Free Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke by Arthur Clarke C.

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 those mirrors seems to be radiating a different programme. I wonder where they’re going? If I’m correct, one of the other planets in the system must lie along those beams. We can soon check that.’
    Orostron called the S9000 and reported the discovery. Both Rugon and Alveron were greatly excited, and made a quick check of the astronomical records.
    The result was surprising – and disappointing. None of the other nine planets lay anywhere near the line of transmission. The great mirrors appeared to be pointing blindly into space.
    There seemed only one conclusion to be drawn, and Klarten was the first to voice it.
    ‘They had interplanetary communication,’ he said. ‘But the station must be deserted now, and the transmitters no longer controlled. They haven’t been switched off, and are just pointing where they were left.’
    ‘Well, we’ll soon find out,’ said Orostron. ‘I’m going to land.’
    He brought the machine slowly down to the level of the great metal mirrors, and past them until it came to rest on the mountain rock. A hundred yards away, a white stone building crouched beneath the maze of steel girders. It was windowless, but there were several doors in the wall facing them.
    Orostron watched his companions climb into their protective suits and wished he could follow. But someone had to stay in the machine to keep in touch with the mother ship. Those were Alveron’s