by Arthur C.
It was as if they were approaching the edge of the world; their oval of light, cut off abruptly ahead of them, became shorter and shorter. But far out on the curved screen of the Sea their monstrous foreshortened shadows had appeared, magnifying and exaggerating every movement. Those shadows had been their companions every step of the way, as they marched down the beam, but now that they were broken at the edge of the cliff they no longer seemed part of them. They might have been creatures of the Cylindrical Sea, waiting to deal with any intruders into their domain.
Because they were now standing on the edge of a fifty-metre cliff, it was possible for the first time to appreciate the curvature of Rama. But no one had ever seen a frozen lake bent upwards into a cylindrical surface; that was distinctly unsettling, and the eye did its best to find some other interpretation. It seemed to Dr. Ernst, who had once made a study of visual illusions, that half the time she was really looking at a horizontally curving bay, not a surface that soared up into the sky. It required a deliberate effort of will to accept the fantastic truth.
Only in the line directly ahead, parallel to the axis of Rama, was normalcy preserved. In this direction alone was there agreement between vision and logic. Here—for the next few kilometres at least—Rama looked flat, and was flat . . . And out there, beyond their distorted shadows and the outer limit of the beam, lay the island that dominated the Cylindrical Sea.
'Hub Control,' Dr. Ernst radioed, 'please aim your beam at New York.'
The night of Rama fell suddenly upon them, as the oval of light went sliding out to sea. Conscious of the now invisible cliff at their feet, they all stepped back a few metres. Then, as if by some magical stage transformation, the towers of New York sprang into view.
The resemblance to old-time Manhattan was only superficial; this star-born echo of Earth's past possessed its own unique identity. The more Dr. Ernst stared at it, the more certain she became that it was not a city at all.
The real New York, like all of Man's habitations, had never been finished; still less had it been designed. This place, however, had an overall symmetry and pattern, though one so complex that it eluded the mind. It had been conceived and planned by some controlling intelligence and then it had been completed, like a machine devised for some specific purpose. After that there was no possibility of growth or change.
The beam of the searchlight slowly tracked along those distant towers and domes and interlocked spheres and crisscrossed tubes. Sometimes there would be a brilliant reflection as some flat surface shot the light back towards them; the first time this happened, they were all taken by surprise. It was exactly as if, over there on that strange island, someone was signalling to them…
But there was nothing that they could see here that was not already shown in greater detail on photographs taken from the Hub. After a few minutes, they called for the light to return to them, and began to walk eastwards along the edge of the cliff. It had been plausibly theorized that, somewhere, there must surely be a flight of steps, or a ramp, leading down to the Sea. And one crewman, who was a keen sailor, had raised an interesting conjecture.
'Where there's a sea,' Sergeant Ruby Barhes had predicted, 'there must be docks and harbours—and ships. You can learn everything about a culture by studying the way it builds boats.' Her colleagues thought this a rather restricted point of view, but at least it was a stimulating one.
Dr. Ernst had almost given up the search, and was preparing to a descent by rope, when Lt. Rodrigo spotted the narrow stairway. It could easily have been overlooked in the shadowed darkness below the edge of the cliff, for there was no guardrail or other indication of its presence. And it seemed to lead nowhere; it ran down the fifty-metre vertical wall at a steep angle, and disappeared below the surface of the Sea.
They scanned the flight of steps with their helmet-lights, could see no conceivable hazard, and Dr. Ernst got Commander Norton's permission to descend. A minute later, she was cautiously testing the surface of the Sea.
Her foot slithered almost frictionlessly back and forth. The material felt exactly like ice. It was ice.
When she struck it with her hammer, a familiar pattern of cracks radiated from the impact point, and she had no difficulty in collecting as many pieces as she wished. Some had already melted when she held up the sample holder to the light; the liquid appeared to be slightly turbid water, and she took a cautious sniff.
'Is that safe?' Rodrigo called down, with a trace of anxiety.
'Believe me, Boris,' she answered, 'if there are any pathogens around here that have slipped through my detectors, our insurance policies lapsed a week ago.'
But Boris had a point. Despite all the tests that had been carried out, there was a very slight risk that this substance might be poisonous, or might carry some unknown disease. In normal circumstances, Dr. Ernst would not have taken even this minuscule chance. Now, however, time was short and the stakes were enormous. If it became necessary to quarantine Endeavour, that would be a very small price to pay for her cargo of knowledge.
'It's water, but I wouldn't care to drink it—it smells like an algae culture that's gone bad. I can hardly wait to get it to the lab.'
'Is the ice safe to walk on?'
'Yes, solid as a rock.'
'Then we can get to New York.'
'Can we, Pieter? Have you ever tried to walk across four kilometres of ice?'
'Oh—I see what you mean. Just imagine what Stores would say, if we asked for a set of skates! Not that many of us would know how to use them, even if we had any aboard.'
'And there's another problem,' put in Boris Rodrigo. 'Do you realize that the temperature is already above freezing? Before long, that ice is going to melt. How many spacemen can swim four kilometres? Certainly not this one…'
Dr. Ernst rejoined them at the edge of the cliff, and held up the small sample bottle in triumph.
