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Rendezvous with Rama  by Arthur C Clarke


1  Spaceguard

2  Intruder

3  Rama and Sita

4  Rendezvous

5  First EVA

6  Committee

7  Two Wives

8  Through the Hub

9  Reconnaissance

10  Descent into Darkness

11  Men, Women and Monkeys

12  The Stairway of the Gods

13  The Plain of Rama

14  Storm Warning

15  The Edge of the Sea

16  Kealakekua

17  Spring

18  Dawn

19  A Warning from Mercury

20  Book of Revelation

21  After the Storm

22  To Sail the Cylindrical Sea

23  NY, Rama

24  Dragonfly

25  Maiden Flight

26  The Voice of Rama

27  Electric Wind

28  Icarus

29  First Contact

30  The Flower

31  Terminal Velocity

32  The Wave

33  Spider

34  His Excellency Regrets ...

35  Special Delivery

36  Biot Watcher

37  Missile

38  General Assembly

39  Command Decision

40  Saboteur

41  Hero

42  Temple of Glass

43  Retreat

44  Space Drive

45  Phoenix

46  Interlude




   CHAPTER ONE - Spaceguard

  Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On 30 June 1908,
Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four
thousand kilometres - a margin invisibly small by the
standards of the universe. Again, on 12 February 1947,
yet another Russian city had a still narrower escape,
when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century
detonated less than four hundred kilometres from Vladi-
vostok, with an explosion rivalling that of the newly
invented uranium bomb.

  In those days, there was nothing that men could do to
protect themselves against the last random shots in the
cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of
the Moon. The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck
uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-
first century, there was no region left on Earth that could
be safely used for celestial target practice. The human
race had spread from pole to pole. And so, inevitably.

  At 09.46 GMT on the morning of 11 September, in the
exceptionally beautiful summer of the year 2077, most of
the inhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball appear
in the eastern sky. Within seconds it was brighter than
the sun, and as it moved across the heavens - at first in
utter silence - it left behind it a churning column of dust
and smoke.

  Somewhere above Austria it began to disintegrate, pro-
ducing a series of concussions so violent that more than a
million people had their hearing permanently damaged.
They were the lucky ones.

  Moving at fifty kilometres a second, a thousand tons of
rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy,
destroying in a few flaming moments the labour of cen-
turies. The cities of Padua and Verona were wiped from
the face of the earth; and the last glories of Venice sank
for ever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic came -
thundering landwards after the hammer-blow from space.

  Six hundred thousand people died, and the total dam
age was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to
history, to science - to the whole human race, for the rest
of time - was beyond all computation. It was as if a great
war had been fought and lost in a single morning; and
few could draw much pleasure from the fact that, as the
dust of destruction slowly settled, for months the whole
world witnessed the most splendid dawns and sunsets
since Krakatoa. -

  After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a de-
termination and a unity that no earlier age could have
shown. Such a disaster, it was realized, might not occur
again for a thousand years - but it might occur tomor-
row. And the next time, the consequences could be even
worse.

  Very well; there would be no next time.

  A hundred years earlier a much poorer world, with far
feebler resources, had squandered its wealth attempting to
destroy weapons launched, suicidally, by mankind
against itself. The effort had never been successful, but
the skills acquired then had not been forgotten. Now
they could be used for a far nobler purpose, and on an
infinitely vaster stage. No meteorite large enough to
cause catastrophe would ever again be allowed to breach
the defences of Earth.

  So began Project SPACEGUARD. Fifty years later - and
in a way that none of its designers could ever have an-
ticipated - it justified its existence.

   CHAPTER TWO - Intruder

  By the year 2130, the Mars-based radars were discovering
new asteroids at the rate of a dozen a day. The SPACE-
GUARD computers automatically calculated their orbits,
and stored away the information in their enormous mem-
ories, so that every few months any interested astronomer
could have a look at the accumulated statistics. These
were now quite impressive.

  It had taken more than a hundred and twenty years to
collect the first thousand asteroids, since the discovery of
Ceres, largest of these tiny worlds, on the very first day of
the nineteenth century. Hundreds had been found and
lost and found again; they existed in such swarms that
one exasperated astronomer had christened them 'vermin
of the skies'. He would have been appalled to know that
SPACEGUARD was now keeping track of half a million.

   Only the five giants - Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Eunomia and
Vesta - were more than two hundred kilometres in dia-
meter; the vast majority were merely oversized boulders
that would fit into a small park. Almost all moved in
orbits that lay beyond Mars; only the few that came far
enough sunwards to be a possible danger to Earth were
the concern of SPACEGUARD. And not one in a thousand of
these, during the entire future history of the solar system,
would pass within a million kilometres of Earth.

  The object first catalogued as 31/439, according to the
year and the order of its discovery, was detected while
still outside the orbit of Jupiter. There was nothing un-
usual about its location; many asteroids went beyond
Saturn before turning once more towards their distant
master, the sun. And Thule II, most far-ranging of all,
travelled so close to Uranus that it might well have been
a lost moon of that planet.

  But a first radar contact at such a distance was un-
precedented; clearly, 31/439 must be of exceptional size.
From the strength of the echo, the computers deduced a
diameter of at least forty kilometres; such a giant had not
- been discovered for a hundred years. That it had been
overlooked for so long seemed incredible.

  Then the orbit was calculated, and the mystery was
resolved - to be replaced by a greater one. 31/439 was not
travelling on a normal asteroidal path, along an ellipse
which it retraced with clockwork precision every few
years. It was a lonely wanderer between the stars, making
its first and last visit to the solar system - for it was mov-
ing so swiftly that the gravitational field of the sun could
never capture it. It would flash inwards past the orbits of
Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury, gaining speed -
as it did so, until it rounded the sun and headed out once
again into the unknown.

  It was at this point that the computers started flashing
their 'Hi there! We have something interesting' sign,
and for the first time 31/439 came to the attention of
human beings. There was a brief flurry of excitement at
SPACEGUARD Headquarters, and the interstellar vagabond
was quickly dignified by a name instead of a mere num-
ber. Long ago, the astronomers had exhausted Greek and
Roman mythology; now they were working through
the Hindu pantheon. And so 31/439 was christened
Rama.

  For a few days, the news media made a fuss of the
visitor, but they were badly handicapped by the sparsity
of information. Only two facts were known about Rama
- its unusual orbit, and its approximate size. Even this
was merely an educated guess, based upon the strength of
the radar echo. Through the telescope, Rama still ap-
peared as a faint, fifteenth magnitude star - much too
small to show a visible disc But as it plunged in towards
the heart of the solar system, it would grow brighter and
larger, month by month; before it vanished for ever, the
orbiting observatories would be able to gather more pre-
cise information about its shape and size. There was
plenty of time, and perhaps during the next 'few years
some spaceship on its ordinary business might be routed
close enough to get good photographs. An actual rendez-
vous was most unlikely; the energy cost would be far too
great to permit physical contact with an object cutting
across the orbits of the planets at more than a hundred
thousand kilometres an hour.

  So the world soon forgot about Rama; but the as-
tronomers did not. Their excitement grew with the pass-
ing months, as the new asteroid presented them with
more and more puzzles.

  First of all, there was the problem of Rama's light
curve. it didn't have one.

  All known asteroids, without exception, showed a slow
variation in their brilliance, waxing and waning within a
period of a few hours. It had been recognized for more
than two centuries that this was an inevitable result of
their spin, and their irregular shape. As they toppled end
over end along their orbits the reflecting surfaces they
presented to the sun were continually changing, and
their brightness varied accordingly.

  Rama showed no such changes. Either it was not spin-
ning at all or it was perfectly symmetrical. Both explana-
tions seemed equally unlikely.

  There the matter rested for several months, because
none of the big orbiting telescopes could be spared from
their regular job of peering into the remote depths of
the universe. Space astronomy was an expensive hobby,
and time on a large instrument could easily cost a thou-
sand dollars a minute. Dr William Stenton would never
have been able to grab the Farside two-hundred-metre
reflector for a full quarter of an hour, if a more impor-
tant programme had not been temporarily derailed by
the failure of a fifty cent capacitor. One astronomer's bad
luck was his good fortune.

  Bill Stenton did not know what he had caught until
the next day, when he was able to get computer time to
process his results. Even when they were finally flashed on
his display screen, it took him several minutes to under-
stand what they meant.

  The sunlight reflected from Rama was not, after all,
absolutely constant in its intensity. There was a very
small variation - hard to detect, but quite unmistakable,
and extremely regular. Like all the other asteroids, Rama
was indeed spinning. But whereas the normal 'day' for an
asteroid was several hours, Rama's was only four minutes.

  Dr Stenton did some quick calculations, and found it
hard to believe the results. At its equator, this tiny world
must be spinning at more than a thousand kilometres an
hour; it would be rather unhealthy to attempt a landing
anywhere except at the poles. The centrifugal force at
Rama's equator must be powerful enough to flick any
loose objects away from it at an acceleration of almost one
gravity. Rama was a rolling stone that could never have
gathered any cosmic moss; it was surprising that such a
body had managed to hold itself together, and- had not
long ago shattered into a million fragments.

  An object forty kilometres across, with a rotation period
of only four minutes - where did that fit into the astro-
nomical scheme of things? Dr Stenton was a somewhat
imaginative man, a little too prone to jump to conclusions.
He now jumped to one which gave him a very uncom-
fortable few minutes indeed.

  The only specimen of the celestial zoo that fitted this
description was a collapsed star. Perhaps Rama was a
dead sun - a madly spinning sphere of neutronium, every
cubic centimetre weighing billions of tons...

  At this point, there flashed briefly through Dr Stenton's
horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G.
Wells's The Star. He had first read it as a very small boy,
and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy.
Across more than two centuries of time, it had lost none
of its magic and terror. He would never forget the images
of hurricanes and tidal waves, of cities sliding into the
sea, as that other visitor from the stars smashed into
Jupiter and then fell sunwards past the Earth. True, the
star that old Wells described was not cold, but incandes-
cent, and wrought much of its destruction by heat. That
scarcely mattered; even if Rama was a cold body, reflect-
ing only the light of the sun, it could kill by gravity as
easily as by fire.

  Any stellar mass intruding into the solar system would
completely distort the orbits of the planets. The Earth
had only to move a few million kilometres sunwards - or
starwards - for the delicate balance of climate to be
destroyed. The Antarctic icecap could melt and flood all
:low4ying land; or the oceans could freeze and the whole
world be locked in an eternal winter. Just a nudge in
either direction would be enough

  Then Dr Stenton relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief.
This was all nonsense; he should be ashamed of himself.

  Rama could not possibly be made of condensed matter.
No star-sized mass could penetrate so deeply into the
solar system without producing disturbances which
would have betrayed it long ago. The orbits of all the
planets would have been affected; that, after all, was how
Neptune, Pluto and Persephone had been discovered.
No, it was utterly impossible for an object as massive as a
dead sun to sneak up unobserved.

  In a way, it was a pity. An encounter with a dark star
would have been quite exciting.

  While it lasted...

   CHAPTER THREE - Rama and Sita

The extraordinary meeting of the Space Advisory Coun-
cil was brief and stormy. Even in the twenty-second cen-
tury, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly
and conservative scientists from occupying crucial ad-
ministrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the prob
lem ever would be solved.

  To make matters worse, the current Chairman of the
SAC was Professor (Emeritus) Olaf Davidson, the distin-
guished astrophysicist. Professor Davidson was not very
much interested in objects smaller than galaxies, and
never bothered to conceal his prejudices. And though he
had to admit that ninety per cent of his science was now
based upon observations from space-borne instruments,
he was not at all happy about it. No less than three
times during his distinguished career, satellites specially
launched to prove one of his pet theories had done pre-
cisely the opposite.

  The question before the Council was straightforward
enough. There was no doubt that Rama was an unusual
object - but was it an important one? In a few months it
would be gone for ever, so there was little time in which
to act. Opportunities missed now would never recur.

  At rather a horrifying cost, a space-probe soon to be
launched from Mars to beyond Neptune could be modi-
fied and sent on a high-speed trajectory to meet Rama.
There was no hope of a rendezvous; it would be the fast-
est fly-by on record, for the two bodies would pass each
other at two hundred thousand kilometres an hour.
Rama would be observed intensively for only a few min-
utes - and in real closeup for less than a second. But with
the right instrumentation, that would be long enough to
settle many questions.

  Although Professor Davidson took a very jaundiced
view of the Neptune probe, it had already been approved
and he saw no point in sending more good money after
bad. He spoke eloquently on the follies of asteroid-chas-
ing, and the urgent need for a new high-resolution inter-
ferometer on the Moon to prove the newly-revived Big
Bang theory of creation, once and for all. -

  That was a grave tactical error, because the three most
ardent supporters of the Modified Steady State Theory
were also members of the Council. They secretly agreed
with Professor Davidson that asteroid-chasing was a waste
of money; nevertheless...

  He lost by one vote.

Three months later the space-probe, rechristened Sita,
was launched from Phobos, the inner moon of Mars. The
flight time was seven weeks, and the instrument was
switched to full power only five minutes before intercep-
tion. Simultaneously, a cluster of camera pods was re-
leased, to sail past Rama so that it could be photo-
graphed from all sides.

  The first images, from ten thousand kilometres away,
brought to a halt the activities of all mankind. On a bib
lion television screens, there appeared a tiny, featureless
cylinder, growing rapidly second by second. By the time
it had doubled its size, no one could pretend any longer
that Rama was a natural object.

  Its body was a cylinder so geometrically perfect that it
might have been turned on a lathe - one with centres
fifty kilometres apart. The two ends were quite flat, apart
from some small structures at the centre of one face, and
were twenty kilometres across; from a distance, when
there was no sense of scale, Rama looked almost comic-
ally like an ordinary domestic boiler.

  Rama grew until it filled the screen. Its surface was a
dull, drab grey, as colourless as the Moon, and completely
devoid of markings except at one point. Halfway along
the cylinder there was a kilometre-wide stain or smear, as
if something had once hit and splattered, ages ago.

  There was no sign that the impact had done the slight-
est damage to Rama's spinning walls; but this mark had
produced the slight fluctuation in brightness that had led
to Stenton's discovery.

  The images from the other cameras added nothing
new. However, the trajectories their pods traced .through
Rama's minute gravitational field gave one other vital
piece of information - the mass of the cylinder.

  It was far too light to be a solid body. To nobody's
great surprise, it was clear that Rama must be hollow.

  The long-hoped-for, long-feared encounter had come at
last. Mankind was about to receive its first visitor from the
stars.

   CHAPTER FOUR - Rendezvous

Commander Norton remembered those first TV trans-
missions, which he had replayed so many times, during
the final minutes of the rendezvous. But there was one
thing no electronic image could possibly convey - and
that was Rama's overwhelming size.

  He had never received such an impression when land-
ing on a natural body like the Moon or Mars. Those were
worlds, and one expected them to be big. Yet he had also
landed on Jupiter VIII, which was slightly larger than
Rama - and that had seemed quite a small object.

  It was very easy to resolve the paradox. His judgement
was wholly altered by the fact that this was an artifact,
millions of times heavier than anything that Man had
ever put into space. The mass of Rama was at least ten
million million tons; to any spaceman, that was not only
an awe-inspiring, but a terrifying thought. No wonder
that he sometimes felt a sense of insignificance, and even
depression, as that cylinder of sculptured, ageless metal
filled more and more of the sky.

  There was also a sense of danger here, that was wholly
novel to his experience. In every earlier landing he had
known what to expect; there was always the possibility of
accident, but never of surprise. With Rama, surprise was
the only certainty.

  Now Endeavour was hovering less than a thousand
metres above the North Pole of the cylinder, at the very
centre of the slowly turning disc. This end has been
chosen because it was the one in sunlight; as Rama
rotated, the shadows of the short enigmatic structures near
the axis swept steadily across the metal plain. The north-
ern face of Rama was a gigantic sundial, measuring out
the swift passage of its four-minute day.

  Landing a five-thousand-ton spaceship at the centre of
a spinning disc was the least of Commander Norton's
worries. It was no different from docking at the axis of a
large space-station; Endeavour's lateral jets had - already
given her a matching spin, and he could trust Lieutenant
Joe Calvert to put her down as gently as a snowflake, with
or without the aid of the nay computer.

  'In three minutes,' said Joe, without taking his eyes
from the display, 'we'll know if it's made of anti-matter.'

  Norton grinned, as he recalled some of the more hair-
raising theories about Rama's origin. If that unlikely
speculation was true, in a few seconds there would be the
biggest bang since the solar system was formed. The total
annihilation of ten thousand tons would, briefly, provide
the planets with a second sun. -

  Yet the mission profile had allowed even for this re-
mote contingency; Endeavour had squirted Rama with
one of her jets from a safe thousand kilometres away.
Nothing whatsoever had happened when the expanding
cloud of vapour arrived on target - and a matter-anti-
matter reaction involving even a few milligrams would
have produced an awesome firework display.

  Norton, like all space commanders, was a cautious
man. He had looked long and hard at the northern face
of Rama, choosing the point of touchdown. After much
thought, he had decided to avoid the obvious spot - the
exact centre, on the axis itself. A clearly marked circular
disc, a hundred metres in diameter, was centred on the
Pole, and Norton had a strong suspicion that this must be
the outer seal of an enormous airlock. The creatures who
had built this hollow world must have had some way of
taking' their ships inside. This was the logical place for
the main entrance, and Norton thought it might be UN-
wise to block the front door with his own vessel.

  But this decision generated other problems. If Endive-
our touched down even a few metres from the axis,
Rama's rapid spin would start her sliding away from
the pole. At first, the centrifugal force would be very
weak, but it would be continuous and inexorable. Com-
mannered Norton did not relish the thought of 'his ship
slithering across the polar plain, gaining speed minute
by minute until it was slung off into space at a thou-
sand kilometres an hour when it reached the edge of the
disc.

  It was possible that Rama's minute gravitational field -
about one thousandth of Earth's - might prevent this
from happening. It would hold Endeavour against the
plain with a force of several tons, and if the surface was
sufficiently rough the ship might stay near the Pole. But
Commander Norton had no intention of balancing an UN-
known frictional force against a quite certain centrifugal
one.

  Fortunately, Rama's designers had provided an answer.
Equally spaced around the polar axis were three low, pill-
box shaped structures, about ten metres in diameter. If
Endeavour touched down between any two of these, the
centrifugal drift would fetch her up against them and she
would be held firmly in place, like a ship glued against
a quayside by the incoming waves.

  'Contact in fifteen seconds,' said Joe. As he tensed him-
self. above the duplicate controls, which he hoped he
would not have to touch, Commander Norton became
acutely aware of all that had come to focus on this instant
of time. This, surely, was the most momentous landing
since the first touchdown on the Moon, a century and a
half ago.

  The grey pill-boxes drifted slowly upwards outside the
control port. There was the last hiss of a reaction jet, and
a barely perceptible jar.

  In the weeks that had passed, Commander Norton had
often wondered what he would say at this moment. But
now that it was upon him, History chose his words, and
he spoke almost automatically, barely aware of the echo
from the past:

  'Rama Base. Endeavour has landed.'
As recently as a month ago, he would never have believed
it possible. The ship had been on a routine mission,
checking and emplacing asteroid warning beacons, when
the order had come. Endeavour was the only spacecraft in
the solar system which could possibly make a rendezvous
with the intruder before it whipped round the sun and
hurled itself back towards the stars. Even so, it had been
necessary to rob three other ships of the Solar Survey,
which were now drifting helplessly until tankers could
refuel them. Norton feared that it would be a long time
before the skippers of Calypso, Beagle and Challenger
would speak to him again.

  Even with all this extra propellant, it had been a long
hard chase; Rama was already inside the orbit of Venus
when Endeavour caught up with her. No other ship
could ever do so; this -privilege was unique, and not a
moment of the weeks ahead was to be wasted. A thousand
scientists on Earth would have cheerfully mortgaged
their souls for this opportunity; now they could only
watch over the TV circuits, biting their lips and thinking
how much better they could do the job. They were prob-
ably fight, but there was no alternative. The inexorable
laws of celestial mechanics had decreed that Endeavour
was the first, and the last, of all Man's ships that would
ever make contact with Rama.

  The advice he was continually receiving from Earth did
little to alleviate Norton's responsibility. If split-second
decisions had to be made, no one could help him; the
radio time-lag to Mission Control was already ten min-
utes, and increasing. He often envied the great navigators
of the past, before the days of electronic communications,
who could interpret their sealed orders without continual
monitoring from headquarters. Why they made mistakes,
no one ever knew.

  Yet at the same time, he was glad that some decisions
could be delegated to Earth. Now that Endeavour's orbit
had coalesced with Rama's they were heading sunwards
like a single body; in forty days they would reach peri-
helion, and pass within twenty million kilometres of the
sun. That was far too close for comfort; long before then,
Endeavour would have to use her remaining fuel to
nudge herself into a safer orbit. They would have per-
haps three weeks of exploring time, before they - parted
from Rama for ever.

  After that, the problem would be Earth's. Endeavour
would be virtually helpless, speeding on an orbit which
could make her the first ship to reach the stars - in ap-
proximately fifty thousand years. There was no need to
worry, Mission Control had promised. Somehow, regard-
less of cost, Endeavour would be refuelled - even if it
proved necessary to send tankers after her, and abandon
them in space once they had transferred every gramme of
propellant. Rama was a prize worth any risk, short of a
suicide mission.

  And, of course, it might even come to that. Com-
mander Norton had no illusions on this score. For the
first time in a hundred years an element of total un-
certainty had entered human affairs. Uncertainty was one
thing that neither scientists nor politicians could toler-
ate. If that was the price of resolving it, Endeavour and
her crew would be expendable.

   CHAPTER FIVE - First EVA

Rama was as silent as a tomb - which, perhaps, it was. No
radio signals, on any frequency; no vibrations that the
seismographs could pick up, apart from the micro-tremors
undoubtedly caused by the sun's increasing heat; no elec-
trical currents; no radioactivity. It was almost ominously
quiet; one might have expected that even an asteroid
would be noisier.

  What did we expect? Norton asked himself. A com-
mittee of welcome? He was not sure whether to be dis-
appointed or relieved. The initiative, at any rate, ap
peared up to him.

  His orders were to wait for twenty-four hours, then to
go out and explore. Nobody slept much that first day;
even the crew members not on duty spent their time
monitoring the ineffectually probing instruments, or
simply looking out of the observation ports at the starkly
geometrical landscape. Is this world alive? they asked
themselves, over and over again. Is it dead? Or is it
merely sleeping?

  On the first EVA, Norton took only one companion -
Lieut-Commander Karl Mercer, his tough and resource-
ful life-support officer. He had no intention of getting out
of sight of the ship, and if there was any trouble, it was
unlikely that a larger party would be safe. As a pre-
caution, however, he had two more crew members, al-
ready suited up, standing by in the airlock.

  The few grammes of weight that Rama's combined
gravitational and centrifugal fields gave them were
neither help nor hindrance; they had to rely entirely on
their jets. As soon as possible, Norton told himself, he
would string a cat's-cradle of guide ropes between the
ship and the pill-boxes, so that they could move around
without wasting propellants.

  The nearest pill-box was only ten metres from the air-
lock, and Norton's first concern was to check that the con-
tact had caused no damage to the ship. Endeavour's hull
was resting against the curving wall with a thrust of see-
real tons, but the pressure was evenly distributed. Re-
assured, he began to drift around the circular structure,
trying to determine its purpose.

  Norton had travelled only a few metres when he came
across an interruption in the smooth, apparently metallic
wall. At first, he thought it was some peculiar decoration,
for it seemed to serve no useful function. Six radial
grooves, or slots, were deeply recessed in the metal, and
lying in them were six crossed bars like the spokes of a
rimless wheel, with a small hub at the centre. But there
was no way in which the wheel could be turned, as it was
embedded in the wall.

  Then he noticed, with growing excitement, that there
were deeper recesses at the ends of the spokes, nicely
shaped to accept a clutching hand (claw? tentacle?). If
one stood so, bracing against the wall, and pulled on the
spoke so...

  Smooth as silk, the wheel slid out of the wall. To his
utter astonishment - for he had been virtually certain
that any moving parts would have become vacuum-
welded ages ago - Norton found himself holding a spoked
wheel. He might have been the captain of some old wind-
jammer standing at the helm of his ship.
He was glad that his helmet sunshade did not allow
Mercer to read his expression.

  He was startled, but also angry with himself; perhaps
he had already made his first mistake. Were alarms now
sounding inside Rama, and had his thoughtless action
already triggered some implacable mechanism?

  But Endeavour reported no change; its sensors still de-
tected nothing but faint thermal crepitations and his
own movements.

   'Well, Skipper - are you going to turn it?'

  Norton thought once more of his instructions. 'Use
your own discretion, but proceed with caution.' If he
checked every single move with Mission Control, he
would never get anywhere.

  'What's your diagnosis, Karl?' he asked Mercer.
'It's obviously a- manual control for an airlock - prob-
ably an emergency back-up system in case of power fail-
ure. I can't imagine any technology, however advanced,
that wouldn't take such precautions.'

  'And it would be fail-safe,' Norton told himself. 'It
could only be operated if there was no possible danger to
the system...'

  He grasped two opposing spokes of the windlass,
braced his feet against the ground, and tested the wheel.
It did not budge.

  'Give me a hand,' he asked Mercer. Each took a spoke;
exerting their utmost strength, they were unable to pro-
duce the slightest movement.

  Of course, there was no reason to suppose that clocks
and corkscrews on Rama turned in the same direction as
they did on Earth... -

  'Let's try the other way,' suggested Mercer.
This time, there was no resistance. The wheel rotated
almost effortlessly through a full circle. Then, very
smoothly, it took up the load.

  Half a metre away, the curving wall of the pill-box
started to move, like a slowly opening clamshell. A few
particles of dust, driven by wisps of escaping air, streamed
outwards like dazzling diamonds as the brilliant sunlight
caught them.

  The road to Rama lay open.

   CHAPTER SIX - Committee

It had been a serious mistake, Dr Bose often thought, to
put the United Planets Headquarters on the Moon. In-
evitably, Earth tended to dominate the proceedings - as
it dominated the landscape beyond the dome. If they had
to build here, perhaps they should have gone to the Far-
side, where that hypnotic disc never shed its rays...
But, of course, it was much too late to change, and in
any case there was no real alternative. Whether the col-
onies liked it or not, Earth would be the cultural and
economic overlord of the solar system for centuries to
come.

  Dr Bose had been born on Earth, and had not emi-
grated to Mars until he was thirty, so he felt that he
could view the political situation fairly dispassionately.
He knew now that he would never return to his home
planet, even though it was only five hours away by shut-
tle. At 115, he was in perfect health, but he could not face
the reconditioning needed to accustom him to three
times the gravity he had enjoyed for most of his life. He
was exiled for ever from the world of his birth; not being
a sentimental man, this -had never depressed him unduly.

  What did depress him sometimes was the need for deal-
ing, year after year, with the same familiar faces. The
marvels of medicine were all very well, and certainly he
had no desire to put back the clock - but there were men
around this conference table with whom he had worked
for more than half a century. He knew exactly what they
would say and how they would vote on any given subject.
He wished that, some day, one of them would do some-
thing totally unexpected - even something quite crazy.

  And probably they felt exactly the same way about
him...

  The Rama Committee was still manageably small,
though doubtless that would soon be rectified. His six
colleagues - the UP representatives for Mercury, Earth,
Luna, Ganymede, Titan and Triton - were all present in
the flesh. They had to be; electronic diplomacy was not
possible over solar system distances. Some elder states-
men, accustomed to the instantaneous communications
which Earth had long taken for granted, had never re-
conciled themselves to the fact that radio waves took
minutes, or even hours, to journey across the gulfs be-
tween the planets. 'Can't you scientists do something
about it?' they had been heard to complain bitterly,
when told that face-to-face conversation was impossible
between Earth and any of its remoter children. Only the
Moon had that barely acceptable one-and-a-half-second
delay - with all the political and psychological conse-
quences which it implied. Because of this fact of astro-
nomical life, the Moon - and only the Moon - would
always be a suburb of Earth.

  Also present in person were three of the specialists who
had been co-opted to the Committee. Professor Davidson,
the astronomer, was an old acquaintance; today, he did
not seem his usual irascible self. Dr Bose knew nothing of
the infighting that had preceded the launch of the first
probe to Rama, but the Professor's colleagues had not let
him forget it.

  Dr Thelma Price was familiar through her numerous
television appearances, though she had first made her
reputation fifty years ago during the archaeological ex-
plosion that had followed the draining of that vast mar-
ine museum, the Mediterranean.

  Dr Bose could still recall the excitement of that time,
when the lost treasures of the Greeks, Romans and a
dozen other civilizations were restored to the light of day.
That was one of the few occasions when he was sorry to
be living on Mars.

  The exobiologist, Carlisle Perera, was another obvious
choice; so was Dennis Solomons, the science historian. Dr
Bose was slightly less happy about the presence of Conrad
Taylor, the celebrated anthropologist, who bad made his
reputation by uniquely combining scholarship and eroti-
cism in his study of puberty rites in late twentieth-cen-
tury Beverley Hills.

  No one, however, could possibly have disputed the
right of Sir Lewis Sands to be on the Committee. A man
whose knowledge was matched only by his urbanity, Sir
Lewis was reputed to lose his composure only when called
the Arnold Toynbee of his age.

  The great historian was not present in person; he stub-
bornly refused to leave Earth, even for so momentous a
meeting as this. His stereo image, indistinguishable from
reality, apparently occupied the chair to Dr Bose's right;
as if to complete the illusion, someone had placed a glass
of water in front of him. Dr Bose considered that this sort
of technological tour de force was an unnecessary gim-
mick, but it was surprising how many undeniably great
men were childishly delighted to be in two places at once.
Sometimes this electronic miracle produced comic dis-
asters; he had been at one diplomatic reception where
somebody had tried to walk through a stereogram - and
discovered, too late, that it was the real person. And it
was even funnier to watch projections trying to shake
hands...

  His Excellency the Ambassador for Mars to the United
Planets called his wandering thoughts to order, cleared
his throat, and said: 'Gentlemen, the Committee is now
in session. I think I am correct in saying that this is a
gathering of unique talents, assembled to deal with a
unique situation. The directive that the Secretary-Gen-
eral has given us is to evaluate that situation, and to ad-
vise Commander Norton when necessary.

  This was a miracle of over-simplification, and everyone
knew it. Unless there was a real emergency, the Commit-
tee might never be in direct contact with Commander
Norton - if, indeed, he ever heard of its existence. For the
Committee was a temporary creation of the United Plan-
ets' Science Organization, reporting through its Director
to the Secretary-General. It was true that the Space Sur-
vey was part of the UP - but on the Operations, not the
Science side. In theory, this should not make much differ-
ence; there was no reason why the Rama Committee - or
anyone else for that matter - should not call up Com-
mander Norton and offer helpful advice.

  But Deep Space Communications are expensive. En-
deavour could be contacted only through PLANETCOM,
which was an autonomous corporation, famous for the
strictness and efficiency of its accounting. It took a long
time to establish a line of credit with PLANETCOM; some-
where, someone was working on this; but at the moment,
PLANETCOM's hard-hearted computers did not recognize
the existence of the Rama Committee.

  'This Commander Norton,' said Sir Robert Mackay,
the Ambassador for Earth. 'He has a tremendous re-
sponsibility. What sort of person is he?'

  'I can answer that,' said Professor Davidson, his fingers
flying over the keyboard of his memory pad. He frowned
at the screenful of information, and started to make an
instant synopsis.

  'William Tsien Norton, Born 2077, Brisbane, Oceana.
Educated Sydney, Bombay, Houston. Then five years at
Astrograd, specializing in propulsion. Commissioned
2102. Rose through usual ranks - Lieutenant on the
Third Persephone expedition, distinguished himself dur-
ing fifteenth attempt to establish base on Venus ... um
um - . . exemplary record . . . dual citizenship, Earth
and Mars ... wife and one child in Brisbane, wife and
two in Port Lowell, with option on third...'

  'Wife?' asked Taylor innocently.

  'No, child of course,' snapped the Professor, before he
caught the grin on the other's face. Mild laughter rippled
round the table, though the overcrowded terrestrials
looked more envious than amused. After a century of de-
termined effort, Earth had still failed to get its popula-
tion below the target of one billion ...

  .... appointed commanding officer Solar Survey Re-
search Vessel Endeavour. First voyage to retrograde sat-
ellites of Jupiter ... um, that was a tricky one.., on aster-
oid mission when ordered to prepare for this operation
... managed to beat deadline...'

  The Professor cleared the display and looked up at his
colleagues.

  'I think we were extremely lucky, considering that he
was the only man available at such short notice. We
might have had the usual run-of-the-mill captain.' He
sounded as if be was referring to the typical peg-legged
scourge of the spaceways, pistol in one hand and cutlass
in the other.

  'The record--only proves that he's competent,' objected
the Ambassador from Mercury (population: i 12,500 but
growing). 'How will be react in a wholly novel situation
like this?'

  On Earth, Sir Lewis Sands cleared his throat. A second
and a half later, he did so on the Moon.

  'Not exactly a novel situation,' he reminded the Her-
mian, 'even though it's three centuries since it last oc-
curred. If Rama is dead, or unoccupied - and so far all
the evidence suggests that it is - Norton is in the position
of an archaeologist discovering the ruins of an extinct
culture.' He bowed politely to Dr Price, who nodded in
agreement. 'Obvious examples are Scbliemann at Troy or
Mouhot at Angkor Vat. The danger is minimal, though
of course accident can never be completely ruled out.'

  'But what about the booby-traps and trigger mechan-
isms these Pandora people have been talking about?'
asked Dr Price.

  'Pandora?' asked the Hermian Ambassador quickly.
'What's that?'

  'It's a crackpot movement,' explained Sir Robert, with
as much embarrassment as a diplomat was ever likely to
show, 'which is convinced that Rama is a grave potential
danger. A box that shouldn't be opened, you know.' He
doubted if the Hermian did know: classical studies were
not encouraged on Mercury.

  'Pandora - paranoia,' snorted Conrad Taylor. 'Oh, of
course, such things are conceivable, but why should any
intelligent race want to play childish tricks?'

  'Well, even ruling out such unpleasantness,' Sir Robert
continued, 'we still have the much more ominous possi-
bility of an active, inhabited Rama. Then the situation is
one of an encounter between two cultures - at very diff-
erent technological levels. Pizzaro and the Incas. Peary
and the Japanese. Europe and Africa. Almost invariably,
the consequences have been disastrous - for one or both
parties. I'm not making any recommendations: I'm mere-
ly pointing out precedents.'

  'Thank you, Sir Robert,' replied Dr Bose. It was a mild
nuisance, he thought, having two 'Sirs' on one small com-
mittee; in these latter days, knighthood was an honour
which few Englishmen escaped. 'I'm sure we've all
thought of these alarming possibilities. But if the creat-
ures inside Rama are - er - malevolent - will it really
make the slightest difference what we do?'

  'They might ignore us if we go away.'

  'What - after they've travelled billions of miles and
thousands of years?'

  The argument had reached the take-off point, and was
now self-sustaining. Dr Bose sat back in his chair, said
very little, and waited for the consensus to emerge.

  It was just as he had predicted. Everyone agreed that,
once he had opened the first door, it was inconceivable
that Commander Norton should not open the second.

   CHAPTER SEVEN - Two Wives

If his wives ever compared his videograms, Commander
Norton thought with more amusement than concern, it
would involve him in a lot of extra work. Now, he could
make one long 'gram and dupe it, adding only brief- per-
sonal messages and endearments before shooting the al-
most identical copies off to Mars and Earth.

  Of course, it was highly unlikely that his wives ever
would do such a thing; even at the concessionary rates
allowed to spacemen's families, it would be expensive.
And there would be no point in it; his families were on
excellent terms with each other, and exchanged- the usual
greetings on birthdays and anniversaries. Yet, on -the
whole, perhaps it was just as well that the girls had never
met, and probably never would. Myrna had been born on
Mars and so could not- tolerate the high gravity of Earth.
And Caroline hated even the twenty-five minutes of the
longest possible terrestrial journey.

  'Sorry I'm a day late with this transmission,' said the
Commander after he had finished the general-purpose
preliminaries, 'but I've been away from the ship for the
last thirty hours, believe it or not. . . -

  'Don't be alarmed - everything is under control, going
perfectly. It's taken us two days, but we're almost through
the airlock complex. We could have done it in a couple of
hours, if we'd known what we do now. But we took no
chances, sent remote cameras ahead, and cycled all the
locks a dozen times to make sure they wouldn't seize up
behind us - after we'd gone through...

  'Each lock is a simple revolving cylinder with a slot on
one side. You go in through this opening, crank the cyl-
inder round a hundred and eighty degrees - and the slot
then matches up with another door so that you can step
out of it. Or float, in this case.

  'The Ramans really made sure of things. There are
three of these cylinder-locks, one after the other just in-
side the outer hull and below the entry pill-box. I can't
imagine how even one would fail, unless someone blew it
up with explosives, but if it did, there would be a second
back-up, and then a third...

  'And that's only the beginning. The final lock opens
into a straight corridor, almost half a kilometre long. It
looks clean and tidy, like everything else we've seen;
- every few metres there are small ports that probably held
lights, but -now everything is completely black and, I
don't mind telling you, scary. There are also two parallel
slots, about a centimetre wide, cut in the walls and run-
ning the whole length of the tunnel. We suspect that
some kind of shuttle runs inside these, to tow equipment
- or people - back and forth. It would save us a lot of
trouble if we could get it working...

  'I mentioned that the tunnel was half a kilometre long.
Well, from our seismic soundings we knew that's about
the thickness of the shell, so obviously we were almost
through it. And at the end of the tunnel we were'nt sur-
prised to find another of those cylindrical airlocks.

  'Yes, and another. And another. These people seem to
have done everything in threes. We're in the final lock
chamber now, awaiting the OK from Earth before we go
through. The interior of Rama is only a few metres away.
I'll be a lot happier when the suspense is over.

  'You know Jerry Kirchoff, my Exec, who's got such a
library of real books that he can't afford to emigrate from
Earth? Well, Jerry told me about a situation just like
this, back at the beginning of the twenty-first - no, twen-
tieth century. An archaeologist found the tomb of an
Egyptian king, the first one that hadn't been looted by
robbers. His workmen took months to dig their way in,
chamber by - chamber, until they came to the final wall.
Then they broke through the masonery, and he held out
a lantern and pushed his head inside. He found himself
looking into a whole roomful of treasure - incredible
stuff gold and jewels ...

  'Perhaps this place is also a tomb; it seems more and
more -likely. Even now, there's still not the slightest
sound, or hint of any activity. Well, tomorrow we should
know.'

  Commander Norton switched the record to HOLD.
What else, he wondered, should he say about the work
before he began 'the separate personal messages to his
families? Normally, he never went into so much detail,
but these circumstances were scarcely normal. This might
be the last 'gram he would ever send to those he loved; he
owed it to them to explain what he was doing.

  By the time they saw these images, and heard these
words, he would be inside Rama - for better or for worse.

   CHAPTER EIGHT - Through the Hub

Never before had Norton felt so strongly his kinship with
that long dead Egyptologist. Not since Howard Carter
had first peered into the tomb of Tutankhamen could
any man have known a moment such as this - yet the
comparison was almost laughably ludicrous.

