Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (12 page)

The magnificent, desperately overstrained generators quietly died when the S9000 was passing the orbit of Persephone. It did not matter, the sun could never harm them now, and although the ship was speeding helplessly out into the lonely night of intersellar space, it would only be a matter of days before rescue came.

There was irony in that. A day ago, they had been the rescuers, going to the aid of a race that now no longer existed. Not for the first time Alveron wondered about the world that had just perished. He tried, in vain, to picture it as it had been in its glory, the streets of its cities thronged with life. Primitive though its people had been, they might have offered much to the Universe. If only they could have made contact! Regret was useless; long before their coming, the people of this world must have buried themselves in its iron heart. And now they and their civilisation would remain a mystery for the rest of time.

Alveron was glad when his thoughts were interrupted by Rugon’s entrance. The chief of communications had been very busy ever since the take-off, trying to analyse the programmes radiated by the transmitter Orostron had discovered. The problem was not a difficult one, but it demanded the construction of special equipment, and that had taken time.

‘Well, what have you found?’ asked Alveron.

‘Quite a lot,’ replied his friend. ‘There’s something mysterious here, and I don’t understand it.

‘It didn’t take long to find how the vision transmissions were built up, and we’ve been able to convert them to suit our own equipment. It seems that there were cameras all over the planet, surveying points of interest. Some of them were apparently in cities, on the tops of very high buildings. The cameras were rotating continuously to give panoramic views. In the programmes we’ve recorded there are about twenty different scenes.

‘In addition, there are a number of transmissions of a different kind, neither sound nor vision. They seem to be purely scientific – possibly instrument readings or something of that sort. All these programmes were going out simultaneously on different frequency bands.

‘Now there must be a reason for all this. Orostron still thinks that the station simply wasn’t switched off when it was deserted. But these aren’t the sort of programmes such a station would normally radiate at all. It was certainly used for interplanetary relaying – Klarten was quite right there. So these people must have crossed space, since none of the other planets had any life at the time of the last survey. Don’t you agree?’

Alveron was following intently.

‘Yes, that seems reasonable enough. But it’s also certain that the beam was pointing to none of the other planets. I checked that myself.’

‘I know,’ said Rugon. ‘What I want to discover is why a giant interplanetary relay station is busily transmitting pictures of a world about to be destroyed – pictures that would be of immense interest to scientists and astronomers. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to arrange all those panoramic cameras. I am convinced that those beams were going somewhere.’

Alveron started up.

‘Do you imagine that there might be an outer planet that hasn’t been reported?’ he asked. ‘If so, your theory’s certainly wrong. The beam wasn’t even pointing in the plane of the Solar System. And even if it were – just look at this.’

He switched on the vision screen and adjusted the controls. Against the velvet curtain of space was hanging a blue-white sphere, apparently composed of many concentric shells of incandescent gas. Even though its immense distance made all movement invisible, it was clearly expanding at an enormous rate. At its centre was a blinding point of light – the white dwarf star that the sun had now become.

‘You probably don’t realise just how big that sphere is,’ said Alveron. ‘Look at this.’

He increased the magnification until only the centre portion of the nova was visible. Close to its heart were two minute condensations, one on either side of the nucleus.

‘Those are the two giant planets of the system. They have still managed to retain their existence – after a fashion. And they were several hundred million miles from the sun. The nova is still expanding – but it’s already twice the size of the Solar System.’

Rugon was silent for a moment.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said, rather grudgingly. ‘You’ve disposed of my first theory. But you still haven’t satisfied me.’

He made several swift circuits of the room before speaking again. Alveron waited patiently. He knew the almost intuitive powers of his friend, who could often solve a problem when mere logic seemed insufficient.

Then, rather slowly, Rugon began to speak again.

‘What do you think of this?’ he said. ‘Suppose we’ve completely underestimated this people? Orostron did it once – he thought they could never have crossed space, since they’d only known radio for two centuries. Hansur II told me that. Well, Orostron was quite wrong. Perhaps we’re all wrong. I’ve had a look at the material that Klarten brought back from the transmitter. He wasn’t impressed by what he found, but it’s a marvellous achievement for so short a time. There were devices in that station that belonged to civilisations thousands of years older. Alveron, can we follow that beam to see where it leads?’

Alveron said nothing for a full minute. He had been more than half expecting the question, but it was not an easy one to answer. The main generators had gone completely. There was no point in trying to repair them. But there was still power available, and while there was power, anything could be done in time. It would mean a lot of improvisation, and some difficult manoeuvres, for the ship still had its enormous initial velocity. Yes, it could be done, and the activity would keep the crew from becoming further depressed, now that the reaction caused by the mission’s failure had started to set in. The news that the nearest heavy repair ship could not reach them for three weeks had also caused a slump in morale.

The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible. Very slowly, over many hours, the great ship began to discard the speed its main drive had given it in as many minutes. In a tremendous curve, millions of miles in radius, the S9000 changed its course and the star fields shifted round it.

The manoeuvre took three days, but at the end of that time the ship was limping along a course parallel to the beam that had once come from Earth. They were heading out into emptiness, the blazing sphere that had been the sun dwindling slowly behind them. By the standards of intersellar flight, they were almost stationary.

