Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke by Arthur Clarke C. Page B

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