  Tutankhamen had been buried only yesterday - not
even four thousand years ago; Rama might be older than
mankind. That little tomb in the Valley of the Kings
could have been lost in the corridors through which they
had already passed, yet the space that lay beyond this
final seal was at least a million times greater. And as for
the treasure it might hold - that was beyond imagina-
tion.

  No one had spoken over the radio circuits for at least
five minutes; the well-trained team had not even re-
ported verbally when all the checks were complete.
Mercer had simply given him the OK sign and waved
him towards the open tunnel. It was as if everyone real-
ized that this was a moment for History, not to be spoiled
by unnecessary small-talk. That suited Commander Nor-
ton, for at the moment he too had nothing to say. He
flicked on the beam of his flashlight, triggered his jets,
and drifted slowly down the short corridor, trailing his
safety line behind him. Only seconds later, he was inside.

  Inside what? All before him was total darkness; not a
glimmer of light was reflected back from the beam. He
bad expected this, but he had not really believed it. All
the calculations had shown that the far wail was tens of
kilometres away; now his eyes told him that this was in-
deed the truth. As he drifted slowly into that darkness, he
felt a sudden need for the reassurance of his safety line,
stronger than any he had ever experienced before, even
on his very first EVA. And that was ridiculous; he had
looked out across the light-years and the megaparsecs
without vertigo; why should he be disturbed by a few
cubic kilometres of emptiness?

  He was still queasily brooding over this problem when
the momentum damper at the end of the line braked him
gently to a halt, with a barely perceptible rebound. He
swept the vainly-probing beam of the flashlight down
from the nothingness ahead, to examine the surface from
which he had emerged.

  He might have been hovering over the centre of a
small crater, which was itself a dimple in the base of a
much larger one. On either side rose a complex of ter-
races and ramps - all geometrically precise and obviously
artificial - which extended for as far as the beam could
reach. About a hundred metres away he could see the exit
of the other two airlock systems, identical with this one.

  And that was all. There was nothing particularly ex-
otic or alien about the scene: in fact, it bore a consider-
able resemblance to an abandoned mine. Norton felt a
vague sense of disappointment; after all this effort, there
should have been some dramatic, even transcendental
revelation. Then he reminded himself that he could see
only a couple of hundred metres. The darkness beyond
his field of view might yet contain more wonders than he
cared to face.

  He reported briefly to his anxiously-waiting compan-
ions, then added: 'I'm sending out the flare - two min-
utes delay. Here goes.' -

  With all his strength, he threw the little cylinder
straight upwards - or outwards - and started to count
seconds as it dwindled along the beam. Before he had
reached the quarter minute it was out of sight; when he
had got to a hundred be shielded his eyes and aimed the
camera. He had always been good at estimating time; ht
was only two seconds off when the world exploded with
light. And this time there was no cause for disappoint-
ment.

  Even the millions of candlepower of the flare could not
light up the whole of this enormous cavity, but now he
could see enough to grasp its plan and appreciate its ti-
tanic scale. He was at one end of a hollow cylinder at
least ten kilometres wide, and of indefinite length. From
his viewpoint at the central axis he could see such a mass
of detail on the curving walls surrounding him that his
mind could not absorb more than a minute fraction of it.;
he was looking at the landscape of an entire world by a
single flash of lightning, and he tried by a deliberate
effort of will to freeze the image in his mind.

  All round him, the terraced slopes of the 'crater' rose
up until they merged into the solid 'wall that rimmed the
sky. No - that impression was false; he must discard the
instincts both of earth and of space, and reorientate him-
self to a new system of coordinates.

  He was not at the lowest point of this strange, inside-
out world, but the highest. From here, all directions were
down, not up. If he moved away from this central axis,
towards the curving wall which he must no longer think
of as a wall, gravity would steadily increase. When he
reached the inside surface of the cylinder, he could stand
upright on it at any point, feet towards the stars and
head towards the centre of the spinning drum. The con-
cept was familiar enough; since the earliest dawn of
spaceflight, centrifugal force had been used to simulate
gravity. It was only the scale of this application which
was so overwhelming, so shocking. The largest of all space-
stations, Syncsat Five, was less than two hundred metres
in diameter. It would take some little while to grow ac-
customed to one a hundred times that size.

  The tube of landscape which enclosed him was mottled
with areas of light and shade that could have been for-
ests, fields, frozen lakes or towns; the distance, and the
fading illumination of the flare, made identification im-
possible. Narrow lines that could be highways, canals, or
well-trained rivers formed a faintly visible geometrical
network; and far along the cylinder, at the very limit of
vision, was a band of deeper darkness. It formed a com-
plete circle, ringing the interior of this world, and Nor-
ton suddenly recalled the myth of Oceanus, the sea
which, the ancients believed, surrounded the Earth.

  Here, perhaps, was an even stranger sea - not circular,
but cylindrical. Before it became frozen in the inter-
- stellar night, did it have waves and tides and currents -
and fish?

  The flare guttered and died; the moment of revelation
was over. But Norton knew that as long as he lived these
images would be burned on his mind. Whatever discov-
eries the future might bring, they could never erase this
first impression. And History could never take from him
the privilege of being the first of all mankind to gaze
upon the works of an alien civilization.

   CHAPTER NINE - Reconnaissance

'We have now launched five long-delay flares down the
axis of the cylinder, and so have a good photo-coverage of
its full length. All the main features are mapped; though
there are very few that we can identify, we've given them
provisional names.

  'The interior cavity is fifty kilometres long and sixteen
wide. The two ends are bowl-shaped, with rather compli-
cated geometries. We've called ours the Northern Hemi-
sphere and are establishing our first base here at the axis.

  'Radiating away from the central hub, 120 degrees
apart, are three ladders that are almost a kilometre long.
They all end at a terrace or ring-shaped plateau, that
runs right round the bowl. And leading on from that,
continuing the direction of the ladders, are three enorm-
ous stairways, which go all the way down to the plain. If
you imagine an umbrella with only three ribs, equally
spaced, you'll have a good idea of this end of Rama.

  'Each of those ribs is a stairway, very steep near the axis
and then slowly flattening out as it approaches the plain
below. The stairways - we've called them Alpha, Beta,
Gamma - aren't continuous, but break at five more
circular terraces. We estimate there must be between
twenty and thirty thousand steps . . . presumably they
were only used for emergencies, since it's inconceivable
that the Ramans - or whatever we're going to call them -
had no better way of reaching the axis of their world.

  'The Southern Hemisphere looks quite different; for
one thing, it has no stairways, and no flat central hub.
Instead, there's a huge spike - kilometres long - jutting
along the axis, with six smaller ones around it. The
whole arrangement is very odd, and we can't imagine
what it means.

  'The fifty-kilometre-long cylindrical section between
the two bowls we've called the Central Plain. It may seem
crazy to use the word "plain" to describe something so
obviously curved, but we feel it's justified. It will appear
flat to us when we get down there - just as the interior of
a bottle must seem flat to an ant crawling round inside
it.

  'The most striking feature of the Central Plain is the
ten-kilometre-wide dark band running completely round
it at the half-way mark. It looks like ice, so we've christ-
ened it the Cylindrical Sea. Right out in the middle
there's a large oval island, about ten kilometres long and
three wide, and covered with tall structures. Because it
reminds us of Old Manhattan, we've called it New York.
Yet I don't think it's a city; it seems more like an enorm-
ous factory or chemical processing plant.

  'But there are some cities - or at any rate, towns. At
least six of them; if they were built for human beings,
they could each hold about fifty thousand people. We've
called them Rome, Peking, Paris, Moscow, London,
Tokyo... They are linked with highways and something
that seems to be a rail system.

  'There must be enough material for centuries of re-
search in this frozen carcass of a world. We've four thou-
sand square kilometres to explore, and only a few weeks
to do it in. I wonder if we'll ever learn the answer to the
two mysteries that have been haunting me ever since we
got inside; who were they - and what went wrong?'

  The recording ended. On Earth and Moon, the mem-
bers of the Rama Committee relaxed, then started to ex-
amine the maps and photographs spread in front of them.
Though they had already studied these for many hours,
Commander Norton's voice added a dimension which no
pictures could convey. He had actually been there - had
looked with his own eyes across this extraordinary inside-
out world, during the brief moments while its age-long
night had been illuminated by the flares. And he was the
man who would lead any expedition to explore it.

  'Dr Perera, I believe you have some comments to
make?'

  Ambassador Bose wondered briefly if he should have
first given the floor to Professor Davidson, as senior scien-
tist and the only astronomer. But the old cosmologist still
seemed to be in a mild state of shock, and was clearly out
of his element. All his professional career he had looked
upon the universe as an arena for the titanic impersonal
forces of gravitation, magnetism, radiation; he had never
believed that life played an important role in the scheme
of things, and regarded its appearance on Earth, - Mars
and Jupiter as an accidental aberration.

  But now there was proof that life not only existed out-
side the solar system, but had scaled heights far beyond
anything that man had achieved, or could hope to reach
for centuries to come. Moreover, the discovery of Rama
challenged another dogma that Professor Olaf had
preached for years. When pressed, he would reluctantly
admit that life probably did exist in other star systems -
but it was absurd, he had always maintained to imagine
that it could ever cross the interstellar gulfs...

  Perhaps the Ramans had indeed failed, if Commander
Norton was correct in believing that their world was now
a tomb. But at least they had attempted the feat, on a
scale which indicated a high confidence in the outcome.
If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have
happened many times in this Galaxy of a hundred thou-
sand million suns ... and someone, somewhere, would
eventually succeed.

  This was the thesis which, without proof but with con-
siderable arm-waving, Dr Carlisle Perera had been preach-
ing for years. He was now a very happy man, though also
a most frustrated one. Rama had spectacularly confirmed
his views - but he could never set foot inside it, or even
see it with his own eyes. If the devil had suddenly
appeared and offered him the gift of instantaneous tele-
portation, he would have signed the contract without
bothering to look at the small print.

  'Yes, Mr Ambassador, I think I have some information
of interest. What we have here is undoubtedly a "Space
Ark". It's an old idea in the astronautical literature; I've
been able to trace it back to the British physicist J. D.
Bernal, who proposed this method of interstellar colon-
ization in a book published in 1929 - yes, two hundred
years ago. And the great Russian pioneer Tsiolkovski put
forward somewhat similar proposals even earlier.

  'If you want to go from one star system to another you
have a number of choices. Assuming that the speed of
light is an absolute limit - and that's still not completely
settled, despite anything you may have heard to the con-
trary' - there was an indignant sniff, but no formal pro-
test from Professor Davidson - 'you can make a fast trip
in a small vessel, or a slow journey in a giant one.

  'There seems no technical reason why spacecraft can-
not reach ninety per cent, or more, of the speed of light.
That would mean a travel time of five to ten years be-
tween neighbouring stars - tedious, perhaps, but not
impracticable, especially for creatures whose life spans
might be measured in centuries. One can imagine voyages
of this duration, carried out in ships not much larger than
ours.

  'But perhaps such speeds are impossible, with reason-
able payloads; remember, you have to carry the fuel
to slow down at the end of the voyage, even if you're
on a one-way trip. So it may make more sense to
take your time - ten thousand, a hundred thousand
years...

  'Bernal and others thought this could be done with
mobile worldlets a few kilometres across, carrying thou-
sands of passengers on journeys that would last for gen-
erations. Naturally, the system would have to be rigidly
closed, recycling all food, air and other expendables. But,
of course, that's just how the Earth operates - on a
slightly larger scale.

  'Some writers suggested that these Space Arks should
be built in the form of concentric spheres; others pro-
posed hollow, spinning cylinders so that centrifugal force
could provide artificial gravity - exactly what we've
found in Rama-'

  Professor Davidson could not tolerate this sloppy talk.

  'No such thing as centrifugal force. It's an engineer's
phantom. There's only inertia.'

  'You're quite right, of course,' admitted Perera, 'though
it might be hard to convince a man who'd just been slung
off a carousel. But mathematical rigour seems unneces-
sary-

  'Hear, hear,' interjected Dr Bose, with some exaspera-
tion. 'We all know what you mean, or think we do. Please
don't destroy our illusions.'

  'Well, I was merely pointing out that there's nothing
conceptually novel about Rama, though its size is start-
ling. Men have imagined such things for two hundred
years.

  'Now I'd like to address myself to another question.
Exactly how long has Rama been travelling through
space?

  'We now have a very precise determination of its orbit
and its velocity. Assuming that it's made no navigational
changes, we can trace its position back for millions of
years. We expected that it would be coming from the
direction of a near-by star - but that isn't the case at
all.

  'It's more than two hundred thousand years since
Rama passed near any star, and that particular one turns
out to be an irregular variable - about the most unsuit-
able sun you could imagine for an inhabited solar system.
It has a brightness range of over fifty to one; any planets
would be alternately baked and frozen every few years.'

  'A suggestion,' put in Dr Price. 'Perhaps that explains
everything. Maybe this was once a normal sun and be-
came unstable. That's why the Ramans had to find a new
one.'

  Dr Perera admired the old archaeologist, so he let her
down lightly. But what would she say, he wondered, if he
started pointing out the instantly obvious in her own
speciality...

  'We did consider that,' he said gently. 'But if our pre-
sent theories of stellar evolution are correct, this star
could never have been stable - could never have had life-
bearing planets. So Rama has been cruising through
space for at least two hundred thousand years, and per-
haps for more than a million.

  'Now it's cold and dark and apparently dead, and I
think I know why. The Ramans may have had no choice
- perhaps they were indeed fleeing from some disaster -
but they miscalculated.

  'No closed ecology can be one hundred per cent effici-
ent; there is always waste, loss - some degradation of the
environment, and build-up of pollutants. It may take bil-
lions of years to poison and wear out a planet - but it
will happen in the end. The oceans will dry up, the at-
mosphere will leak away...

  'By our standards, Rama is enormous - yet it is still a
very tiny planet. My calculations, based on the- leakage
through its hull, and some reasonable guesses about the
rate of biological turnover, indicate that its ecology could
only survive for about a thousand years. At the most, I'll
grant ten thousand...

  'That would be long enough, at the speed Rama is
travelling, for a transit between the closely-packed suns
in the heart of the Galaxy. But not out here, in the scat-
tered population of the spiral arms. Rama is a ship which
exhausted its provisions before it reached its goal. It's a
derelict, drifting among the stars.

  'There's just one serious objection to this theory, and
I'll raise it before anybody else does. Rama's orbit is
aimed so accurately at the solar system that coincidence
seems ruled out. In fact, I'd say it's now heading much
too close to the sun for comfort: Endeavour will have to
break away long before perihelion, to avoid overheating.

  'I don't pretend to understand this. Perhaps, there ma
be some form of automatic terminal guidance still oper-
ating, steering Rama to the nearest suitable star ages
after its builders are dead.

  'And they are dead; I'll stake my reputation on that.
All the samples we've taken from the interior are absol-
utely sterile - we've not found a single micro-organism.
As for the talk you may have heard about suspended
animation, you can ignore it. There are fundamental
reasons why hibernation techniques will only work for a
very few centuries - and we're dealing with time spans a
thousand-fold longer.

  'So the Pandorans and their sympathizers have nothing
to worry about. For my part, I'm sorry. It would have
been wonderful to have met another intelligent species.

  'But at least we have answered one ancient question.
We are not alone. The stars will never again be the same
to us:

   CHAPTER TEN - Descent into Darkness

Commander Norton was sorely tempted - but, as captain
his first duty was to his ship. If anything went badly
wrong on this initial probe, he might have to run for it.

  So that left his second officer, Lieut-Commander Mer-
cer, as the obvious choice. Norton willingly admitted that
Karl was better suited for the mission.

  The authority on life-support systems, Macer had writ-
ten some of - the standard textbooks on the subject. He
had personally checked out innumerable types of equip-
ment, often under hazardous conditions, and his biofeed-
back control was famous. At a moment's notice he could
cut his pulse-rate by fifty per cent, and reduce respiration
to almost zero for up to ten minutes. These useful little
tricks had saved his life on more than one occasion.

  Yet despite his great ability and intelligence, he was
almost wholly lacking in imagination. To him the most
dangerous experiments or missions were simply jobs that
had to be done. He never took unnecessary risks, and had
no use at all for what was commonly regarded as courage.

  The two mottoes on his desk summed up his philos-
ophy of life. One asked WHAT HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN? The
other said HELP STAMP our BRAVERY. The fact that, he was
widely regarded as the bravest man in the Fleet was the
only thing that ever made him angry.

  Given Mercer, that automatically selected the next
man - his inseparable companion Lt Joe Calvert. It was
hard to see what the two had in common; the lightly-
built, rather highly strung navigating officer was ten years
younger than his stolid and imperturbable friend, who
certainly did not share his passionate interest in the art of
the primitive cinema.

  But no one can predict where lightning will strike, and
years ago Mercer and Calvert had established an appar-
ently stable liaison. That was common enough; much
more unusual was the fact that they also shared a wife
back on Earth, who had borne each of them a child.
Commander Norton hoped that he could meet her one
day; she must be a very remarkable woman. The triangle
had lasted for at least five years, and still seemed to be an
equilateral one.

  Two men were not enough for an exploring team; long
ago it had been found that three was the optimum - for
if one man was lost, two might still escape where a single
survivor would be doomed. After a good deal of thought,
Norton had chosen Technical Sergeant Willard Myron.
A mechanical genius who could make anything work - or
design something better if it wouldn't - Myron was the
ideal man to identify alien pieces of equipment. On a
long sabbatical from his regular job as Associate Pro-
fessor at Astrotech, the Sergeant had refused to accept a
commission on the grounds that he did not wish to block
the promotion of more deserving career officers. No one
took this explanation very seriously and it was generally
agreed that Will rated zero for ambition. He might make
it to Space Sergeant, but would never be a full professor.
Myron, like countless NCOs before him, had discovered
the ideal compromise between power and responsibility.

  As they drifted through the last airlock and floated out
along the weightless axis of Rama, Lt Calvert found him-
self, as he so often did, in the middle of a movie flash-
back. He sometimes wondered if he should attempt to
cure himself of this habit, but he could not see that it had
any disadvantages. It could make even the dullest situa-
tions interesting and - who could tell? - one day it might
save his life. He would remember what Fairbanks or
Connery or Hiroshi had done in similar circumstances...

  This time, he was about to go over the top, in one of
the early-twentieth-century wars; Mercer was the sergeant
leading a three-man patrol on a night raid into no-man's
land. It was not too difficult to imagine that they were at
the bottom of an immense shell-crater, though one that
had somehow become neatly tailored into a series of
ascending terraces. The crater was flooded with light
from three widely-spaced plasma-arcs, which gave an al-
most shadowless illumination over the whole interior.
But beyond that - over the rim of the most distant ter-
race - was darkness and mystery.

  In his mind's eye, Calvert knew perfectly well what lay
there. First there was the flat circular plain over a kilo-
metre across. Trisecting it into three equal parts, and
looking very much like broad railroad tracks, were three
wide ladders, their rungs recessed into the surface so that
they would provide no obstruction to anything sliding
over it. Since the arrangement was completely symmetri-
cal, there was no reason to choose one ladder rather than
another; that nearest to Airlock Alpha had been selected
purely as a matter of convenience.

  Though the rungs of the ladders were uncomfortably
far apart, that presented no problem. Even at the rim of
the Hub, half a kilometre from the axis, gravity was still
barely one thirtieth of Earth's. Although they were carry-
ing almost a hundred kilos of equipment and life-support
gear, they would still be able to move easily hand-over-
hand.

  Commander Norton and the back-up team accompan-
ied them along the guide ropes that had been stretched
from Airlock Alpha to the rim of the crater; then, beyond
the range of the floodlighis, the darkness of Rama lay
before them. All that could be seen in the dancing beams
of the helmet lights was the first few hundred metres of
the ladder, dwindling away across a flat and otherwise
featureless plain.

  And now, Karl Mercer told himself, I have to make my
first decision. Am I going up that ladder, or down it?

  The question was not a trivial one. They were still
essentially in zero gravity, and the brain could select any
reference system it pleased. By a simple effort of will,
Mercer could convince himself that he was looking out
across a horizontal plain, or up the face of a vertical wall,
or over the edge of a sheer cliff. Not a few astronauts had
experienced grave psychological problems by choosing
the wrong coordinates when they started on a compli-
cated job.

  Mercer was determined to go head-first, for any other
mode of locomotion would be awkward; moreover, this
way he could more easily see what was in front of him.
For the first few hundred metres, therefore, he would im-
agine he was climbing upwardsd: only when the increasing
pull of gravity made it impossible to maintain the illu-
sion would he switch his mental directions one hundred
and eighty degrees.

  He grasped the first rung and gently propelled himself
along the ladder. Movement was as effortless as swim-
ming along the seabed - more so, in fact, for there was no
backward drag of water. It was so easy that there was a
temptation to go too fast, but Mercer was much too ex-
perienced to hurry in a situation as novel as this.

  In his earphones, he could hear the regular breathing
of his two companions. He needed no other proof that
they were in good shape, and wasted no time in conver-
sation. Though he was tempted to look back, he decided
not to risk it until they had reached the platform at the
end of the ladder.

  The rungs were spaced a uniform half metre apart, and
for the first portion of the climb Mercer missed the alter-
nate ones. But he counted them carefully, and at around
two hundred noticed the first distinct sensations of
weight. The spin of Rama was starting to make itself felt.

  At rung four hundred, he estimated that his apparent
weight was about five kilos. This was no problem, but it
was now getting hard to pretend that he was climbing,
when he was being firmly dragged upwards.

  The five hundredth rung seemed a good place to
pause. He could feel the muscles in his arms responding
to the unaccustomed exercise, even though Rama was
now doing all the work and he had merely to guide him-
self.

  'Everything OK, Skipper,' he reported. 'We're just pass-
ing the halfway mark. Joe, Will - any problems?'

  'I'm fine - what are you stopping for?' Joe Calvert an-
swered.

  'Same here,' added Sergeant Myron. 'But watch out for
the Coriolis force. It's starting to build up.'

  So Mercer had already noticed. When he let go of the
rungs he had a distinct tendency to drift off to the right.
He knew perfectly well that this was merely the effect of
Rama's spin, but it seemed as if some mysterious force
was gently pushing him away from the ladder.

  Perhaps it was time to start going feet-first, now that
'down' was beginning to have a physical meaning. He
would run the risk of a momentary disorientation.

  'Watch out - I'm going to swing round.'

  Holding firmly on to the rung, he used his arms to
twist himself round a hundred and eighty degrees, and
found himself momentarily blinded by the lights of his
companions. Far above them - and now it really was
above - he could see a fainter glow along the rim of the
sheer cliff. Silhouetted against it were the figures of Com-
mander Norton and the back-up team, watching him in-
tently. They seemed very small and far away, and he gave
them a reassuring wave.

  He released his grip, and let Rama's still feeble pseudo-
gravity take over. The drop from one rung to the next
required more than two seconds; on Earth, in the same
time, a man would have fallen thirty metres.

  The rate of fall was so painfully slow that he hurried
things up a trifle by pushing with his hands, gliding over
spans of a dozen rungs at a time, and checking himself
with his feet whenever he felt he was travelling too fast.

  At rung seven hundred, he came to another halt and
swung the beam of his helmet-lamp downwards; as he
had calculated, the beginning of the stairway was only
fifty metres below.

  A few minutes later, they were on the first step. It was a
strange experience, after months in space, to stand up-
right on a solid surface, and to feel it pressing against
one's feet. Their weight was still less than ten kilogrammes,
but that was enough to give a feeling of stability. When
he closed his eyes, Mercer could believe that he once more
had a real world beneath him.

  The ledge or platform from which the stairway des-
cended was about ten metres wide, and curved upwards
on each side until it disappeared into the darkness. Mer-
cer knew that it formed a complete circle and that if he
walked along it for five kilometres he would come right
back to his starting-point, having circumnavigated Rama.

  At the fractional gravity that existed here, however,
real walking was impossible; one could only bound along
in giant strides. And therein lay danger.

  The stairway that swooped down into the darkness, far
below the range of their lights, would be deceptively easy
to descend. But it would be essential to hold on to the tall
handrail that flanked it on either side; too bold a step
might send an incautious traveller arching far out into
space. He would hit the surface again perhaps a hundred
metres lower down; the impact would be harmless, but its
consequences might not be - for the spin of Rama would
have moved the stairway off to the left. And so a falling
body would hit against the smooth curve that swept in
an unbroken arc to the plain almost seven kilometres
below.

  That, Mercer told himself, would be a hell of a tobog-
gan ride; the terminal speed, even in this gravity, could
be several hundred kilometres an hour. Perhaps it would
be possible to apply-enough friction to check such a head-
long descent; if so, this might even be the most con-
venient way to reach the inner surface of Rama. But
some very cautious experimenting would be necessary
first.

  'Skipper,' reported Mercer, 'there were no problems
getting down the ladder. If you agree, I'd like to continue
towards the next platform. I want to time our rate of
descent on the stairway.'

  Norton replied without hesitation.

  'Go ahead.' He did not need to add, 'Proceed with cau-
tion.'

  It did not take Mercer long to make a fundamental
discovery. It was impossible, at least at this one-twentieth-
of-a-gravity level, to walk down the stairway in the nor-
mal manner. Any attempt to do so resulted in a slow-
motion dream-like movement that was intolerably tedi-
ous; the only practical way was to ignore the steps, and to
use the handrail to pull oneself downwards.

  Calvert had come to the same conclusion.

  'This stairway was built to walk up, not down!' he
exclaimed. 'You can use the steps when you're moving
against gravity, but they're just a nuisance in this direc-
tion. It may not be dignified, but I think the best way
down is to slide along the handrail.'

  'That's ridiculous,' protested Sergeant Myron. 'I can't
believe the Ramans did it this way.' -

  'I doubt if they ever used this stairway - it's obviously
only for emergencies. They must have had some mech-
anical transport system to get up here. A funicular, per-
haps. That would explain those long slots running down
from the Hub.'

  'I always assumed they were drains - but I suppose they
could be both. I wonder if it ever rained here?'
'Probably,' said Mercer. 'But I think Joe is right, and to
hell with dignity. Here we go.'

  The handrail - presumably it was designed for some-
thing like hands7 was a smooth, flat, metal bar supported
on widely-spaced pillars a metre high. Commander Mer-
cer straddled it, carefully gauged the braking power he
could exert with his hands, and let himself slide.

  Very sedately, slowly picking up speed, he descended
into the darkness, moving in the pool of light from his
helmet-lamp. He had gone about fifty metres when he
called the others to join him.

  None would admit it, but they all felt like boys again.
sliding down the banisters. In less than two minutes, they
had made a kilometre descent in safety and comfort.

  Whenever they felt they were going too fast,. a tightened
grip on the handrail provided all the braking that was
necessary.

  'I hope you enjoyed yourselves,' Commander Norton
called when they stepped off at the second platform.
'Climbing back won't be quite so easy.'

  'That's what I want to check,' replied Mercer, who was
walking experimentally back and forth, getting the feel
of the increased gravity. 'It's already a tenth of a gee here
- you really notice the difference.'

  He walked - or, more accurately, glided - to the edge
of the platform, and shone his helmet-light down the
next section of the stairway. As far as his beam could
reach, it appeared identical with the one above - though
careful examination of photos had shown that the height
of the steps steadily decreased with the rising gravity.
The stair had apparently been designed so that the effort
required to climb it was more or less constant at every
point in its long curving sweep.

  Mercer glanced up towards the Hub of Rama, now al-
most two kilometres above him. The little glow of light,
and the tiny figures silhouetted against it, seemed hor-
ribly far away. For the first time, he was suddenly glad
that he could not see the whole length of this enormous
stairway. Despite his steady nerves and lack of imagina-
tion, he was not sure how he would react if he could see
himself like an insect crawling up the face of a vertical
saucer more than sixteen kilometres high - and with the
upper half overhanging above him. Until this moment,
he had regarded the darkness as a nuisance; now he al-
most welcomed it.

  'There's no change of temperature,' he reported to
Commander Norton. 'Still just below freezing. But the
air-pressure is up, as we expected - around three hundred
millibars. Even with this low oxygen content, it's almost
breathable; further down there will be no problems at
all. That will simplify exploration enormously. 'What a
find - the first world on which we can walk without
breathing gear! In fact, I'm going to take a sniff.'

  Up on the Hub, Commander Norton stirred a little
uneasily. But Mercer, of all men, knew exactly what he
was doing. He would already have made enough tests to
satisfy himself.

  Mercer equalized pressure, unlatched the securing clip
of his helmet, and opened it a crack. He took a cautious
breath; then a deeper one.

  The air of Rama was dead and musty, as if from a
tomb so ancient that the last trace of physical corruption
had disappeared ages ago. Even Mercer's ultra-sensitive
nose, trained through years of testing life-support systems
to and beyond the point of disaster, could detect no re-
cognizable odours. There was a faint metallic tang, and
he suddenly recalled that the first men on the Moon had
reported a hint of burnt gunpowder when they repres-
surized the lunar module. Mercer imagined that the
moon-dust-contaminated cabin on Eagle must have
smelled rather like Rama.

  He sealed the helmet again, and emptied his lungs of
the alien air. He had extracted no sustenance from it;
even a mountaineer acclimatized to the summit of Ever-
est would die quickly here. But a few kilometres further
down, it would be a different matter.

  'What else was -there to do here? He could think of
nothing, except the enjoyment of the gentle, unaccust-
omed gravity. But there was no point in growing used to
that, since they would be returning immediately to the
weightlessness of the Hub.

  'We're coming back, Skipper,' he reported. 'There's no
reason to go further - until we're ready to go all the way.'

  'I agree. We'll be timing you, but take it easy.'

  As he bounded up the steps, three or four at a stride,
Mercer agreed that Calvert had been perfectly correct;
these stairs were built to be walked up, not down. As long
as one did not look back, and ignored the - vertiginous
steepness of the ascending curve, the climb was a delight-
ful experience. After about two hundred steps, however,
he began to feel some twinges in his calf muscles, and
decided to slow down. The others had done the same;
when he ventured a quick glance over his shoulder, they
were considerably further down the slope.

  The climb was wholly uneventful - merely an- appar-
ently endless succession of steps. When they stood once
more on the highest platform, immediately beneath the
ladder, they were barely winded, and it had taken them
only ten minutes. They paused for another ten, then
started on the last vertical kilometre.

  Jump - catch hold of a rung - jump - catch - jump -
catch... it was easy, but so boringly repetitious that there
was danger of becoming careless. Halfway up the ladder
they rested for five minutes: by this time their arms as
well as their legs had begun to ache. Once again, Mercer
was glad that they could see so little of the vertical face to
which they were clinging; it was not too difficult to pre-
tend that the ladder only extended just a few metres be-
yond their circle of light, and would soon come to an -
end.

  Jump - catch a rung - jump - then, quite suddenly,
the ladder really ended. They were back at the weightless
world of the axis, among their anxious friends. The
whole trip had taken under an hour, and they felt a sense
of modest achievement.

  But it was much too soon to feel pleased with them-
selves. For all their efforts, they had traversed less than an
eighth of that cyclopean stairway.

   CHAPTER ELEVEN - Men, Women and Monkeys

Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago,
should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did
things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It
was bad enough when they were motionless; but when
they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it
was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked
to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space
accident had been caused by acute crew distraction, after
the transit of a well-upholstered lady officer through the
control cabin.

  He had once mentioned this theory to Surgeon-Com-
mander Laura Ernst, without revealing who had inspired
his particular train of thought. There was no need; they
knew each other much too well. On Earth, years ago, in a
moment of mutual loneliness and depression, they had
once made love. Probably they would never repeat the
experience (but could one ever be quite sure of that?)
because so much had changed for both of them. Yet
whenever the well-built Surgeon oscillated into the Com-
mander's cabin, he felt a fleeting echo, of an old passion,
she knew that he felt it, and everyone was happy.

  'Bill,' she began, 'I've checked our mountaineers, and
here's my verdict. Karl and Joe are in good shape - all
indications normal for the work they've done. But Will
shows signs of exhaustion and body-loss - I won't bother
about the details. I don't believe he's been getting all the
exercise he should, and he's not the only one. There's
been some cheating in the centrifuge; if there's any more,
heads will roll. Please pass the word.'

  'Yes, Ma'am. But there's some excuse. The men have
been working very hard.'

  'With their brains and fingers, certainly. But not with
their bodies - not real work in kilogramme-metres. And
that's what we'll be dealing with, if we're going to ex-
plore Rama.'

  'Well, can we?'

  'Yes, if we proceed with caution. Karl and I have
worked out a very conservative profile - based on the
assumption that we can dispense with breathing gear be-
low Level Two. Of course, that's an incredible stroke of
luck, and changes the whole logistics picture. I still can't
get used to the idea of a world with oxygen... So we only
need to supply food and water and thermosuits, and
we re in business. Going down will be easy; it looks as if
we can slide most of the way, on that very convenient
banister.'

  'I've got Chips working on a sled with parachute brak-
ing. Even if we can't risk it for crew, we can use it for
stores and equipment.'

  'Fine; that should do the trip in ten minutes; otherwise
it will take about an hour.

  'Climbing up is harder to estimate; I'd like to allow six
hours, including two one-hour periods. Later, as we get
experience - and develop some muscles - we may be able
to cut this back considerably.'

  'What about psychological factors?'

  'Hard to assess, in such a novel environment. Darkness
may be the biggest problem.

  'I'll establish searchlights on the Hub. Besides its own
lamps, any party down there will always have a beam play-
ing on it.'

  'Good - that should be a great help.'

  'One other point: should we play safe and send a party
only halfway down the stair - and back - or should we go
the whole way on the first attempt?'

  'If we had plenty of time, I'd be cautious. But time is
short, and I can see no danger in going all- the way - and
looking around when we get there.'

  'Thanks, Laura - that's all I want to know. I'll get the
Exec working on the details. And I'll order all hands to
the centrifuge - twenty minutes a day at half a gee. Will
that satisfy you?'

  'No. It's point six gee down there in Rama, and I want
a safety margin. Make it three quarters-'

  'Ouch!'

  '-for ten minutes-'

  I'll settle for that-'

  '-twice a day.'

  'Laura, you're a cruel, hard woman. But so be it. I'll
break the news just before dinner. That should spoil a
few appetites.'
It was the first time that Commander Norton had ever
seen Karl Mercer slightly ill at ease. He had spent the
fifteen minutes discussing the logistics problem in his
usual competent manner, but something was obviously
worrying him. His captain, who had a shrewd idea of
what it was, waited patiently until he brought it out.

  'Skipper,' Karl said at length, 'are you sure you should
lead this party? If anything goes wrong, I'm considerably
more expendable. And I've been further inside Rama
than anyone else - even if only by fifty metres.'

  'Granted. But it's time the commander led his troops,
and we've decided that there's no greater risk on this trip
than on the last. At the first sign of trouble, I'll be back
up that stairway fast enough to qualify for the Lunar
Olympics.'

  He waited for any further objections, but none came,
though Karl still looked unhappy. So he took pity on him
and added gently: 'And I bet Joe will beat me to the
top.'

  The big man relaxed, and a slow grin spread across his
face. 'All the same, Bill, I wish you'd taken someone else.'
'I wanted one man who'd been down before, and we
can' t both go. As for Herr Doctor Professor Sergeant
Myron, Laura says he's still two kilos overweight. Even
shaving off that moustache didn't help.'

  'Who's your number three?'

  'I still haven't decided. That depends on Laura.'

  'She wants to go herself.'

  'Who doesn't? But if she turns up at the top of her own
fitness list, I'll be very suspicious.

  As Lieut-Commander Mercer gathered up his papers
and launched himself out of the cabin, Norton felt a
brief stab of envy. Almost all the crew - about eighty-five
per cent, by his minimum estimate - had worked out
some sort of emotional accommodation. He had known
ships where the captain had done the same, but that was
not his way. Though discipline aboard the Endeavour
was based very largely on the mutual respect between
highly trained and intelligent men and women, the com-
mander needed something more to underline his posi-
tion. His responsibility was unique, and demanded a cer-
tain degree of isolation, even from his closest friends. Any
liaison could be damaging to morale, for it was almost
impossible to avoid charges of favouritism. - For this rea-
son, affairs spanning more than two degrees of rank were
firmly discouraged; but apart from this, the only rule
regulating shipboard sex was 'So long as they don't do it
in the corridors and frighten the simps'.

  There were four superchimps aboard Endeavour,
though strictly speaking the name was inaccurate, be-
cause the ship's non-human crew was not based on chim-
panzee stock. In zero gravity, a prehensile tail is an
enormous advantage, and all attempts to supply these to
humans had turned into embarrassing failures. After
equally unsatisfactory results with the great apes, the
Superchimpanzee Corporation had turned to the monkey
kingdom.

  Blackie, Blondie, Goldie and Brownie had family trees
whose branches included the most intelligent of the Old
and New World monkeys, plus synthetic genes that had
never existed in nature. Their rearing and education had
probably cost as much as that of the average spaceman,
and they were worth it. Each weighed less than thirty
kilos and consumed only half the food and oxygen of a
human being, but each could replace 2.75 men for house-
keeping, elementary cooking, tool-carrying and dozens of
other routine jobs.

  That 2.75 was the Corporation's claim, based on in-
numerable time-and-motion studies. The figure, though
surprising and frequently challenged, appeared to be ac-
curate, for simps were quite happy to work fifteen hours a
day and did not get bored by the most menial and repeti-
tious tasks. So they freed human beings for human work;
and on a spaceship, that was a matter of vital importance.

  Unlike the monkeys who were their nearest relatives
Endeavour's simps were docile, obedient and uninquisi-
tive. Being cloned, they were also sexless, which elimi-
nated awkward behavioural problems. Carefully house-
trained vegetarians, they were very clean and didn't
smell; they would have made perfect pets, except that
nobody could possibly have afforded them.

  Despite these advantages, having simps on board in-
volved certain problems. They had to have their own
quarters - inevitably labelled 'The Monkey House'.
Their little mess-room was always spotless, and was well-
equipped with TV, games equipment and programmed
teaching machines. To avoid accidents, they were absol-
utely forbidden - to enter the ship's technical areas; the
entrances to all these were colour-coded in red, and the
simps were conditioned so that it was psychologically im-
possible for them to pass the visual barriers.

  There was also a communications problem. Though
they had an equivalent IQ of sixty, and could understand
several hundred words of English, they were unable to
talk. It had proved impossible to give useful vocal chords
either to apes or monkeys, and they therefore had to ex-
press themselves in sign language.

  The basic signs were obvious and easily learned, so that
everyone on board ship could understand routine mes-
sages. But the only man who could speak fluent Simpish
was their handler - Chief Steward McAndrews.

  It was a standing joke that Sergeant Ravi McAndrews
looked rather like a simp - which was hardly an insult,
for with their short, tinted pelts and graceful movements
they were very handsome animals. They were also affec-
tionate, and everyone on board had his favourite; Com-
mander Norton's was the aptly-named Goldie.

  But the warm relationship which one could so easily
establish with simps created another problem, often used
as a powerful argument against their employment in
space. Since they could only be trained for routine, low-
grade tasks, they were worse than useless in an emerg-
ency; they could then be a danger to themselves and to
their human companions. In particular, teaching them to
use spacesuits had proved impossible, the concepts in-
volved being quite beyond their understanding.

