised that the
dumping of entire crates would mean an uncontrollable rise, possibly
even to pressure height. He instructed his chief officer to break open
the containers and to throw their contents out through the open cargo
bay doors piece by piece until ordered to stop. The crates handiest to
the doors were those in which the clockwork motor parts were packed.
The
crew set to work with a will—and soon it became obvious that there was
more need for speed than discretion. Handfuls of toothed wheels were
flung out of the ship. And still she was falling, although more slowly.
The
assembled journalists, on the roof of Townsville's tallest building,
could see that there was something wrong. They stared in bewilderment at
the glittering shower descending from the open doors. One of them, who
was using a powerful pair of binoculars, realized the lethal potential
of the metallic rain.
"Take cover!" he yelled. "It's raining Datsun cogs!"
art: Jim Odbert