'It's a long walk for a few cc's of dirty water, but it may teach us more about Rama than anything we've found so far. Let's head for home.'
They turned towards the distant lights of the Hub, moving with the gentle, loping strides which had proved the most comfortable means of walking under this reduced gravity. Often they looked back, drawn by the hidden enigma of the island out there in the centre of the frozen sea.
And just once, Dr. Ernst thought she felt the faint suspicion of a breeze against her cheek.
It did not come again, and she quickly forgot all about it.
CHAPTER 16
KEALAKEKUA
'AS YOU KNOW perfectly well, Dr. Perera,' said Ambassador Bose in a tone of patient resignation, 'few of us share your knowledge of mathematical meteorology. So please take pity on our ignorance.'
'With pleasure,' answered the exobiologist, quite unabashed. 'I can explain it best by telling you what is going to happen inside Rama—very soon.'
'The temperature is now about to rise, as the solar heat pulse reaches the interior. According to the latest information I've received, it's already above freezing point. The Cylindrical Sea will soon start to thaw; and unlike bodies of water on Earth, it will melt from the bottom upwards. That may produce some odd effects but I'm much more concerned with the atmosphere.'
'As it's heated, the air inside Rama will expand—and will attempt to rise towards the central axis. And this is the problem. At ground level, although it's apparently stationary, it's actually sharing the spin of Rama—over eight hundred kilometres an hour. As it rises towards the axis it will try to retain that speed—and it won't be able to do so, of course. The result will be violent winds and turbulence; I estimate velocities of between two and three hundred kilometres an hour.'
'Incidentally, very much the same thing occurs on Earth. The heated air at the Equator—which shares the Earth's sixteen-hundred-kilometres-an-hour spin—runs into the same problem when it rises and flows north and south.'
'Ah, the Trade Winds! I remember that from my geography lessons.'
'Exactly, Sir Robert. Rama will have Trad
e Winds, with a vengeance. I believe they'll last only a few hours, and then some kind of equilibrium will be restored. Meanwhile, I should advise Commander Norton to evacuate—as soon as possible. Here is the message I propose sending.'
With a little imagination, Commander Norton told himself, he could pretend that this was an improvised night camp at the foot of some mountain in a remote region of Asia or America. The clutter of sleeping pads, collapsible chain and tables, portable power plant, lighting equipment, electrosan toilets, and miscellaneous scientific apparatus would not have looked out of place on Earth—especially as there were men and women working here without life-support systems.
Establishing Camp Alpha had been very hard work, for everything had had to be man-handled through the chain of airlocks, sledded down the slope from the Hub, and then retrieved and unpacked. Sometimes, when the braking parachutes had failed, a consignment had ended up a good kilometre away out on the plain. Despite this, several crewmembers had asked permission to make the ride; Norton had firmly forbidden it. In an emergency, however, he might be prepared to reconsider the ban.
Almost all this equipment would stay here, for the labour of carrying it back was unthinkable—in fact, impossible. There were times when Commander Norton felt an irrational shame at leaving so much human litter in this strangely immaculate place. When they finally departed, he was prepared to sacrifice some of their precious time to leave everything in good order. Improbable though it was, perhaps millions of years hence, when Rama shot through some other star system, it might have visitors again. He would like to give them a good impression of Earth.
Meanwhile, he had a rather more immediate problem. During the last twenty-four hours he had received almost identical messages from both Mars and Earth. It seemed an odd coincidence; perhaps they had been commiserating with each other, as wives who lived safely on different planets were liable to do under sufficient provocation. Rather pointedly, they had reminded him that even though he was now a great hero, he still had family responsibilities.
The Commander picked up a collapsible chair, and walked out of the pool of light into the darkness surrounding the camp. It was the only way he could get any privacy, and he could also think better away from the turmoil. Deliberately turning his back on the organized confusion behind him, he began to speak into the recorder slung around his neck.
'Original for personal file, dupes to Mars and Earth. Hello, darling—yes, I know I've been a lousy correspondent, but I haven't been aboard ship for a week. Apart from a skeleton crew, we're all camping inside Rama, at the foot of the stairway we've christened Alpha.'
'I have three parties out now, scouting the plain, but we've made disappointingly slow progress, because everything has to be done on foot. If only we had some means of transport! I'd be very happy to settle for a few electric bicycles … they'd be perfect for the job.'
'You've met my medical officer, Surgeon-Commander Ernst—' He paused uncertainly; Laura had met one of his wives, but which? Better cut that out.
Erasing the sentence, he began again.
'My MO, Surgeon-Commander Ernst, led the first group to reach the Cylindrical Sea, fifteen kilometres from here. She found that it was frozen water, as we'd expected—but you wouldn't want to drink it. Dr. Ernst says it's a dilute organic soup, containing traces of almost any carbon compound you care to name, as well as phosphates and nitrates and dozens of metallic salts. There's not the slightest sign of life—not even any dead micro-organisms. So we still know nothing about the biochemistry of the Ramans … though it was probably not wildly different from ours.'