  No one liked to talk about it, but everybody knew
what had to be done if a hull was breached or the order
came to abandon ship. It had happened only once; then
the simp handler had carried out his instructions more
than adequately. He was found with his charges, killed
by the same poison. Thereafter the - job of euthing was
transferred to the chief medical officer, who it was felt
would have less emotional involvement.

  Norton was very thankful that this responsibility, at
least, did not fall upon the captain's shoulders. He had
known men he would have killed with far fewer qualms
than he would Goldie.

   CHAPTER TWELVE - The Stairway of the Gods

In the clear, cold atmosphere of Rama, the beam of the
searchlight was completely invisible. Three kilometres
down from the central Hub, the hundred-metre wide oval
of light lay across a section of that colossal stairway. A
brilliant oasis in the surrounding darkness, it was sweep-
ing slowly towards the curved plain still five kilometres
below; and in its centre moved a trio of ant-like figures,
casting long shadows before them.

  It had been, just as they had hoped and expected, a
completely uneventful descent. They had paused briefly
at the first platform, and Norton had walked a few hun-
dred metres along the narrow, curving ledge before start-
ing the slide down to the second level. Here they had
discarded their oxygen gear, and revelled in the strange
luxury of being able to breathe without mechanical aids.
Now they could explore in comfort, freed from the great-
est danger that confronts a man in space, and forgetting
all worries about suit integrity and oxygen reserve.

  By the time they had reached the fifth level, and there
was only one more section to go, gravity had reached al-
most half its terrestrial value. Rama's centrifugal spin
was at last exerting its real strength; they were surrender-
ing themselves to the implacable force which rules every
planet, and which can exert a merciless price for the
smallest slip. It was still very easy to go downwards; but
the thought of the return, up those thousands upon thou-
sands of steps, was already beginning to prey upon their
minds.

  The stairway had long - ago ceased its vertiginous
downward plunge and was now flattening out towards
the horizontal. The gradient was now only about s in 5;
at the beginning, it had been 5 in i. Normal walking was
now both physically, and psychologically, acceptable;
only the lowered gravity reminded them that they were
not descending some great stairway on Earth. Norton had
once visited the ruins of an Aztec temple, and the feelings
he had then experienced came echoing back to him -
amplified a hundred times. Here was the same sense of
awe and mystery, and the sadness of the irrevocably van-
ished past. Yet the scale here was so much greater, both in
time and space, that the mind was unable to do it justice;
after a while, it ceased to respond. Norton wondered if,
sooner or later, he would take even Rama for granted.

  And there was another respect in which the parallel
with terrestrial ruins failed completely. Rama was hun-
dreds of times older than any structure that had survived
on Earth - even the Great Pyramid. But everything
looked absolutely new; there was no sign of wear and
tear.

  Norton had puzzled over this a good deal, and had
arrived at a tentative explanation. Everything that they
had so far examined was part of an emergency back-up
system, very seldom put to actual use. He could not imag-
ine that the Ramans - unless they were physical fitness
fanatics of the kind not uncommon on Earth - ever
walked up and down this incredible stairway, or its two
identical companions completing the invisible Y far
above his head. Perhaps they had only been required
during the actual construction of Rama, and had served
no purpose since that distant day. That theory would do
for the moment, yet it did not feel right. There was some-
thing wrong, somewhere...

  They did not slide for the last kilometre but went
down the steps two at a time in long, gentle strides; this
way, Norton decided, they would give more exercise to
muscles that would soon have to be used. And so the end
of the stairway came upon them almost unawares; sud-
denly, there were no more steps - only a flat plain, dull
grey in the now weakening beam of the Hub searchlight,
fading away into the darkness a few hundred metres
ahead.

  Norton looked back along the beam, towards its source
up on the axis more than eight kilometres away. He knew
that Mercer would be watching through the telescope, so
he waved to him cheerfully.

  'Captain here,' he reported over the radio. 'Everyone in
fine shape - no problems. Proceeding as planned.'

  'Good,' replied Mercer. 'We'll be watching.'

  There was a brief silence; then a new voice cut in.
'This is the Exec, on board ship. Really, Skipper, this
isn't good enough. You know the news services have been
screaming at us for the last week. I don't expect deathless
prose, but can't you do better than that?'

  'I'll try,' Norton chuckled. 'But remember there's
nothing to see yet. It's like - well, being on a huge, dark-
ened stage, with a single spotlight. The first few hundred
steps of the stairway, rise out of it until they disappear
into the darkness overhead. What we can see of the plain
looks perfectly flat - the curvature's too small to be vis-
ible over this limited area. And that's about it.'

  'Like to give any impressions?'

  'Well, it's still very cold - below freezing - and we're
glad of our thermosuits. And quiet of course; quieter than
anything I've ever known on Earth, or in space, where
there's always some background noise. Here, every sound
is swallowed up; the space around us is so enormous that
there aren't any echoes. It's weird, but I hope we'll get
used to it.'

  'Thanks, Skipper. Anyone else - Joe, Boris?'

  Lt Joe Calvert, never at a loss for words, was happy to
oblige.

  'I can't help thinking that this is the first time - ever
- that we've been able to walk on another world, breath-
ing its natural atmosphere - though I suppose "natural" is
hardly the word you can apply to a place like this. Still,
Rama must resemble the world of its builders; our own
spaceships are all miniature earths. Two examples are
damned poor statistics, but does this mean that all in-
telligent life-forms are oxygen eaters? What we've seen of
their work suggests that the Ramans were humanoid,
though perhaps about fifty per cent taller than we are.
Wouldn't you agree, Boris?'

  Is Joe teasing Boris? Norton asked himself. I wonder
how he's going to react? ...

  To all his shipmates, Boris Rodrigo was something of
an enigma. The quiet, dignified communications officer
was- popular with the rest of the crew, but he never en-
tered fully into their activities and always seemed a little
apart - marching to the music of a different drummer.

  As indeed he was, being a devout member of the Fifth
Church of Christ, Cosmonaut. Norton had never been
able to discover what had happened to the earlier four,
and he was equally in the dark about the Church's rituals
and ceremonies. But the main tenet of its faith was well
known: it believed that Jesus Christ was a visitor from
space, and had constructed an entire theology on that
assumption.

  It was perhaps not surprising that an unusually high
proportion of the Church's devotees worked in space in
some capacity or other. Invariably, they were efficient,
conscientious and absolutely reliable. They were univers-
ally respected and even liked, especially as they made no
attempt to convert others. Yet there was also something
slightly spooky about them; Norton could never under-
stand how men with advanced scientific and technical
training could possibly believe some of the things he had
heard Christers state as incontrovertible facts.

  As he waited for Lt Rodrigo to answer Joe's possibly
loaded question, the commander had a sudden insight
into his own hidden motives. He had chosen Boris be-
cause he was physically fit, technically qualified, and
completely dependable. At the same time, he wondered if
some part of his mind had not selected the lieutenant out
of an almost mischievous curiosity. How would a man
with such religious beliefs react to the awesome reality
of Rama? Suppose he encountered something that con-
founded his theology ... or, for that matter, confirmed
it?

  But Boris Rodrigo, with his usual caution, refused to be
drawn.

  'They were certainly oxygen breathers, and they could
be humanoid. But let's wait and see. With any luck, we
should discover what, they were like. There may be pic-
tures, statues - perhaps even bodies, over in those towns.
If they are towns.'

  'And the nearest is only eight kilometres away,' said
Joe Calvert hopefully.

  Yes, thought the commander, but it's also eight kilo-
metres back - and then there's that overwhelming stair-
way to climb again. Can we take the risk?

  A quick sortie to the 'town' which they had named
Paris had been among the first of his contingency plans,
and now he had to make his decision. They had ample
food and water for a stay of twenty-four hours; they
would always be in full view of the back-up team on the
Hub, and any kind of accident seemed virtually impos-
sible on this smooth, gently curving, metal plain. The only
foreseeable danger was exhaustion; when they got to
Paris, which they could do easily enough, could they do
more than take a few photographs and perhaps collect
some small artifacts, before they had to return?

  But even such a brief foray would be worth it; there
was so little time, as Rama hurtled sunwards towards a
perihelion too dangerous for Endeavour to match.

  In any case, part of the decision was not his to make.
Up in the ship, Dr Ernst would be watching the outputs
of the bio-telemetering sensors attached to his body. If
she turned thumbs-down, that would be that.

  'Laura, what do you think?'

  'Take thirty minutes' rest, and a five hundred calorie
energy module. Then you can start.'

  'Thanks, Doc,' interjected Joe Calvert. 'Now I can die
happy. I always wanted to see Paris. Montmartre, here we
come.'

   CHAPTER THIRTEEN - The Plain of Rama

After those interminable stairs, it was a strange luxury to
walk once more on a horizontal surface. Directly ahead,
the ground was indeed completely flat; to right and left,
at the limits of the floodlit area, the rising curve could
just be detected. They might have been walking along a
very wide, shallow valley; it was quite impossible to be-
lieve that they were really crawling along the inside of a
huge cylinder, and that beyond this little oasis of light
the land rose up to meet - no, to become - the sky.

  Though they all felt a sense of confidence and subdued
excitement, after a while the almost palpable silence of
Rama began to weigh heavily upon them. Every footstep,
every word, vanished instantly into the unreverberant
void; after they had gone little more than half a kilo-
metre, Lt Calvert could stand it no longer.

  Among his minor accomplishments was a talent now
rare, though many thought not rare enough - the art of
whistling. With or without encouragement he could re-
produce the themes from most of the movies of the last
two hundred years. He started appropriately with Heigh-
ho, heigh-ho, 'tis off to work we go, found that he
couldn't stay down comfortably in the bass with Disney's
marching dwarfs, and switched quickly to River Kwai.
Then he progressed, more or less chronologically, through
half a dozen epics, culminating with the theme from Sid
Krassman's famous late-twentieth-century Napoleon.

  It was a good try, but it didn't work, even as a morale-
builder. Rama needed the grandeur of Bach or Beet-
hoven or Sibelius or Tuan Sun, not the trivia of popular
entertainment. Norton was on the point of suggesting
that Joe save his breath for later exertions, when the
young officer realized the inappropriateness of his efforts.
Thereafter, apart from an occasional consultation with
the ship, they marched on in silence. Rama had won this
round.

  On his initial traverse, Norton had allowed for one de-
tour. Paris lay straight ahead, halfway between the foot
of the stairway and the shore of the Cylindrical Sea, but
only a kilometre to the right of their track was a very
prominent, and rather mysterious, feature which had
been christened the Straight Valley. It was a long groove
or trench, forty metres deep and a hundred wide, with
gently sloping sides; it had been provisionally identified
as an irrigation ditch or canal. Like the stairway itself, it
had two similar counterparts, equally spaced around the
curve of Rama.

  The three valleys were almost ten kilometres long, and
stopped abruptly just before they reached the Sea -
which was strange, if they were intended to carry water.
And on the other side of the Sea the pattern was re-
peated: three more ten-kilometre-trenches continued on
to the South Polar region.

  They reached the end of the Straight Valley after only
fifteen minutes' comfortable walking, and stood for a
while staring thoughtfully into its depths. The perfectly
smooth walls sloped down at an angle of sixty degrees;
there were no steps or footholds. Filling the bottom was a
sheet of flat, white material that looked very much like
ice. A specimen could settle a good many arguments;
Norton decided to get one.

  With Calvert and Rodrigo acting as anchors and pay-
ing out a safety rope, he rapelled slowly down the steep
incline. When he reached the bottom, he fully expected
to find the familiar slippery feel of ice underfoot, but he
was mistaken. The friction was too great; his footing was
secure. This material was some kind of glass or trans-
parent crystal; when he touched it with his fingertips, it
was cold, hard and unyielding.

  Turning his back to the searchlight and shielding his
eyes from its glare. Norton tried to peer into the crystal-
line depths, as one may attempt to gaze through the ice of
a frozen lake. But he could see nothing; even when he
tried the concentrated beam of his own helmet-lamp. he
was no more successful. This stuff was translucent, but
not transparent. If it was a frozen liquid, it had a melting-
point very much higher than water.

  He tapped it gently with the hammer from his geology
kit; the tool rebounded with a dull, unmusical 'dunk'.
He tapped harder, with no more result, and was about to
exert his full strength when some impulse made him de-
sist.

  It seemed most unlikely that he could crack this mat-
erial; but what if he did? He would be like a vandal,
smashing some enormous plate-glass window. There would
be a better opportunity later, and at least he had dis-
covered valuable information. It now seemed more un-
likely than ever that this was a canal; it was simply a
peculiar trench that stopped and started abruptly, but
led nowhere. And if at any time it had carried liquid,
where were the stains, the encrustations of dried-up sedi-
ment, that one would expect? Everything was bright and
clean, as if the builders had left only yesterday...

  Once again he was face to face with the fundamental
mystery of Rama, and this time it was impossible to evade
it. Commander Norton was a reasonably imaginative
man, but he would never have reached his present posi-
tion if he had been liable to the wilder flights of fancy.
Yet now, for the first time, he had a sense - not exactly of
foreboding, but of anticipation. Things were not what
they seemed; there was something very, very odd about a
place that was simultaneously brand new - and a million
years old.

  Very thoughtfully, he began to walk slowly along the
length of the little valley, while his companions. still
holding the rope that was attached to his waist, followed
him along the rim. He did not expect to make any
further discoveries, but he wanted to let his curious emo-
tional state run its course. For something else was worry-
ing him; and it had nothing to do with the inexplicable
newness of Rama.

  He had walked no more than a dozen metres when it
hit him like a thunderbolt.

  He knew this place. He had been here before. Even on
Earth, or some familiar planet, that experience is dis-
quieting, though it is not particularly rare. Most men
have known it at some time or other, and usually they
dismiss it as the memory of a forgotten photograph, a
pure coincidence - or, if they are mystically inclined,
some form of telepathy from another mind, or even a
flashback from their own future.

  But to recognize a spot which no other human being
can possibly have seen - that is quite shocking. For sev-
eral seconds, Commander Norton stood rooted to the
smooth crystalline surface on which he had been walk-
ing, trying to straighten out his emotions. His well-ordered
universe had been turned upside down, and he had
a dizzying glimpse of those mysteries at the edge of exist-
ence which he had successfully ignored for most of his
life.

  Then, to his immense relief, common sense came to the
rescue. The disturbing sensation of dΘjα-vu faded out, to
be replaced by a real and identifiable memory from his
youth.

  It was true - he had once stood between such steeply
sloping walls, watching them drive into the distance until
they seemed to converge at a point indefinitely far ahead.
But they had been covered with neatly trimmed grass;
and underfoot had been broken stone, not smooth crys-
tal.

  It had happened thirty years ago, during a summer
vacation in England. Largely because of another student
(he could remember her face - but he had forgotten her
name) he had taken a course of industrial archaeology,
then very popular among science and engineering gradu-
ates. They had explored abandoned coal-mines and cot-
ton mills, climbed over ruined blast-furnaces and steam-
engines, goggled unbelievingly at primitive (and still dan-
gerous) nuclear reactors, and driven priceless' turbine-
powered antiques along restored motor roads.

  Not everything that they saw was genuine; much had
been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to
preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life. But
where it was necessary to make copies, they had been re-
constructed with loving care.

  And so young Bill Norton had found himself bowling
along, at an exhilarating hundred kilometres an hour,
while he furiously shovelled precious coal into the firebox
of a locomotive that looked two hundred years old, but
was actually younger than he was. The thirty-kilometre
stretch of the Great Western Railway, however, was quite
genuine, though it had required a good deal of excavat-
ing to get it back into commission.

  Whistle screaming, they had plunged into a hillside
and raced through a smoky, flame-lit darkness. An aston-
ishingly long time later, they had burst out of the tunnel
into a deep, perfectly straight cutting between steep
grassy banks. The long-forgotten vista was almost identi-
cal with the one before him now.

  'What is it, Skipper?' called Lt Rodrigo. 'Have you
found something?'

  As Norton dragged himself back to present reality,
some of the oppression lifted from his mind. There was
mystery here - yes; but it might not be beyond human
understanding. He had learned a lesson, though it was
not one that he could readily impart to others. At all
costs, he must not let Rama overwhelm him. That way
lay failure - perhaps even madness.

  'No,' he answered, 'there's nothing down here. Haul
me up - we 11 head straight to Paris.'

     CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Storm Warning

'I've called this meeting of the Committee,' said His Ex-
cellency the Ambassador of Mars to the United Planets,
'because Dr Perera has something important to tell us.
He insists that we get in touch with Commander Norton
right away, using the priority channel we've been able to
establish after, I might say, a good deal of difficulty. Dr
Perera's statement is rather technical, and before we
come to it I think a summary of the present position
might be in order; Dr Price has prepared one. Oh yes -
some apologies for absence. Sir Lewis Sands is unable to
be with us because he's chairing a conference, and Dr
Taylor asks to be excused?

  He was rather pleased about that last abstention. The
anthropologist had rapidly lost interest in Rama, when it
became obvious that it would present little scope for him.
Like many others, he had been bitterly disappointed to
find that the mobile worldlet was dead; now there would
be no opportunity for sensational books and viddies
about Raman rituals and behavioural patterns. Others
might dig up skeletons and classify artifacts; that sort of
thing did not appeal to Conrad Taylor. Perhaps the only
discovery that would bring him back in a hurry would be
some highly explicit works of art, like the notorious fres-
coes of Thera and Pompeii. -

  Thelma Price, the archaeologist, took exactly the oppo-
site point of view. She preferred excavations and ruins
uncluttered by inhabitants who might interfere with dis-
passionate, scientific studies. The bed of the Mediter-
ranean had been ideal - at least until the city planners
and landscape artists had started getting in the way. And
Rama would have been perfect, except for the madden-
ing detail that it was a hundred million kilometres away
and she would never be able to visit it in person.

  'As you all know,' she began, 'Commander Norton has
completed one traverse of almost thirty kilometres, with-
out encountering any problems. He explored the curious
trench shown on your maps as the Straight Valley; its
purpose is still quite unknown, but it's clearly important
as it runs the full length of Rama - except for the break
at the Cylindrical Sea - and there are two other identical
structures 120 degrees apart round the circumference of
-the world.

  'Then the party turned left - or East, if we adopt the
North Pole convention - until they reached Paris. As
you'll see from this photograph, taken by a telescope
camera at the Hub, it's a group of several hundred build-
ings, with wide streets between them.

  'Now these photographs were taken by Commander
Norton's group when they reached the site. If Paris is a
city, it's a very peculiar one. Note that none of the build-
ings have windows, or even doors! They are all plain
rectangular structures, an identical thirty-five metres
high. And they appear to have been extruded out of the
ground - there are no seams or joints - look at this close-
up of the base of a wall - there's a smooth transition into
the ground.

  'My own feeling is that this place is not a residential
area, but a storage or supply depot. In support of that
theory, look at this photo

  'These narrow slots or grooves, about five centimetres
wide, run along all the streets, and there's one leading to
every building - going straight into the wall .There's a
striking resemblance to the street-car tracks of the early
twentieth century; they are obviously part of some trans-
port system.

  'We've never considered it necessary to have public
transport direct to every house. It would be economically
absurd - people can always walk a few hundred metres.
But if these buildings are used for the storage of heavy
materials, it would make sense.

  'May I ask a question?' said the Ambassador for Earth.

  'Of course, Sir Robert.'

  'Commander Norton couldn't get into a single build-
ing?'

  'No; when you listen to his report, you can tell he was
quite frustrated. At one time he decided that the build-
ings could only be entered from underground; then he
discovered the grooves of the transport system, and
changed his mind.'

  'Did he try to break in?'

  'There was no way he could, without explosives or
heavy tools. And he doesn't want to do that until all
other approaches have failed.'

  'I have it!' Dennis Solomons suddenly interjected. 'Co-
cooning!'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'It's a technique developed a couple of hundred years
ago,' continued the science historian. 'Another name for
it is moth-balling. When you have something you want to
preserve, you seal it inside a plastic envelope, and then
pump in an inert gas. The original use was to protect
military equipment between wars; it was once applied to
whole ships. It's still widely used in museums that are
short of storage space; no one knows what's inside some of
the hundred-year-old cocoons in the Smithsonian base-
ment.'

  Patience was not one of Carlisle Perera's virtues; he was
aching to drop his bombshell, and could restrain himself
no longer.

  'Please, Mr Ambassador! This is all very interesting,
but I feel my information is rather more urgent.'

  'If there are no other points - very well, Dr Perera.'

  The exobiologist, unlike Conrad Taylor, had not
found Rama a disappointment. It was true that he no
longer expected to find life - but sooner or later, he had
been quite sure, some remains would be discovered of the
creatures who had built this fantastic world. The ex-
ploration had barely begun, although the time available
was horribly brief before Endeavour would be forced to
escape from her present sun-grazing orbit.

  But now, if his calculations were correct, Man's contact
with Rama would be even shorter than he had feared.
For one detail had been overlooked - because it was so
large that no one had noticed it before.

  'According to our latest information,' Perera began,
'one party is now on its way to the Cylindrical Sea, while
Commander Norton has another group setting up a sup-
ply base at the foot of Stairway Alpha. When that's estab-
lished, he intends to have at least two exploratory mis-
sions operating at all times. In this way he hopes to use
his limited manpower at maximum efficiency.
ò 'It's a good plan, but there may be no time to carry it
out. In fact, I would advise an immediate alert, and a
preparation for total withdrawal at twelve hours' notice.
Let me explain...

  'It's surprising how few people have commented on a
rather obvious anomaly about Rama. It's now well inside
the orbit of Venus - yet the interior is still frozen. But the
temperature of an object in direct sunlight at this point
is about five hundred degrees!

  'The reason of course, is that Rama hasn't had time to
warm up. It must have cooled down to near absolute zero
- two hundred and seventy below - while it was in inter-
stellar space. Now, as it approaches the sun, the outer
hull is already almost as hot as molten lead. But the
inside will stay cold, until the heat works its way through
that kilometre of rock.

  'There's some kind of fancy dessert with a hot exterior
and ice-cream in the middle - I don't remember what it's
called-'

  'Baked Alaska. It's a favourite at UP banquets, unfor-
tunately.'

  'Thank you, Sir Robert. That's the situation in Rama
at the moment, but it won't last. All these weeks, the
solar heat has been working its way through, and we ex-
pect a sharp temperature rise to begin in a few hours.
That's not the problem; by the time we'll have to leave
anyway, it will be no more than comfortably tropical.'

  'Then what's the difficulty?'

  'I can answer in one word, Mr Ambassador. Hurri-
canes.'

   CHAPTER FIFTEEN - The Edge of the Sea

There were now more than twenty men and women in-
side Rama - six of them down on the plain, the rest ferry-
ing equipment and expendables through the airlock sys-
tem and down the stairway. The ship itself was almost
deserted, with the minimum possible staff on duty; the
joke went around that Endeavour was really being run
by the four simps and that Goldie had been given the
rank of Acting-Commander.

  For these first explorations, Norton had established a
number of ground-rules; the most important dated back
to the earliest days of man's space-faring. Every group, he
had decided, must contain one person with prior experi-
ence. But not more than one. In that way, everybody
would have an opportunity of learning as quickly as pos-
sible.

  And so the first party to head for the Cylindrical Sea,
though it was led by Surgeon-Commander Laura Ernst,
had as its one-time veteran Lt Boris Rodrigo, just back
from Paris. The third member, Sergeant Pieter Rousseau,
had been with the back-up teams at the Hub; he was an
expert on space reconnaissance instrumentation, but on
this trip he would have to depend on his own eyes and a
small portable telescope.

  From the foot of Stairway Alpha to the edge of the Sea
was just under fifteen kilometres - or an Earth-equi-
valent of eight under the low gravity of Rama. Laura
Ernst, who had to prove that she lived up to her own
standards, set a brisk pace. They stopped for thirty min-
utes at the mid-way mark, and made the whole trip in a
completely uneventful three hours.

  It was also quite monotonous, walking forward in the
beam of the searchlight through the anechoic darkness of
Rama. As the pool of light advanced with them, it slowly
elongated into a long, narrow ellipse; this foreshortening
of the beam was the only visible sign of progress. If the
observers up on the Hub had not given them continual
distance checks, they could not have guessed whether
they had travelled one kilometre, or five, or ten. They
just plodded onwards through the million-year-old night,
over an apparently seamless metal surface.

  But at last, far ahead at the limits of the now weaken-
ing beam, there was something new. On a normal world,
- it would have been a horizon; as they approached, they
could see that the plain on which they were walking dame
to an abrupt stop. They were nearing the edge of the
Sea.

  'Only a hundred metres,' said Hub Control. 'Better
slow down.'

  That was hardly necessary, yet they had already done
so. It was a sheer straight drop of fifty metres from the
level of the plain to that of the Sea - if it was a sea, and not
another sheet of that mysterious crystalline material. Al-
though Norton had impressed upon everyone the danger
of taking anything for granted in Rama, few doubted
that the Sea was really made of ice. But for what conceiv-
able reason was the cliff on the southern shore five hun-
dred metres high, instead of the fifty here?

  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 move-
ment. 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 crea-
tures of the Cylindrical Sea, waiting to deal with any in-
truders 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 deliber-
ate 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 super-
ficial; 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 intelli-
gence - 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
criss-crossed 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 theor-
ized that, somewhere, there must surely be a flight of
steps, or a ramp, leading down to the Sea. And one crew-
man, who was a keen sailor, had raised an interesting
conjecture.

  'Where there's a sea,' Sergeant Ruby Barhes had pre-
dicted, '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 pre-
paring to m4e a descent by rope, when Lt Rodrigo spot-
ted the narrow stairway. It could easily have been over-
looked in the shadowed darkness below the edge of the
cliff, for there was no guard-rail 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 pat-
tern 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 de-
tectors, 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 un-
known disease. In normal circumstances, Dr Ernst would
not have taken even this minuscule chance. Now, how-
ever, 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 re-
duced gravity. Often they looked back, drawn by the hid-
den enigma of the island out there in the centre of the
frozen sea.

  And just once, Dr Ernst thought she felt the faint sus-
picion of a breeze against her cheek.

  It did not come again, and she quickly forgot all about
it.

   CHAPTER SIXTEEN - 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 un-
abashed. 'I can explain it best by telling you what is go-
ing 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 in-
formation 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 Trade Winds,
with a vengeance. I believe they'll last only a few hours,
and then spine kind of equilibrium will be restored.
Meanwhile, I should advise Commander Norton to evac-
uate - as soon as possible. Here is the message I propose
sending.'

With a little imagination, Commander Norton told him-
self, 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 equip-
ment, electrosan toilets, and miscellaneous scientific ap-
paratus 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 brak-
ing parachutes had failed, a consignment had ended up a
good kilometre away out on the plain: Despite this, sev-
ual crew members 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 lab-
our of carrying it back was unthinkable - in fact, impos-
sible. 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 commiserat-
ing 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 re-
sponsibilities.

  The Commander picked up a collapsible chair, and
walked out of the pool of light into the darkness sur-
rounding the camp. It was the only way he could get any
privady, 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 re-
corder slung around his neck.

  'Original for personal file, dupes to Mars and Earth.
Hello, darling - yes, I know I've been a lousy correspond-
ent, 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 every-
thing 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 phos-
phates 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 biochemis-
try 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 some-
thing 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 stor-
age depot. London is a collection of cylinders linked to-
gether 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 on-
set' - 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 mo-
ment 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 acci-
dent.

  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 hun-
dred 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 ex-
actly 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 voy-
ages 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 ex-
perience. 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 dis-
concerted him. The guide had led his group of scientists,
engineers and astronauts past 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 pres-
ence seemed very close. In the secret depths of his mind,
he would ask: 'Well, Captain - what is your advise?' 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 Spacecom. Appreciate your advice and
will take precautions. Please specify meaning of phrase
"sudden onset". Respectfully, Norton, Commander, En-
deavour.'

  He waited until the Sergeant had disappeared towards
the blazing lights of the camp, then switched on his re-
corder 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.

  It was not often that Captain Cook came to his aid
when he was neglecting his duty. But he suddenly re-
membered how rarely and briefly poor Elizabeth Cook
had seen her husband in sixteen years of married life. Yet
she had borne him six children - and outlived them all.

  His wives, never more than ten minutes away at the
speed of light, had nothing to complain about...

   CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Spring

During the first 'nights' on Rama, it had not been easy to
sleep. The darkness and the mysteries it concealed were
oppressive, but even more unsettling was the silence. Ab-
sence of noise is not a natural condition; all human
senses require some input. If they are deprived of it, the
mind manufactures its own substitutes.

  And so many sleepers had complained of strange noises
- even of voices - which were obviously illusions, because
those awake had heard nothing. Surgeon-Commander
Ernst had prescribed a very simple and effective cure;
during the sleeping period, the camp was now lulled by
gentle, unobtrusive background music.

  This night, Commander Norton found the cure in-
adequate. He kept straining his ears into the darkness,
and he knew what he was listening for. But though a very
faint breeze did caress his face from time to time, there
was no sound that could possibly be taken for that of a
distant, rising wind. Nor did either of the exploring
parties report anything unusual.

  At least, around Ship's midnight, he went to sleep.
There was always a man on watch at the communications
console, in case of any urgent messages. No other precau-
tions seemed necessary.

  Not even a hurricane could have created the sound
that did wake him, and the whole camp, in a single in-
stant. It seemed that the sky was falling, or that Rama
had split open and was tearing itself apart. First there
was a rending crack, then a long-drawn-out series of
crystalline crashes like a million glass-houses being de-
molished. It lasted for minutes, though it seemed like
hours; it was still continuing, apparently moving away
into the distance, when Norton got to the message centre.

  'Hub Control! What's happened?'

  'Just a moment, Skipper. It's over by the Sea. We're
getting the light on it.'

  Eight kilometres overhead, on the axis of Rama, the
searchlight began to swing its beam out across the plain.
It reached the edge of the Sea, then started to track along
it, scanning around the interior of the world. A quarter
of the way round the cylindrical surface, it stopped.

  Up there in the sky - or what the mind still persisted in
calling the sky - something extraordinary was happening.
At first, it seemed to Norton that the Sea was boiling. It
was no longer static and frozen in the grip of an eternal
winter; a huge area, kilometres across, was in turbulent
movement. And it was changing colour; a broad band of
white was marching across the ice.

  Suddenly a slab perhaps a quarter of a kilometre on a
side began to tilt upwards like an opening door. Slowly
and majestically, it reared into the sky, glittering and
sparkling in the beam of the searchlight. Then it slid back
and vanished underneath the surface, while a tidal wave
of foaming water raced outwards in all directions from its
point of submergence.

  Not until then did Commander Norton fully realize
what was happening. The ice was breaking up. All these
days and weeks, the Sea had been thawing, far down in
the depths. It was hard to concentrate because of the
crashing roar that still filled the world and echoed round
the sky, but he tried to think of a reason for so dramatic a
convulsion. When a frozen lake or river thawed on Earth,
it was nothing like this...

  But of course! It was obvious enough, now that it had
happened. The Sea was thawing from beneath as the
solar heat seeped through the hull of Rama. And when
ice turns into water, it occupies less volume ...

  So the Sea had been sinking below the upper layer of
ice, leaving it unsupported. Day by day the strain bad
been building up; now the band of ice that encircled the
equator of Rama was collapsing, like a bridge that had
lost its central pier. It was splintering into hundreds of
floating islands, that would<crash and jostle into each
other until they too melted. Norton's blood ran suddenly
cold, when he remembered the plans that were being
made to reach New York by sledge...

  The tumult was swiftly subsiding; a temporary stale-
mate had been reached in the war between ice and water.
In a few hours, as the temperature continued to rise, the
water would win and the last vestiges of ice would dis-
appear. But in the long run, ice would be the victor, as
Rama rounded the sun and set forth once more into the
interstellar night.

  Norton remembered to start breathing again; then he
called the party nearest the Sea. To his relief, Lieutenant
Rodrigo answered at once. No, the water hadn't reached
them. No tidal wave had come sloshing over the edge of
the cliff. 'So now we know,' he added very calmly, 'why
there is a cliff.' Norton agreed silently; but that hardly
explains, he thought to himself, why the cliff on the
southern shore is ten times higher...

  The Hub searchlight continued to scan round the
world. The awakened Sea was steadily calming, and the
boiling white foam no longer raced outwards from capsiz-
ing ice-floes. In fifteen minutes, the main disturbance was
over.

  But Rama was no longer silent; it had awakened from
its sleep, and ever and again there came the sound of
grinding ice as one berg collided with another.

  Spring had been a little late, Norton told himself, but
winter had ended.

  And there was that breeze again, stronger than ever.
Rama had given him enough warnings; it was time to go.

As he neared the halfway mark, Commander Norton
once again felt gratitude to the darkness that concealed
the view above - and below. Though he knew that more
than ten thousand steps still lay ahead of him, and could
picture the steeply ascending curve in his mind's eye, the
fact that he could see only a small portion of it made the
prospect more bearable.

  This was his second ascent, and he had learned from
his mistakes on the first. The great temptation was to
dumb too quickly in this low gravity; every step was so
easy that it was very hard to adopt a slow, plodding
rhythm. But unless one did this, after the first few thou-
sand steps strange aches developed in the thighs and
calves. Muscles that one never knew existed started to
protest, and it was necessary to take longer and longer
periods of rest. Towards the end he had spent more time
resting than climbing, and even then it was not enough.
He had suffered painful leg-cramps for the next two days,
and would have been almost incapacitated had he not
been back in the zero-gravity environment of the ship.

  So this time he had started with almost painful slow-
ness, moving like an old man. He had been the last to
leave the plain, and the others were strung out along the
half-kilometre of stairway above him; he could see their
lights moving up the invisible slope ahead.

  He felt sick at heart at the failure of his mission, and
even now hoped that this was only a temporary retreat.
When they reached the Hub, they could wait until any
atmospheric disturbances had ceased. Presumably, it
would be a dead calm there, as at the centre of a cyclone,
and they could wait out the expected storm in safety.

  Once again, he was jumping to conclusions, drawing
dangerous analogies from Earth. The meteorology of a
whole world, even under steady-state conditions, was a
matter of enormous complexity. After several centuries of
study, terrestrial weather-forecasting was still not abso-
lutely reliable. And Rama was not merely a completely
novel system; it was also undergoing rapid changes, for
the temperature had risen several degrees in the last few
hours. Yet still there was no sign of the promised hurri-
cane, though there had been a few feeble gusts from ap-
parently random directions.

  They had now climbed five kilometres, which in this
low and steadily diminishing gravity was equivalent to
less than two on Earth. At the third level, three kilo-
metres from the axis, they rested for an hour, taking light
refreshments and massaging leg muscles. This was the last
point at which they could breathe in comfort; like old-
time Himalayan mountaineers, they had left their oxy-
gen supplies here, and now put them on for the final as-
cent.

  An hour later, they had reached the top of the stairway
- and the beginning of the ladder. Ahead lay the last,
vertical kilometre, fortunately in a gravity field only a
few per cent of Earth's. Another thirty-minute rest, a
careful check of oxygen, and they were ready for the final
lap.

  Once again, Norton made sure that all his men were
safely ahead of him, spaced out at twenty-metre intervals
along the ladder. From now on, it would be a slow, steady
haul, extremely boring. The best technique was to empty
the mind of all thoughts and to count the rungs as they
drifted by - one hundred, two hundred, three hundred,
four hundred...

  He had just reached twelve hundred and fifty when he
suddenly realized that something was wrong. The light
shining on the vertical surface immediately in front of
his eyes was the wrong colour - and it was much too
bright.

  Commander Norton did not even have time to check
his ascent, or to call a warning to his men. Everything
happened in less than a second.

  In a soundless concussion of light, dawn burst upon
Rama.

   CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Dawn

The light was so brilliant that for a full minute Norton
had to keep his eyes clenched tightly shut. Then he risked
opening them, and stared through barely-parted lids at
the wall a few centimetres in front of his face. He blinked
several times, waited for the involuntary tears to drain
away, and then turned slowly to behold the dawn.

  He could endure the sight for only a few seconds; then
he was forced to close his eyes again. It was not the glare
that was intolerable - he could grow accustomed to that -
but the awesome spectacle of Rama, now seen for the first
time in its entirety.

  Norton had known exactly what to expect; neverthe-
less the sight had stunned him. He was seized by a spasm
of uncontrollable trembling; his hands tightened round
the rungs of the ladder with the violence of a drowning
man clutching at a lifebelt. The muscles of his forearms
began to knot, yet at the same time his legs - already
fatigued by hours of steady climbing - seemed about to
give way. If it had not been for the low gravity, he might
have fallen.

  Then his training took over, and he began to apply the
first remedy for panic. Still keeping his eyes closed and
trying to forget the monstrous spectacle around him, he
started to take deep, long breaths, filling his lungs with
oxygen and washing the poisons of fatigue out of his sys-
tem.

  Presently he felt much better, but he did not open his
eyes until he had performed one more action. It took a
major effort of will to force his right hand to open - he
had to talk to it like a disobedient child - but presently
he manoeuvred it down to his waist, unclipped the safety
belt from his harness, and hooked the buckle to the
nearest rung. Now, whatever happened, he could not
fall.

  Norton took several more deep breaths; then - still
keeping his eyes closed - he switched on his radio. He
hoped his voice sounded calm and authoritative as he
called: 'Captain here. Is everyone OK?'

  As he checked off the names one by one, and received
answers - even if somewhat tremulous ones - from every-
body, his own confidence and self-control came swiftly
- back to him. All his men were safe, and were looking
to him for leadership. He was the commander once
more.

  'Keep your eyes closed until you're quite sure you can
take it,' he called. 'The view is - overwhelming. If anyone
finds that it's too much, keep on climbing without look-
ing back. Remember, you'll soon be at zero gravity, so
you can't possibly fall.'

  It was hardly necessary to point out such an elementary
fact to trained spacemen, but Norton had to remind him-
self of it every few seconds. The thought of zero-gravity
was a kind of talisman, protecting him from harm. What-
ever his eyes told him, Rama could not drag him down to
destruction on the plain eight kilometres below.

  It became an urgent matter of pride and self-esteem
that he should open his eyes once more and look at the
world around him. But first, he had to get his body under
control.

  He let go of the ladder with both hands, and hooked
his left arm under a rung. Clenching and unclenching his
fats, he waited until the muscle cramps had faded away;
then, when he felt quite comfortable, he opened his eyes
and slowly turned to face Rama.

  His fist impression was one of blueness. The glare that
filled the sky could not have been mistaken for sunlight;
it might have been that of an electric arc. So Rama's sun,
Norton told himself,' must be hotter than ours. That
should interest the astronomers...

  And now he understood the purpose of those mysteri-
ous trenches, the Straight Valley and its five companions;
they were nothing less than gigantic strip-lights. Rama
had six linear suns, symmetrically ranged around its in-
terior. From each, a broad fan of light was aimed across
the central axis, to shine upon the far side of the world.
Norton wondered if they could be switched alternately to
produce a cycle of light and darkness, or whether this was
a planet of perpetual day.

  Too much staring at those blinding bars of light had
made his eyes hurt again; he was not sorry to have a good
excuse to close them for a while. It was not until then,
when he had almost recovered from this initial visual
shock, that he was able to devote himself to a much more
serious problem.

  Who or what, had switched on the lights of Rama?