For hours Rugon strained over his instruments, driving his detector beams far ahead into space. There were certainly no planets within many light-years; there was no doubt of that. From time to time Alveron came to see him and always he had to give the same reply: ‘Nothing to report.’ About a fifth of the time Rugon’s intuition let him down badly; he began to wonder if this was such an occasion.

Not until a week later did the needles of the mass-detectors quiver feebly at the ends of their scales. But Rugon said nothing, not even to his captain. He waited until he was sure, and he went on waiting until even the short-range scanners began to react, and to build up the first faint pictures on the vision screen. Still he waited patiently until he could interpret the images. Then, when he knew that his wildest fancy was even less than the truth, he called his colleagues into the control room.

The picture on the vision screen was the familiar one of endless star fields, sun beyond sun to the very limits of the Universe. Near the centre of the screen a distant nebula made a patch of haze that was difficult for the eye to grasp.

Rugon increased the magnification. The stars flowed out of the field; the little nebula expanded until it filled the screen and then – it was a nebula no longer. A simultaneous gasp of amazement came from all the company at the sight that lay before them.

Lying across league after league of space, ranged in a vast three-dimensional array of rows and columns with the precision of a marching army, were thousands of tiny pencils of light. They were moving swiftly; the whole immense lattice holding its shape as a single unit. Even as Alveron and his comrades watched, the formation began to drift off the screen and Rugon had to recentre the controls.

After a long pause, Rugon started to speak.

‘This is the race,’ he said softly, ‘that has known radio for only two centuries – the race that we believed had crept to die in the heart of its planet. I have examined those images under the highest possible magnification.

‘That is the greatest fleet of which there has ever been a record. Each of those points of light represents a ship larger than our own. Of course, they are very primitive – what you see on the screen are the jets of their rockets. Yes, they dared to use rockets to bridge interstellar space! You realise what that means. It would take them centuries to reach the nearest star. The whole race must have embarked on this journey in the hope that its descendants would complete it, generations later.

‘To measure the extent of their accomplishment, think of the ages it took us to conquer space, and the longer ages still before we attempted to reach the stars. Even if we were threatened with annihilation, could we have done so much in so short a time? Remember, this is the youngest civilisation in the Universe. Four hundred thousand years ago it did not even exist. What will it be a million years from now?’

An hour later, Orostron left the crippled mother ship to make contact with the great fleet ahead. As the little torpedo disappeared among the stars, Alveron turned to his friend and made a remark that Rugon was often to remember in the years ahead.

‘I wonder what they’ll be like?’ he mused. ‘Will they be nothing but wonderful engineers, with no art or philosophy? They’re going to have such a surprise when Orostron reaches them – I expect it will be rather a blow to their pride. It’s funny how all isolated races think they’re the only people in the Universe. But they should be grateful to us; we’re going to save them a good many hundred years of travel.’

Alveron glanced at the Milky Way, lying like a veil of silver mist across the vision screen. He waved toward it with a sweep of a tentacle that embraced the whole circle of the galaxy, from the Central Planets to the lonely suns of the Rim.

‘You know,’ he said to Rugon, ‘I feel rather afraid of these people. Suppose they don’t like our little Federation?’ He waved once more toward the star-clouds that lay massed across the screen, glowing with the light of their countless suns.

‘Something tells me they’ll be very determined people,’ he added. ‘We had better be polite to them. After all, we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one.’

Rugon laughed at his captain’s little joke.

Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny.

Technical Error

First published in
Fantasy
, December 1946

Collected in
Reach for Tomorrow

As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the idea of the Fourth Dimension. In fact, my very first television programme was devoted to the subject – 30 minutes
live
on black and white TV, from Alexandra Palace, in May 1950!

It was one of those accidents for which no one could be blamed. Richard Nelson had been in and out of the generator pit a dozen times, taking temperature readings to make sure that the unearthly chill of liquid helium was not seeping through the insulation. This was the first generator in the world to use the principle of superconductivity. The windings of the immense stator had been immersed in a helium bath, and the miles of wire now had a resistance too small to be measured by any means known to man.

Nelson noted with satisfaction that the temperature had not fallen further than expected. The insulation was doing its work; it would be safe to lower the rotor into the pit. That thousand-ton cylinder was now hanging fifty feet above Nelson’s head, like the business end of a mammoth drop hammer. He and everyone else in the power station would feel much happier when it had been lowered onto its bearings and keyed into the turbine shaft.

Nelson put away his notebook and started to walk toward the ladder. At the geometric centre of the pit, he made his appointment with destiny.

The load on the power network had been steadily increasing for the last hour, while the zone of twilight swept across the continent. As the last rays of sunlight faded from the clouds, the miles of mercury arcs along the great highways sprang into life. By the million, fluorescent tubes began to glow in the cities; housewives switched on their radio-cookers to prepare the evening meal. The needles of the mega-wattmeters began to creep up the scales.

These were the normal loads. But on a mountain three hundred miles to the south a giant cosmic ray analyser was being rushed into action to await the expected shower from the new supernova in Capricornus, which the astronomers had detected only an hour before. Soon the coils of its five-thousand-ton magnets began to drain their enormous currents from the thyratron converters.

A thousand miles to the west, fog was creeping toward the greatest airport in the hemisphere. No one worried much about fog, now, when every plane could land on its own radar in zero visibility, but it was nicer not to have it around. So the giant dispersers were thrown into operation, and nearly a thousand megawatts began to radiate into the night, coagulating the water droplets and clearing great swaths through the banks of mist.