Something brushed lightly against his hair; he had been too busy to get it cut, and would have to do something about that before he next put on a space-helmet…
'You've seen the viddies of Paris and the other towns we've explored on this side of the Sea … London, Rome, Moscow. It's impossible to believe that they were ever built for anything to live in. Paris looks like a giant storage depot. London is a collection of cylinders linked together by pipes connected to what are obviously pumping stations. Everything is sealed up, and there's no way of finding what's inside without explosives or lasers. We won't try these until there are no alternatives.'
'As for Rome and Moscow—'
'Excuse me, Skipper. Priority from Earth.'
What now? Norton asked himself. Can't a man get a few minutes to talk to his families?
He took the message from the Sergeant, and scanned it quickly, just to satisfy himself that it was not immediate. Then he read it again, more slowly.
What the devil was the Rama Committee? And why had he never heard of it? He knew that all sorts of associations, societies, and professional groups—some serious, some completely crackpot—had been trying to get in touch with him; Mission Control had done a good job of protection, and would not have forwarded this message unless it was considered important.
'Two-hundred-kilometre winds … probably sudden onset' … well, that was something to think about. But it was hard to take it too seriously, on this utterly calm night; and it would be ridiculous to run away like frightened mice, when they were just starting effective exploration.
Commander Norton lifted a hand to brush aside his hair, which had somehow fallen into his eyes again. Then he froze, the gesture uncompleted.
He had felt a trace of wind, several times in the last hour. It was so slight that he had completely ignored it; after all, he was the commander of a spaceship, not a sailing ship. Until now the movement of air had not been of the slightest professional concern. What would the long-dead captain of that earlier Endeavour have done in a situation such as this?
Norton had asked himself that question at every moment of crisis in the last few years. It was his secret, which he had never revealed to anyone. And like most of the important things in life, it had come about quite by accident.
He had been captain of Endeavour for several months before he realized that it was named after one of the most famous ships in history. True, during the last four hundred years there had been a dozen Endeavours of sea and two of space, but the ancestor of them all was the 370-ton Whitby collier that Captain James Cook, RN, had sailed round the world between 1768 and 1771.
With a mild interest that had quickly turned to an absorbing curiosity—almost an obsession—Norton had begun to read everything he could find about Cook. He was now probably the world's leading authority on the greatest explorer of all time, and knew whole sections of the Journals by heart.
It still seemed incredible that one man could have done so much, with such primitive equipment. But Cook had been not only a supreme navigator, but a scientist and—in an age of brutal discipline—a humanitarian. He treated his own men with kindness, which was unusual; what was quite unheard of was that he behaved in exactly the same way to the often-hostile savages in the new lands he discovered.
It was Norton's private dream, which he knew he would never achieve, to retrace at least one of Cook's voyages around the world. He had made a limited but spectacular start, which would certainly have astonished the Captain, when he once flew a polar orbit directly above the Great Barrier Reef. It had been early morning on a clear day, and from four hundred kilometres up he had had a superb view of that deadly wall of coral, marked by its line of white foam along the Queensland coast.
He had taken just under five minutes to travel the whole two thousand kilometres of the Reef. In a single glance he could span weeks of perilous voyaging for that first Endeavour. And through the telescope, he had caught a glimpse of Cooktown and the estuary where the ship had been dragged ashore for repairs, after her near-fatal encounter with the Reef.
A year later, a visit to the Hawaii Deep-Space Tracking Station had given him an even more unforgettable experience. He had taken the hydrofoil to Kealakekua Bay, and as he moved swiftly past the bleak volcanic cliffs, he felt a depth of emotion that had surprised and even disconcerted him. The guide had led his group of scientists, engineers and astronauts p
ast the glittering metal pylon that had replaced the earlier monument, destroyed by the Great Tsunami of '68. They had walked on for a few more yards across black, slippery lava to the small plaque at the water's edge. Little waves were breaking over it, but Norton scarcely noticed them as he bent down to read the words:
Near this spot
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
was killed
14 February 1779
Original tablet dedicated 28 August, 1928
by Cook Sesquicentennial Commission
replaced by Tricentennial Commission
14 February, 2079
That was years ago, and a hundred million kilometres away. But at moments like this, Cook's reassuring presence seemed very close. In the secret depths of his mind, he would ask: 'Well, Captain—what is your advice?' It was a little game he played, on occasions when there were not enough facts for sound judgement, and one had to rely on intuition. That had been part of Cook's genius; he always made the right choice—until the very end, at Kealakekua Bay.
The Sergeant waited patiently, while his Commander stared silently out into the night of Rama. It was no longer unbroken, for at two spots about four kilometres away, the faint patches of light of exploring parties could be clearly seen.
In an emergency, I can recall them within the hour, Norton told himself. And that, surely, should be good enough.
He turned to the Sergeant, 'Take this message. Rama Committee, care of PLANETCOM. Appreciate your advice and will take precautions. Please specify meaning of phrase "sudden onset". Respectfully, Norton, Commander, Endeavour.'
He waited until the Sergeant had disappeared towards the blazing lights of the camp, then switched on his recorder again. But the train of thought was broken, and he could not get back into the mood. The letter would have to wait for some other time.