  This world was sterile, by the most sensitive tests that
man could apply to it. But now something was happen-
ing that could not be explained by the action of natural
forces. There might not be life here, but there could be
consciousness, awareness; robots might be waking after a
sleep of aeons. Perhaps this outburst of light was an un-
programmed, random spasm - a last dying gasp of mach-
ines that were responding wildly to the warmth of a new
sun, and would soon lapse again into quiescence, this
time for ever.

  Yet Norton could not believe such a simple explana-
tion. Bits of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to fall into
place, though many were still missing. The absence of all
signs of wear, for example - the feeling of nearness, as if
Rama had just been created ...

  These thoughts might have inspired fear, even terror.
Somehow, they did nothing of the sort. On the contrary,
Norton felt a sense of exhilaration - almost of delight.
There was far more here to discover than they had ever
dared to hope. 'Wait,' he said to himself, 'until the Rama
Committee hears about this!'

  Then, with a calm determination, he opened his eyes
again and began a careful inventory of everything he
saw.

  First, he had to establish some kind of reference system.
He was looking at the largest enclosed space ever seen by
man, and needed a mental map to find his way around
it.

  The feeble gravity was very little help, for with an
effort of will he could switch Up and Down. in any direc-
tion he pleased. But some directions were psychologically
dangerous; whenever his mind skirted these, he had to
vector it hastily away.

  Safest of all was to imagine that he was at the bowl-
shaped bottom of a gigantic well, sixteen kilometres wide
and fifty deep. The advantage of this image was that
there could be no danger of falling further, nevertheless,
it had some serious defects.

  He could pretend that the scattered towns and cities,
and the differently coloured and textured areas, were all
securely fixed to the towering walls. The various complex
structures that could be seen hanging from the dome
overhead were perhaps no more disconcerting than the
pendent candelabra in some great concert-ball on Earth.
What was quite unacceptable was the Cylindrical Sea

  There it was, halfway up the well-shaft - a band of
water, wrapped completely round it, with no visible
means of support. There could be no doubt that it was
water; it was a vivid blue, flecked with brilliant sparkles
from the few remaining ice-floes. But a vertical sea
forming a complete circle twenty kilometres up in the
sky was such an unsettling phenomenon that after a
while he began to seek an alternative.

  That was when his mind switched the scene through
ninety degrees. Instantly, the deep well became a long
'tunnel, capped at either end. 'Down' was obviously in the
direction of the ladder and the stairway he had just as-
cended; and now with this perspective, Norton was at last
able to appreciate the true vision of the architects who
had built this place.

  He was clinging to the face of a curving sixteen-kilo-
metre-high cliff, the upper half of which overhung com-
pletely until it merged into the arched roof of What was
now the sky. Beneath him, the ladder descended more
than five hundred metres, until it ended at the first ledge
or terrace. There the stairway began, continuing almost
vertically at first in this low-gravity regime, then slowly
becoming less and less steep until, after breaking at five
more platforms, it reached the distant plain. For the first
two or three kilometres he could see the individual steps,
but thereafter they had merged into a continuous band.

  The downward swoop of that immense stairway was so
overwhelming that it was impossible to appreciate its
true scale. Norton had once flown round Mount Everest,
and had been awed by its size. He reminded himself that
this stairway was as high as the Himalayas, but the com-
parison was meaningless.

  And no comparison at all was possible with the other
two stairways, Beta and Gamma, which slanted up into
the sky and then curved far out over his head. Norton
had now acquired enough confidence to lean back and
glance up at them - briefly. Then he tried to forget that
they were there...

  For too much thinking along those lines evoked yet a
third image of Rama, which he was anxious to avoid at
all costs. This was the viewpoint that regarded it once
again as a vertical cylinder or well - but now he was at
the top, not the bottom, like a fly crawling upside down
on a domed ceiling, with a fifty-kilometre drop immedi-
ately below. Every time Norton found this image creeping
up on him, it needed all his willpower not to cling to the
ladder again in mindless panic.

  In time, he was sure, all these fears would ebb. The
wonder and strangeness of Rama would banish its ter-
rors, at least for men who were trained to face the reali-
ties of space. Perhaps no one who had never left Earth,
and had never seen the stars all around him, could en-
dure these vistas. But if any men could accept them, Nor-
ton told himself with grim determination, it would be
the captain and crew of Endeavour.

  He looked at his chronometer. This pause had lasted
only two minutes, but it had seemed a lifetime. Exerting
barely enough effort to overcome his inertia and the fad-
ing gravitational field, he started to pull himself slowly
up the last hundred metres of the ladder. Just before he
entered the airlock and turned his back upon Rama, he
made one final swift survey of the interior.

  It had changed, even in the last few minutes; a mist
was rising from the Sea. For the first few hundred metres
the ghostly white columns were tilted sharply forward in
the direction of .Rama's spin; then they started to dissolve
in a swirl of turbulence, as the uprushing air tried to
jettison its excess velocity. The Trade Winds of this cyl-
indrical world were beginning to etch their patterns in
its sky; the first tropical storm in unknown ages was
about to break.

   CHAPTER NINE TEEN - A Warning from Mercury

It was the first time in weeks that every member of the
Rama Committee had made himself available. Professor
Solomons had emerged from the depths of the Pacific,
where he had been studying mining operations along the
mid-ocean trenches. And to nobody's surprise, Dr Taylor
had reappeared, now that there was at least a possibility
that Rama held something more newsworthy than lifeless
artifacts.

  The Chairman had fully expected Dr Carlisle Perera
to be even more dogmatically assertive than usual, now
that his prediction of a Raman hurricane had been con-
firmed. To His Excellency's great surprise, Perera was re-
markably subdued, and accepted the congratulations of
his colleagues in a manner as near to embarrassment as
he was ever likely to achieve.

  The exobiologist, in fact, was deeply mortified. The
spectacular break-up of the Cylindrical Sea was a much
more obvious phenomenon than the hurricane winds - yet
he had completely overlooked it. To have remembered
that hot air rises, but to have forgotten that hot ice con-
tracts, was not an achievement of which he could be very
proud. However, he would soon get over it, and revert to
his normal Olympian self-confidence.

  When the Chairman offered him the floor, and asked
what further climatic changes he expected, he was very
careful to hedge his bets.

  'You must realize,' he explained, 'that the meteorology
of a world as strange as Rama may have many other sur-
prises. But if my calculations are correct, there will be no
further storms, and conditions will soon be stable. There
will be a slow temperature rise until perihelion - and
beyond - but that won't concern us, as Endeavour will
have had to leave long before then.'

  'So it should soon be safe to go back inside?'
  'Er - probably. We should certainly know in forty-
eight hours.'

  'A return is imperative,' said the Ambassador for Mer-
cury. 'We have to learn everything we possibly can about
Rama. The situation has now changed completely.'

  'I think we know what you mean, but would you care
to elaborate?'

  'Of course. Until now, we have assumed that Rama is
lifeless - or at any rate uncontrolled. But we can no
longer pretend that it is a derelict. Even if there are no
life-forms aboard, it may be directed by robot mech-
anisms, programmed to carry out 'some mission - per-
haps one highly disadvantageous to us. Unpalatable
though it may be, we must consider the question of self-
defence.'

  There was a babble of protesting voices, and the
Chairman had to hold up his hand to restore order.

  'Let His Excellency finish!' he pleaded. 'Whether we
like the idea or not, it should be considered seriously.'

  'With all due respect to the Ambassador,' said Dr Con-
rad Taylor in his most disrespectful voice, 'I think we can
rule out as na∩ve the fear of malevolent intervention.
Creatures as advanced as the Ramans must have corres-
pondingly developed morals. Otherwise, they would have
destroyed themselves - as we nearly did in the twentieth
century. I've made that quite clear in my new book Ethos
and Cosmos. I hope you received your copy.

  'Yes, thank you, though I'm afraid the pressure of other
matters has not allowed me to read beyond the introduc-
tion. However, I'm familiar with the general thesis. We
may have no malevolent intentions towards an ant-heap.
But if we want to build a house on the same site ...

  'This is as bad as the Pandora Party! It's nothing less
than interstellar xenophobia!'

  'Please, gentlemen! This is getting us nowhere. Mr
Ambassador, you still have the floor.'

  The Chairman glared across three hundred and
eighty thousand kilometres of space at Conrad Taylor,
who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its
tune.

  'Thank you,' said the Ambassador for Mercury. 'The
danger may be unlikely, but where the future of the
human race is involved, we can take no chances. And,
if I may say so, we Hermians may be particularly con-
cerned. We may have more cause for alarm than anyone
else.'

  Dr Taylor snorted audibly, but was quelled by another
glare from the Moon.

  'Why Mercury, more than any other planet?' asked the
Chairman.

  'Look at the dynamics of the situation. Rama is already
inside our orbit. It is only an assumption that it will go
round the sun and head on out again into space. Suppose
it carries out a braking manoeuvre? If it does so, this will
be at perihelion, about thirty days from now. My scien-
tists tell rue that if the entire velocity change is carried
out there, Rama will end up in a circular orbit only
twenty-five million kilometres from the sun. From here, it
could dominate the solar system.'

  For a long time nobody - not even Conrad Taylor -
spoke a word. Ml the members of the Committee were
marshalling their thoughts about those difficult people
the Hermians, so ably represented here by their Am-
bassador.

  To most people, Mercury was a fairly good approxi-
mation of Hell; at least, it would do until something
worse came along. But the Hermians were proud of their
bizarre planet, with its days longer than its years, its
double sunrises and sunsets, its rivers of molten metal ...
By comparison, the Moon and Mars had been almost tri-
vial challenges. Not until men landed on Venus (if they
even did) would they encounter an environment - more
hostile than that of Mercury.

  And yet this world had turned out to be, in many ways,
the key to the solar system. This seemed obvious in retro-
spect, but the Space Age had been almost a century old
before the fact was realized. Now the Hermians never let
anyone forget it.

  Long before men reached the planet, Mercury's ab-
normal density hinted at the heavy elements it con-
tained; even so, its wealth was still a source of astonish-
ment, and had postponed for a thousand years any fears
that the key metals of human civilization would be ex-
hausted. And these treasures were in the best possible
place, where the power of the Sun was ten times greater
than on frigid Earth.

  Unlimited energy - unlimited metal; that was Mer-
cury. Its great magnetic launchers could catapult manu-
factured products to any point in the solar system. It
could also export energy, in synthetic transuranium iso-
topes or pure radiation. It had even been proposed that
Hermian lasers would one day thaw out gigantic Jupiter,
but this idea had not been well received on the other
worlds. A technology that could cook Jupiter had too
many tempting possibilities for interplanetary black-
mail.

  That such a concern had ever been expressed said a
good deal about the general attitude towards the Her-
mians. They were respected for their toughness and engi-
neering skills, and admired for the way in which they had
conquered so fearsome a world. But they were not liked,
and still less were they completely trusted.
- At the same time, it was possible to appreciate their
point of view. The Hermians, it was often joked, some-
times behaved as if the Sun was their, personal property.
They were bound to it in an intimate love-hate relation-
ship - as the Vikings had once been linked to the sea, the
Nepalese to the Himalayas, the Eskimos to the Tundra.
They would be most unhappy if something came be-
tween them and the natural force that dominated and
controlled their lives.

  At last, the Chairman broke the long silence. He still
remembered the sun of India, and shuddered to contem-
plate the sun of Mercury. So he took the Hermians very
seriously indeed, even though he considered them un-
couth technological barbarians.

  'I think there is some merit in your argument, Mr Am-
bassador,' he said slowly. 'Have you any proposals?'

  'Yes, sir. Before we know what action to take, we must
have the facts. We know the geography of Rama - if one
can use that term - but we have no idea of its capabili-
ties. And the key to the whole problem is this: does
Rama have a propulsion system? Can it change orbit? I'd
be very interested in Dr Perera's views.'

  'I've given the subject a good deal of thought,' an-
swered the exobiologist. 'Of course, Rama must have
been given its original impetus by some launching device,
but that could have been an external booster. If it does
have onboard propulsion, we've found no trace of it. Cer-
tainly there are no rocket exhausts, or anything similar,
anywhere on the outer shell.'

  'They could be hidden.'

  'True, but there would seem little point in it. And
where are the propellant tanks, the energy sources? The
main hull is solid - we've checked that with seismic sur-
veys. The cavities in the northern cap are all accounted
for by the airlock systems.

  'That leaves the southern end of Rama, which Com-
mander Norton has been unable to reach, owing to that
ten-kilometre-wide band of water. There are all sorts of
curious mechanisms and structures up on the South Pole
- you've seen the photographs. What they are is any-
body's guess.

  'But I'm reasonably sure of this. If Rama does have a
propulsion system, it's something completely outside our
present knowledge. In fact, it would have to be the fabu-
bus "Space Drive" people have been talking about for
two hundred years.

  'You wouldn't rule that out?'

  'Certainly not. If we can prove that Rama has a Space
Drive - even if we learn nothing about its mode of opera-
tion - that would be a major discovery. At least we'd
know that such a thing is possible.'

  'What is a Space Drive?' asked the Ambassador for
Earth, rather plaintively.

  'Any kind of propulsion system, Sir Robert, that doesn't
work on the rocket principle. Anti-gravity - if it is pos-
sible - would do very nicely. At present, we don't know
where to look for such a drive, and most scientists doubt
if it exists.'

  'It doesn't,' Professor Davidson interjected. 'Newton
settled that. You can't have action without reaction.
Space Drives are nonsense. Take it from me.'

  'You may be right,' Perera replied with unusual bland-
ness. 'But if Rama doesn't have a Space Drive, it has no
drive at all. There's simply no room for a conventional
propulsion system, with its enormous fuel tanks.'

  'It's hard to imagine a whole world being pushed
around,' said Dennis Solomons. "What would happen to
the objects inside it? Everything would have to be bolted
down. Most inconvenient.'

  'Well, the acceleration would probably be very low.
The biggest problem would be the water in the Cylindri-
cal Sea. How would you stop that from...'

  Perera's voice suddenly faded away, and his eyes
glazed over. He seemed to be in the throes of an incipient
epileptic fit, or even a heart attack. His colleagues looked
at him in alarm; then he made a sudden recovery, banged
his fist on the table and shouted: 'Of course! That ex-
plains everything! The southern cliff - now it makes
sense!'

  'Not to rue,' grumbled the Lunar Ambassador, speak-
ing for all the diplomats present.

  'Look at this longitudinal cross-section of Rama,' Per-
era continued excitedly, unfolding his 'map. 'Have you
got your copies? The Cylindrical Sea is enclosed between
two cliffs, which completely circle the interior of Rama.
The one on the north is only fifty metres high. The
southern one, on the other hand, is almost half a kilo-
metre high. Why the big difference? No one's been able
to think of a sensible reason.

  'But suppose Rama is able to propel itself - accelerat-
ing so that the northern end is forward. The water in the
Sea would tend to move back; the level at the south would
rise - perhaps hundreds of metres. Hence the cliff. Let's
see-'

  Perera started scribbling furiously. After an astonish-
ingly short time - it could not have been more than
twenty seconds - he looked up in triumph.-

  'Knowing the height of those cliffs, we can calculate the
maximum acceleration Rama can take. If it was more
than two per cent of a gravity, the Sea would slosh over
into the southern continent.'

  'A fiftieth of a gee? That's not very much.'

  'It is - for a mass of ten million megatons. And it's all
you need for astronomical manoeuvring.'

  'Thank you very much, Dr Perera,' said the Hermian
Ambassador. 'You've given us a lot to think about. Mr
Chairman - can we impress on Commander Norton the
importance of looking at the South Polar region?'

  'He's doing his best. The Sea is the obstacle, 'of course.
They're trying to build some kind of raft - so that they can
at least reach New York.'

  'The South Pole may be even more important. Mean-
while, I am going to bring these matters to the attention
of the General Assembly. Do I have your approval?'

  There were no objections, not even from Dr Taylor.
But just as the Committee members were about to switch
out of circuit, Sir Lewis raised his hand.

  The old historian very seldom spoke; when he did,
everyone listened.

  'Suppose we do find that Rama is - active - and has these
capabilities. There is an old saying in military affairs that
capability does not imply intention.'

   'How long should we wait to find what its intentions
are?' asked the Hermian. 'When we discover them, it may
be far too bate.'

  'It is already too late. There is nothing we can do to
affect Rama. Indeed, I doubt if there ever was.'

   'I do not admit that, Sir Lewis. There are many things
we can do - if it proves necessary. But the time is desper-
ately short. Rama is a cosmic egg, being warmed by the
fires of the sun. It may hatch at any moment.'

  The Chairman of the Committee looked at the Ambas-
sador for Mercury in frank astonishment. He bad seldom
been so surprised in his diplomatic career.

   He would never have dreamed that a Hermian was
capable of such a poetic flight of imagination.

   CHAPTER TWENTY - Book of Revelation

When one of his crew called him 'Commander', or, worse
still 'Mister Norton', there was always something serious
afoot. He could not recall that Boris Rodrigo had ever
before addressed him in such a fashion, so this must be
doubly serious. Even in normal times, Lieut-Commander
Rodrigo was a very grave and sober person.

  'What's the problem, Boris?' he asked when the cabin
door closed behind them.

  'I'd like permission, Commander, to use Ship Priority
for a direct message to Earth.'

  This was unusual, though not unprecedented. Routine
'signals went to the nearest 'planetary relay - at the mo-
ment, they were working through Mercury - and even
though the transit time was only a matter of minutes, it
was often five or six hours before a message arrived at the
desk of the person for whom it was intended. Ninety-nine
per cent of the time, that was quite good enough; but in
an emergency more direct, and much more expensive,
channels could be employed, at the captain's discretion.

  'You know, of course, that you have to give me a good
reason. All our available bandwidth is already clogged
with data transmissions. Is this a personal emergency?'

  'No, Commander. It is much more important than
that. I want to send a message to the Mother Church.'

  Uh-uh, said Norton to himself. How do I handle this?

  'I'd be glad if you'll explain.'

  It was not mere curiosity that prompted Norton's re-
quest - though that was certainly' present. If be gave
Boris the priority he asked, he would have to justify his
action.

  The calm, blue eyes stared into his. He had never
known Boris to lose control, to be other than completely
self-assured. All the Cosmo-Christers were bike this; it was
one of the benefits of their faith, and it helped to make
them good spacemen. Sometimes, however, their unques-
tioning certainty was just a little annoying to those un-
fortunates who had not been vouchsafed the Revelation.

  'It concerns the purpose of Rama, Commander. I be-
lieve I have discovered it.'

  'Go on.'

  'Look at the situation. Here is a completely empty, life-
less world - yet it is suitable for human beings. It has
water, and an atmosphere we can breathe. It comes from
the remote depths of space, aimed precisely at the solar
system - something quite incredible, if it was a matter of
pure chance. And it appears not only new; it looks as if it
has never been used.'

  We've all been through this dozens of times, Norton
told himself. What could Boris add to it?

  'Our faith has told us to expect such a visitation
though we do not know exactly what form it will take.
The Bible gives hints. If this is not the Second Coming, it
may be the Second Judgement; the story of Noah des-
cribes the first. I believe that Rama is a cosmic Ark, sent
here to save - those who are worthy of salvation.'

  There was silence for quite a while in the Captain's
cabin. It was not that Norton was at a loss for words;
rather, he could think of too many questions, but he was
not sure which ones it would be tactful to ask.

  Finally he remarked, in as mild and non-committal a
voice as he could manage: 'That's a very interesting con-
cept, and though I don't go along with your faith, it's a
tantalizingly plausible one.' He was not being hypocriti-
cal or flattering; stripped of its religious overtones, Rod-
rigo's theory was at beast as convincing as half a dozen
others he had heard. Suppose some catastrophe was about
to befall the human race, and a benevolent higher in-
telligence knew all about it? That would explain every-
thing, very neatly. However, there were still a few prob-
lems...

  'A couple of questions, Boris. Rama will be at peri-
helion in three weeks; then it will round the 'sun and
leave the solar system just as fast as it came in. There's
not much time for a Day of Judgement or for shipping
across those who are, er, selected - however that's going to
be done.'

  'Very true. So when it reaches perihelion, Rama will
have to decelerate and go into a parking orbit - probably
one with aphelion at Earth's orbit. There it might make
another velocity change, and rendezvous with Earth.'

  This was disturbingly persuasive. If Rama wished to
remain in, the solar system, it was going the right way
about it. The most efficient way to slow down was to get
as close to the sun as possible, and carry out the braking
manoeuvre there. If there was any truth in Rodrigo's
theory - or some variant of it - it would soon be put to
the test.

  'One other point, Boris. What's controlling Rama
now?'

  'There is no doctrine to advise on that. It could be a
pure robot. Or it could be - a spirit. That would explain
why there are no signs of biological life-forms.'

  The Haunted Asteroid; why had that phrase popped
up from the depths of memory? Then be recalled a silly
story he had read years ago; he thought it best not to ask
Boris if he had ever run into it. He doubted if the other's
tastes ran to that sort of reading.

  'I'll tell you what we'll do, Boris,' said Norton, ab-
ruptly making up his mind. He wanted to terminate this
interview before it got too difficult, and thought he had
found a good compromise.

  'Can you sum up your ideas in less than - oh, a thou-
sand bits?'

  'Yes, I think so.'

  'Well, if you can make it sound like a straightforward
scientific theory, I'll send it, top priority, to the Rama
Committee. Then a copy can go to your Church at the
same time, and everyone will be happy.'

  'Thank you, Commander, I really appreciate it.'

  'Oh, I'm not doing this to save my conscience. I'd just
bike to see what the Committee makes of it. Even if I
don't agree with you all along the line, you may have hit
on something important.'

  'Well, we'll know at perihelion, won't we?'

  'Yes. We'll know at perihelion.'

  When Boris Rodrigo had left, Norton called the bridge
and gave the necessary authorization. He thought he had
solved the problem rather neatly; besides, just suppose
that Boris was right.

  He might have increased his chances of being among
the saved.

   CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - After the Storm

As they drifted along the now familiar corridor of the
Alpha Airlock complex, Norton wondered if they had
let impatience overcome caution. They had waited
aboard Endeavour for forty-eight hours - two precious
days - ready for instant departure if events should justify
it. But nothing had happened; the instruments left in
Rama had detected no unusual activity. Frustratingly, the
television camera on the Hub had been blinded by a fog
which had reduced visibility to a few metres and bad
only now started to retreat.

  When they operated the final airlock door, and floated
out into the cat's-cradle of guide-ropes around the Hub,
Norton was struck first by the change in the light. It was
no longer harshly blue, but was much more mellow and
gentle, reminding him of a bright, hazy day on Earth.

  He looked outwards along the axis of the world - and
could see nothing except a glowing, featureless tunnel of
white, reaching all the way to those strange mountains at
the South Pole. The interior of Rama was completely
blanketed with clouds, and nowhere was a break visible in
the overcast. The top of the layer was quite sharply de'
fined; it formed a smaller cylinder inside the larger one
of this spinning world, leaving a central core, five or six
kilometres wide, quite clear except for a few stray wisps
of cirrus.

  The immense tube of cloud was bit from underneath
by the six artificial suns of Rama. The locations of the
three on this Northern continent were dearly defined by
diffuse strips of light, but those on the far side of the
Cylindrical Sea merged together into a continuous, glow-
ing band.

  What is happening down beneath those clouds? Nor-
ton asked himself. But at least the storm, which had
centrifuged them into such perfect symmetry about the
axis of Rama, had now died away. Unless there were
some other surprises, it would be safe to descend.

  It seemed appropriate, \n this return visit, to use the
team that had made the first deep penetration into
Rama. Sergeant Myron - like every other member of En-
deavour's crew - now fully met Surgeon-Commander
Ernst's physical requirements; he even maintained, with
convincing sincerity, that he was never going to wear his
old uniforms again.

  As Norton watched Mercer, Calvert and Myron 'swim-
ming' quickly and confidently down the ladder, he re-
minded himself how much had changed. That first time
they had descended in cold and darkness; now they were
going towards light and warmth. And on all earlier visits,
they had been confident that Rama was dead. That
might yet be true, in a biological sense. But something
was stirring; and Boris Rodrigo's phrase would do as well
as any other. The spirit of Rama was awake.

  When they had reached the platform at the foot of the
ladder and were preparing to start down the stairway,
Mercer carried out his usual routine test of the atmo-
sphere. There were some things that he never took for
granted; even when the people around him were breath-
ing perfectly comfortably, without aids, he had been
known to stop for an air check before opening his helmet.
When asked to justify such excessive caution, he had an-
swered: 'Because human senses aren't good enough,
that's why. You may think you're fine, but you could fall
flat on your face with the next deep breath.'

  He booked at his meter, and said 'Damn!'

  'What's the trouble?' asked Calvert.

  'It's broken - reading too high. Odd; I've never known
that to happen before. I'll check it on my breathing cir-
cuit.'

  He plugged the compact little analyser into the test
point of his oxygen supply, then stood in thoughtful
silence for a while. His companions booked at him with
anxious concern; anything that upset Karl was to be
taken very seriously indeed.

  He unplugged the meter, used it to sample the Rama
atmosphere again, then called Hub Control.

  'Skipper! Will you take an 02 reading?'

  There was a much longer pause than the request justi-
fied. Then Norton radioed back: 'I think there's some-
thing wrong with my meter.'

  A slow smile spread across Mercer's face.

  'It's up fifty per cent, isn't it?'

  'Yes, what does that mean?'

  'It means that we can all take off our masks. Isn't that
convenient?'

  'I'm not sure,' replied Norton, echoing the sarcasm in
Mercer's voice. 'It seems too good to be true.' There was
no need to say any more. Like all spacemen, Commander
Norton had a profound suspicion of things that were too
good to be true.

  Mercer cracked his mask open a trifle, and took a cau-
tious sniff. For the first time at this altitude, the air was
perfectly breathable. The musty, dead smell had gone; so
had the excessive dryness, which in the past had caused
several respiratory complaints. Humidity was now an as-
tonishing eighty per cent; doubtless the thawing of the
Sea was responsible for this. There was a muggy feeling
in the air, though not an unpleasant one. It was like a
summer evening, Mercer told himself, on some tropical
coast. The climate inside Rama had improved dramatic-
ally during the last few days...

  And why? The increased humidity was no problem;
the startling rise in oxygen was much more difficult to
explain.

  As he recommenced the descent, Mercer began a whole
series of mental calculations. He 'had not arrived at any
satisfactory result by the time they entered the cloud
layer.

  It was a dramatic experience, for the transition was
very abrupt. At one moment they were sliding down-
wards in clear air, gripping the smooth metal of the hand-
rail so that they would not gain speed too swiftly in this
quarter-of-a-gravity region. Then, suddenly, they shot in-
to a blinding white fog, and visibility dropped to a few
metres. Mercer put on the brakes so quickly that Calvert
almost bumped into him - and Myron did bump into
Calvert, nearly knocking him off the rail.

  'Take it easy,' said Mercer. 'Spread out so we can just
see each other. And don't let yourself build up speed, in
case I have to stop suddenly.'

  In eerie silence, they continued to glide, downwards
through 'the fog. Calvert could just see Mercer as a vague
shadow ten metres ahead, and 'when he looked back,
'Myron was at the same distance behind him. In some
ways, this was even spookier than descending in the
complete darkness of the Raman night; then, at least, the
searchlight beams had shown them what lay ahead. But'
this was like diving in poor visibility in the open sea.

  It was impossible to tell how far they had travelled,
and Calvert guessed they had almost reached the fourth
level when Mercer suddenly braked again. When they
had bunched together, he whispered: 'Listen! Don't you
hear something?'

  'Yes,' said Myron, after a minute. 'It sounds bike the
wind.'

  Calvert was not so sure. He turned his head back and
forth, trying to locate the direction of the very faint
murmur that had come to them through the fog, then
abandoned the attempt as hopeless.

  They continued the slide, reached the fourth level, and
started on towards the fifth. All the while the sound grew
louder - and more hauntingly familiar. They were half-
way down the fourth stairway before Myron called out:
'Now do you recognize it?'

  They would have identified it bong ago, but it was not
a sound they would ever have associated with any world
except Earth. Coming out of the fog, from a source whose
distance could not be guessed, was the steady thunder of
falling water.

  A few minutes later, the cloud ceiling ended as ab-
ruptly as it had begun. They shot out into the blinding
glare of the Raman day, made more brilliant by the bight
reflected from the low-hanging clouds. There was the
familiar curving plain - now made more acceptable to
mind and senses, because its full circle could no longer be
seen. It was not too difficult to pretend that they were
booking along a broad valley, and that the upward sweep
of the Sea was really an outward one.

  They halted at the fifth and penultimate platform, to
report that they were through the cloud cover and to
make a careful survey. As far as they could tell, nothing
had changed down there on the plain; but up here on the
Northern dome, Rama had brought forth another won-
der.

  So there was the origin of the sound they had heard.
Descending from some hidden source in 'the clouds three
or four kilometres away was a waterfall, and for long
minutes they stared at it silently, almost unable to be-
lieve their eyes. Logic told them that on this spinning
world no falling object could move in a straight line, but
there was something horribly unnatural about a curving
waterfall that curved sideways, to end many kilometres
away from the point directly below its source...

  'If Galileo had been born in this world,' said Mercer at
length, 'he'd have gone crazy working out the laws of
dynamics.'

  'I thought I knew them,' Calvert replied, 'and I'm going
crazy anyway. Doesn't it upset you, Prof?'

  'Why should it?' said Sergeant Myron. 'It's a perfectly
straightforward demonstration of the Coriolis Effect. I
wish I could show it to some of my students.'

  Mercer was staring thoughtfully at the globe-circling
band of the Cylindrical Sea.

  'Have you noticed what's happened to the water?' he
said at last.

  'Why - it's no longer so blue. I'd call it pea-green.
What does that signify?'

  'Perhaps the same thing that it does on Earth. Laura
called the Sea an organic soup waiting to be shaken into
life. Maybe that's exactly what's happened.'

  'In a couple of days! It took millions of years on
Earth.'

  'Three hundred and seventy-five million, according to
the latest estimate. So that's where the oxygen's come
from. Rama's shot through the anerobic stage and has got
to photosynthetic plants - in about forty-eight hours. I
wonder what it will produce tomorrow?'

   CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - To Sail the Cylindrical Sea

When they reached the foot of the stairway, they had an-
other shock. At first, it appeared that something had gone
through the camp, overturning equipment, even collect-
ing smaller objects and carrying them away. But after a
brief examination, their alarm was replaced by a rather
shame-faced annoyance.

  The culprit was only the wind; though they had tied
down all loose objects before they left, some ropes must
have parted during exceptionally strong gusts. It was sev-
eral days before they were able to retrieve all their scat-
tered property.

  Otherwise, there seemed no major changes. Even the
silence of Rama had returned, now that the ephemeral
storms of spring were over. And out there at the edge of
the plain was a calm sea, waiting for the first ship in a
million years.
'Shouldn't one christen a new boat with a bottle of cham-
pagne?'

  'Even if we had any on board, I wouldn't allow such a
criminal waste. Anyway, it's too bate. We've already
launched the thing.'

  'At least it does float. You've won your bet, Jimmy. I'll
settle when we get back to Earth.'

  'It's got to have a name. Any ideas?'

  The subject of these unflattering comments was now
bobbing beside the steps beading down into the Cylindri-
cal Sea. It was a small raft, constructed from six empty
storage drums held together by a light metal framework.
Building it, assembling it at Camp Alpha and hauling it
on demountabbe wheels across more than ten kilometres
of plain had absorbed the crew's entire energies for sev-
eral days. It was a gamble that had better pay off.

  The prize was worth the risk. The enigmatic towers of
New York, gleaming there in the shadowless bight five
kilometres away, had taunted them ever since they had
entered Rama. No one doubted that the city - or what-
ever it might be - was the real heart of this world. If they
did nothing else, they must reach New York.

  'We still don't have a name. Skipper - what about it?'

  Norton laughed, then became suddenly serious.

  'I've got one for you. Call it Resolution.'

  'Why?'

  'That was one of Cook's ships. It's a good name - may
she live up to it.'

  There was a thoughtful silence; then Sergeant Barnes,
who had been principally responsible for the design,
asked for three volunteers. Everyone present held up a
hand.

  'Sorry - we only have four life-jackets. Boris, Jimmy,
Pieter - you've all done some sailing. Let's try her out.'

  No one thought it in the least peculiar that an Execu-
tive Sergeant was now taking charge of the proceedings.
Ruby Barnes had the only Master's Certificate aboard, so
that settled the matter. She had navigated racing tri-
marans across the Pacific, and it did not seem likely that a
few kilometres of dead-calm water could present much of
a challenge to her skills.

  Ever since she had set eyes upon the Sea, she had been
determined to make this voyage. In all the thousands of
years that man had had dealings with the waters of his
own world, no sailor had ever faced anything remotely
like this. In the last few days a silly little jingle had been
running through her mind, and she could not get rid of
it. 'To sail the Cylindrical Sea...' Well, that was pre-
cisely what she was going to do.

  Her passengers took their places on the improvised
bucket seats, and Ruby opened the throttle. The twenty-
kilowatt motor started to whirr, the chain-drives of the
reduction gear blurred, and Resolution surged away to
the cheers of the spectators.

  Ruby had hoped to get fifteen kph with this load, but
would settle for anything over ten. A half-kilometre
course had been measured along the cliff, and she made
the round trip in five and a half minutes. Allowing for
turning time, this worked out at twelve kph; she was
quite happy with that.

  With no power, but with three energetic paddlers help-
ing her own more skilful blade, Ruby was able to get a
quarter of this speed. So even if the motor broke down,
they could get back to shore in a couple of hours. The
heavy-duty power cells could provide enough energy to
circumnavigate the world; she was carrying two spares, to
be on the safe side. And now that the fog had completely
burned away, even such a cautious mariner as Ruby was
prepared to put to sea without a compass.

  She saluted smartly as she stepped ashore.

  'Maiden voyage of Resolution successfully completed,
Sir. Now awaiting your instructions.'

  'Very good ... Admiral. When will you be ready to
sail?'

  'As soon as stores can be loaded aboard, and the Har-
bour Master gives us clearance.'

  'Then we leave at dawn.'

  'Aye, aye, Sir.'

Five kilometres of water does not seem very much on a
map; it is very different when one is in the middle of it.
They had been cruising for only ten minutes, and the
fifty-metre cliff facing the Northern Continent already
seemed a surprising distance away. Yet, mysteriously, New
York hardly appeared much closer than before...

  But most of the time they paid little attention to the
land; they were still too engrossed in the wonder of the
Sea. They no longer made the nervous jokes that had
punctuated the start of the voyage; this new experience
was too overwhelming.

  Every time, Norton told himself, he felt that he had
grown accustomed to Rama, it produced some new won-
der. As Resolution hummed steadily forward, it seemed
that they were caught in the trough of a gigantic wave - a
wave which curved u~ on either side until it became
vertical - then overhung until the two flanks met in a
liquid arch sixteen kilometres above their heads. Despite
everything that reason and logic told them, none of the
voyagers could for long throw off the impression that at
any minute those millions of tons of water would come
crashing down from the sky.

  Yet despite this, their main feeling was one of exhilara-
tion; there was a sense of danger, without any real dan-
ger. Unless, of course, the Sea itself produced any more
surprises.

  That was a distinct possibility, for as Mercer had
guessed, the water was now alive. Every spoonful con-
tained thousands of spherical, single-celled micro-organ-
isms, similar to the earliest forms of plankton that had
existed in the oceans of Earth.

  Yet they showed puzzling differences; they lacked a
nucleus, as well as many of the other minimum require-
ments of even the most primitive terrestrial life-forms.
And although Laura Ernst - now doubling as research
scientist as well as ship's doctor - had proved that they
definitely generated oxygen, there were far too few of
them to account for the augmentation of Rama's atmo-
sphere. They should have existed in billions, not mere
thousands.

  Then she discovered that their numbers were dwind-
ling rapidly, and must have been far higher during the
first hours of the Raman dawn. It was as if there had
been a brief explosion of life, recapitulating on a trillion-
fold swifter time-scale the early history of Earth. Now,
perhaps, it had exhausted itself; the drifting micro-organ-
isms were disintegrating, releasing their stores of chemi-
cals back into the Sea.

  'If you have to swim for it,' Dr Ernst had warned the
mariners, 'keep your mouths closed. A few drops won't
matter - if you spit them out right away. But all those
weird organo-metallic salts add up to a fairly poisonous
package, and I'd hate to have to work out an antidote.'

  This danger, fortunately, seemed very unlikely. Reso-
lution could stay afloat if any two of her buoyancy tanks
were punctured. (When told of this, Joe Calvert had
muttered darkly: 'Remember the Titanic! ') And even if
she sank, the crude but efficient life-jackets would keep
their heads above, water. Although Laura had been re-
luctant to give a firm ruling on this, she did not think
that a few hours' immersion in the Sea would be fatal;
but she did not recommend it.

  After twenty minutes of steady progress, New York was
no longer a distant island. It was becoming a real place,
and details which they had seen only through telescopes
and photo-enlargements were now revealing themselves
as massive, solid structures. It was now strikingly appar-
ent that the 'city', like so much of Rama, was triplicated;
it consisted of three identical, circular complexes or super-
structures, rising from a long, oval foundation. Photo-
graphs taken from the Hub also indicated that each com-
plex was itself divided into three equal components, like a
pie sliced into 120-degree portions. This would greatly
simplify the task of exploration; presumably they had to
examine only one ninth of New York to have seen the
whole of it. Even this would be a formidable undertak-
ing; it would mean investigating at least a square kilo-
metre of buildings and machinery, some of which tow-
ered hundreds of metres into the air.

  The Ramans, it seemed, had brought the art of triple-
redundancy to a high degree of perfection. This was
demonstrated in the airlock system, the stairways at the
Hub, the artificial suns. And where it really mattered,
they had even taken the next step. New York appeared to
be an example of triple-triple redundancy.

  Ruby was steering Resolution towards the central com-
plex, where a flight of steps led up from the water to the
very -top of the wall or levee which surrounded the island.
There was even a conveniently-placed mooring post to
which boats could be tied; when she saw this, Ruby be-
came quite excited. Now she would never be content un-
til she found one of the craft in which the Ramans sailed
their extraordinary sea.

   Norton was the first to step ashore; he looked back at
his three companions and said: 'Wait here on the boat
until I get to the top -of the wall. When I wave, Pieter
and Boris will join me. You stay at the helm, Ruby, so
that we can cast off at a moment's notice. If anything
happens to me, report to Karl and follow his instructions.
Use your best judgement - but no heroics. Understood?'
'Yes, Skipper. Good luck!'

  Commander Norton did not really believe in luck; he
never got into a situation until he had analysed all the
factors involved and had secured his line of retreat. But
once again Rama was forcing him to break some of his
cherished rules. Almost every factor here- was unknown -
as unknown as the Pacific and the Great Barrier Reef had
been to his hero, three and a half centuries ago... Yes, he
could do with all the luck that happened to be lying
around.

  The stairway was a virtual duplicate of the one down
which they had descended on the other side of the Sea;
doubtless his friends over there Were looking straight
across at him through their telescopes. And 'straight' was
now the correct word; in this one direction, parallel to
the axis of Rama, the Sea was indeed completely flat. It
might well be the only body of water in the universe of
which this was true, for on all other worlds, every sea or
lake must follow the surface of a sphere, with equal cur-
vature in all directions.

