The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (12 page)

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 megawattmeters 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.

The meters in the power station gave another jump, and the engineer on duty ordered the stand-by generators into action. He wished the big, new machine was finished; then there would be no more anxious hours like these. But he thought he could handle the load. Half an hour later the Meteorological Bureau put out a general frost warning over the radio. Within sixty seconds, more than a million electric fires were switched on in anticipation. The meters passed the danger mark and went on soaring.

With a tremendous crash three giant circuit breakers leaped from their contacts. Their arcs died under the fierce blast of the helium jets. Three circuits had opened—but the fourth breaker had failed to clear. Slowly, the great copper bars began to glow cherry-red. The acrid smell of burning insulation filled the air and molten metal dripped heavily to the floor below, solidifying at once on the concrete slabs. Suddenly the conductors sagged as the load ends broke away from their supports. Brilliant green arcs of burning copper flamed and died as the circuit was broken. The free ends of the enormous conductors fell perhaps ten feet before crashing into the equipment below. In a fraction of a second they had welded themselves across the lines that led to the new generator.

Forces greater than any yet produced by man were at war in the windings of the machine. There was no resistance to oppose the current, but the inductance of the tremendous windings delayed the moment of peak intensity. The current rose to a maximum in an immense surge that lasted several seconds. At that instant, Nelson reached the centre of the pit.

Then the current tried to stabilise itself, oscillating wildly between narrower and narrower limits. But it never reached its steady state; somewhere, the overriding safety devices came into operation and the circuit that should never have been made was broken again. With a last dying spasm, almost as violent as the first, the current swiftly ebbed away. It was all over.

When the emergency lights came on again, Nelson’s assistant walked to the lip of the rotor pit. He didn’t know what had happened, but it must have been serious. Nelson, fifty feet down, must have been wondering what it was all about.

‘Hello, Dick!’ he shouted. ‘Have you finished? We’d better see what the trouble is.’

There was no reply. He leaned over the edge of the great pit and peered into it. The light was very bad, and the shadow of the rotor made it difficult to see what was below. At first it seemed that the pit was empty, but that was ridiculous; he had seen Nelson enter it only a few minutes ago. He called again.

‘Hello! You all right, Dick?’

Again no reply. Worried now, the assistant began to descend the ladder. He was halfway down when a curious noise, like a toy balloon bursting very far away, made him look over his shoulder. Then he saw Nelson, lying at the centre of the pit on the temporary woodwork covering the turbine shaft. He was very still, and there seemed something altogether wrong about the angle at which he was lying.

Ralph Hughes, chief physicist, looked up from his littered desk as the door opened. Things were slowly returning to normal after the night’s disasters. Fortunately, the trouble had not affected his department much, for the generator was unharmed. He was glad he was not the chief engineer: Murdock would still be snowed under with paperwork. The thought gave Dr Hughes considerable satisfaction.

‘Hello, Doc,’ he greeted the visitor. ‘What brings you here? How’s your patient getting on?’

Doctor Sanderson nodded briefly. ‘He’ll be out of hospital in a day or so. But I want to talk to you about him.’

‘I don’t know the fellow—I never go near the plant, except when the Board goes down on its collective knees and asks me to. After all, Murdock’s paid to run the place.’

Sanderson smiled wryly. There was no love lost between the chief engineer and the brilliant young physicist. Their personalities were too different, and there was the inevitable rivalry between theoretical expert and ‘practical’ man.

‘I think this is up your street, Ralph. At any rate, it’s beyond me. You’ve heard what happened to Nelson?’

‘He was inside my new generator when the power was shot into it, wasn’t he?’

‘That’s correct. His assistant found him suffering from shock when the power was cut off again.’

‘What kind of shock? It couldn’t have been electric; the windings are insulated, of course. In any case, I gather that he was in the centre of the pit when they found him.’

‘That’s quite true. We don’t know what happened. But he’s now come round and seems none the worse—apart from one thing.’ The doctor hesitated a moment as if choosing his words carefully.

‘Well, go on! Don’t keep me in suspense!’

‘I left Nelson as soon as I saw he would be quite safe, but about an hour later Matron called me up to say he wanted to speak to me urgently. When I got to the ward he was sitting up in bed looking at a newspaper with a very puzzled expression. I asked him what was the matter. He answered, “Something’s happened to me, Doc.” So I said, “Of course it has, but you’ll be out in a couple of days.” He shook his head; I could see there was a worried look in his eyes. He picked up the paper he had been looking at and pointed to it. “I can’t read any more,” he said.

‘I diagnosed amnesia and thought: This is a nuisance! Wonder what else he’s forgotten? Nelson must have read my expression, for he went on to say, “Oh, I still know the letters and words—but they’re the wrong way round! I think something must have happened to my eyes.” He held up the paper again. “This looks exactly as if I’m seeing it in a mirror,” he said. “I can spell out each word separately, a letter at a time. Would you get me a looking glass? I want to try something.”