During the period of darkness, Hoddan racked his brains for the vaguest of ideas on why so many ships should appear about an obscure and unimportant world like Darth. Presently the sunset line appeared ahead, and far away he saw moving lights which were the hulls of the volubly communicating vessels. He stared, blankly. There were tens— Scores— He was forced to guess at the stark impossibility of more than a hundred spacecraft in view. As the boat rushed onward he had to raise the guess. It couldn't be, but—
He turned on the outside telescope, and the image on its screen was more incredible than the voices and the existence of the fleet itself. The scope focused first on a bulging, monster, antiquated freighter of a design that had not been built for a hundred years. The second view was of a passenger liner with the elaborate ornamentation that in past generations was considered suitable for space. There was a bulk-cargo ship, with no emergency rockets at all and crews' quarters in long blisters built outside the gigantic tank which was the ship itself. There was a needle-sharp space yacht. More freighters, with streaks of rust on their sides where they had lain aground for tens of years....
The fleet was an anomaly, and each of its component parts was separately a freak. It was a gathering-together of all the outmoded and obsolete hulks and monstrosities of space. One would have to scavenge half the galaxy to bring together so many crazy, over-age derelicts that should have been in junk yards.
Then Hoddan drew an explosive deep breath. It was suddenly clear what the fleet was and what its reason must be. Why it stopped here could not yet be guessed, but—
Hoddan watched absorbedly. He couldn't know what was toward, but there was some emergency. It could be in the line of what an electronic engineer could handle. If so—why—it could mean an opportunity to accomplish great things, and grow rich, and probably marry some delightful girl and be a great man somewhere—an assortment of ambitions one could not easily gratify on Zan, or Walden, or Darth.
VII
The spaceboat floated on upon a collision-course with the arriving fleet. That would not mean, of course, actual contact with any of the improbable vessels themselves. Crowded as the sunlit specks might seem from Darth's night-side shadow, they were sufficiently separated. It was more than likely that even with ten-mile intervals the ships would be considered much too crowded. But they came pouring out of emptiness to go into a swirling, plainly pre-intended orbit about the planet from which Hoddan had risen less than an hour before.
There was inevitable confusion, though, and the spacephone proved it. There were disputes between freakish ships when craft with the astrogational qualities of washtubs tried to keep assigned positions, and failed, and there were squabbles when ships had to pass close together. One had to shut off its drive-field to keep from blowing the fuses of both.