  'Nearly at the top,' he reported, speaking for the record
and for his intently listening second-in-command, five
kilometres away, 'still completely quiet - radiation nor-
mal. I'm holding the meter above my head, just in case
this wall is acting as a shield for anything. And if there
are any hostiles on the other side, they'll shoot that first.'

  He was joking, of course. And yet - why take any
chances, when it was just as easy to avoid them?

  When he - took the last step, he found that the flat-
topped embankment was about ten metres thick; on the
inner side, an alternating series of ramps and stairways
led down to the main level of the city, twenty metres
below. In effect, he was standing on a high wall which
completely surrounded New York, and so was able to get
a grandstand view of it.

  It was a view almost stunning in its complexity, and his
first act was to make a slow panoramic scan with his cam-
era. Then he waved to his companions and radioed back
across the Sea: 'No sign of any activity - everything
quiet. Come on up - we'll start exploring.'

   CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - NY, Rama

It was not a city; it was a machine. Norton had come to
that conclusion in ten minutes, and saw no reason to
change it after they had made a complete traverse of the
island. A city - whatever - the nature of its occupants -
surely had to provide some form of accommodation: there
was nothing here of that - nature, unless it was under-
ground. And if that was the case, where were the en-
trances, the stairways, the elevators? He had not found
anything that even qualified as a simple door...

  The closest analogy he had ever seen to this place on
Earth was a giant chemical processing plant. However,
there were no stockpiles of raw materials, or any indica-
tions of a transport system to move them around. Nor
could he imagine where the finished product would
emerge - still less what that product could possibly be. It
was all very baffling, and more than a little frustrating.

  'Anybody care to make a guess?' he said at last, to all
who might be listening. 'If this is a factory, what does it
make? And where does it get its raw materials?'

  'I've a suggestion, Skipper,' said Karl Mercer, over on
the far shore. 'Suppose it uses the Sea. According to Doc,
that contains just about anything you can think of.'

  It was a plausible answer, and Norton had already con-
sidered it. There could well be buried pipes leading to
the Sea - in fact, there must be, for any conceivable
chemical plant would require large quantities of water.
But he had a suspicion of plausible answers; they were so
often wrong.

  'That's a good idea, Karl; but what does New York do
with its seawater?'

  For a long time, nobody answered from ship, Hub or
Northern plain. Then an unexpected voice spoke.

  'That's easy, Skipper. But you're all going to laugh at
me.'

  'No, we're not, Ravi. Go ahead.'

  Sergeant Ravi McAndrews, Chief Steward and Simp
Master, was the last person on this ship who would norm-
ally get involved in a technical discussion. His IQ was
modest and his scientific knowledge was minimal, but
he was no fool and had a natural shrewdness which
everyone respected.

  'Well, it's a factory all right, Skipper, and maybe the
Sea - provides the raw material ... after all, that's how it
all happened on Earth, though in a different way ... I
believe New York is a factory for making - Ramans.

  Somebody, somewhere, snickered, but became quickly
silent and did not identify himself.

  'You know, Ravi,' said his commander at last, 'that
theory is crazy enough to be true. And I'm not sure if I
want to see it tested ... at least, until I get back to the
mainland.'

  This celestial New York was just about as wide as the
island of Manhattan, but its geometry was totally differ-
ent. There were few straight thoroughfares; it was a maze
of short, concentric arcs, with radial spokes linking them.
Luckily, it was impossible to lose one's bearings inside
Rama; a single glance at the sky was enough to establish
the north-south axis of the world.

  They paused at almost every intersection to make a
panoramic scan. When all these hundreds of pictures
were sorted out, it would be a tedious but fairly straight-
forward job to construct an accurate scale model of the
city. Norton suspected that the resulting jigsaw puzzle
would keep scientists busy for generations.

  It was even harder to get used to the silence here than
it had been out on the plain of Rama. A city-machine
should make some sound; yet there - was not even the
faintest of electric hums, or the slightest whisper of mech-
anical motion. Several times Norton put his ear to the
ground, or to the side of a building, and listened in-
tently. He could hear nothing except the pounding of his
own blood,

  The machines were sleeping: they were not even tick-
ing over. Would they ever wake again, and for what pur-
pose? Everything was in perfect condition, as usual. It was
easy to believe that the closing of a single circuit, in some
patient, hidden computer, would bring all this maze back
to life.

  When at last they had reached the far side of the city,
they climbed to the top of the surrounding levee and
looked across the southern branch of the Sea. For a long
time Norton stared at the five-hundred-metre cliff that
barred them from almost half of Rama - and, judging
from their telescopic surveys, the most complex and var-
ied half. From this angle, it appeared an ominous, for-
bidding black, and it was easy to think of it as a prison
wall surrounding a whole continent. Nowhere along its
entire circle was there a flight of stairways or any other
means of access.

  He wondered how the Ramans reached their southern
land from New York. Probably there was an under-
ground transport system running beneath the Sea, but
they must also have aircraft as well; there were many
open areas here in the city that could be used for landing.
To discover a Raman vehicle would be a major accom-
plishment - especially if -they could learn to operate it.
(Though could any conceivable power-source still be
functioning, after several hundred thousand years?)

  There were numerous structures that had the functional
look of hangars or garages, but they were all smooth and
windowless, as if they had been sprayed with sealant.
Sooner or later, Norton had told himself grimly, we'll be
forced to use explosives, and laser beams. He was deter-
mined to put off this decision to the last possible moment.

  His reluctance to use brute force was based partly on
pride, partly on fear. He did not wish to behave like a
technological barbarian, smashing what he could not
understand. After all, he was an uninvited visitor in this
world, and should act accordingly.

  As for his fear - perhaps that was too strong ~ word;
apprehension might be better. The Ramans seemed to
have planned for everything; he was not anxious to dis-
cover the precautions they had taken to guard their
property. When he sailed back to the mainland, it would
be with empty hands.

   CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Dragonfly

Lieutenant James Pak was the most junior officer on
board Endeavour, and this was only his fourth mission
into deep space. He was ambitious, and due for promo-
tion; he had also committed a serious breach of regula-
tions. No wonder, therefore, that he took a long time to
make up his mind.

  It would be a gamble; if he lost, he could be in deep
trouble. He could not only be risking his career; he
might even be risking his neck. But if he succeeded, he
would be a hero. What finally convinced him was
neither of these arguments; it was the certainty that, if
he did nothing at all, he would spend the rest of his life
brooding over his lost opportunity. Nevertheless, he was
still hesitant when he asked the Captain for a private
meeting.

  What is it this time? Norton asked himself, as he analy-
sed the uncertain expression on the young officer's face.
He remembered his delicate interview with Boris Rod-
rigo; no, it wouldn't be anything like that. Jimmy was
certainly not the religious type; the only interests he had
ever shown outside his work were sport and sex, prefer-
ably combined. -

  It could hardly be the former, and Norton hoped it
was not the latter. He had encountered most of the prob-
lems that a commanding officer could encounter in this
department - except the classical one o-f an unscheduled
birth during a mission. Though this situation was the
subject of innumerable jokes, it had never happened yet;
of time.

  'Well, Jimmy, what is it?'

  'I have an idea, Commander. I know how to reach the
southern continent - even to the South Pole.'

  'I'm listening. How do you propose to do it?'

  'Er - by flying there.'

  'Jimmy, I've had at least five proposals to do that -
more if you count crazy suggestions from Earth. We've
looked into the possibility of adapting our spacesuit pro-
pulsors, but air drag would make them hopelessly ineffici-
ent. They'd run out of fuel before they could go ten kilo-
metres.'

  'I know that. But I have the answer.'

  Lt Pak's attitude was a curious mixture of complete
confidence and barely suppressed nervousness. Norton
was quite baffled; what was the kid worried about?
Surely he knew his commanding officer well enough to be
certain that no reasonable proposal would be laughed
out of court.

  'Well, go on. If it works, I'll see your promotion is retro-
active.'

  That little half-promise, half-joke didn't go down as
well as he had hoped. Jimmy gave a rather sickly smile,
made several false starts, then decided on an oblique ap-
proach to the subject.

  'You know, Commander, that I was in the Lunar Olym-
pics last year.'

  'Of course. Sorry you didn't win.'

  'It was bad equipment; I know what went wrong. I
have friends on Mars who've been working on it, in
secret. We want to give everyone a surprise.'

  'Mars? But I didn't know...'

  'Not many people do - the sport's still new there; it's
only been tried in the Xante Sportsdome. But the best
aerodynamicists in the solar system are on Mars; if you
can fly in that atmosphere, you can fly anywhere.

  'Now, my idea was that if the Martians could build a
good machine, with all their know-how, it would really
perform on the Moon - where gravity is only half as
strong.'

  'That seems plausible, but how does it help us?'

  Norton was beginning to guess, but he wanted to give
Jimmy plenty of rope.

  'Well, I formed a syndicate with some friends in Lowell
City. They've built a fully aerobatic flyer with some re-
finements that no one has ever seen before. In lunar grav-
ity, under the Olympic dome, it should create a sensa-
tion.'

  'And win you the gold medal.'

  'I hope so.'

  'Let me see if I follow your train of thought correctly.
A sky-bike that could enter the Lunar Olympics, at a
sixth of a gravity, would be even more sensational inside
Rama, with no gravity at all. You could fly it right along
the axis, from the North Pole to the South - and back
again.'

  'Yes - easily. The one-way trip would take three hours,
non-stop. But of course you could rest whenever you
wanted to, as long as you kept near the axis.'
'It's -a brilliant idea, and I congratulate you. What a
pity sky-bikes aren't part of regular Space Survey equip-
ment.'

  Jimmy seemed to have some difficulty in finding words.
He opened his mouth several times, but nothing hap-
pened.

  'All right, Jimmy. As a matter of morbid interest, and
purely off the record, how did you smuggle the thing
aboard?'

  'Er - "Recreational Stores".'

  'Well, you weren't lying. And what about the weight?'

  'It's only twenty kilograms.'

  'Only! Still, that's not as bad as I thought. In fact, I'm
astonished you can build a bike for that weight.'

   'Some have been only fifteen, but they were too fragile
and usually folded up when they made a turn. There's no
danger of Dragonfly doing that. As I said, she's fully aero-
batic.'

  'Dragonfly - nice name. So tell me just how you plan to
use her; then I can decide whether a promotion or a
court martial is in order. Or both.'

   CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Maiden Flight

Dragonfly was certainly a good name. The long, tapering
wings were almost invisible, except when the light struck
them from certain angles and was refracted into rainbow
hues. It was as if a soap-bubble had been wrapped round
a delicate tracery of aerofoil sections; the envelope en-
dosing the little flyer was an organic film only a few
molecules thick, yet strong enough to control and direct
the movements of a fifty-kph air flow.

  The pilot - who was also the powerplant and the guid-
ance system - sat on a tiny seat at the centre of gravity, in
a semi-reclining position to reduce air resistance. Control
was by a single stick which could be moved backwards
and forwards, right and left; the only 'instrument' was a
piece of weighted ribbon attached to the leading edge, to
show the direction of the relative wind.

  Once the flyer had been assembled at the Hub, Jimmy
Pak would allow no one to -touch it. Clumsy handling
could snap one of the single-fibre structural members,
and those glittering wings were an almost irresistible at-
traction to prying fingers. It was hard to believe that
there was really something there...

  As he watched Jimmy climb into the contraption, Com-
mander Norton began to have second thoughts. If one of
those wire-sized struts snapped when Dragonfly was on
the other side of the Cylindrical Sea, Jimmy would have
no way of getting back - even if he was able to make a
safe landing. They were also breaking one of the most
sacrosanct rules of space exploration; a man was going
alone into unknown territory, beyond all possibility of
help. The only consolation was that he would be in full
view and communication all the time; they would know
exactly what had happened to him, if he did meet with
disaster.

  Yet this opportunity was far too good to miss; if one
believed in fate or destiny, it would be challenging the
gods themselves to neglect the only chance they might
ever have of reaching the far side of Rama, and seeing at
close quarters the mysteries of the South Pole. Jimmy
knew what he was attempting, far better than anyone in
the crew could tell him. This was precisely the sort of risk
that had to be taken; if it failed, that was the luck of the
game. You couldn't win them all...

  'Now listen to me carefully, Jimmy,' said Surgeon-Com-
mander Ernst. 'It's very important not to over-exert your-
self. Remember, the oxygen level here at the axis is still
very low. If you feel breathless at any time, stop and
hyperventilate for thirty seconds - but no longer.'

  Jimmy nodded absentmindedly as he tested the con-
trols. The whole rudder-elevator assembly, which formed
a single unit on an outrigger five metres behind the rudi-
mentary cockpit, began to twist around; then the flap-
shaped ailerons, halfway along the wing, moved altern-
ately up and down.

  'Do you want me to swing the prop?' asked Joe Calvert,
unable to suppress memories of two-hundred-year-old war
movies. 'Ignition! Contact!' Probably no one except
Jimmy knew what he was talking about, but it helped to
relieve the tension.

  Very slowly, Jimmy started to move the foot-pedals.
The flimsy, broad fan of the airscrew - like the wing, a
delicate skeleton covered with shimmering film - began
to turn. By the time it had made a few revolutions, it had
disappeared completely; and Dragonfly was on her way.

  She moved straight outwards from the Hub, moving
slowly along the axis of Rama. When she had travelled a
hundred metres, Jimmy stopped pedalling; it was strange
to see an obviously aerodynamic vehicle hanging motion-
less in mid-air. This must be the first time such a thing
had ever happened, except possibly on a very limited
scale inside one of the larger space-stations.

  'How does she handle?' Norton called.

  'Response good, stability poor. But I know what the
trouble is - no gravity. We'll be better off a kilometre
lower down.'

  'Now wait a minute- is that safe?'

  By losing altitude, Jimmy would be sacrificing his
main advantage. As long as he stayed precisely on the
axis, he - and Dragonfly - would be completely weightless.
He could hover effortlessly, or even go to sleep if he
wished. But as soon as he moved away from the central
line around which Rama spun, the pseudo-weight of
centrifugal force would reappear.

  And so, unless he could maintain himself at this alti-
tude, he would continue to lose height - - and at the same
time, to gain weight. It would be an accelerating process,
which could end in catastrophe. The gravity down on the
plain of Rama was twice that in which Dragonfly had been
designed to operate. Jimmy might be able to make a safe
landing; he could certainly never take off again.

  But he had already considered all this, and he an-
swered confidently enough: 'I can manage a tenth of a
gee without any trouble. And she'll handle more easily in
denser air.

  In a slow, leisurely spiral, Dragonfly drifted across the
sky, roughly following the line of Stairway Alpha down
towards the plain. From some angles, the little sky-bike
was almost invisible; Jimmy seemed to be sitting in mid-
air pedalling furiously. Sometimes he moved into spurts
of up to thirty kilometres an hour; then he would coast to
a halt, getting the feel of the controls, before accelerating
again. And he was always very careful to keep a safe dist-
ance from the curving end of Rama.

  It was soon obvious that Dragonfly handled much bet-
ter at lower altitudes; she no longer rolled around at any
angle, - but stabilized so that her wings were parallel to
the plain seven kilometres below. Jimmy completed sev-
eral wide orbits, then started to climb upwards again. He
finally halted a Jew metres above his waiting colleagues
and realized, a little belatedly, that he was not quite sure
how to land this gossamer craft.

  'Shall we throw you a rope?' Norton asked half-seri-
ously.

  'No, Skipper - I've got to work this out myself. I won't
have anyone to help me at the other end.'

  He sat thinking for a while, then started to ease Dra-
gonfly towards the Hub with short bursts of power. She
quickly lost momentum between each, as air drag
brought her to rest again. When he was only five metres
away, and the sky-bike was still barely moving, Jimmy
abandoned ship. He let himself float towards the nearest
safety line in the Hub webwork, grasped it, then swung
around in time to catch the approaching bike with his
hands. The manoeuvre was so neatly executed that it
drew a round of applause.

  'For my next act-' Joe Calvert began.

  Jimmy was quick to disclaim any credit.

  'That was messy,' he said. 'But now I know how to do
it. I'll take a sticky-bomb on a twenty-metre line; then I'll
be able to pull myself in wherever I want to.' --

  'Give me your wrist, Jimmy,' ordered the Doctor, 'and
blow into this bag. I'll want a blood sample, too. Did you
have any difficulty in breathing?'

  'Only at this altitude. Hey, what do you want the
blood for?'

  'Sugar level; then I can tell how much energy you've
used. We've got to make sure you carry enough fuel for
the mission. By the way, what's the endurance record for
sky-biking?'

  'Two hours twenty-five minutes three point six seconds.
On the Moon, of course - a two kilometre circuit in the
Olympic Dome.'

  'And you think you can keep it up for six hours?'

  'Easily, since I can stop for a rest at any time. Sky-
biking on the Moon is at least twice as hard as it is here.'

  'OK Jimmy - back to the lab. I'll give you a Go-No-Go
as soon as I've analysed these samples. I don't want to
raise false hopes - but I think you can make it.'

  A large smile of satisfaction spread across Jimmy Pak's
ivory-hued countenance. As he followed Surgeon-Com-
mander Ernst to the airlock, he called back to his com-
panions: 'Hands off, please! I don't Want anyone put-
ting his fist through the wings.'

  'I'll see to that, Jimmy,' promised the Commander.
'Dragonfly is off limits to everybody - including myself.'

   CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - The Voice of Rama

The real magnitude of his adventure did not hit Jimmy
Pak until he reached the coast of the Cylindrical Sea.
Until now, he had been over known territory; barring a
catastrophic structural failure, he could always land and
walk back to base in a few hours.

  That -option no longer existed. If he came down in the
Sea, he would probably drown, quite unpleasantly, in its
poisonous waters. And even if he made a safe landing in
the southern continent, it might be impossible to rescue
him before Endeavour had to break away from Rama's
sunward orbit.

  He was also acutely aware that the foreseeable disasters
were the ones most unlikely to happen. The totally un-
known region over which he was flying might produce
any number of surprises; suppose there were flying crea-
tures here, who objected to his intrusion? He would hate
to engage in a dog-fight with anything larger than a
pigeon. A few well-placed pecks could destroy Dragonfly's
aerodynamics.

  Yet, if there were no hazards, there would be no
achievement - no sense of adventure. Millions of men
would gladly have traded places with him now. He was
going not only where no one had ever been before - but
where no one would ever go again. In all of history, he
would be the only human being to visit the southern re-
gions of Rama. Whenever he felt fear brushing against
his mind, he could remember that.

  He had now grown accustomed to sitting in mid-air,
with the world wrapped around him. Because he had
dropped two kilometres below the central axis, he had
acquired a definite sense of 'up' and 'down'. The ground
was only six kilometres below, but the arch of the sky was
ten kilometres overhead. The 'city' of London was hang-
ing up there near the zenith; New York, on the other
hand, was the right way up, directly ahead.

  'Dragonfly,' said Hub Control, 'you're getting a little
low. Twenty-two hundred metres from the axis.'

  'Thanks,' he replied. 'I'll gain altitude. Let me know
when I'm back at twenty.'

  This was something he'd have to watch. There was a
natural tendency to lose height - and he had no instru-
ments to tell him exactly where he was. If he got too far
away from the zero-gravity of the axis, he might never be
able to climb back to it. Fortunately, there was a wide
margin for error, and there was always someone watching
his progress through a telescope at the Hub.

  He was now well out over the Sea, pedalling along at a
steady twenty kilometres an hour. In five minutes, he
would be over New York; already the island looked
rather like a ship, sailing for ever round and round the
Cylindrical Sea.

  When he reached New York, he flew a circle over it,
stopping several times so that his little TV camera could
send back steady, vibration-free images. The panorama of
buildings, towers, industrial plants, power stations - or
whatever they were - was fascinating but essentially
meaningless. No matter how long he stared at its com-
plexity, he was unlikely to learn anything. The camera
would record far more details than he could possibly as-
similate; and one day - perhaps years hence - some stu-
dent might find in them the key to Rama's secrets.

  After leaving New York, he crossed the other half of
the Sea in only fifteen minutes. Though he was not aware
of it, he had been flying fast over water, but as soon as he
reached the south coast he unconsciously relaxed and his
speed dropped by several kilometres an hour. He might
be in wholly alien territory - but at least he was over
land.

  As soon as he had crossed the great cliff that formed the
Sea's southern limit, he panned the TV camera com-
pletely round the circle of the world.

  'Beautiful!' said Hub Control. 'This will keep the map-
makers happy. How are you feeling?'

  'I'm fine - just a little fatigue, but no more than I
expected. How far do you make me from the Pole?'

  'Fifteen point six kilometres.'

  'Tell me when I'm at ten; I'll take a rest then. And
make sure I don't get low again. I'll start climbing when
I've five to go.'

  Twenty minutes later the world was closing in upon
him; he had come to the end of the cylindrical section,
and was entering the southern dome.

  He had studied it for hours through the telescopes at
the other end of Rama, and had learned its geography by
heart. Even so, that had not fully prepared him for the
spectacle all around him.

  In almost every way the southern and northern ends of
Rama differed completely. Here was no triad of stair-
ways, no series of narrow, concentric plateaux, no sweep-
ing curve from hub to plain. Instead, there was an im-
mense central spike, more than five kilometres long, ex-
tending along the axis. Six smaller ones, half this size,
were equally spaced around it; the whole assembly
looked like a group of remarkably symmetrical stalactites,
hanging from the roof of a cave. Or, inverting the point
of view, the spires of some Cambodian temple, set at the
bottom of a crater...

  Linking these slender, tapering towers, and curving
down from them to merge eventually in the cylindrical
plain, were flying buttresses that looked massive enough
to bear the weight of a world. And this, - perhaps, was
their function, if they were indeed the elements of some
exotic drive units, as some had suggested.

  Lieutenant Pak approached the central spike cautiously,
stopped pedalling while he was still a hundred metres
away, and let Dragonfly drift to rest. He checked the
radiation level, and found only Rama's very low back-
ground. There might be forces at work here which no
human instruments could detect, but that was another
unavoidable risk.

  'What can you see?' Hub Control asked anxiously.

  'Just Big Horn - it's absolutely smooth - no markings -
and the point's so sharp you could use it as a needle. I'm
almost scared to go near it.'

  He was only half joking. It seemed incredible that so
massive an object should taper to such a geometrically
perfect point. Jimmy had seen collections of insects im-
paled upon pins, and he had no desire for his own Drag-
onfly to meet a similar fate.

  He pedalled slowly forward until the spike had flared
out to several metres in diameter, then stopped again.
Opening a small container, he rather gingerly extracted a
sphere about as big as a baseball, and tossed it towards
the spike. As it drifted away, it played out a barely visible
thread.

  The sticky-bomb hit the smoothly curving surface -
and did not rebound. Jimmy gave the thread an experi-
mental twitch, then a harder tug. Like a fisherman haul-
ing in his catch, he slowly wound Dragonfly across to the
tip of the appropriately christened 'Big Horn', until he
was able to put out his hand and make contact with it.

  'I suppose you could call this some kind of touchdown,'
he reported to Hub Control. 'It feels like glass - almost
frictionless, and slightly warm. The sticky-bomb worked
fine. Now I'm trying the mike ... let's see if the suction
pad holds as well ... plugging in the leads ... anything
coming through?'

  There was a long pause from the Hub; then Control
said disgustedly: 'Not a damn thing, except the usual
thermal noises. Will you tap it with a piece of metal?
Then at least we'll find if it's hollow.'

  'OK. Now what?'

  'We'd like you to fly along the spike, making a com-
plete scan every half-kilometre, and looking out for any-
thing unusual. Then, if you're sure it's safe, you might go
across to one of the Little Horns. But only if you're cer-
tain you can get back to zero gee without any problems.'

  'Three kilometres from the axis - that's slightly above
lunar gravity. Dragonfly was designed for that. I'll just
have to work harder.'

  'Jimmy, this is the Captain. I've got second thoughts on
that. Judging by your pictures, the smaller spikes are just
the same as the big one. Get the best coverage of them
you can with the zoom lens. I don't want you leaving the
low-gravity region ... unless you see something that looks
very important. Then we'll talk it over.

  'OK, Skipper,' said Jimmy, and perhaps there was just
a trace of relief in his voice. 'I'll stay close to Big Horn.
Here we go again.'

  He felt he was dropping straight downwards into a
narrow valley between a group of incredibly tall and
slender mountains. -Big Horn now towered a kilometre
above him, and the six spikes of the Little Horns were
looming up all around. The complex of buttresses and
flying arches which surrounded the lower slopes was ap-
proaching rapidly; he wondered if he could make a safe
landing somewhere down there in that Cyclopean archi-
tecture. He could no longer land on Big Horn itself, for
the gravity on its widening slopes was now too power-
ful to be counteracted by the feeble force of the sticky-
bomb.

  As he came even closer to the South Pole, he began to
feel more and more like a sparrow flying beneath the
vaulted roof of some great cathedral - though no cathe-
dial ever built had been even one hundredth the size of
this place. He wondered if it was indeed a religious
shrine, or something remotely analogous, but quickly dis-
missed the idea. Nowhere in Rama had there been any
trace of artistic expression; everything was purely func-
tional. Perhaps the Ramans felt that they already knew
the ultimate secrets of the universe, and were no longer -
haunted by the yearnings and aspirations that drove
mankind.

  That was a chilling thought, quite alien to Jimmy's
usual not-very-profound philosophy; he felt an urgent
need to resume contact, and reported his situation back
to his distant friends.

  'Say again, Dragonfly,' replied Hub Control. 'We can't
understand you - your transmission is garbled.'

  'I repeat - I'm near the base of Little Horn number
Six, and am using the sticky-bomb to haul myself in.'

  'Understand only partially. Can you hear me?'

  'Yes, perfectly. Repeat, perfectly.'

  Please start counting numbers.'

  'One, two, three, four...'

  'Got part of that. Give us beacon for fifteen seconds,
then go back to voice.'

  'Here it is.'

  Jimmy switched on the low-powered beacon which
would locate him anywhere inside Rama, and counted off
the seconds. When he went over to voice again he asked
plaintively: 'What's happening? Can you hear me now?'

  Presumably Hub didn't, because the controller then
asked for fifteen seconds of TV. Not until Jimmy had re-
peated the question twice did the message get through.

  'Glad you can hear us OK, Jimmy. But there's some-
thing very peculiar happening at your end. Listen.'

  Over the radio, he heard the familiar whistle of his
own beacon, played back to him. For a moment it was
perfectly normal; then a weird distortion crept into it.
The thousand-cycle whistle became modulated by a deep,
throbbing pulse so low that it was almost beneath the
threshold of hearing; it was a kind of basso-profundo
flutter in which each individual vibration could be
heard. And the modulation was itself modulated; it rose
and fell, rose and fell with a period of about five seconds.

  Never for a moment did it occur to Jimmy that there
was something wrong with his radio transmitter. This
was from outside; though what it was, and what it meant,
was beyond his imagination.

  Hub Control was not much wiser, but at least it had a
theory.

  'We think you must be in some kind of very intense
field - probably magnetic - with a frequency of about ten
cycles. It may be strong enough to be dangerous. Suggest
you get Out right away - it may only be local. Switch on
your beacon again, and we'll play it back to you. Then you
can tell when you're getting clear of the interference.

  Jimmy hastily jerked the sticky-bomb loose and aban-
doned his attempt to land. He swung Dragonfly round in
a wide circle, listening as he did so to the sound that wav-
ered in his earphones. After flying only a few metres, he
could tell that its intensity was falling rapidly; as Hub
Control had guessed, it was extremely localized.

  He paused for a moment at the last spot where he
could hear it, like a faint throbbing deep in his brain. So
might a primitive savage have listened in awestruck ig-
norance to the low humming of a giant power trans-
former. And even the savage might have guessed that the
sound he heard was merely the stray leakage from colossal
energies, fully controlled, but biding their time...

  Whatever this sound meant, Jimmy was glad to be
clear of it. This was no place, among the overwhelming
architecture of the South Pole, for a lone man to listen to
the voice of Rama.

   CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Electric Wind

As Jimmy turned homewards, the northern end of Rama
seemed incredibly far away. Even the three giant stair-
ways were barely visible, as a faint Y etched on the dome
that closed the world. The band of the Cylindrical Sea
was a wide and menacing barrier, waiting to swallow him
up if, like Icarus, his fragile wings should fail.

  But he had come all this way with no problems, and
though he was feeling slightly tired he now felt that he
had nothing to worry about. He had not even touched his
food or water, and had been too excited to rest. On the
return journey, he would relax and take it easy. He was
also cheered by the thought that the homeward trip
could be twenty kilometres shorter than the outward one,
for as long as he cleared the Sea, he could make an
emergency landing anywhere in the northern continent.
That would be a nuisance, because he would have a long
walk - and much worse, would have to abandon Dragon-
fly - but it gave him a very comforting safety margin.

  He was now gaining altitude, climbing back towards
the central spike; Big Horn's tapering needle still
stretched for a kilometre ahead of him, and sometimes he
felt it was the axis on Which this whole world turned.

  He had almost reached the tip of Big Horn when he
became aware of a curious sensation; a feeling of forebod-
ing, and indeed of physical as well as psychological dis-
comfort, had come over him. He suddenly recalled - and
this did nothing at all to help - a phrase he had once
come across: 'Someone is walking over your grave.'

  At first he shrugged it off, and continued his steady
pedalling. He certainly had no intention of reporting
anything as tenuous as a vague malaise to Hub Control,
but as it grew steadily worse he was tempted to do so. It
could not possibly be psychological; if it was, his mind
was much more powerful than he realized. Forte could,
quite literally, feel his skin beginning to crawl

  Now seriously alarmed, he stopped in mid-air and be-
gan to consider the situation. What made it all the more
peculiar was the fact that this depressed heavy feeling was
not completely novel; he had known it before, but could
not remember where.

  He looked around him. Nothing had changed. The
great spike of Big Horn was a few hundred metres above,
with the other side of Rama spanning the sky beyond
that. Eight kilometres below lay the complicated patch-
work of the Southern continent, full of wonders that no
other man would ever see. In all the utterly alien yet now
familiar landscape, he could find no cause for his discom-
fort.

  Something was tickling the back of his hand; for a
moment, he thought an insect had landed there, and
brushed it away without looking. He had only half-com-
pleted the swift motion when he realized what he was
doing and checked himself, feeling slightly foolish. Of
course, no one had ever seen an insect in Rama...

  He lifted his hand, and stared at it, mildly puzzled
because the tickling sensation was still there. It was then
that he noticed that every individual hair was standing
straight upright. All the way up his forearm it was the
same - and so it was with his head, when he checked with
an exploring hand.

  So that was the trouble. He was in a tremendously
powerful electric field; the oppressed, heavy sensation he
had felt was that which sometimes precedes a thunder-
storm on Earth.

  The sudden realization of his predicament brought
Jimmy very near to panic. Never before in his life had he
been in real physical danger. Like all spacemen, he had
known moments of frustration with bulky equipment,
and times when, owing to mistakes or inexperience, he
had wrongly believed he was in a perilous situation. But
none of these episodes had lasted more than a few min-
utes, and usually he was able to laugh at them almost at
once.

  This time there was no quick way out. He felt naked
and alone in a suddenly hostile sky, surrounded by ti-
tanic forces which might discharge their furies at any
moment. Dragonfly - already fragile enough - now
seemed more insubstantial than the finest gossamer. The
first detonation of the gathering storm would blast her to
fragments.

  'Hub Control,' he said urgently. 'There's a static
charge building up around me. I think there's going to
be a thunderstorm at any moment.'

  He had barely finished speaking when there was a
flicker of light behind him; by the time he had counted
ten, the first crackling rumble arrived. Three kilometres -
that put it back around the Little Horns. He looked to-
wards them and saw that every one of the six needles
seemed to be on fire. Brush discharges, hundreds of
metres long, were dancing from their points, as if they
were giant lightning conductors.

  What was happening back there could take place on
an even larger scale near the tapering spike of Big Horn.
His best move would be to get as far as possible from this
dangerous structure, and to seek clear air. He started
to pedal again, accelerating as swiftly as he could with-
out putting too great a strain on Dragonfly. At the
same time he began to lose altitude; even though
this would mean entering the region of higher gravity,
he was now prepared to take such a risk. Eight kilo-
metres was much too far from the ground for his peace of
mind.

  The ominous black spike of Big Horn was still free of
visible discharges, but he did not doubt that tremendous
potentials were building up there. From time to time the
thunder still reverberated behind him, rolling round and
round the circumference of the world. It suddenly oc-
curred to Jimmy how strange it was to have such a storm
In a perfectly clear sky; then he realized that this was not
a meteorological phenomenon at all. In fact, it might be
only a trivial leakage of energy from some hidden source,
deep in the southern cap of Rama. But why now? And,
even more important - what next?

  He was now well past the tip of Big Horn, and hoped
that he would soon be beyond the range of any lightning
discharges. But now he had another problem; the air was
becoming turbulent, and he had difficulty in controlling
Dragonfly. A wind seemed to have sprung up from no-
where, and if conditions became much worse the bike's
fragile skeleton would be endangered. He pedalled
grimly on, trying to smooth out the buffeting by varia-
tions in power and movements of his body. Because
Dragonfly was almost an extension of himself, he was
partly successful; but he did not like the faint creaks of
protest that came from the main spar, nor the way in
which the wings twisted with every gust.

  And there was something else that worried him - a
faint rushing sound, steadily growing in strength, that
seemed to come from the direction of Big Horn. It soun-
ded like gas escaping from a valve under pressure, and he
wondered if it had anything to do with the turbulence
which he was battling. Whatever its cause, it gave him yet
further grounds for disquiet.

  From time to time he reported these phenomena,
rather briefly and breathlessly, to Hub Control. No one
there could give him any advice, or even suggest what
might be happening; but it was reassuring to hear the
voices of his friends, even though he was now beginning
to fear that he would never see them again.
  The turbulence was still increasing. It almost felt as if
he was entering a jet stream - which he had once done,
in search of a record, while flying a high-altitude glider
on Earth. But what could possibly create a jet stream
inside Rama?

  He had asked himself the right question; as soon as he
had formulated it, he knew the answer.

  The sound he had heard was the electric wind carrying
away the tremendous ionization that must be building
up around Big Horn. Charged air was spraying out along
the axis of Rama, and more air was flowing into the low-
pressure region behind. He looked back at that gigantic
and now doubly threatening needle, trying to visualize
the boundaries of the gale that was blowing from it. Per-
haps the best tactic would be to fly by ear, getting as far
as possible away from the ominous hissing.

  Rama spared him the necessity of choice. A sheet of
flame burst out behind him, filling the sky. He had time
to see it split into six ribbons of fire, stretching from the
tip of Big Horn to each of the Little Horns. Then the
concussion reached him.

   CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Icarus

Jimmy Pak had barely time to radio: 'The wing's buck-
ling - I'm going to crash - I'm going to crash!' when
Dragonfly started to fold up gracefully around him. The
left wing snapped cleanly in the middle, and the outer
section drifted away like a gently falling leaf. The right
wing put up a more complicated performance. It twisted
round at the root, and angled back so sharply that its
tip became entangled in the tail. Jimmy felt that
he was sitting in a broken kite, slowly falling down the
sky.

  Yet he was not quite helpless; the airscrew still worked,
and while he had power there was still some measure of
control. He had perhaps five minutes in which to use it.

  Was there any hope of reaching the Sea? No - it was
much too far away. Then he remembered that he was still
thinking in terrestrial terms; though he was a good swim-
mer, it would be hours before he could possibly be res-
cued, and in that time the poisonous waters would un-
doubtedly have killed him. His only hope was to come
down on land; the problem of the sheer southern cliff he
would think about later - if there was any 'later'.
  He was falling very slowly, here in this tenth-of-a-grav-
ity zone, but would soon start to accelerate as he got fur-
ther away from the axis. However, air-drag would com-
plicate the situation, and would prevent him from build-
ing up too swift a rate of descent. Dragonfly, even without
power, would act as a crude parachute. The few kilo-
grammes of thrust he could still provide might make all the
difference between life and death; that was his only hope.

  Hub had stopped talking; his friends could see exactly
what was happening to him and knew that there was no
way their words could help. Jimmy was now doing the
most skilful flying of, his life; it was too bad, he thought
with grim humour, that his audience was so small, and
could not appreciate the finer details of his performance.

  He was going down in a wide spiral, and as long as its
pitch remained fairly flat his chances of survival were
good. His pedalling was helping to keep Dragonfly air-
borne, though he was afraid to exert maximum power in
case the broken wings came completely adrift And every
time he swung southwards, he could appreciate the fan-
tastic display that Rama had kindly arranged for his
benefit.
  The streamers of lightning still played from the tip of
Big Horn down to the lesser peaks beneath, but now the
whole pattern was rotating. The six-pronged crown of fire
was turning against the spin of Rama, making one revo-
lution every few seconds. Jimmy felt that he was watch-
ing a giant electric motor in operation. and perhaps that
was not hopelessly far from the truth.

  He was halfway down to the plain, still orbiting in a
fiat spiral, when the firework display suddenly ceased. He
could feel the tension drain from the sky and knew, with-
out looking, that the hairs on his arms were no longer
straining upright. There was nothing to distract or
hinder him now, during the last few minutes of his fight
for life.

  Now that he could be certain of the general area in
which he must land, he started to study it intently. Much
of this region was a checkerboard of totally conflicting
environments, as if a mad landscape gardener had been
given a free hand and told to exercise his imagination to
the utmost. The squares of the checkerboard were almost
a kilometre on a side, and though most of them were flat
he could not be sure if they were solid, their colours and
textures varied so greatly. He decided to wait until the
last possible minute before making a decision - it in-
deed he had any choice.

  When there were a few hundred metres to go, he made
a last call to the Hub.

  'I've still got some control - will be down in half a
minute - will call you then.'

  That was optimistic, and everyone knew it. But he re-
fused to say goodbye; he wanted his comrades to know
that he had gone down fighting, and without fear.

  Indeed, he felt very little fear, and this surprised him,
for he had never thought of himself as a particularly
brave man. It was almost as if he was watching the strug-
gles of a complete stranger, and was not himself person-
ally involved. Rather, he was studying an interesting
problem in aerodynamics, and changing various para-
meters to see what would happen. Almost the only emo-
tion he felt was a certain remote regret for lost oppor-
tunities - of which the most important was the forthcom-
ing Lunar Olympics. One future at least was decided;
Dragonfly would never show her paces on the Moon.

  A hundred metres to go; his ground speed seemed
acceptable, but how fast was he falling? And here was
one piece of luck - the terrain was completely flat. He
would put forth all his strength in a final burst of power,
starting - NOW!

  The right wing, having done its duty, finally tore off at
the roots. Dragonfly started to roll over, and he tried to
correct by throwing the weight of his body against the
spin. He was looking directly at the curving arch of land-
scape sixteen kilometres away when he hit.
  It seemed altogether unfair and unreasonable that the
sky should be so hard.

   CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - First Contact

When Jimmy Pak returned to consciousness, the first
thing he became aware of was a splitting headache. He
almost welcomed it; at least it proved that he was still
alive.

  Then he tried to move, and at once a wide selection of
aches and pains brought themselves to his attention. But
as far as he could tell, nothing seemed to be broken.

  After that, he risked opening his eyes, but closed them
at once when he found himself staring straight into the
band of light along the ceiling of the world. As a cure
for headache, that view was not recommended.

