Captain Vertigo

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SKY (245 pp.) --Arthur C. Clarke--Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).

"This is a slightly unusual request," says Dr. Wagner. "As far as I know, it's the first time anyone's been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?"

"Gladly," replies the questing lama. His lamasery has been occupied for 300 years with but one project--finding and listing j the 9 billion names of God. The explanation satisfies Dr. Wagner and he packs the Mark V Computer off to Tibet with two technicians, George and Chuck. As "electromatic" typewriters tap out the giant brain's findings, George and Chuck begin to have qualms. The high lama believes that the world will come to an end when Mark V emits the 9 billionth name of God. What if the monks turn violent when the Last Trump fails to sound?

Chuck and George decide to take it on the lam from lamaland. On a brilliantly starlit night, the technicians descend by donkeyback to the foot of the high Himalayas. "Wonder if the computer's finished its run," muses George. "It was due about now." Both men gaze upward and continue to do so, for "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

Victorian Space Age. Eerie little spine ticklers of this sort have sold some 2,000,000 copies of 19 books by Britain's Arthur C. (for Charles) Clarke, a science-fiction writer with rare qualifications. Author Clarke holds a first-class honors degree in science from King's College, University of London, served as chairman of the British Interplanetary Society (1950-53), and as early as 1945 he published a pioneering paper on using a space station for radio and television relay. A ten-year sifting of Author Clarke's tales of the space age, The Other Side of the Sky is heavily weighted with Victorian Age flummery, but offers sound science along with good fun.

In Cosmic Casanova, an intergalactic lover boy tunes in a cute pinup on his rocketship TV screen. He makes an unscheduled landing on her tiny home planet, only to be disappointed when the hatch door opens. The girl turns out to be a giantess, and "I'd have looked like such a fool, standing there on tiptoe with my arms wrapped around her knees."

In Security Check, a science-fiction writer is called on the carpet for his unwittingly explicit descriptions of spaceships and space weapons. He assumes his interrogators to be FBI agents, and they are--but not earth's.

The 37th Dimension. Outer spacemanship seems to call for large fictional gestures, and before he is through, Author Clarke manages to blow up the sun. the earth, and one or two outlying solar systems. His stories are larded with the lingo and gadgetry of tomorrow, e.g., "gravity inverters," "radiospectrographs," "the thirty-seventh dimension." Spaceman Clarke believes that "space travel is man's next step in evolution with consequences that may be even greater than those of man's evolution as a land animal." His latest book carries glimmerings of the awesome dimensions of that step, but at times, the dialogue interferes. One line, at least, should be permanently retired. A minor planet is graced with the unexpected landing of a giant rocketship. The flustered local dignitary goes forward to greet the visitors. For a moment words fail him, and then he blurts out: "You're from Earth--I presume?"

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