Free The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke by Arthur C. Clarke

Like Torkalee, his mission was to photograph and record, and to report progress to the mother ship. The little scout had no room for specimens or passengers. If contact was made with the inhabitants of this world, the S9000 would come at once. There would be no time for parleying. If there was any trouble the rescue would be by force and the explanations could come later.
    The ruined land beneath was bathed with an eerie, flickering light, for a great auroral display was raging over half the world. But the image on the vision screen was independent of external light, and it showed clearly a waste of barren rock that seemed never to have known any form of life. Presumably this desert land must come to an end somewhere. Orostron increased his speed to the highest value he dared risk in so dense an atmosphere.
    The machine fled on through the storm, and presently the desert of rock began to climb toward the sky. A great mountain range lay ahead, its peaks lost in the smoke-laden clouds. Orostron directed the scanners toward the horizon, and on the vision screen the line of mountains seemed suddenly very close and menacing. He started to climb rapidly. It was difficult to imagine a more unpromising land in which to find civilisation and he wondered if it would be wise to change course. He decided against it. Five minutes later, he had his reward.
    Miles below lay a decapitated mountain, the whole of its summit sheared away by some tremendous feat of engineering. Rising out of the rock and straddling the artificial plateau was an intricate structure of metal girders, supporting masses of machinery. Orostron brought his ship to a halt and spiralled down toward the mountain.
    The slight Doppler blur had now vanished, and the picture on the screen was clear-cut. The latticework was supporting some scores of great metal mirrors, pointing skyward at an angle of forty-five degrees to the horizontal. They were slightly concave, and each had some complicated mechanism at its focus. There seemed something impressive and purposeful about the great array; every mirror was aimed at precisely the same spot in the sky—or beyond.
    Orostron turned to his colleagues.
    ‘It looks like some kind of observatory to me,’ he said. ‘Have you ever seen anything like it before?’
    Klarten, a multitentacled, tripedal creature from a globular cluster at the edge of the Milky Way, had a different theory.
    ‘That’s communication equipment. Those reflectors are for focusing electromagnetic beams. I’ve seen the same kind of installation on a hundred worlds before. It may even be the station that Kulath picked up—though that’s rather unlikely, for the beams would be very narrow from mirrors that size.’
    ‘That would explain why Rugon could detect no radiation before we landed,’ added Hansur II, one of the twin beings from the planet Thargon.
    Orostron did not agree at all.
    ‘If that is a radio station, it must be built for interplanetary communication. Look at the way the mirrors are pointed. I don’t believe that a race which has only had radio for two centuries can have crossed space. It took my people six thousand years to do it.’
    ‘We managed it in three,’ said Hansur II mildly, speaking a few seconds ahead of his twin. Before the inevitable argument could develop, Klarten began to wave his tentacles with excitement. While the others had been talking, he had started the automatic monitor.
    ‘Here it is! Listen!’
    He threw a switch, and the little room was filled with a raucous whining sound, continually changing in pitch but nevertheless retaining certain characteristics that were difficult to define.
    The four explorers listened intently for a minute; then Orostron said, ‘Surely that can’t be any form of speech! No creature could produce sounds as quickly as that!’
    Hansur I had come to the same conclusion. ‘That’s a television programme. Don’t you think so, Klarten?’
    The other agreed.
    ‘Yes, and each of