  He was still lying there, regaining his strength and won-
dering how soon it would be safe to open his eyes, when
there was a sudden crunching noise from close at hand.
Turning his head very slowly towards the source of the
sound, he risked a look - and almost lost consciousness
again.

  Not more than five metres away, a large crab-like
creature was apparently dining on the wreckage of poor
Dragonfly. When Jimmy recovered his wits he rolled
slowly and quietly away from the monster, expecting at
every moment to be seized by its claws, when it discov-
ered that more appetizing fare was available. However, it
took not the slightest notice of him; when he had in-
creased their mutual separation to ten metres, he cauti-
ously propped himself up in a sitting position.

  From this greater distance, the thing did not appear
quite so formidable. It had a low, flat body about two
metres long and one wide, supported on six triple-jointed
legs. Jimmy saw that he was mistaken in assuming that it
had been eating Dragonfly; in fact, he could not see any
sign of a mouth. The creature was actually doing a neat
job of demolition, using scissor-like claws to chop the sky-
bike into small pieces. A whole row of manipulators,
which looked uncannily like tiny human hands, then
transferred the fragments to a steadily growing pile on
the animal's back.

  But was it an animal? Though that had been Jimmy's
first reaction, now he had second thoughts. There was a
purposefulness about its behaviour which suggested fairly
high intelligence; he could see no reason why any crea-
ture of pure instincts should carefully collect the scat-
tered pieces of his sky-bike - unless, perhaps, it was gath-
ering material for a nest.

  Keeping a wary eye on the crab, which still ignored
him completely, Jimmy struggled to his feet. A few wav-
ering steps demonstrated that he could still walk, though
he was not sure if he could outdistance those six legs.
Then he switched on his radio, never doubting that it
would be operating. A crash that he could survive would
not even have been noticed by its solid-state electronics.

  'Hub Control,' he said softly. 'Can you receive me?'

  'Thank God! Are you OK?'

  'Just a bit shaken. Take a look at this.'

  He turned his camera towards the crab, just in time to
record the final demolition of Dragonfly's wing.

  'What the devil is it - and why is it chewing up your
bike?'

  'Wish I knew. It's finished with Dragonfly. I'm going to
back away, in case it wants to start on me.'

  Jimmy slowly retreated, never taking his eyes off the
crab. It was now moving round .and round in a steadily
widening spiral, apparently searching for fragments it
might have overlooked, and so Jimmy was able to get an
overall view of it for the first time.

  Now that the initial shock had worn off, he could
appreciate that it was quite a handsome beast. The name
'crab' which he had automatically given it was perhaps a
little misleading; if it had not been so impossibly large,
he might have called it a beetle. Its carapace had a beaut-
iful metallic sheen; in fact, he would almost have been
prepared to swear that it was metal.

  That was an interesting idea. Could it be a robot, and
not an animal? He stared at the crab intently with this
thought in mind, analysing all the details of its anatomy.
Where it should have had a mouth was a collection of
manipulators that reminded Jimmy strongly of the multi-
purpose knives that are the delight of all red-blooded
boys; there were pinchers, probes, rasps and even some-
thing that looked like a drill. But none of this was de-
cisive. On Earth, the insect world had matched all these
tools, and many more. The animal-or-robot question re-
mained in perfect balance in his mind.

  The eyes, which might have settled the matter, left it
even more ambiguous. They were so deeply recessed in
protective hoods that it was impossible to tell whether
their lenses were made of crystal or jelly. They were quite
expressionless and of a startlingly vivid blue. Though
they had been directed towards Jimmy several times, they
had never shown the slightest flicker of interest. In his
perhaps biased opinion, that decided the level of the
creature's intelligence. An entity - robot or animal -
which could ignore a human being could not be very
bright.

  It had now stopped its circling, and stood still for a few
seconds, as if listening to some inaudible message. Then
it set off, with a curious rolling gait, in the general direc-
tion of the Sea. It moved in a perfectly straight line at a
steady four or five kilometres an hour, and had already
travelled a couple of hundred metres before Jimmy's still
slightly-shocked mind registered the fact that the last sad
relics of his beloved Dragonfly were being carried away
from him. He set off in a hot and indignant pursuit.

  His action was not wholly illogical. The crab was head-
ing towards the Sea - and if any rescue was possible, it
could only be from this direction. Moreover, he wanted
to discover what the creature would do with its trophy;
that should reveal something about its motivation and
intelligence.

  Because he was still bruised and stiff, it took Jimmy
several minutes to catch up with the purposefully-moving
crab. When he had done so, he followed it at a respectful
distance, until he felt sure that it did not resent his pres-
ence. It was then - that he noticed his water-flask and
emergency ration pack among the debris of Dragonfly,
and instantly felt both hungry and thirsty.

  There, scuttling away from him at a remorseless five
kilometres an hour, was the only food and drink in all
this half of the world. Whatever the risk, he had to get
hold of it.

  He cautiously closed in on the crab, approaching from
right rear. While he kept station with it, he studied the
complicated rhythm of its legs, until he could anticipate
where they would be at any moment. When he was ready,
he muttered a quick 'Excuse me,' and shot swiftly in to
grab his property. Jimmy had never dreamed that he
would one day have to exercise the skills of a pickpocket,
and was delighted with his success. He was out again in
less than a second, and the crab never slackened its steady
pace.

  He dropped back a dozen metres, moistened his lips
from the flask, and started to chew a bar of meat concen-
trate. The little victory made him feel much happier;
now he could even risk thinking about his sombre future.

  While there was life, there was hope; yet he could im-
agine no way in which he could possibly be rescued. Even
if his colleagues crossed the Sea, how could he reach
them, half a kilometre below? 'We'll find a way down
somehow,' Hub Control had promised. 'That cliff can't
go right round the world, without a break anywhere.' He
had been tempted to answer 'Why not?', but had thought
better of it.

  One of the strangest things about walking inside Rama
was that you could always see your destination. Here, the
curve of the world did not hide - it revealed. For some
time Jimmy had been aware of the crab's objective; up
there in the land which seemed to rise before him was a
half-kilometre-wide pit. It was one of three in the south-
ern continent; from the Hub, it had been impossible to
see how deep they were. All had been named after promi-
nent lunar craters, and he was approaching Copernicus.
The name was hardly appropriate, for there were no sur-
rounding hills and no central peaks. This Copernicus was
merely a deep shaft or well, with perfectly vertical sides.

  When he came close enough to look into it, Jimmy was
able to see a pool of ominous, leaden-green water at least
half a kilometre below. This would put it just about level
with the Sea, and he wondered if they were connected.

  Winding down the interior of the well was a spiral
ramp, completely recessed into the sheer wall, so that the
effect was rather like that of rifling in an immense gun-
barrel. There seemed to be a remarkable number of
turns; not until Jimmy had traced them for several revo-
lutions, getting more and more confused in the process,
did he realize that there was not one ramp but three,
totally independent and 120 degrees apart. In any other
background than Rama, the whole concept would have
been an impressive architectural tour de force.

  The three ramps led straight down into the pool and
disappeared beneath its opaque surface. Near the water-
line Jimmy could see a group of black tunnels or caves;
they looked rather sinister, and he wondered if they were
inhabited. Perhaps the Ramans were amphibious...

  As the crab approached the edge of the well, Jimmy
assumed that it was going to descend one of the ramps -
perhaps taking the wreckage of Dragonfly to some entity
who would be able to evaluate it. Instead, the creature
walked straight to the brink, extended almost half its
body over the gulf without any sign of hesitation, though
an error of a few centimetres would have been disastrous
- and gave a brisk shrug. The fragments of Dragonfly
went fluttering down into the depths; there were tears in
Jimmy's eyes as he watched them go. So much, he thought
bitterly, for this creature's intelligence.

  Having disposed of the garbage, the crab swung
around and started to walk towards Jimmy, standing
only about ten metres away. Am I going to get the same
treatment? he wondered. He hoped the camera was not
too unsteady as he showed Hub Control the rapidly ap-
proaching monster. 'What do you advise?' he whispered
anxiously, without much hope that he would get a useful
answer. It was some small consolation to realize that he
was making history, and his mind raced through the ap-
proved patterns for such a meeting. Until now, all of
these had been purely theoretical. He would be the first
man to check them in practice.

  'Don't run until you're sure it's hostile', Hub Control
whispered back at him. Run where? Jimmy asked him-
self. He thought he could out-distance the thing in a
hundred metre sprint, but had a sick certainty that it
could wear him down over the long haul.

  Slowly, Jimmy held up his outstretched hands. Men
had been arguing for two hundred years about this ges-
ture; would every creature, everywhere in the universe,
interpret this as 'See no weapons?' But no one could
think of anything better.

  The crab showed no reaction whatsoever, nor did it
slacken its pace. Ignoring Jimmy completely, it. walked
straight past him and headed purposefully into the south.
Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of
Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away
across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his pres-
ence.
- He had seldom been so humiliated in his life. Then
Jimmy's sense of humour came to his rescue. After all, it
was no great matter to have been ignored by an animated
garbage truck. It would have been worse if it had greeted
him as a long-lost brother...

  He walked back to the rim of Copernicus, and stared
down into its opaque waters. For the first time, he noticed
that vague shapes - some of them quite large - were mov-
ing slowly back and forth beneath the surface. Presently
one of them headed towards the nearest spiral ramp, and
something that looked like a multi-legged tank started on
the long ascent. At the rate it was going, Jimmy decided,
it would take almost an hour to get here; if it was a
threat, it was a very slow-moving one.
- Then he noticed a flicker of much more rapid move-
ment, near those cave-like openings down by the water-
line. Something was travelling very swiftly along the
ramp, but he could not focus clearly upon it, or discern
any definite shape. It was as if he was looking at a small
whirlwind or 'dust-devil', about the size of a man ...

  He blinked and shook his head, keeping his eyes closed
for several seconds. When he opened them again, the
apparition was gone.

  Perhaps the impact had shaken him up more than he
had realized; this was the first time he had ever suffered
from visual hallucinations. He would not mention it to
Hub Control.

  Nor would he bother to explore those ramps, as he had
half-thought of doing. It would obviously be a waste of
energy.
  The spinning phantom he had merely imagined seeing
had nothing to do with his decision.

  Nothing at all; for, of course, Jimmy did not believe in
ghosts.



   CHAPTER THIRTY- The Flower

Jimmy's exertions had made him thirsty, and he was
acutely conscious of the fact that in all this land there
was no water that a man could drink. With the contents
of his flask, he could probably survive a week - but for
what purpose? The best brains of Earth would soon be
focused on his problem; doubtless Commander Norton
would be bombarded with suggestions. But he could
imagine no way in which he could lower himself down
the face of that half-kilometre cliff. Even it he had a long
enough rope, there was nothing to which he could attach
it.

  Nevertheless, it was foolish - and unmanly - to give up
without a struggle. Any help would have to come from
the Sea, and while he was marching towards it he could
carry on with his job as if nothing had happened. No one
else would ever observe and photograph the varied ter-
rain through which he must pass, and that would guaran-
tee a posthumous immortality. Though he would have
preferred many other honours, that was better than noth-
ing.

  He was only three kilometres from the Sea as poor
Dragonfly could have flown, but it seemed unlikely that
he could reach it in a straight line; some of the terrain
ahead of him might prove too great an obstacle. That was
no problem, however, as there were plenty of alternative
routes. Jimmy could see them all, spread out on the great
curving map that swept up and away from him on
either side.

  He had plenty of time; he would start with the most
interesting scenery, even if it took him off his direct
route. About a kilometre away towards the right was a
square that glittered like cut glass - or a gigantic display
of jewellery. It was probably this thought that triggered
Jimmy's footsteps. Even a doomed man might reasonably
be expected to take some slight interest in a few thousand
square metres of gems.

  He was not particularly disappointed when they
turned out to be quartz crystals, millions of them, set in a
bed of sand. The adjacent square of the checkerboard
was rather more interesting, being covered with an ap-
parently random pattern of hollow metal columns, set
very close together and ranging in height from less than
one to more than five metres. It was completely impass-
able; only a tank could have crashed through that forest
of tubes.

  Jimmy walked between the crystals and the columns
until he came to the first crossroads. The square on the
right was a huge rug or tapestry made of woven wire; he
tried to prise a strand loose, but was unable to break it.

  On the left was a tessellation of hexagonal tiles, so
smoothly inlaid that there were no visible joints between
them. It would have appeared a continuous surface, had
the tiles not been coloured all the hues of the rainbow.
Jimmy spent many minutes trying to find two adjacent
tiles of the same colour, to see if he could then distin-
guish their boundaries, but he could not find a single
example of such coincidence.

  As he did a slow pan right around the crossroads, he
said plaintively to Hub Control: 'What do you think
this is? I feel I'm trapped in a giant jigsaw puzzle. Or is
this the Raman Art Gallery?'

  'We're as baffled as you, Jimmy. But there's never been
any sign that the Ramans go in for art. Let's wait until
we have some more examples before we jump to any con-
clusions.'

  The two examples he found at the next crossroads were
not much help. One was completely blank - a smooth,
neutral grey, hard but slippery to the touch. The other
was a soft sponge, perforated with billions upon billions of
tiny holes. He tested it with his foot, and the whole sur-
face undulated sickeningly beneath him like a barely
stabilized quicksand.

  At the next cross-roads he encountered something strik-
ingly like a ploughed field - except that the furrows were
a uniform metre in depth, and the material of which they
were made had the texture of a file or rasp. But he paid
little attention to this, because the square adjacent to it
was the most thought-provoking of all that he had so far
met. At last there was something that he could under.
stand; and it was more than a little disturbing.

  The entire square was surrounded by a fence, so con-
ventional that he would not have looked at it twice had
he seen it on Earth. There were posts - apparently of
metal - five metres apart, with six strands of wire strung
taut between them.

  Beyond this fence was a second, identical one - and
beyond that, a third. It was another typical example of
Raman redundancy; whatever was penned inside this en-
closure would have no chance of breaking out. There was
no entrance - no gates that could be swung open to drive
in the beast, or beasts, that were presumably kept here.
Instead, there was a single hole, like a smaller version of
Copernicus, in the centre of the square.

  Even in different circumstances, Jimmy would prob-
ably not have hesitated, but now he had nothing to lose.
He quickly scaled all three fences, walked over to the
hole, and peered into it.

  Unlike Copernicus, this well was only fifty metres deep.
There were three tunnel exits at the bottom, each of
which looked large enough to accommodate an elephant.
And that was all.

  After staring for some time, Jimmy decided that the
only thing that made sense about the arrangement was
for the floor down there to be an elevator. But what it
elevated he was never likely to know; he could only guess
that it was quite large, and possibly quite dangerous.

  During the next few hours, he walked more than ten
kilometres along the edge of the Sea, and the checker-
board squares had begun to blur together in his memory.
He had seen some that were totally enclosed in tent-like
structures of wire mesh, as if they were giant bird-cages.
There were others which seemed to be pools of congealed
liquid, full of swirl-patterns; however, when he tested
them gingerly, they were quite solid. And there was
one so utterly black that he could not even see it clearly;
only the sense of touch told him that anything was
there.

  Yet now there was a subtle modulation into something
he could understand. Ranging one after the other to-
wards the south was a series of - no other word would do
- fields. He might have been walking past an experi-
mental farm on Earth; each square was a smooth expanse
of carefully levelled earth, the first he had ever seen in
the metallic landscapes of Rama.

  The great fields were virgin, lifeless - waiting for crops
that had never been planted. Jimmy wondered what
their purpose could be, since it was incredible that crea-
tures as advanced as the Ramans would engage in any
form of agriculture; even on Earth, farming was no more
than a popular hobby and a source of exotic luxury
foods. But he could swear that these were potential farms,
immaculately prepared. He had never seen earth that
looked so clean; each square was covered with a great
sheet of tough, transparent plastic. He tried to cut
through it to obtain a sample, but his knife would barely
scratch the surface.

  Further inland were other fields, and on many of them
were complicated constructions of rods and wires, pre-
sumably intended for the support of climbing plants.
They looked very bleak and desolate, like leafless trees in
the depths of winter. The winter they had known must
have been long and terrible indeed, and these few weeks
of light and warmth might be only a brief interlude be-
fore it came again.

  Jimmy never knew what made him stop and look more
closely into the metal maze to the south. Unconsciously,
his mind must have been checking every detail around
him; it had noticed, in this fantastically alien landscape,
something even more anomalous.

  About a quarter of a kilometre away, in the middle of
a trellis of wires and rods, glowed a single speck of colour.
It was so small and inconspicuous that it was almost at
the limit of visibility; on Earth, no one would have
looked at it twice. Yet undoubtedly one of the reasons he
had noticed it now was because it reminded him of
Earth ...

  He did not report to Hub Control until he was sure
that there was no mistake, and that wishful thinking had
not deluded him. Not until he was only a few metres
away could he be completely sure that life as he knew it
had intruded into the sterile, aseptic world of Rama. For
blooming here in lonely splendour at the edge of the
southern continent was a flower.

  As he came closer, it was obvious to Jimmy that some-
thing had gone wrong. There was a hole in the sheathing
that, presumably, protected this layer of earth from con-
tamination by unwanted life-forms. Through this break
extended a green stem, about as thick as a man's little
finger, which twined its way up through the trellis-work.
A metre from the ground it burst into an efflorescence of
bluish leaves, shaped more like feathers than the foliage
of any plant known to Jimmy. The stem ended, at eye-
level, in what he had first taken to be a single flower.
Now he saw, with no surprise at all, that it was actually
three flowers tightly packed together.

  The petals were brightly coloured tubes about five
centimetres long; there were at least fifty in each bloom,
and they glittered with such metallic blues, violets and
greens, that they seemed more like the wings of a butter-
fly than anything in the vegetable kingdom. Jimmy knew
practically nothing about botany, but he was puzzled to
see no trace of any structures resembling petals or sta-
mens. He wondered if the likeness to terrestrial flowers
might be a pure coincidence; perhaps this was something
more akin to a coral polyp. In either case, it would seem
to imply the existence of small, airborne creatures to
serve either as fertilizing agents - or as food.

  It did not really matter. Whatever the scientific defini-
tion, to Jimmy this was a flower. The strange miracle, the
un-Raman-like accident of its existence here reminded
him of all that he would never see again; and he was
determined to possess it.

  That would not be easy. It was more than ten metres
away, separated from him by a lattice-work made of thin
rods. They formed a cubic pattern, repeated over and
over again, less than forty centimetres on either side.
Jimmy would not have been flying sky-bikes unless he
had been slim and wiry, so he knew he could crawl
through the interstices of the grid. But getting out again
might be quite a different matter; it would certainly be
impossible for him to turn around, so he would have to
retreat backwards.

  Hub Control was delighted with his discovery, when he
had described the flower and scanned it from every avail-
able angle. There was no objection when he said: 'I'm
going after it.' Nor did he expect there to be; his life was
now his own, to do with as he pleased.

  He stripped off all his clothes, grasped the smooth
metal rods, and started to wriggle into the framework. It
was a tight fit; he felt like a prisoner escaping through
the bars of his cell. When he had inserted himself com-
pletely into the lattice he tried backing out again, just to
see if there were any problems. It was considerably more
difficult, since he now had to use his outstretched arms for
pushing instead of pulling, but he saw no reason why he
should get helplessly trapped.

  Jimmy was a man of action and impulse, not of intro-
spection. As he squirmed uncomfortably along the nar-
row corridor of rods, he wasted no time asking himself
just why he was performing so quixotic a feat. He had
never been interested in flowers in his whole life, yet now
he was gambling his last energies to collect one.
  It was true that this specimen was unique, and of
enormous scientific value. But he really wanted it be-
cause it was his last link with the world of life and the
planet of his birth.

  Yet when the flower was in his grasp, he had sudden
qualms. Perhaps it was the only flower that grew in the
whole of Rama; was he justified in picking it?

  If he needed any excuse, he could console himself with
the thought that the Ramans themselves had not in-
cluded it in their plans. It was obviously a freak, growing
ages too late - or too soon. But lie did not really require
an excuse, and his hesitation was only momentary. He
reached out, grasped the stem, and gave a sharp jerk.

  The flower came away easily enough; he also collected
two of the leaves, then started to back slowly through the
lattice. Now that he had only one free hand, progress was
extremely difficult, even painful, and he soon had to
pause to regain his breath. It was then that he noticed
that the feathery leaves were closing, and the headless stem
was slowly unwinding itself from its supports. As he
watched with a mixture of fascination and dismay, he
saw that the whole plant was steadily retreating into the
ground, like a mortally injured snake crawling back into
its hole.

  I've murdered something beautiful, Jimmy told him-
self. But then Rama had killed him. He was only collect-
ing what was his rightful due.

   CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - Terminal Velocity

Commander Norton had never yet lost a man, and he
had no intention of starting now. Even before Jimmy had
set off for the South Pole, he had been considering ways
of rescuing him in the event of accident; the problem,
however, had turned out to be so difficult that he had
found no answer. All that he had managed to do was to
eliminate every obvious solution.

  How does one climb a half-kilometre vertical cliff; even
in reduced gravity? With the right equipment - and
training - it would be easy enough. But there were no
piton-guns aboard Endeavour, and no one could think of
any other practical way of driving the necessary hundreds
of spikes into that hard, mirror surface.

  He had glanced briefly at more exotic solutions, some
frankly crazy. Perhaps a simp, fitted with suction pads,
could make the ascent. But even if this scheme was
practical, how long would it take to manufacture and test
such equipment - and to train a simp to use it? He
doubted if a man would have the necessary strength to
perform the feat.

  Then there was more advanced technology. The EVA
propulsion units were tempting, but their thrust was too
small, since they were designed for zero-gee operation.
They could not possibly lift the weight of a man, even
against Rama's modest gravity.

  Could an EVA thrust be sent up on automatic control,
carrying only a rescue line? He had tried out this idea on
Sergeant Myron, who had promptly shot it down in
flames. There were, the engineer pointed out, severe stab-
ility problems; they might be solved, but it would take a
long time - much longer than they could afford.

  What about balloons? There seemed a faint possibility
here, if they could devise an envelope and a sufficiently
compact source of heat. This was the only approach that
Norton had not dismissed, when the problem suddenly
ceased to be one of theory, and became a matter of life
and death, dominating the news in all the inhabited
worlds.

  While Jimmy was making his trek along the edge of
the Sea, half the crackpots in the solar system were trying
to save him. At Fleet Headquarters, all the suggestions
were considered, and about one in a thousand was for-
warded to Endeavour. Dr Carlisle Perera' arrived twice -
once via the Survey's own network, and once by PLANET-
COM, RAMA PRIORITY. It had taken the scientist approxi-
mately five minutes of thought and one millisecond of
computer time.

  At first, Commander Norton thought it was a joke in
very poor taste. Then he saw the sender's name and the
attached calculations, and did a quick double-take.

  He handed the message to Karl Mercer.

  'What do you think of this?' he asked, in as non-com-
mittal a tone of voice as he could manage.

  Karl read it swiftly, then said, 'Well I'm damned! He's
right, of course.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'He was right about the storm, wasn't he? We should
have thought of this; it makes me feel a fool.'

  'You have company. The next problem is - how do we
break it to Jimmy?'

  'I don't think we should ... until the last possible min-
ute. That's how I'd prefer it, if I was in his place. Just tell
him we're on the way.'
Though he could look across the full width of the Cylin-
drical Sea, and knew the general direction from which
Resolution was coming, Jimmy did not spot the tiny craft
until it had already passed New York. It seemed incred-
ible that it could carry six men - and whatever equip-
ment they had brought to rescue him.

  When it was only a kilometre away, he recognized
Commander Norton, and started waving. A little later
the skipper spotted him, and waved back.

  'Glad to see you're in good shape, Jimmy,' he radioed.
'I promised we wouldn't leave you behind. Now do you
believe me?'

  Not quite, Jimmy thought; until this moment he had
still wondered if this was all a kindly plot to keep up his
morale. But the Commander would not have crossed the
Sea just to say goodbye; he must have worked out some-
thing.

  'I'll believe you, Skipper,' he said, 'when I'm down
there on the deck. Now will you tell me how I'm going to
make it?'

  Resolution was now slowing down, a hundred metres
from the base of the cliff; as far as Jimmy could tell, she
carried no unusual equipment - though he was not sure
what he had expected to see.

  'Sorry about that, Jimmy - but we didn't want you to
have too many things to worry about.'

  Now that sounded ominous; what the devil did he
mean?

  Resolution came to a halt, fifty metres out and five
hundred below; Jimmy had almost a bird's-eye view of
the Commander as he spoke into his microphone.

  'This is it, Jimmy. You'll be perfectly safe, but it will
require nerve. We know you've got plenty of that. You're
going to jump.'

  'Five hundred metres!'

  'Yes, but at only half a gee.'

  'So - have you ever fallen two hundred and fifty on
Earth?'

  'Shut up, or I'll cancel your next leave. You should
have worked this out for yourself... it's just a question of
terminal velocity. In this atmosphere, you can't reach
more than ninety kilometres an hour - whether you fall
two hundred or two thousand metres. Ninety's a little
high for comfort, but we can trim it some more. This is
what you'll have to do, so listen carefully...'

  'I will,' said Jimmy. 'It had better be good.'

  He did not interrupt the Commander again, and made
no comment when Norton had finished. Yes, it made
sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a
genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not
expect to do it himself...

  Jimmy had never tried high-diving, or made a delayed
parachute drop, which would have given him some psy-
chological preparation for this feat. One could tell a man
that it was perfectly safe to walk a plank across an abyss -
yet even if the structural calculations were impeccable, he
might still be unable to do it. Now Jimmy understood
why the Commander had been so evasive about the de-
tails of the rescue. He had been given no time to brood,
or to think of objections.

  'I don't want to hurry you,' said Norton's persuasive
voice from half a kilometre below. 'But the sooner the
better.'

  Jimmy looked at his precious souvenir, the only flower
in Rama. He wrapped it very carefully in his grimy
handkerchief, knotted the fabric, and tossed it over the
edge of the cliff.

  It fluttered down with reassuring slowness, but it also
took a very long time getting smaller, and smaller, and
smaller, until he could no longer see it. But then Resolu-
tion surged forward, and he knew that it had been spot-
ted.

  'Beautiful!' exclaimed the Commander enthusiastic-
ally. 'I'm sure they'll name it after' you. OK - we're wait-
ing...

  Jimmy stripped off his shirt - the only upper garment
anyone ever wore in this now tropical climate - and
stretched it thoughtfully. Several times on his trek he
life.

  For the last time, he looked back at the hollow world
he alone had explored, and the distant, ominous pin-
nacles of the Big and Little Horns. Then, grasping the
shirt firmly with his right hand, he took a running jump
as far out over the cliff as he could.

  Now there was no particular hurry; he had a full
twenty seconds in which to enjoy the experience. But he
did not waste any time, as the wind strengthened around
him and Resolution slowly expanded in his field of view.
Holding his shirt with both hands, he stretched his arms
above his. head, so that the rushing air filled the garment
and blew it into a hollow tube.

  As a parachute, it was hardly a success; the few kilo-
metres an hour it subtracted from his speed was useful,
but not vital. It was doing a much more important job -
keeping his body vertical, so that he would arrow straight
into the sea.

  He still had the impression that he was not moving at
all, but that the water below was rushing up towards
him. Once he had committed himself, he had no sense of
fear; indeed, he felt a certain indignation against the
skipper for keeping him in the dark. Did he really think
that he would be scared to jump, if he had to brood over
it too long?

  At the very last moment, he let go of his shirt, took a
deep breath, and grabbed his mouth and nose with his
hands. As he had been instructed, he stiffened his body
into a rigid bar, and locked his feet together. He would
enter the water as cleanly as a falling spear...

  'It will be just the same,' the Commander had prom-
ised, 'as stepping off a diving board on Earth. Nothing to
it - if you make a good entry.'

  'And if I don't?' he had asked.

  'Then you'll have to go back and try again.'

  Something slapped him across the feet - hard, but not
viciously. A million slimy hands were tearing at his body;
even though his eyes were tightly closed, he could tell that
darkness was falling as he arrowed down into the depths
of the Cylindrical Sea.

  With all his strength, he started to swim upwards to-
wards the fading light. He could not open his, eyes for
more than a single blink; the poisonous water felt like
acid when he did so. He seemed to have been struggling
for ages, and more than once he had a nightmare fear
that he had lost his orientation and was really swimming
downwards. Then he would risk another quick glimpse,
and every time the light was stronger.

  His eyes were still clenched tightly shut when he broke
water. He gulped a precious mouthful of air, rolled over
on his back, and looked around.

  Resolution was heading towards him at top speed;
within seconds, eager hands had grabbed him and drag-
ged him aboard.

  'Did you swallow any water?' was the Commander's
anxious question.

  'I don't think so.'

  'Rinse out with this, anyway. That's fine. How do you
feel?'

  'I'm not really sure. I'll let you know in a minute. Oh
... thanks, everybody.' The minute was barely up when
Jimmy was only too sure how lie felt.

  'I'm going to be sick,' he confessed miserably. His res-
cuers were incredulous.

  'In a dead calm - on a flat sea?' protested Sergeant
Barnes, who seemed to regard Jimmy's plight as a direct
reflection on her skill.

  'I'd hardly call it flat,' said the Commander, waving his
arm around the band of water that circled the sky. 'But
don't be ashamed - you may have swallowed some of that
stuff. Get rid of it as quickly as you can.

  Jimmy was still straining, unheroically and unsuccess-
fully, when there was a sudden flicker of light in the sky
behind them. All eyes turned towards the South Pole,
and Jimmy instantly forgot his sickness. The Horns had
started their firework display again.

  There were the kilometre-long streamers of fire, danc-
ing from the central spike to its smaller companions.
Once again they began their stately rotation, as if invis-
ible dancers were winding their ribbons around an elec-
tric maypole. But now they began to accelerate, moving
faster and faster until they blurred into a flickering cone
of light.

  It was a spectacle more awe-inspiring than any they
had yet seen here, and it brought with it a distant crack-
ling roar which added to the impression of overwhelm-
ing power. The display lasted for about five minutes;
then it stopped as abruptly as if someone had turned a
switch.

  'I'd like to know what the Rama Committee make of
that,' Norton muttered to no one in particular. 'Has any-
one here got any theories?'

  There was no time for an answer, because at that mo-
ment Hub Control called in great excitement.

  'Resolution! Are you OK? Did you feel that?'

  'Feel what?'

  'We think it was an earthquake - it must have hap-
pened the minute those fireworks stopped.'

  'Any damage?'

  'I don't think so. It wasn't really violent - but it shook
us up a bit.'

  'We felt nothing at all. But we wouldn't, out here in
the Sea.'

  'Of course, silly of me. Anyway, everything seems quiet
now ... until next time.'

  'Yes, until the next time,' Norton echoed. The mystery
of Rama was steadily growing; the more they discovered
about it, the less they understood.

  There was a sudden shout from the helm.

  'Skipper - look - up there in the sky!'

  Norton lifted his eyes, swiftly scanning the circuit of
the Sea. He saw nothing, until his gaze had almost
reached the zenith, and he was staring at the other side of
the world. -

  'My God,' he whispered slowly, as he realized that the
'next time' was already almost here.

  A tidal wave was racing towards them, down the eter-
nal curve of the Cylindrical Sea.

   CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - The Wave

Yet even in that moment of shock, Norton's first concern
was for his ship.

  'Endeavour!' he called. 'Situation report!'

  'All OK, Skipper,' was the reassuring answer from the
Exec. 'We felt a slight tremor, but nothing that could
cause any damage. There's been a small change of atti-
tude - the bridge says about point two degrees. They also
think the spin rate has altered slightly - we'll have an
accurate reading on that in a couple of minutes.'

  So it's beginning to happen, Norton told himself, and a
lot earlier than we expected; we're still a long way from
perihelion, and the logical time for an orbit change. But
some kind of trim was undoubtedly taking place - and
there might be more shocks to come.

  Meanwhile, the effects of this first one were all too ob-
vious, up there on the curving sheet of water which
seemed perpetually falling from the sky. The wave was
still about ten kilometres away, and stretched the full
width of the Sea from northern to southern shore. Near
the land, it was a foaming wall of white, but in deeper
water it was a barely visible blue line, moving much
faster than the breakers on either flank. The drag of the
shoreward shallows was already bending it into a bow,
with the central portion getting further and further
ahead.

  'Sergeant,' said Norton urgently. 'This is your job.
What can we do?'

  Sergeant Barnes had brought the raft completely to
rest and was studying the situation intently. Her expres-
sion, Norton was relieved to see, showed no trace of alarm
- rather a certain zestful excitement, like a skilled athlete
about to accept a challenge.

  'I wish we had some soundings,' she said. 'If we're in
deep water, there's nothing to worry about.'

  'Then we're all right. We're still four kilometres from
shore.'

  'I hope so, but I want to study the situation.'

  She applied power again, and swung Resolution
around until it was just under way, heading directly to-
wards the approaching wave. Norton judged that the
swiftly moving central portion would reach them in less
than five minutes, but he could also see that it presented
no serious danger. It was only a racing ripple a fraction
of a metre high, and would scarcely rock the boat. The
walls of foam lagging far behind it were the real menace.

  Suddenly, in the very centre of the Sea, a line of
breakers appeared. The wave had. clearly hit a submerged
wall, several kilometres in length, not far below the sur-
face. At the same time; the breakers on the two flanks
collapsed, as they ran into deeper water.

  Anti-slosh plates, Norton told himself. Exactly the
same as in Endeavour's own propellant tanks - but on a
thousand-fold greater scale. There must be a complex
pattern of them all around the Sea, to damp out any
waves as quickly as possible. The only thing that matters
now is: are we right on top of one?

  Sergeant Barnes was one jump ahead of him. She
brought Resolution to a full stop and threw out the an-
chor. It hit bottom at only five metres.

  'Haul it up!' she called to her crewmates. 'We've got to
get away from here!'

  Norton agreed heartily; but in which direction? The
Sergeant was headed full speed towards the wave, which
was now only five kilometres away. For the first time, he
could hear the sound of its approach - a distant, unmistak-
able roar which he had never expected to hear inside
Rama. Then it changed in intensity; the central portion
was collapsing once more - and the flanks were building
up again.

  He tried to estimate the distance between the sub-
merged baffles, assuming that they were spaced at equal
intervals. If he was right, there should be one more to
come; if they could station the raft in the deep water
between them, they would be perfectly safe.

  Sergeant Barnes cut the motor, and threw out the an-
chor again. It went down thirty metres without hitting
bottom.

  "We're OK,' she said, with a sigh of relief. 'But I'll keep
the motor running.'

  Now there were only the lagging walls of foam along
the coast; out here in the central Sea it was calm again,
apart from the inconspicuous blue ripple still speeding
towards them. The Sergeant was just holding Resolution
on course towards the disturbance, ready to pour on full
power at a moment's notice.

  Then, only two kilometres ahead of them, the Sea
started to foam once more. It humped up in white-maned
fury, and now its roaring seemed to fill the world. Upon
the sixteen-kilometre-high wave of the Cylindrical Sea, a
smaller ripple was superimposed, like an avalanche thun-
dering down a mountain slope. And that ripple was quite
large enough to kill them.

  Sergeant Barnes must have seen the expressions on the
faces of her crewmates. She shouted above the roar:
'What are you scared about? I've ridden bigger ones than
this.' That was not quite true; nor did she add that her
earlier experience had been in a well-built surf-boat, not
an improvised raft. 'But if we have to jump, wait until I
tell you. Check your life-jackets.'

  She's magnificent, thought the Commander - obviously
enjoying every minute, like a Viking warrior going into
battle. And she's probably right - unless we've miscalcu-
lated badly.

  The wave continued to rise, curving upwards and over.
The slope above them probably exaggerated its height,
but it looked enormous - an irresistible force of nature
that would overwhelm everything in its path.

  Then, within seconds, it collapsed, as if its foundations
had been pulled out from underneath it. It was over the
submerged barrier, in deep water again. When it reached
them a minute later Resolution merely bounced up and
down a few times before Sergeant Barnes swung the raft
around and set off at top speed towards the north.

  'Thanks, Ruby - that was splendid. But will we get
home before it comes round for the second time?'

  'Probably not; it will be back in about twenty minutes.
But it will have lost all its strength then; we'll scarcely
notice it.'

  Now that the Wave had passed, they could relax and
enjoy the voyage - though no one would be completely at
ease until they were back on land. The disturbance had
left the water swirling round in random eddies, and had
also stirred up a most peculiar acidic smell - 'like crushed
ants', as Jimmy aptly put it. Though unpleasant, the
odour caused none of the attacks of sea-sickness that
might have been expected; it was something so alien that
human physiology could not respond to it.

  A minute later, the wave front hit the next underwater
barrier, as it climbed away from them and up the sky.
This time, seen from the rear, the spectacle was unim-
pressive and the voyagers felt ashamed of their previous
fears. They began to feel themselves masters of the Cylin-
drical Sea.

  The shock was therefore all the greater when, not more
than a hundred metres away, something like a slowly ro-
tating wheel began to rear up out of the water. Glittering
metallic spokes. five metres long, emerged dripping from
the sea, spun for a moment in the fierce Raman glare,
and splashed back into the water. It was 'as if a giant
starfish with tubular arms had broken the surface.

  At first sight, it was impossible to tell whether it was an
animal or a machine. Then it flopped over and lay half-
awash, bobbing up and down in the gentle aftermath of
the wave.

  Now they could see that there were nine arms, appar-
ently jointed, radiating from a central disc. Two of the
arms were broken, snapped off at the outer joint. The
others ended at a complicated collection of manipula-
tors that reminded Jimmy very strongly of the crab he
had encountered. The two creatures came from the same
line of evolution - or the same drawing-board.

  At the middle of the disc was a small turret, bearing
three large eyes. Two were closed, one open - and even
that appeared to be blank and unseeing. No one doubted
that they were watching the death-throes of some strange
monster, tossed up to the surface by the submarine dis-
turbance that had just passed.

  Then they saw that it was not alone. Swimming round
it, and snapping at its feebly moving limbs, were two
small beasts like overgrown lobsters. They were efficiently
chopping up the monster, and it did nothing to resist,
though its own claws seemed quite capable of dealing
with the attackers.

  Once again, Jimmy was reminded of the crab that had
demolished Dragonfly. He watched intently as the one-
sided conflict continued, and quickly confirmed his im-
pression.

  'Look, Skipper,' he whispered. 'Do you see - they're not
eating it. They don't even have any mouths. They're
simply chopping it to pieces. That's exactly what hap-
pened to Dragonfly.'

  'You're right. They're dismantling it - like - like a
broken machine.' Norton wrinkled his nose. 'But no dead
machine ever smelled like that!'

  Then another thought struck him.

  'My God - suppose they start on us! Ruby, get us back
to shore as quickly as you can!'

  Resolution surged forward with reckless disregard for
the life of her power cells. Behind them, the nine spokes
of the great starfish - they could think of no better name
for it - were clipped steadily shorter, and presently the
weird tableau sank back into the depths of the Sea.

  There was no pursuit, but they did not breathe com-
fortably again until Resolution had drawn up to the
landing stage and they had stepped thankfully ashore. As
he looked back across that mysterious and now 'suddenly
sinister band of water, Commander Norton grimly de-
termined that no one would ever sail it again. There
were too many unknowns, too many dangers...

