Always an Eye on the Things to Come

His prodigiously creative mind has transported tens of millions of his fellow earthlings on journeys to other galaxies, suns and planets. But at this particular juncture on the time-space continuum, Arthur C. Clarke has his attention focused on a different kind of orb: a Ping-Pong ball.

“This . . . is essential,” huffs the bespectacled godfather of the telecommunications satellite and the preeminent futurist and science fiction writer of his times, as he clamps his left hand to the table for support and awaits his opponent’s next serve. “My reactions are OK. But I can’t make my legs move any faster anymore.”

Stricken with post-polio syndrome and failing hearing and suffering for the moment from a nasty chest infection, Clarke, who turned 78 in December, now must walk with the support of one of his two “keepers” or use a wheelchair.

But every afternoon, he faithfully comes for a table-tennis workout at a swimming club here. He breaks a sweat and regularly trounces men half his age and younger.

“I’m feeling fine mentally--there’s just so many interesting things going on!” says the English-born writer, who has made this tropical island in the Indian Ocean his home for more than three decades. “It’s just that my body is rebelling.”

Regardless of what is going on in the tissue that hosts it, the imagination that gave birth to more than 70 books and co-wrote the screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey” functions like a newly minted microchip, spraying out ideas, quips, hypotheses, queries and jokes at a bewildering pace.

If the caller is a journalist, Clarke will likely tiptoe into the book- and memento-lined sanctum on the second floor with some trepidation. For his press kit begins with a preemptive strike: “Having done several thousand interviews in all media, I’m completely fed up with talking (even about myself).”

But the barefoot author clad in a batik sarong proves charming, funny, graciously hospitable and contagiously enthusiastic. His health problems compel him to take an afternoon nap, he apologizes. But he still puts in 10-hour workdays and gets enough done to keep seven secretaries on three continents busy.

Next month, his 70th-odd book (he seems to have lost count) will go on sale. It depicts a sinister world “run by Chinese-held corporations and an America split along racial lines” that is suddenly jolted by an enormous earthquake. Hence, the title: “Richter 10.”

Since Clarke these days rarely leaves his exclusive neighborhood, let alone this remote island off southeastern India, the novel was “virtually co-authored” with Mike McQuay, a writer Clarke never met.

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Clarke’s love affair with space and the “what ifs?” of sci-fi date to his boyhood.

In 1945, while serving in the Royal Air Force and running the first prototype in Britain of ground-controlled approach radar, he postulated in an article for a communications journal that a satellite, 22,300 miles above the Earth, could maintain a fixed geostationary orbit. By bouncing signals off such “rocket stations,” almost instantaneous communications between two fixed points on Earth would be possible, he theorized.

It was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who first popularized his theory, Clarke recalls with gratitude still.

Twenty years later, Early Bird, the first geostationary communications satellite, was launched and the era of global satellite telecommunications began.

Clarke sometimes feels, he now admits, like Dr. Frankenstein, devoured by his own creations and the ease with which modern telecommunications allow fans, UFO spotters, would-be inventors and anyone who has come up with a plan to save the world to reach him by phone, fax or e-mail.

Then there’s TV, now broadcasting via the kind of satellite he foresaw, which for half a century has been beaming evidence of Earth’s present level of civilization--from the evening news to “Beavis and Butt-Head”--into the cosmos at 186,000 miles per second.

“This shows there is no intelligent civilization within 50 light years of here, for if there was, the cops would be here, sirens screaming right across the radio spectrum,” Clarke told a workshop on space science in Colombo this month.

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Half a decade short of 2001, the year that he and Stanley Kubrick made a pop-culture icon in what many believe is the greatest science fiction film ever made, Clarke worries about a general decline of educational standards and “the rise of ignorance and crazy ideas,” developments he blames largely on television.

Even the rapid spread of the Internet has its costs, he believes. “Everybody’s plugged in and nobody’s running the world,” he says.

Clarke came to this balmy island (he calls it “India without the hassles”) in the 1960s to dive in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. He started a scuba-diving company and now lives with partner Hector Ekanayake and his Australian-born wife and three daughters.

Despite his good-natured grousing, he clearly remains spellbound by advanced technology (“indistinguishable from magic,” he wrote in “The Lost Worlds of 2001”). While receiving a guest, he periodically turns to his Compaq computer to check his e-mail or to surf the Net, pausing at locations where fans and acquaintances discuss his work or the latest scientific innovations.

Last year, thanks to satellites and modern telecommunications, Clarke was able to bask in Sri Lankan warmth and address an IBM convention at EuroDisney, hold televised chats with Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner and CNN’s top brass, and receive NASA’s Distinguished Service Award from Administrator Dan Goldin.

He also wrapped up 26 episodes of his latest TV series, “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Universe” and acted in the interactive CD-ROM version of his “Rama Tapestry” saga, pretending to confront monsters that will be dropped in later by computer.

He pitched in to help buy the embryo of one of Tyrannosaurus rex’s relatives, which has been sent for scientific scanning. When Hollywood gets around to making “Jurassic Park 10,” Clarke joked in a newsletter to friends, the movie may star a real dinosaur. Meantime, Steven Spielberg has taken out an option on his penultimate fiction, “Hammer of God,” the tale of a comet that threatens to slam into Earth.

This November, if the Russians adhere to their schedule, Clarke’s picture and recorded words will blast off for Mars, more than 34 million miles away, aboard two landers. The hope is that whenever human colonists finally make their way to the Red Planet, they will discover the CD-ROMs that include Clarke’s lyrical message of greetings sent “across the gulfs of space.”

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Clarke does not at all like to make general predictions about what lies ahead for humanity. Ask him to foretell the future and he cites his personal favorite among his many books, “The Songs of Distant Earth.”

“I blew up the Earth in the first chapter. So I hope it’s not a forecast,” he says.

What captivates him now is research into an alternate source of energy, known as “vacuum power,” that supposedly is generated by fleeting subatomic particles. In one test, a minute charge of DC electricity reportedly produced more than 1,000 times as much thermal power.

The Japanese, Clarke says, recently boosted their contribution to vacuum energy research to more than $100 million. “It’s going to be another technological Pearl Harbor,” he warns. “It could turn the world upside down and upset everything.”

Many mainstream physicists are skeptical, seeing vacuum energy as just the latest version of the philosopher’s stone or perpetual motion machine. But they might ponder an observation from Sri Lanka’s best-known resident: “If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.”