  He looked back upon the towers and ramparts of New
York, and the dark cliff of the continent beyond. They
were safe now from inquisitive man.

  He would not tempt the gods of Rama again.

   CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - Spider

From now on, Norton had decreed, there would always
be at least three people at Camp Alpha, and one of them
would always be awake. In addition, all exploring parties
would follow the same routine. Potentially dangerous
creatures were on the move inside Rama, and though
none had shown active hostility, a prudent commander
would take no chances.

  As an extra safeguard, there was always an observer up
on the Hub, keeping watch through a powerful telescope.
From this vantage point, the whole interior of Rama
could be surveyed, and even the South Pole appeared
only a few hundred metres away. The territory round
any group of explorers was to be kept under regular ob-
servation; in this way, it was hoped to eliminate any pos-
sibility of surprise. It was a good plan - and it failed
completely.

  After the last meal of the day, and just before the 22.00
hour sleep period, Norton, Rodrigo, Calvert and Laura
Ernst were watching the regular evening news telecast
specially beamed to them from the transmitter at In-
ferno, Mercury. They had been particularly interested in
seeing Jimmy's film of the Southern continent, and the
return across the Cylindrical Sea - an episode which had
excited all viewers. Scientists, news commentators, and
members of the Rama Committee had given their opin-
ions, most of them contradictory. No one could agree
whether the crab-like creature Jimmy had encountered
was an animal, a machine, a genuine Raman - or some-
thing that fitted none of these categories.

  They had just watched, with a distinctly queasy feel-
ing, the giant starfish being demolished by its predators
when they discovered that they were no longer alone.
There was an intruder in the camp.

  Laura Ernst noticed it first. She froze in sudden shock,
then said: 'Don't move, Bill. Now look slowly to the
right.'

  Norton turned his head. Ten metres away was a
slender-legged tripod surmounted by a spherical body no
larger than a football. Set around the body were three
large, expressionless eyes, apparently giving g6o degrees
of vision, and trailing beneath it were three whiplike
tendrils. The creature was not quite as tall as a man, and
looked far too fragile to be dangerous, but that did not
excuse their carelessness in letting it sneak up on them
unawares. It reminded Norton of nothing so much as a
three-legged spider, or daddy-long-legs, and he wondered
how it had solved the problem - never challenged by any
creature on Earth - of tripedal locomotion.

  'What do you make of it, Doc?' he whispered, turning
off the voice of the TV newscaster.

  'Usual Raman three-fold symmetry. I don't see how it
could hurt us, though those whips might be unpleasant -
and they could be poisonous, like a coelenterate's. Sit
tight and see what it does.'

  After regarding them impassively for several minutes,
the creature suddenly moved - and now they could under-
stand why they had failed to observe its arrival. It was
fast, and it covered the ground with such an extraordin-
ary spinning motion that the human eye and mind had
real difficulty in following it.

  As far as Norton could judge - and only a high-speed
camera could settle the matter - each leg in turn acted as
a pivot around which the creature whirled its body. And
he was not sure, but it also seemed to him that every few
'steps' it reversed its direction of spin, while the three
whips flickered over the ground like lightning as it
moved. Its top speed - though this also was very hard to
estimate - was at least thirty kilometres an hour.

  It swept swiftly round the camp, examining every item
of equipment, delicately touching the improvised beds
and chairs and tables, communication gear, food con-
tainers, Electrosans, cameras, water tanks, tools - there
seemed to be nothing that it ignored, except the four
watchers. Clearly, it was intelligent enough to draw a dis-
tinction between humans and their inanimate property;
its actions gave the unmistakable impression of an ex-
tremely methodical curiosity or inquisitiveness.

  'I wish I could examine it!' Laura exclaimed in frus-
tration, as the creature continued its swift pirouette.
'Shall we try to catch it?'

  'How?' Calvert asked, reasonably enough.

  'You know - the way primitive hunters bring down fast-
moving animals with a couple of weights whirling
around at the end of a rope. It doesn't even hurt them.'

  'That I doubt,' said Norton. 'But even if it worked, we
can't risk it. We don't know how intelligent this creature
is - and a trick like that could easily break its legs. Then
we would be in real trouble - from Rama, Earth and
everyone else.'

  'But I've got to have a specimen!'

  'You may have to be content with Jimmy's flower -
unless one of these creatures cooperates with you. Force is
out. How would you like it if something landed on Earth
and decided that you would make a nice specimen for
dissection?'

  'I don't want to dissect it,' said Laura, not at all con-
vincingly. 'I only want to examine it.'

  'Well, alien visitors might have the same attitude to-
wards you, but you could have a very uncomfortable time
before you believed them. We must make no move that
could possibly he regarded as threatening.'

  He was quoting from Ship's Orders, of course, and
Laura knew it. The claims of science had a lower priority
than those of space-diplomacy.

  In fact, there was no need to bring in such elevated
considerations; it was merely a matter of good manners.
They were all visitors here, and had never even asked
permission to come inside...

  The creature seemed to have finished its inspection. It
made one more high-speed circuit of the camp, then shot
off at a tangent - towards the stairway.

  'I wonder how it's going to manage the steps?' Laura
mused. Her question was quickly answered; the spider
ignored them completely, and headed up the gently slop-
ing curve of the ramp without slackening its speed.

  'Hub Control,' said Norton. 'You may have a visitor
shortly; take a look at the Alpha Stairway Section Six.
And incidentally, thanks a lot for keeping such a good
watch on us.'

  It took a minute for the sarcasm to sink in; then the
Hub observer started to make apologetic noises.

  'Er - I can just see something, Skipper, now you tell me
it's there. But what is it?'

  'Your guess is as good as mine,' Norton answered, as he
pressed the General Alert button. 'Camp Alpha calling
all stations. We've just been visited by a creature like a
three-legged spider, with very thin legs, about two metres
high, small spherical body, travels very fast with a spin-
ning motion. Appears harmless but inquisitive. It may
sneak up on you before you notice it. Please acknow-
ledge.'

  The first reply came from London, fifteen kilometres to
the east.

  'Nothing unusual here, Skipper.'

  The same distance to the west, Rome answered, sound-
ing suspiciously sleepy.

  'Same here, Skipper. Uh, just a moment...'

  'What is it?'

  'I put my pen down a minute ago - it's gone! What -
oh!'

  'Talk sense!'

  'You won't believe this, Skipper. I was making some
notes - you know I like writing, and it doesn't disturb
anybody - I was using my favourite ball-point, it's nearly
two hundred years old - well, now it's lying on the
ground, about five metres away! I've got it - thank good-
ness - it isn't damaged.'

  'And how do you suppose it got there?'

  'Er - I may have dozed off for a minute. It's been a
hard day.'

  Norton sighed, but refrained from comment; there
were so few of them, and they had so little time in which
to explore a world. Enthusiasm could not always over-
come exhaustion, and he wondered if they were taking
unnecessary risks. Perhaps he should not split his men up
into such small groups, and try to cover so much territory.
But he was always conscious of the swiftly passing days,
and the unsolved mysteries around them. He was becom-
ing more and more certain that something was about to
happen, and that they would have to abandon Rama
even before it reached perihelion - the moment of truth
when any orbit change must surely take place.

  'Now listen, Hub, Rome, London - everyone,' he said.
'I want a report at every half-hour through the night. We
must assume that from now on we may expect visitors at
any time. Some of them may be dangerous, but at all costs
we have to avoid incidents. You all know the directives
on this subject.'

  That was true enough; it was part of their training -
yet perhaps none of them had ever really believed that
the long-theorized 'physical contact with intelligent
aliens' would occur in their lifetimes - still less that they
would experience it themselves.

  Training was one thing, reality another; and no one
could be sure that the ancient, human instincts of self-
preservation would not take over in an emergency. Yet it
was essential to give every entity they encountered in
Rama the benefit of the doubt, up to the last possible
minute-and even beyond.

  Commander Norton did not want to be remembered
by history as the man who started the first interplanetary
war.
Within a few hours there were hundreds of the spiders,
and they were all over the plain. Through the telescope,
it could be seen that the southern continent was also in-
fested with them - but not, it seemed, the island of New
York.

  They took no further notice of the explorers, and after
a while the explorers took little notice of them - though
from time to time Norton still detected a predatory gleam
in his Surgeon-Commander's eye. Nothing would please
her better, he was sure, than for one of the spiders to have
an unfortunate accident, and he would not put it past
her to arrange such a thing in the interests of science.

  It seemed virtually certain that the spiders could not
be intelligent; their bodies were far too small to contain
much in the way of brains, and indeed it was hard to see
where they stored all the energy to move. Yet their be-
haviour was curiously purposeful and coordinated; they
seemed to be everywhere, but they never visited the same
place twice. Norton frequently had the impression that
they were searching for something. Whatever it was, they
did not seem to have discovered it.

  They went all the way up to the central Hub, still
scorning the three great stairways. How they managed to
ascend the vertical sections, even under almost zero grav-
ity, was not clear; Laura theorized that they were equip-
ped with suction pads.

  And then, to her obvious delight, she got her eagerly
desired specimen. Hub Control reported that a spider
had fallen down the vertical face and was lying, dead or
incapacitated, on the first platform. Laura's time up from
the plain was a record that would never be beaten.

  When she arrived at the platform, she found that, des-
pite the low velocity of impact, the creature had broken
all its legs. Its eyes were still? open, but it showed no reac-
tions to any external tests. Even a fresh human corpse
would have been livelier, Laura decided; as soon as she
got her prize back to Endeavour, she started to work with
her dissecting kit.

  The spider was so fragile that it almost came to pieces
without her assistance. She disarticulated the legs, then
started on the delicate carapace, which split along three
great circles and opened up like a peeled orange.

  After some moments of blank incredulity - for there
was nothing that she could recognize or identify - she
took a series of careful photographs. Then she picked up
her scalpel.

  Where to start cutting? She felt like closing her eyes,
and stabbing at random, but that would not have been
very scientific.

  The blade went in with practically no resistance. A
second later, Surgeon-Commander Ernst's most unlady-
like yell echoed the length and breadth of Endeavour.

  It took an annoyed Sergeant McAndrews a good
twenty minqtes to calm down the startled simps.

   CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - His Excellency Regrets...

'As you are all aware, gentlemen,' said the Martian Am-
bassador, 'a great deal has happened since our last meet-
ing. We have much to discuss - and to decide. I'm there-
fore particularly sorry that our distinguished colleague
from Mercury is not here.'

  That last statement was not altogether accurate. Dr
Bose was not particularly sorry that HE the Hermian
Ambassador was absent. It would have been much more
truthful to say that he was worried. All his diplomatic
instincts told him that something was happening, and
though his sources of information were excellent, he could
gather no hints as to what it might be.

  The Ambassador's letter of apology had been cour-
teous and entirely uncommunicative. His Excellency
had regretted that urgent and unavoidable business had
kept him from attending the meeting, either in per-
son or by video. Dr Bose found it very hard to think
of anything more urgent - or more important - than
Ram a.

  'Two of our members have statements to make. 1
would first like to call on Professor Davidson.'

  There was a rustle of excitement among the other scien-
tists on the Committee. Most of them had felt that the
astronomer, with his well-known cosmic viewpoint, was
not the right man to be Chairman of the Space Advisory
Council. He sometimes gave the impression that the activi-
ties of intelligent life were an unfortunate irrelevance in
the majestic universe of stars and galaxies, and that it was
bad manners to pay too much attention to it. This had
not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr Perera, who
took exactly the opposite view. To them, the only pur-
pose of the Universe was the production of intelligence,
and they were apt to talk sneeringly about purely astro-
rjomical phenomena. 'Mere dead matter' was one of their
favourite phrases.

  'Mr Ambassador,' the scientist began, 'I have been
analysing the curious behaviour of Rama during the last
few days, and would like to present my conclusions. Some
of them are rather startling.'

  Dr Perera looked surprised, then rather smug. He
strongly approved of anything that startled Professor
Davidson.

  'First of all, there was the remarkable series of events
when that young lieutenant flew over to the Southern
hemisphere. The electrical discharges themselves, though
spectacular, are not important; it is easy to show that
they contained relatively little energy. But they coin-
cided with a change in Rama's rate of spin, and its atti-
tude - that is, its orientation in space. This must have
involved an enormous amount of energy; the discharges
which nearly cost Mr - er Pak his life were merely a
minor by-product - perhaps a nuisance that had to be
minimized by those giant lightning conductors at the
South Pole.

  'I draw two conclusions from this. When a spacecraft -
and we must call Rama a spacecraft, despite its fantastic
size - makes a change of attitude, that usually means it is
about to make a change of orbit. We must therefore take
seriously the views of those who believe that Rama may
be preparing to become another planet of our sun, in-
stead of going back to the st4rs.

  'If this is the case, Endeavour must obviously be pre-
pared to cast off - is that what spaceships do? - at a mo-
ment's notice. She may be in very serious danger while
she is still physically attached to Rama. I imagine that
Commander Norton is already well aware of this possi-
bility, but I think we should send him an additional
warning.'

  'Thank you very much, Professor Davidson. Yes - Dr
Solomons?'

  'I'd like to comment on that,' said the science historian.
'Rama seems to have made a change of spin without us-
ing any jets or reaction devices. This leaves only two
possibilities, it seems to me.

  'The first one is that it has internal gyroscopes, or their
equivalent. They must be enormous; where are they?

  'The second possibility - which would turn all our
physics upside down - is that it has a reactionless propul-
sion system. The so-called Space Drive, which Professor
Davidson doesn't believe in. If this is the case, Rama may
be able to do almost anything. We will be quite unable
to anticipate its behaviour, even on the gross physical
level.'

  The diplomats were obviously somewhat baffled by
this exchange, and the astronomer refused to be drawn.
He had gone out on enough limbs for one day.

  'I'll stick to the laws of physics, if you don't mind, until
I'm forced to give them up. If we've not found any gyro-
scopes in Rama, we may not have looked hard enough, or
in the right place.'

  Ambassador Bose could see that Dr Perera was getting
impatient. Normally, the exobiologist was as happy as
anyone else to engage in speculation; but now, for the
first time, he had some solid facts. His long-impoverished
science had become wealthy overnight.

  'Very well - if there are no other comments - I know
that Dr Perera has some important information.'

  'Thank you, Mr Ambassador. As you've all seen, we
have at last obtained a specimen of a Raman life-form,
and have observed several others at close quarters. Sur-
geon-Commander Ernst, Endeavour's medical officer, has
sent a full report on the spider-like creature she dis-
sected.

  'I must say at once that some of her results are baffling,
and in any other circumstances I would have refused to
believe them.

  'The spider is definitely organic, though its chemistry
differs from ours in many respects - it contains consider-
able quantities of light metals. Yet I hesitate to call it an
animal, for several fundamental reasons.

  'In the first place, it seems to have no mouth, no stom-
ach, no gut - no method of ingesting food! Also no air
intakes, no lungs, no blood, no reproductive system...

  'You may wonder what it has got. Well, there's a simple
musculature, controlling its three legs and the three whip-
like tendrils or feelers. There's a brain - fairly complex,
mostly concerned with the creature's remarkably devel-
oped triocular vision. But eighty per cent of the body
consists of a honeycomb of large cells, and this is what
gave Dr Ernst such an unpleasant surprise when she
started her dissection. If she'd been luckier she might have
recognized it in time, because it's the one Raman struc-
ture that does exist on Earth - though only in a handful
of marine animals.

  'Most of the spider is simply a battery, very much like
that found in electric cells and rays. But in this case, it's
apparently not used for defence. It's the creature's
source of energy. And that is why it has no provisions for
eating and breathing; it doesn't need such primitive
arrangements. And incidentally, this means that it would
be perfectly at home in a vacuum...

  'So we have a creature which, to all intents and pur-
poses, is nothing more than a mobile eye. It has no organs
of manipulation; those tendrils are much too feeble. If I
had been given its specifications, I would have said it was
merely a reconnaissance device.

  'Its behaviour certainly fits that description. All the
spiders ever do is to run around and look at things.
That's all they can do ...

  'But the other animals are different. The crab, the star-
fish, the sharks - for want of better words - can obviously
manipulate their environment and appear to be special-
ized for various functions. I assume that they are also
electrically powered since, like the spider, they appear to
have no mouths.

  'I'm sure you'll appreciate the biological problems
raised by all this. Could such creatures evolve naturally?
I really don't think so. They appear to be designed like
machines, for specific jobs. If I had to describe them, I
would say that they are robots - biological robots - some-
thing that has no analogy on Earth.

  'If Rama is a spaceship, perhaps they are part of its
crew. As to how they are born - or created - that's some-
thing I can't tell you. But I can guess that the answer's
over there in New York. If Commander Norton and his
men can wait long enough, they may encounter increas-
ingly more complex creatures, with unpredictable be-
haviour. Somewhere along the line they may meet the
Ramans themselves - the real makers of this world.

  'And when that happens, gentlemen, there will be no
doubt about it at all...'

   CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - Special Delivery

Commander Norton was sleeping soundly when his per-
sonal communicator dragged him away from happy
dreams. He had been holidaying with his family on Mars,
flying past the awesome, snow-capped peak of Nix Olym-
pica - mightiest volcano in the solar system. Little Billie
had started to say something to him; now he would never
know what it was.

  The dream faded; the reality was his executive officer,
up on the ship.

  'Sorry to wake you, Skipper,' said Lieutenant-Com-
mander Kirchoff. 'Triple A priority from Headquarters.'

  'Let me have it,' Norton answered sleepily.

  'I can't. It's in code - Commander's Eyes Only.'

  Norton was instantly awake. He had received such a
message only three times in his whole career, and on each
occasion it had meant trouble.

  'Damn!' he said. 'What do we do now?'

  His Exec did not bother to answer. Each understood
the problem perfectly; it was one that Ship's Orders had
never anticipated. Normally, a commander was never
more than a few minutes away from his office and the
code book in his personal safe. If he started now, Norton
might get back to the ship - exhausted - in four or five
hours. That was not the way to handle a Class AAA Pri-
ority.

  'Jerry,' he said at length. 'Who's on the switchboard?'

  'No one; I'm making the call myself.'

  'Recorder off?'

  'By an odd breach of regulations, yes.

  Norton smiled. Jerry was the best Exec he had ever
worked with. He thought of everything.

  'OK. You know where my key is. Call me back.'

  He waited as patiently as he could for the next ten
minutes, trying - without much success - to think of
other problems. He hated wasting mental effort; it was
very unlikely that he could out-guess the message that
was coming, and he would know its contents soon
enough. Then he would start worrying effectively.

  When the Exec called back, he was obviously speaking
under considerable strain.

  'It's not really urgent Skipper - an hour won't make
any difference. But I prefer to avoid radio. I'll send it
down by messenger.'

  'But why - oh, very well - I trust your judgement. Who
will carry it through the airlocks?'

  'I'm going myself; I'll call you when I reach the Hub.'

  'Which leaves Laura in charge.'

  'For one hour, at the most. I'll get right back to the
ship.'

  A medical officer did not have the specialized training
to be acting commander, any more than a commander
could be expected to do an operation. In emergencies,
both jobs had sometimes been successfully switched; but
it was not recommended. Well, one order had already
been broken tonight...

  'For the record, you never leave the ship. Have you
woken Laura?'

  'Yes. She's delighted with the opportunity.'

  'Lucky that doctors are used to keeping secrets. Oh -
have you sent the acknowledgement?'

  'Of course, in your name.'

  'Then I'll be waiting.'

  Now it was quite impossible to avoid anxious anticipa-
tions. 'Not really urgent - but I prefer to avoid radio...'

  One thing was certain. The Commander was not going
to get much more sleep this night.

   CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - Riot Watcher

Sergeant Pieter Rousseau knew why he had volunteered
for this job; in many ways, it was a realization of a child-
hood dream. He had become fascinated by telescopes
when he was only six or seven years old, and much of his
youth had been spent collecting lenses of all shapes and
sizes. These he had mounted in cardboard tubes, making
instruments of ever-increasing power until he was fam-
iliar with the moon and planets, the nearer space-stations,
and the entire landscape within thirty-kilometres of his
home.

  He had been lucky in his place of birth, among the
mountains of Colorado; in almost every direction, the
view was spectacular and inexhaustible. He had spent
hours exploring, in perfect safety, the peaks which every
year took their toll of careless climbers. Though he had
seen much, he had imagined even more; he had liked to
pretend that over each crest of rock, beyond the reach of
his telescope, were magic kingdoms full of wonderful
creatures. And so for years he had avoided visiting the
places his lenses brought to him, because he knew that.
the reality could not live up to the dream.

  Now, on the central axis of Rama, he could survey
marvels beyond the wildest fantasies of his youth. A
whole world lay spread out before him - a small one, it
was true, yet a man could spend an entire lifetime explor-
ing four thousand square kilometres, even when it was
dead and changeless.

  But now life, with all its infinite possibilities, had come
to Rama. If the biological robots were not living crea-
tures, they were certainly very good imitations.

  No one knew who invented the word 'biot'; it seemed
to come into instant use, by a kind of spontaneous gen-
eration. From his vantage point on the Hub, Pieter was
Biot-Watcher-in-Chief, and he was beginning, - so he
believed - to understand some of their behaviour pat-
terns.

  The Spiders were mobile sensors, using vision - and
probably touch - to examine the whole interior of Rama.
At one time there had been hundreds of them rushing
around at high speed, but after less than two days they
had disappeared; now it was quite unusual to see even
one.

  They had been replaced by a whole menagerie of much
more impressive creatures; it had been no minor task,
thinking of suitable names for them. There were the
Window Cleaners, with large padded feet, who were ap-
parently polishing their way the whole length of Rama's
- six artificial suns. Their enormous shadows, cast right
across the diameter of the world, sometimes caused tem-
porary eclipses on the far side.

  The crab that had demolished Dragonfly seemed to be
a Scavenger. A relay chain of identical creatures had ap-
proached Camp Alpha and carried off all the debris that
had been neatly stacked on the outskirts; they would
have carried off everything else if Norton and Mercer had
not stood firm and defied them. The confrontation had
been anxious but brief; thereafter, the Scavengers seemed
to understand what they were allowed to touch, and ar-
rived at regular intervals to see if their services were re-
quired. It was a most convenient arrangement, and indi-
cated a high degree of intelligence - either on the part of
the Scavengers themselves, or some controlling entity
elsewhere.

  Garbage disposal on Rama was very simple; everything
was thrown into the Sea, where it was, presumably,
broken down into forms that could be used again. The
process was rapid; Resolution had disappeared overnight,
to the great annoyance of Ruby Barnes. Norton had con-
soled her by pointing out that it had done its job magni-
ficently - and he would never have allowed anyone to use
it again. The Sharks might not be as discriminating as
the Scavengers.

  No astronomer discovering an unknown planet could
- have been happier that Pieter when he spotted a new
type of biot and secured a good photo of it through his
telescope. Unfortunately, it seemed that all the interest-
ing species were over at the South Pole, where they were
performing mysterious tasks round the Horns. Something
that looked like a centipede with suction pads could be
seen from time to time exploring Big Horn itself, while
round the lower peaks Pieter had caught a glimpse of a
burly creature that could have been a cross between a
hippopotamus and a bulldozer. And there was even a
double-necked giraffe, which apparently acted as a mob-
ile crane.

  Presumably, Rama, like any ship, required testing,
checking and repairing after its immense voyage. The
crew was already hard at work; when would the pas-
sengers appear?

  Biot classifying was not Pieter's main job; his orders
were to keep watch on the two or three exploring parties
that were always out, to see that they did not get into
trouble, and to warn them if anything approached. He
alternated every six hours with anyone else who could be
spared, though more than once he had been on duty for
twelve hours at a stretch. As a result, he now knew the
geography of Rama better than any man who would ever
live. It was as familiar to him as the Colorado mountains
of his youth.

  When Jerry Kirchoff emerged from Airlock Alpha,
Pieter knew at once that something unusual was happen-
ing. Personnel transfers never occurred during the sleep-
ing period, and it was now past midnight by Mission
Time. Then Pieter remembered how short-handed they
were, and was shocked by a much more startling irregu-
larity.

   'Jerry - who's in charge of the ship?'
- 'I am,' said the Exec coldly, as he flipped open his
helmet. 'You don't think I'd leave the bridge while I'm
on watch, do you?'

  He reached into his suit carry-all, and pulled out a
small can still bearing the label: CONCENTRATED ORANGE
 JUICE:   TO MAKE FIVE LITRES.

  'You're good at this Pieter. The skipper is waiting for it.'
Pieter hefted the can, then said, 'I hope you've put
enough mass inside it - sometimes they get stuck on the
first terrace.'

  'Well, you're the expert.'

  That was true enough. The Hub observers had had
plenty of practice, sending down small items that had
been forgotten or were needed in a hurry. The trick was
to get them safely past the low-gravity region,. and then to
see that the Coriolis effect did not carry them too far
away from the Camp during the eight-kilometre roll
downhill.

  Pieter anchored himself firmly, grasped the can, and
hurled it down the face of the cliff. He did not aim dir-
ectly towards Camp Alpha, but almost thirty degrees
away from it.

  Almost immediately, air resistance robbed the can of its
initial speed, but then the pseudo-gravity of Rama took
over and it started to move downwards at a constant
velocity. It hit once near the base of the ladder, and did a
slow-motion bounce which took it clear of the first ter-
race.

  'It's OK now,' said Pieter. 'Like to make a bet?'

  'No,' was the prompt reply. 'You know the odds.'

  'You're no sportsman. But I'll tell you now - it will
stop within three hundred metres of the Camp.'

  'That doesn't sound very close.'

  'You might try it some time. I once saw Joe miss by a
couple of kilometres.'

  The can was no longer bouncing; gravity had become
strong enough to glue it to the curving face of the North
Dome. By the time it had reached the second terrace it
was rolling along at twenty or thirty kilometres an hour,
and had reached very nearly the maximum speed that
friction would allow.

  'Now we'll have to wait,' said Pieter, seating himself at
the telescope, so that he could keep track of the mes-
senger. 'It will be there in ten minutes. Ah, here comes
the skipper - I've got used to recognizing people from
this angle - now he's looking up at us.

  'I believe that telescope gives you a sense of power.'

  'Oh, it does. I'm the only person who knows everything
that's happening in Rama. At least, I thought I did,' he
added plaintively, giving Kirchoff a reproachful look.

  'If it will keep you happy, the skipper found he'd run
out of toothpaste.'

  After that, conversation languished; but at last Pieter
said: 'Wish you'd taken that bet ... he's only got to walk
fifty metres ... now he sees it ... mission complete.'

  'Thanks, Pieter - a very good job. Now you can go back
to sleep.'

  'Sleep! I'm on watch until 0400.'

  'Sorry - you must have been sleeping. Or how else
could you have dreamed all this?'

SPACE SURVEY HQ TO COMMANDER SSV ENDEAVOUR. PRI-
ORITY AAA. CI.ASSIFICATION YOUR EYES ONLY. NO PER-
MANENT RECORD.
SPACEGUARD REPORTS ULTRA HIGH SPEED VEHICLE
APPARENTLY LAUNCHED MERCURY TEN TO TWELVE DAYS
AGO ON RAMA INTERCEPT. IF NO ORBIT CHANGE ARRIVAL
PREDICTED DATE 322 DAYS 15 HOURS. MAY BE NECESSARY
YOU EVACUATE BEFORE THEN. WILL ADVISE FURTHER.

                                     C IN C

Norton read the message half a dozen times to mem-
orize the date. It was hard to keep track of time inside
Rama; he had to look at his calendar watch to see that
it was now Day 315. That might leave them only one
week...

  The message was chilling, not only for what it said,
but for what it implied. The Hermians had made a
clandestine launch - that in itself a breach of Space Law.
The conclusion was obvious; their 'vehicle' could only be
a missile.

  But why? It was inconceivable - well, almost incon-
ceivable - that they would risk endangering Endeavour,
so presumably he would receive ample warning from the
Hermians themselves. In an emergency, he could leave at
a few hours' notice, though he would do so only under
extreme protest, at the direct orders of the Commander-
in-Chief.

  Slowly, and very thoughtfully, he walked across to the
improvised life-support complex and dropped the mes-
sage into an electrosan. The brilliant flare of laser light
bursting out through the crack beneath the seat-cover told
him that the demands of security were satisfied. It was too
bad, he told himself, that all problems could not be dis-
posed of so swiftly and hygienically.

   CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - Missile

The missile was still five million kilometres away when
the glare of its plasma braking jets became clearly visible
in Endeavour's main telescope. By that time the secret was
already out, and Norton had reluctantly ordered the sec-
ond and perhaps final evacuation of Rama; but he had
no intention of leaving until events gave him no alterna-
tive.

  When it had completed its braking manoeuvre, the
unwelcome guest from Mercury was only fifty kilometres
from Rama, and apparently carrying out a survey
through its TV cameras. These were clearly visible - one
fore and One aft - as were several small omni-antennas
and one large directional dish, aimed steadily at the dis-
tant star of Mercury. Norton wondered what instructions
were coming down that beam, and what information was
going back.

  Yet the Hermians could learn nothing that they did
not already know; all that Endeavour had discovered had
been broadcast throughout the solar system. This space-
craft - which had broken all speed records to get here -
could only be an extension of its makers' will, an instru-
ment of their purpose. That purpose would soon be
known, for in three hours the Hermian Ambassador to
the United Planets would be addressing the General As-
sembly.

  Officially, the missile did not yet exist. It bore no
identification marks, and was not radiating on any stan-
dard beacon frequency. This was a serious breach of law,
but even SPACEGUARD had not yet issued a formal protest.
Everyone was waiting, with nervous impatience, to see
what Mercury would do next.

  It had been three days since the missile's existence -
and origin - had been announced; all that time, the Her-
mians had remained stubbornly silent. They ,could be
very good at that, when it suited them.

  Some psychologists had claimed that it was almost im-
possible to understand fully the mentality of anyone
born and bred on Mercury. Forever exiled from Earth by
its three-times-more-powerful gravity, Hermians could
stand on the Moon and look across the narrow gap to the
planet of their ancestors - even of their own parents -
but they could never visit it. And so, inevitably, they
claimed that they did not want to.

  The pretended to despise the soft rains, the rolling
fields, the lakes and seas, the blue skies - all the things
that they could know only through recordings. Because
their planet was drenched with such solar energy that the
day time temperature often reached six hundred degrees,
they affected a rather swaggering roughness that did not
bear a moment's serious examination. In fact, they
tended to be physically weak, since they could only sur-
vive if they were totally insulated from their environ-
ment. Even if he could have tolerated the gravity, a Her-
mian would have been quickly incapacitated by a hot
day in any equatorial country on Earth.

  Yet in matters that really counted, they were tough.
The psychological pressures of that ravening star so close
at hand, the engineering problems of tearing into a stub-
born planet and wrenching from it all the necessities of
life - these had produced a spartan and in many ways
highly admirable culture. You could rely on the Her-
mians; if they promised something, they would do it -
though the bill might be considerable. It was their own
joke that, if the sun ever showed signs of going nova, they
would contract to get it under control - once the fee had
been settled. It was a non-Hermian joke that any child
who showed signs of interest in art, philosophy or ab-
stract mathematics was ploughed straight back into the
hydroponic farms. As far as criminals and psychopaths
were concerned, this was not a joke at all. Crime was one
of the luxuries that Mercury could not afford.

  Commander Norton had been to Mercury once, had
been enormously impressed - like most visitors - and had
acquired many Hermian friends. He had fallen in love
with a girl in Port Lucifer, and had even contemplated
signing a three-year contract, but parental disapproval of
anyone from outside the orbit of Venus had been too
strong. It was just as well.

  'Triple A message from Earth, Skipper,' said the
bridge. 'V9ice and back-up text from Commander-in-
Chief. Ready to accept?'

  'Check and file text; let me have the voice.

  'Here it comes.'

  Admiral Hendrix sounded calm and matter-of-fact, as if
he was issuing a routine fleet order, instead of handling a
situation unique in the history of space. But then, he was
not ten kilometres from the bomb.

  'C-in-C to Commander, Endeavour. This is a quick
summary of the situation as we see it now. You know that
the General Assembly meets at i4.oo and you'll be listen-
ing to the proceedings. It is possible that you may then
have to take action immediately, without consultation;
hence this briefing.

  'We've analysed the photos you have sent us; the veh-
icle is a standard space-probe, modified for high-impulse
and probably laser-riding for initial boost. Size and mass
are consistent with fusion bomb in the 500 to 1,ooo mega-
ton range; the Hermians use up to 1oo megatons rou-
tinely in their mining operations, so they would have had
no difficulty in assembling such a warhead.

  'Our experts also estimate that this would be the min-
imum size necessary to assure destruction of Rama. If it
was detonated against the thinnest part of the shell -
underneath the Cylindrical Sea - the hull would be rup-
tured and the spin of the body would complete its disin-
tegration.

  'We assume that the Hermians, if they are planning
such an act, will give you ample time to get clear. For
your information, the gamma-ray flash from such a bomb
could be dangerous to you up to a range of a thousand
kilometres.

  'But that is not the most serious danger. The fragments
of Rama, weighing tons and spinning off at almost a
thousand kilometres an hour, could destroy you at an
unlimited distance. We therefore recommend that you
proceed along the spin axis, since no fragments will be
thrown off in that direction. Ten thousand kilometres
should give an adequate safety margin.

  'This message cannot be intercepted; it is going by
multiple-pseudo-random routing, so I can talk in clear
English. Your reply may not be secure, so speak with dis-
cretion and use code when necessary. I will call you im-
mediately after the General Assembly discussion. Message
concluded. C-in-C, out.'

   CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - General Assembly

According to the history books - though no one could
really believe it - there had been a time when the old
United Nations had '72 members. The United planets
had only seven; and that was sometimes bad enough. In
order of distance from the Sun, they were Mercury, Earth,
Luna, Mars, Ganymede, Titan and Triton.

  The list contained numerous omissions and ambigui-
ties which presumably the future would rectify. Critics
never tired of pointing out that most of the United
Planets were not planets at all, but satellites. And how
ridiculous that the four giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus
and Neptune were not included ...

  But no one lived on the Gas Giants, and quite possibly
no one ever would. The same might be true of the other
major absentee, Venus. Even the most enthusiastic of
planetary engineers agreed that it would take centuries
to tame Venus; meanwhile the Hermians kept their eyes
on her, and doubtless brooded over long-range plans.

  Separate representation for Earth and Luna had also
been a bone of contention; the other members argued
that it put too much power in one corner of the solar
system. But there were more people on the Moon than
all the other worlds except Earth itself - and it was the
meeting place of the UP. Moreover, Earth and Moon
hardly ever agreed on anything, so they were not likely
to constitute a dangerous bloc.

  Mars held the asteroids in trust - except for the Icarian
group (supervised by Mercury) and a handful with pen-
helions beyond Saturn - and thus claimed by Titan. One
day the larger asteroids, such as Pallas, Vesta, Juno and
Ceres, would be important enough to have their own am-
bassadors, and membership of the UP would then reach
two figures.

  Ganymede represented not only Jupiter - and there-
fore more mass than all the rest of the solar system put
together - but also the remaining fifty or so Jovian satel-
lites, if one included temporary captures from the aster-
oid belt (the lawyers were still arguing over this). In the
same way, Titan took care of Saturn, its rings and the
other thirty-plus satellites.

  The situation for Triton was even more complicated.
The large moon of Neptune was the outermost body in
the solar system under permanent habitation; as a result,
its ambassador wore a considerable number of hats. He
represented Uranus and its eight moons (none yet occu-
pied); Neptune and its other three satellites; Pluto and
its solitary moon; and lonely, moonless Persephone. If
there were planets beyond Persephone, they too would be
Triton's responsibility. And as if that was not enough,
the Ambassador for the Outer Darkness, as he was some-
times called, had been heard to ask plaintively: 'What
about comets?' It was generally felt that this problem
could be left for the future to solve.

  And yet, in a very real sense, that future was already
here. By some definitions, Rama was a comet; they were
the only other visitors from the interstellar deeps, and
many had travelled on hyperbolic orbits even closer to
the Sun than Rama's. Any space-lawyer could make a
very good case out of that - and the Hermian Ambassa-
dor was one of the best.

  'We recognize His Excellency the Ambassador for Mer-
cury.'

  As the delegates were arranged counter-clockwise in
order of distance from the sun, the Hermian was on the
President's extreme right. Up to the very last minute, he
had been interfacing with his computer; now he removed
the synchronizing spectacles which allowed, no one else to
read the message on the display screen. He picked up his
sheaf of notes, and rose briskly to his feet.

   'Mr President, distinguished fellow delegates, I would
like to begin with a brief summary of the situation which
now confronts us.'

  From some delegates, that phrase 'a brief summary'
would have evoked silent groans among all listeners; but
everyone knew that Hermians meant exactly what they
said.

  'The giant spaceship, or artificial asteroid, which has
been christened Rama was detected over a year ago, in
the region beyond Jupiter. At first it was believed to be a
natural body, moving on a hyperbolic orbit which would
take it round the sun and on to the stars.

  'When its true nature was discovered, the Solar Survey
Vessel Endeavour was ordered to rendezvous with it. I am
sure we will all congratulate Commander Norton and his
crew for the efficient way in which they have carried out
their unique assignment.

  'At first, it was believed that Rama was dead - frozen
for so many hundreds of thousands of years that there
was no possibility of revival. This may still be true, in a
strictly biological sense. There seems general agreement,
among those who have studied the matter, that no living
organism of any complexity can survive more than a
very few centuries of suspended animation. Even at ab-
solute zero, residual quantum effects eventually erase too
much cellular information to make revival possible. It
therefore appeared that, although Rama was of enormous
archaeological importance, it did not present any major
astropolitical problems.

   'It is now obvious that this was a very na∩ve attitude,
though even from the first there were some who pointed
out that Rama was too precisely aimed at the Sun for
pure chance to be involved.

  'Even so, it might have been argued -. indeed, it was
argued - that here was an experiment that had failed.
Rama had reached the intended target, but the control-
ling intelligence had not survived. This view also seems
very simple-minded; it surely underestimates the entities
we are dealing with.

  'What we failed to take into account was the possibility
of non-biological survival. If we accept Dr Perera's very
plausible theory, which certainly fits all the facts, the crea-
tures who have been observed inside Rama did not exist
until a short time ago. Their patterns, or templates, were
stored in some central information bank, and when the
time was ripe they were manufactured from available
raw materials - presumably the metallo-organic soup of
the Cylindrical Sea. Such a feat is still somewhat beyond
our own ability, but does not present any theoretical
problems. We know that solid state circuits, unlike living
matter, can store information without loss, for indefinite
periods of time.

  'So Rama is now in full operating condition, serving
the purpose of its builders - whoever they may be. From
our point of view, it does not matter if the Ramans them-
selves have all been dead for a million years, or whether
they too will be re-created, to join their servants, at any
moment. With or Without them, their will is being done
and will continue to be done.

   'Rama has now given proof that its propulsion system is
still operating. In a few days, it will be at perihelion,
where it would logically make any major orbit change.
We may therefore soon have a new planet - moving
through the solar space over which my government has
jurisdiction. Or it may. of course, make additional
changes and occupy a final orbit at any distance from the
sun. It could even become a satellite of a major planet -
such as Earth ...

  'We are therefore, fellow delegates, faced with a whole
spectrum of possibilities, some of them very serious in-
deed. It is foolish to pretend that these creatures must be
benevolent and will not interfere with us in any way. If
they come to our solar system, they need something from
it. Even if it is only scientific knowledge - consider how
that knowledge may be used

  'What confronts us now is a technology hundreds -
perhaps thousands - of years in advance of ours, and a
culture which may have no points of contact whatsoever.
We have been studying the behaviour of the biological
robots - the biots - inside Rama, as shown on the films
that Commander Norton has relayed, and we have arrived
at certain conclusions which we wish to pass on to you.

  'On Mercury we are perhaps unlucky in having no in-
digenous life-forms to observe. But, of course, we have a
complete record of terrestrial zoology, and we find in it
one striking parallel with Rama.

  'This is the termite colony. Like Rama, it is an arti-
ficial world with a controlled environment. Like Rama,
its functioning depends upon a whole series of specialized
biological machines - workers, builders, farmers - war-
riors. And although we do not know if Rama has a
queen, I suggest that the island known as New York
serves a similar function.

  'Now, it would obviously be absurd to press this anal-
ogy too far; it breaks down at many points. But I put it to
you for this reason.

  'What degree of cooperation or understanding would
ever be possible between human beings and termites?
When there is no conflict of interest, we tolerate each
other. But when either needs the other's territory or re-
sources, no quarter is given.

  'Thanks to our technology and our intelligence, we can
always win, if we are sufficiently determined. But some-
times it is not easy, and there are those who believe that,
in the long run, final victory may yet go to the ter-
mites...

  'With this in mind, consider now the appalling threat
that Rama may - I do not say must present to human
civilization. What steps have we taken to counter it, if the
worst eventuality should occur? None whatsoever; we
have merely talked and speculated and written learned
papers.

  'Well, my fellow delegates, Mercury has done more
than this. Acting under the provisions of Clause 34 of the
Space Treaty of 2057, which entitled us to take any steps
necessary to protect the integrity of our solar space, we
have dispatched a high-energy nuclear device to Rama.
We will indeed be happy if we never have to utilize it.
But now, at least, we are not helpless - as we were before.

  'It may be argued that we have acted unilaterally,
without prior consultation. We admit that. But does any-
one here imagine - with, all respect, Mister President -
that we could have secured any such agreement in the
time available? We consider that we are acting not only
for ourselves, but for the whole human race. All future
generations may one day thank us for our foresight.

  'We recognized that it would be a tragedy - even a
crime - to destroy an artifact as wonderful as Rama. If
there is any way in which this can be avoided, without
risk to humanity, we will be very happy to hear of it. We
have not found one, and time is running out.

  'Within the next few days, before Rama reaches peri-
helion, the choke will have to be made. We will, of
course, give ample warning to Endeavour - but we would
advise Commander Norton always to be ready to leave
at an hour's notice. It is conceivable that Rama may
undergo further dramatic transformations at any moment.

  'That is all, Mister President, fellow delegates. I thank
you for your attention. I look forward to your coopera-
tion.'

   CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - Command Decision

  'Well, Rod, how do the Hermians fit into your theology?'

  'Only too well, Commander,' replied Rodrigo with a
humourless smile. 'It's the age-old conflict between the
forces of good and the forces of evil. And there are times
when men have to take sides in such a conflict.'

  I thought it would be something like that, Norton told
himself. This situation must have been a shock to Boris,
but he would not have resigned himself to passive acqui-
escence. The Cosmo-Christers were very energetic, compe-
tent people. Indeed, in some ways they were remarkably
like the Hermians.

  'I take it you have a plan, Rod.'

  'Yes, Commander. It's really quite simple. We merely
have to disable the bomb.'

  'Oh. And how do you propose to do that?'

  'With a small pair of wire-cutters.'

  If this had been anyone else, Norton would have as-
sumed that they were joking. But not Boris Rodrigo.

  'Now just a minute! It's bristling with cameras. Do
you suppose the Hermians will just sit and watch you?'

  'Of course; that's all they can do. When the signal
reaches them, it will be far too late. I can easily finish the
job in ten minutes.

  'I see. They certainly will be mad. But suppose the
bomb is booby-trapped so that interference sets it off?'

  'That seems very unlikely; what would be the purpose?
This bomb was built for a specific deep-space mission,
and it will be fitted with all sorts of safety devices to
prevent detonation except on a positive command. But
that's a risk I'm prepared to take - and it can be done
without endangering the ship. I've worked everything out.'

  'I'm sure you have,' said Norton. The idea was fascin-
ating - almost seductive in its appeal; he particularly
liked the idea of the frustrated Hermians; and would give
a good deal to see their reactions when they realized - too
late - what was happening to their deadly toy.

  But there were other complications, and they seemed
to multiply as Norton surveyed the problem. He was fac-
ing by far the most difficult, and the most crucial, de-
cision in his entire career.

  And that was a ridiculous understatement. He was
faced with the most difficult decision any commander had
ever had to make; the future of the entire human race
might well depend upon It. For just suppose the Her-
mians were right?
When Rodrigo had left, he switched on the DO NOT
DISTURB sign; he could not remember when he had last
used it, and was mildly surprised that it was working.
Now, in the heart of his crowded, busy ship, he was com-
pletely alone - except for the portrait of Captain James
Cook, gazing at him down the corridors of time.

  It was impossible to consult with Earth; he had already
been warned that any messages might be tapped - per-
haps by relay devices on the bomb itself. That left the
whole responsibility in his hands.

  There was a story he had heard somewhere about a
President of the United States - was it Roosevelt or
Perez? - who had a sign on his desk saying 'The buck
stops here'. Norton was not quite certain what a buck
was, but he knew when one had stopped at his desk.

  He could do nothing, and wait until the Hermians ad-
vised him to leave. How would that look in the histories
of the future? Norton was not greatly concerned with
posthumous fame or infamy, yet he would not care to be
remembered for ever as the accessory to a cosmic crime -
which it had been in his power to prevent.

  And the plan was flawless. As he had expected, Rodrigo
had worked out every detail, anticipated every possibility
even the remote danger that the bomb might be triggered
when tampered with. If that happened, Endeavour could
still be safe, behind the shield of Rama. As for Lieu-
tenant Rodrigo himself, he seemed to regard the possi-
bility of instant apotheosis with complete equanimity.

  Yet, even if the bomb was successfully disabled, that
would be far from the end of the matter. The Hermians
might try again - unless some way could be found of
stopping them. But at least weeks of time would have
been bought; Rama would be far past perihelion before
another missile could possibly reach it. By then, hope-
fully, the worst fears of the alarmists might have been
disproved. Or the reverse...

  To act, or not to act - that was the question. Never
before had Commander Norton felt such a close kinship
with the Prince of Denmark. Whatever he did, the possi-
bilities for good and evil seemed in perfect balance. He
was faced with the most morally difficult of all decisions.
If his choice was wrong, he would know very quickly. But
if he was correct - he might never be able to prove it...

  It was no use relying any further on logical arguments
and the endless mapping of alternative futures. That
way, one could go round and round in circles for ever.
The time had come to listen to his inner voices.

  He returned the calm, steady gaze across the centuries.
'I agree with you, Captain,' he whispered. 'The human
race has to live with its conscience. Whatever the Her-
mians argue, survival is not everything.'

  He pressed the call button for the bridge circuit and
said slowly, 'Lieutenant Rodrigo - I'd like to see you.

  Then he closed his eyes, hooked his thumbs in the re-
straining straps of his chair, and prepared to enjoy a few
moments of total relaxation.

  It might be some time before he would experience it
again.

   CHAPTER FORTY - Saboteur

The scooter had been stripped of all unnecessary equip-
ment; it was now merely an open framework holding to-
gether propulsion, guidance and life-support systems.
Even the seat for the second pilot had been removed, for
every kilogramme of extra mass had to be paid for in mis-
sion time.

  That was one of the reasons, though not the most im-
portant, why Rodrigo had insisted on going along. It was
such a simple job that there was no need for any extra
hands, and the mass of a passenger would cost sev-
eral minutes of flight time. Now the stripped-down
scooter could accelerate at over a third of a gravity;
it could make the trip from Endeavour to the bomb
in four minutes. That left six to spare; it should. be
sufficient.

  Rodrigo looked back only once when he had left the
ship; he saw that, as planned, it had lifted from the cen-
tral axis and was thrusting gently away across the spin-
ning disc of the North Face. By the time he reached the
bomb, it would have placed the thickness of Rama be-
tween them.

  He took his time, flying over the polar plain. There was
no hurry here, because the bomb's cameras could not yet
see him, and he could therefore conserve fuel. Then he
drifted over the curving rim of the world - and there was
the missile, glittering in sunlight fiercer even than that
shining cm the planet of its birth.

  Rodrigo had already punched in the guidance instruc-
tions. He initiated the sequence; the scooter spun on its
gyros, and came up to full thrust in a matter of seconds.
At first the sensation of weight seemed crushing; then ~
Rodrigo adjusted to it. He had, after all, comfortably en-
dured twice as much inside Rama - and had been born
under three times as much on Earth.

  The huge, curving exterior wall of the fifty-kilometre
cylinder was slowly falling away beneath him as the
scooter aimed itself directly at the bomb. Yet it was im-
possible to judge Rama's size, since it was completely
smooth and featureless - so featureless, indeed, that it
was difficult to tell that it was spinning.

  One hundred seconds into the mission; he was ap-
proaching the halfway point. The bomb was still too far
away to show any details, but it was much brighter
against the let-black sky. It was strange to see no stars -
not even brilliant Earth or dazzling Venus; the dark
filters which protected his eyes against the deadly glare
made that impossible. Rodrigo guessed that he was break-
ing a record; probably no other man had ever engaged in
extra-vehicular work so close to the sun. It was lucky for
him that solar activity was low.

  At two minutes ten seconds the flip-over light started
flashing, thrust dropped to zero, and the scooter spun
through 180 degrees. -Full thrust was back in an instant,
but now he was decelerating at the same mad rate Of
three metres per second squared - rather better than that,
in fact, since he had lost almost half his propellent mass.
The bomb was twenty-five kilometres away; he would be
there in another two minutes. He had hit a top speed of
fifteen hundred kilometres an hour - which, for a space-
scooter, was utter insanity, and probably another record.
But this was hardly a routine EVA, and he knew pre-
cisely what he was doing.

  The bomb was growing; and now he could see the
main antenna, holding steady on the invisible star of
Mercury. Along that beam, the image of his approaching
scooter had been flashing at the speed of- light for the last
three minutes. There were still two to go, before it
reached Mercury.

  What would the Hermians do, when they saw him?
There would be consternation, of course; they would
realize instantly that he had made a rendezvous with the
bomb several minutes before they 'even knew he was on
the way. Probably some stand-by observer would call
higher authority - that would take more time. But even
in the worst possible case - even if the officer on duty had
authority to detonate the bomb, and pressed the button
immediately - it would take another five minutes for the
signal to arrive.

  Though Rodrigo was not gambling on it - Cosmo-
Christers never gambled - he was quite sure that there
would be no such instantaneous reaction. The Hermians
would hesitate to destroy a reconnaissance vehicle from
Endeavour, even if they suspected its motives. They
would certainly attempt some form of communication
first - and that would mean more delay.

  And there was an even better reason; they would not
waste a gigaton bomb on. a mere scooter. Wasted it would
be, if it was detonated twenty kilometres from its target.
They would have to move it first. Oh, he had plenty of
time. . . but he would still assume the very worst.

  He would act as if the triggering impulse would arrive
in the shortest possible time - just five minutes.

  As the scooter closed in across the last few hundred
metres, Rodrigo quickly matched the details he could now
see with those he had studied in the photographs taken
at long range. What had been only a collection of pic-
tures became hard metal and smooth plastic - no longer
abstract, but a deadly reality.

  The bomb was a cylinder about ten metres long and
three in diameter - by a strange coincidence, almost the
same proportions as Rama itself. It was attached to the
framework of the carrier vehicle by an open lattice-work
of short I-beams. For some reason, probably to do with the
location of the centre of mass, it was supported at right
angles to the axis of the carrier, so that it conveyed an
appropriately sinister hammer-head impression. It was
indeed a hammer, one powerful enough to smash a world.

  From each end of the bomb, a bundle of braided cables
ran along the cylindrical side and disappeared through
the lattice-work into the interior of the vehicle. All com-
munication and control was here; there was no antenna
of any kind on the bomb itself. Rodrigo had only to cut
those two sets of cables and there would be nothing here
but harmless, inert metal.

  Although this was exactly what he had expected, it still
seemed a little too easy. He glanced at his watch; it
would be another thirty seconds before the Hermians,
even if they had been watching when he rounded the
edge of Rama, could know of his existence. He had an
absolutely certain five minutes for uninterrupted work -
and a ninety-nine per cent probability of much longer
than that. -

  As soon as the scooter had drifted to a complete halt,
Rodrigo grappled it to the missile framework so that the
two formed a rigid structure. That took only seconds; he
had already chosen his tools, and was out of the pilot's
seat at once, only slightly hampered by the stiffness of his
heavy-insulation suit.

  The first thing he found himself inspecting was a small
metal plate bearing the inscription:

   DEPARTMENT OF POWER ENGINEERING

                          Section D,

                 47, Sunset Boulevard,

                 Vulcanopolis, 17464

    For information apply to Mr Henry K. Jones

  Rodrigo suspected that, in a very few minutes, Mr
Jones might be rather busy.

  The heavy wire-cutters made short work of the cable.
As the fist strands parted, Rodrigo gave scarcely a
thought to the fires of hell that were pent up only centi-
metres away; if his actions triggered them, he would never
know.

  He glanced again at his watch; this had taken less than
a minute, which meant that he was on schedule. Now for
the back-up cable - and then he could head for home, in
full view of the furious and frustrated Hermians.,

  He was just beginning to work on the second cable
assembly when he felt a faint vibration in the metal he
was touching. Startled, he looked back along the body of
the missile.

  The characteristic blue-violet glow of a plasma thruster
in action was hovering round one of the attitude control
jets. The bomb was preparing to move.
The message from Mercury was brief, and devastating. It
arrived two minutes after Rodrigo had disappeared
around the edge of Rama.

  COMMANDER ENDEAVOUR FROM MERCURY SPACE CONTROL,

  INFERNO WEST. YOU HAVE ONE HOUR FROM RECEIPT OF

  THIS MESSAGE TO LEAVE VICINITY OF RAMA. SUGGEST YOU

  PROCEED MAXIMUM ACCELERATION ALONG SPIN AXIS. RE-

  QUEST ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. MESSAGE ENDS.

  Norton read it with sheer disbelief, then anger. He felt
a childish impulse to radio back that all his crew were
inside Rama, and it would take hours to get everyone
out. But that would achieve nothing - except perhaps to
test the will and nerve of the Hermians.

  And why, several days before perihelion, had they de-
cided to act? He wondered if the mounting pressure of
public opinion was becoming too great, and they decided
to present the rest of the human race with a fait accom-
pli. It seemed an unlikely explanation; such sensitivity
would have been uncharacteristic.

  There was no way in which he could recall Rodrigo,
for the scooter was now in the radio shadow of Rama and
would be out of contact until they were in line of sight
again. That would not be until the mission was com-
pleted - or had failed.

  He would have to wait it out; there was still plenty of
time - a full fifty minutes. Meanwhile, he had decided on
the most effective answer to Mercury.

  He would ignore the message completely, and see what
the Hermians did next.
Rodrigo's first sensation, when the bomb started to move,
was not one of physical fear; it was something much more
devastating. He believed that the universe operated ac-
cording to strict laws, which not even God Himself could
disobey - much less the Hermians. No message could
travel faster than light; he was five minutes ahead of any-
thing that Mercury could do.

  This could only be a coincidence - fantastic, and per-
haps deadly, but no more than that. By chance, a control
signal must have been sent to the bomb at about the time
he was leaving Endeavour; while he was travelling fifty
kilometres, it had covered eighty million.

  Or perhaps this was only an automatic change of atti-
tude, to counter over-heating somewhere in the vehicle.
There were places where the skin temperature ap-
proached fifteen hundred degrees, and Rodrigo had been
very careful to keep in the shadows as far as possible.

  A second thruster started to fire, checking the spin
given by the first. No, this was not a mere thermal adjust-
ment. The bomb was re-orientating itself, to point to-.
wards .......

  Useless to wonder why this was happening at this pre-
cise moment in time. There was one thing in his favour;
the missile was a low acceleration device. A tenth of a
gee was the most that it could manage. He could hang
on.

  He checked the grapples attaching the scooter to the
bomb framework, and re-checked the safety line on his
own suit. A cold anger was growing in his mind, adding
to his determination. Did this manoeuvre mean that the
Hermians were going to explode the bomb without warn-
ing, giving Endeavour no chance to escape? That seemed
incredible - an act not only of brutality but of folly, cal-
culated to turn the rest of the solar system against them.
And what would have made them ignore the solemn
promise of their own Ambassador?

  Whatever their plan, they would not get away with it.

The second message from Mercury was identical with the
first, and arrived ten minutes later. So they had extended
the deadline - Norton still had one hour. And they had
obviously waited until a reply from Endeavour could
have reached them before calling him again.

  Now there was another factor; by this time they must
have seen Rodrigo, and would have had several minutes
in which to take action. Their instructions could already
be on the way. They could arrive at any second.

  He should be preparing to leave. At any moment, the
sky-filling bulk of Rama might become incandescent
along the edges, blazing with a transient glory that would
far outshine the sun.

When the main thrust came on, Rodrigo was securely
anchored. Only twenty seconds later, it cut off again. He
did a quick mental calculation; the delta vee could not
have been more than fifteen kilometres an hour. The
bomb would take over an hour to reach Rama; perhaps it
was only moving in close to get a quicker reaction. If so,
that was a wise precaution; but the Hermians had left it
too late.

  Rodrigo glanced at his watch, though by now he was
almost aware of the time without having to check. On
Mercury, they would now be seeing him heading pur-
posefully towards the bomb, and less than two kilometres
away from it. They could have no doubt of his inten-
tions, and would be wondering if he had already carried
them out.

  The second set of cables went as easily as the first; like
any good workman, Rodrigo had chosen his tools well.
The bomb was disarmed; or, to be more accurate, it
could no longer be detonated by remote command.

  Yet there was one other possibility, and he could not
afford to ignore it. There were no external contact fuses,
but there might be internal ones, armed by the shock of
impact. The Hermians still had control over their veh-
icle's movements, and could crash it into Rama whenever
they wished. Rodrigo's work was not yet completely fin-
ished.

  Five minutes from now, in that control room some-
where on Mercury, they would see him crawling back
along the exterior of the missile, carrying the modestly-
sized wire-cutters that had neutralized the mightiest wea-
pon ever built by man. He was almost tempted to wave at
the camera, but decided that it would seem undignified;
after all, he was making history, and millions would
watch this scene in the years to come. Unless, of course,
the Hermians destroyed the recording in a fit of pique;
he would hardly blame them.

  He reached the mounting of the long-range antenna,
and drifted hand-over-hand along it to the big dish. His
faithful cutters made short work of the multiplex feed
system, chewing up cables and laser wave guides alike.
When he made the last snip, the antenna started to swing
slowly around; the unexpected movement took him by
surprise, until he realized that he had destroyed its auto-
matic lock on Mercury. Just five minutes from now, the
Hermians would lose all contact with their servant. Not
only was it impotent; now it was blind and deaf.

  Rodrigo climbed slowly back to the scooter, released
the shackles, and swung it round until the forward
bumpers were pressing against the missile, as close as pos-
sible to its centre of mass. He brought thrust up to full
power, and held it there for twenty seconds.

  Pushing against many times its own mass, the scooter
responded very sluggishly. When Rodrigo cut the thrust
back to zero, he took a careful reading of the bomb's new
velocity vector.

  It would miss Rama by a wide margin - and it could
be located again with precision at any future time. It was,
after all, a very valuable piece of equipment.

  Lieutenant Rodrigo was a man of almost pathological
honesty. He would not like the Hermians to accuse him
of losing their property.

   CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - Hero

'Darling,' began Norton, 'this nonsense has cost us more
than a day, but at least it's given me a chance to talk to
you.

  'I'm still in the ship, and she's heading back to station
at the polar axis. We picked up Rod an hour ago, looking
as if he'd just come off duty after a quiet watch. I suppose
neither of us will ever be able to visit Mercury again, and
I'm wondering if we're going to be treated as heroes or
villains when we get back to Earth. But my conscience is
clear; I'm sure we did the right thing. I wonder if the
Ramans will ever say "thank you".

  'We can stay here only two more days; unlike Rama,
we don't have a kilometre-thick skin to protect us from
the sun. The hull's already developing dangerous hot-
spots and we've had to put out some local screening. I'm
sorry - I didn't want to bore you with my problems...

  'So there's time for just one more trip into Rama, and I
intend to make the most of it. But don't worry - I'm not
taking any chances.'

  He stopped the recording. That, to say the least, was
stretching the truth. There was danger and uncertainty
about every moment inside Rama; no man could ever feel
really at home there, in the presence of forces beyond his
understanding. And on this final trip, now that he knew
they would never return and that no future operations
would be jeopardized, he intended to press his luck just a
little further.

  'In forty-eight hours, then, we'll have completed this
mission. What happens then is still uncertain; as you
know, we've used virtually all our fuel getting into this
orbit. I'm still waiting to hear if a tanker can rendezvous
with us in time to get back to Earth, or whether we'll
have to make planet-fall at Mars. Anyway, I should be
home by Christmas. Tell Junior I'm sorry I can't bring a
baby biot; there's no such animal...

  'We're all fine, but we're very tired. I've earned a long
leave after all this, and we'll make up for lost time. What-
ever they say about me, you can claim you're married to a
hero. How many wives have a husband who saved a
world?'

  As always, he listened carefully to the tape before dup-
ing it, to make sure that it was applicable to both his
families. It was strange to think that he did not know
which of them he would see first; usually, his schedule was
determined at least a year in advance, by the inexorable
movements of the planets themselves.

  But that was in the days before Rama; now nothing
would ever be the same again.

   CHAPTER FORTY-TWO - Temple of Glass

  'If we try it,' said Karl Mercer, 'do you think the bio
will stop us?'

  'They may; that's one of the things I want to find out
Why are you looking at me like that?'

  Mercer gave his slow, secret grin, which was liable to be
set off at any moment by a private joke he might or might
not share with his shipmates.

  'I was wondering, Skipper, if you think you own
Rama. Until now, you've vetoed any attempt to cut into
buildings. Why the switch? Have the Hermians given
you ideas?'

  Norton laughed, then suddenly checked himself. It was
a shrewd question, and he was not sure if the obvious
answers were the right ones.

  'Perhaps I have been ultra-cautious - I've tried to
avoid trouble. But this is our last chance; if we're forced
to retreat we won't have lost much.'

  'Assuming that we retreat in good order.'

  'Of course. But the biots have never shown hostility;
and except for the Spiders, I don't believe there's any-
thing here that can catch us - if we do have to run for
it.'

  'You may run, Skipper, but I intend to leave with dig-
nity. And incidentally, I've decided why the biots are so
polite to us.'

  'It's a little late for a new theory.'

  'Here it is, anyway. They think we're Ramans. They
can't tell the difference between one oxy-eater and an-
other.'

  'I don't believe they're that stupid.'

  'It's not a matter of stupidity. They've beep program-
med for their particular jobs, and we simply don't come
into their frame of reference.'

  'Perhaps you're right. We may find out - as soon as we
start to work on London.'

  Joe Calvert had always enjoyed those old bank-robbery
movies, but he had never expected to be involved in one.
Yet this was, essentially, what he was doing now.

  The. deserted streets of 'London' seemed full of men-
ace, though he knew that was only his guilty conscience.
He did not really believe that the sealed and windowless
structures ranged all around them were full of watchful
inhabitants, waiting to emerge in angry hordes as soon as
the invaders laid a hand on their property. In fact, he was
quite certain that this whole complex - like all the other
towns - was merely some kind of storage area.

  Yet a second fear, also based on innumerable ancient
crime dramas, could be better grounded. There might be
no clanging alarm bells and screaming sirens, but it was
reasonable to assume that Rama would have some kind
of warning system. How otherwise did the biots know
when and where their services were needed?

  'Those without goggles, turn your backs,' ordered Serg-
eant Myron. There was a smell of nitric oxides as the air
itself started to burn in the beam of the laser torch, and a
steady sizzling as the fiery knife sliced towards secrets that
had been hidden since the birth of man.

  Nothing material could resist this concentration
of power, and the cut proceeded smoothly at a rate of
several metres a minute. In a remarkably short time,
a section large enough to admit a man had been sliced
out.

  As the cut-away section showed no signs of moving,
Myron tapped it gently - then harder - then banged on
it with all his strength. It fell inwards with a hollow,
reverberating crash.

  Once again, as he had done during that very first en-
trance into Rama, Norton remembered the archaeologist
who had opened the old Egyptian tomb. He did not ex-
pect to see the glitter of gold; in fact, he had no precon-
ceived ideas at all, as he crawled through the opening, his
flashlight held in front of him.

  A Greek temple made of glass - that was his first im-
pression. The building was filled with row upon row of
vertical crystalline columns, about a metre wide and
stretching from floor to ceiling. There were hundreds of
them, marching away into the darkness beyond the reach
of his light.

  Norton walked towards the nearest column and dir-
ected his beam into its interior. Refracted as through a
cylindrical lens, the light fanned out on the far side to be
focused and refocused, getting fainter with each repeti-
tion, in the array of pillars beyond. He felt that he was in
the middle of some complicated demonstration in optics.

  'Very pretty,' said the practical Mercer, 'but what does
it mean? Who needs a forest of glass pillars?'

  Norton rapped gently on one column. It sounded solid,
though more metallic than crystalline. He was completely
baffled, and so followed a piece of useful advice he had
heard long ago: 'When in doubt, say nothing and move
on.

  As he reached the next column, which looked exactly
like the first, he heard an exclamation of surprise from
Mercer.

  'I could have sworn this pillar was empty - now there's
something inside it.'

  Norton glanced quickly back.

  'Where?' he said. 'I don't see anything.'

  He followed the direction of Mercer's pointing finger.
It was aimed at nothing; the column was still completely
transparent.

  'You can't see it?' said Mercer incredulously. 'Come
around this side. Damn - now I've lost it!'

  'What's going on here?' demanded Calvert. It was

  several minutes before he got even the first approxima-
tion to an answer.

  The columns were not transparent from every angle or
under all illuminations. As one walked around them, ob-
jects would suddenly flash into view, apparently em-
bedded in their depths like flies in amber - and would
then disappear again. There were dozens of them, all
different. They looked absolutely real and solid, yet many
seemed to occupy the identical volume of space.

  'Holograms,' said Calvert. 'Just like a museum on
Earth.'

  That was the obvious explanation, and therefore Nor-
ton viewed it with suspicion. His doubts grew as he exam-
ined the other columns, and conjured up the images
stored in their interiors.

  Hand-tools (though for huge and peculiar hands), con-
tainers, small machines with keyboards that appeared to
have been made for more than five fingers, scientific in-
struments, startlingly conventional domestic utensils, in-
cluding knives and plates which apart from their size
would not have attracted a second glance on any terres-
trial table ... they were all there, with hundreds of less
identifiable objects, often jumbled up together in the
same pillar. A museum, surely, would have some logical
arrangement, some segregation of related items. This
seemed to be a completely random collection of hard-
ware.

  They had photographed the elusive images inside a
score of the crystal pillars when the sheer variety of items
gave Norton a clue. Perhaps this was not a collection, but
a catalogue, indexed according to some arbitrary but per-
fectly logical system. He thought of the wild juxtaposi-
tions that any dictionary or alphabetized list will give,
and tried the idea on his companions.

  'I see what you mean,' said Mercer. 'The Ramans
might be equally surprised to find us putting - ah - cam-
shafts next to cameras.'

  'Or books beside boots', added Calvert, after several
seconds' hard thinking. One could play this game for
hours, he decided, with increasing degrees of impropriety.

  'That's the idea,' replied Norton. 'This may be an in-
dexed catalogue for 3-D images - templates - solid blue-
prints, if you like to call them that.'

  'For what purpose?'

  'Well, you know the theory about the biots ... the idea
that they don't exist until they're needed and then
they're created - synthesized - from patterns stored some-
where?'

  'I see,' said Mercer slowly and thoughtfully. 'So when a
Raman needs a left-handed blivet, he punches out the
correct code number, and a copy is manufactured from
the pattern in here.'

  'Something like that. But please don't ask me about the
practical details.'

  The pillars through which they had been moving had
been steadily growing in size, and were now more than
two metres in diameter. The images were correspond-
ingly larger; it was obvious that, for doubtless excellent
reasons, the Ramans believed in sticking to a one-to-one
scale. Norton wondered how they stored anything really
big, if this was the case.

  To increase their rate of coverage, the four explorers
had now spread out through the crystal columns and were
taking photographs as quickly as they could get their
cameras focused on the fleeting images. This was an
astonishing piece of luck, Norton told himself, though he
felt that he had earned it; they could not possibly have
made a better choice than this Illustrated Catalogue of
Raman Artifacts. And yet, in another way; it could
hardly have been more frustrating. There was nothing
actually here, except impalpable patterns of light and
darkness; these apparently solid objects did not really
exist.

  Even knowing this, more than once Norton felt an al-
most irresistible urge to laser his way into one of the pil-
lars, so that he could have something material to take
back to Earth. It was the same impulse, he told himself
wryly, that would prompt a monkey to grab the reflection
of a banana in a mirror.

  He was photographing what seemed to be some kind of
optical device when Calvert's shout started him running
through the pillars.

  'Skipper - Karl - Will - look at this!'

  Joe was prone to sudden enthusiasms, but what he had
found was enough to justify any amount of excitement.

  Inside one of the two-metre columns was an elaborate
harness, or uniform, obviously made for a vertically-
standing creature, much taller than a man. A very nar-
row central metal band apparently surrounded the waist,
thorax or some division unknown to terrestrial zoology.
From this rose three slim columns, tapering outwards and
ending in a perfectly circular belt, an impressive metre in
diameter. Loops equally spaced along it could only be
intended to go round upper limbs or arms. Three of
them...

  There were numerous pouches, buckles, bandoliers
from which tools (or weapons?) protruded, pipes and
electrical conductors, even small black boxes that would
have looked perfectly at home in an electronics lab on
Earth. The whole arrangement was almost as complex as
a spacesuit, though it obviously provided only partial
covering for the creature wearing it.

  And was that creature a Raman? Norton asked him-
self. We'll probably never know; but it must have been
intelligent - no mere animal could cope with all that
sophisticated equipment.

  'About two and a half metres high,' said Mercer
thoughtfully, 'not counting the bead - whatever that was
like.'

  'With three arms - and presumably three legs. The
same plan as the Spiders, on a much more massive scale.
Do you suppose that's a coincidence?'

  'Probably not. We design robots in our own image; we
might expect the Ramans to do the same.'

  Joe Calvert, unusually subdued, was looking at the dis-
play with something like awe.

  'Do you suppose they know we're here?' he half-whisp-
ered.

  'I doubt it,' said Mercer. 'We've not even reached their
threshold of consciousness - though the Hermians cer-
tainly had a good try.'

  They were still standing there, unable to drag them-
selves away, when Pieter called from the Hub, his voice
full of urgent concern.

  'Skipper - you'd better get outside.'

  'What is it - biots heading this way?'

  'No - something much more serious. The lights are go-
ing out.'

   CHAPTER FORTY-THREE - Retreat

When he hastily emerged from the hole they had lasered,
it seemed to Norton that the six suns of Rama were as
brilliant as ever. Surely, he thought, Pieter must have
made a mistake.., that's not like him at all ...

  But Pieter had anticipated just this reaction.

  'It happened so slowly,' he explained apologetically,
'that it was a long time before I noticed any difference.
But there's no doubt about it - I've taken a meter read-
ing. The light level's down forty per cent.'

  Now, as his eyes readjusted themselves after the gloom
of the glass temple, Norton could believe him. The long
day of Rama was drawing to its close.

  It was still as warm as ever, yet Norton felt himself
shivering. He had known this sensation once before, dur-
ing a beautiful summer day on Earth. There had been
an inexplicable weakening of light as if darkness was fall-
ing from the air, or the sun had lost its strength - though
there was not a cloud in the sky. Then he remembered; a
partial eclipse was in progress.

  'This is it,' he said grimly. 'We're going home. Leave
all the equipment behind - we won't need it again.'

  Now, he hoped, one piece of planning was about to
prove its worth. He had selected London for this raid
because no other town was so close to a stairway; the foot
of Beta was only four kilometres away.

  They set off at the steady, loping trot which was the
most comfortable mode of travelling at half a gravity.
Norton set a pace which, he estimated, would get them to
the edge of the plain without exhaustion, and in the
minimum of time. He was acutely aware of the eight
kilometres they would still have to climb when they had
reached Beta, but he would feel much safer when they
had actually started the ascent.

  The first tremor came when they had almost reached
the stairway. It was very slight, and instinctively Norton
turned towards the south, expecting to see another dis-
play of fireworks around the Horns. But Rama never
seemed to repeat itself exactly; if there were any electrical
discharges above those needle-sharp mountains, they were
too faint to be seen.

  'Bridge,' he called, 'did you notice that?'

  'Yes, Skipper - very small shock. Could be another atti-
tude change. We're watching the rate gyro - nothing yet.
Just a minute! Positive reading! Can just detect it - less
than a microradian per second, but holding.'

  So Rama was beginning to turn, though with almost
imperceptible slowness. Those earlier shocks might have
been a false alarm - but this, surely, was the real
thing.

  'Rate increasing five microrad. Hello, did you feel
that shock?'

  'We certainly did. Get all the ship's systems opera-
tional. We may have to leave in a hurry.'

  'Do you expect an orbit change already? We're still a
long way from perihelion.

  'I don't think Rama works by our textbooks. Nearly at
Beta. We'll rest there for five minutes.'

  Five minutes was utterly inadequate, yet it seemed an
age. For there was now no doubt that the light was fail-
ing, and failing fast.

  Though they were all equipped with flashlights, the
thought of darkness here was now intolerable; they had
grown so psychologically accustomed to the endless day
that it was hard to remember the conditions under which
they had first explored this world. They felt an over-
whelming urge to escape - to get out into the light of the
Sun, a kilometre away on the other side of these cylindri-
cal walls.

  'Hub Control!' called Norton. 'Is the searchlight oper-
ating? We may need it in a hurry.'

  'Yes, Skipper. Here it comes.

  A reassuring spark of light started to shine eight kilo-
metres above their heads. Even against the now fading
day of Rama, it looked surprisingly feeble; but it had
served them before, and would guide them once again if
they needed it.

  This, Norton was grimly aware, would be the longest
and most nerve-wracking climb they had ever done. What-
ever happened, it would be impossible to hurry; if they
over-exerted themselves, they would simply collapse some-
where on that vertiginous slope, and would have to wait
until their protesting muscles permitted them to continue.
By this time, they must be one of the fittest crews that
had ever carried out a space mission; but there were lim-
its to what flesh and blood could do.

  After an hour's steady plodding they had reached the
fourth section of the stairway, about three kilometres
from the plain. From now on, it would be much easier;
gravity was already down to a third of Earth value. Al-
though there had been minor shocks from time to time,
no other unusual phenomena had occurred, and there
was still plenty of light. They began to feel more optimis-
tic, and even to wonder if they had left too soon. One
thing was certain, however; there was no going back.
They had all walked for the last time on the plain of
Rama.

  It was while they were taking a ten-minute rest on the
fourth platform that Joe Calvert suddenly exclaimed:
ò 'What's that noise, Skipper?'

  'Noise! - I don't hear anything.'

  'High-pitched whistle - dropping in frequency, you
must hear it.'

  'Your ears are younger than mine - oh, now I do.'

  The whistle seemed to come from everywhere. Soon it
was loud, even piercing, and falling swiftly in pitch.
Then it suddenly stopped.

  A few seconds later it came again, repeating the same
sequence. It had all the mournful, compelling quality of
a lighthouse siren sending out its warnings into the fog-
shrouded night. There was a message here, and an urgent
one. It was not designed for their ears, but they under-
stood it. Then, as if to make doubly sure, it was re-
inforced by the lights themselves.

  They dimmed almost to extinction, then started to
flash. Brilliant beads, like ball lightning, raced along the
six narrow valleys that had once illuminated this world.
They moved from both Poles towards the Sea in a syn-
chronized, hypnotic rhythm which could have only one
meaning. 'To the Sea!' the lights were calling, 'To the
Sea I' And the summons was hard to resist; there was not
a man who did not feel a compulsion to turn back, and to
seek oblivion in the water of Rama.

  'Hub Control!' Norton called urgently. 'Can you see
what's happening?'

  The voice of Pieter came back to him; he sounded
awed, and more than a little frightened.

  'Yes, Skipper. I'm looking across at the Southern conti-
nent. There are still scores of biots over there - including
some big ones. Cranes; Bulldozers - lots of Scavengers.
And they're all rushing back to the Sea faster than I've
ever seen them move before. There goes a Crane - right
over the edge! Just like Jimmy, but going down a lot
quicker ... it smashed to pieces when it hit ... and here
come the Sharks - they're tearing into it... ugh; it's not a
pleasant sight...

  'Now I'm looking at the plain. Here's a Bulldozer that
seems to have broken down ... it's going round and
round in circles. Now a couple of Crabs are tearing into
it, pulling it to pieces ... Skipper, I think you'd better get
back right away.'

  'Believe me,' Norton said with deep feeling, 'we're com-
ing just as quickly as we can.

  Rama was battening down the hatches, like a ship pre-
paring for a storm. That was Norton's overwhelming im-
pression, though he could not have put it on a logical
basis. He no longer felt completely rational; two compul-
sions were warring in his mind - the need to escape, and
the desire to obey those bolts of lightning, that still
flashed across the sky, ordering him to join the biots in
their march to the sea.

  One more section of stairway - another ten-minute
pause, to let the fatigue poisons drain from his muscles.
Then on again - another two kilometres to go, but let's
try not to think about that-
The maddening sequence of descending whistles ab-
ruptly ceased. At the same moment, the fireballs racing
along the slots of the Straight Valleys stopped their sea-
ward strobing; Rama's six linear suns were once more
continuous bands of light.

  But they were fading fast, and sometimes they flick-
ered, as if tremendous jolts of energy were being drained
from waning power sources. From time to time, there
were slight tremors underfoot; the bridge reported that
Rama was still swinging with imperceptible slowness, like
a compass needle responding to a weak magnetic field.
This was perhaps reassuring; it was when Rama stopped
its swing that Norton would really begin to worry.

  All the biots had gone, so Pieter reported. In the whole
interior of Rama, the only movement was that of human
beings, crawling with painful slowness up the curving
face of the north dome.

  Norton had long since overcome the vertigo he had felt
on that first ascent, but now a new fear was beginning to
creep into his mind. They were so vulnerable here, on
this endless climb from plain to Hub. Suppose that, when
it had completed its attitude change, Rama started to
accelerate?

  Presumably its thrust would be along the axis. If it was
in the northward direction, that would be no problem;
they would be held a little more firmly against the slope
which they were ascending. But if it was towards the
south, they might be swept off into space, to fall back
eventually on the plain far below.

  He tried to reassure himself with the thought that any
possible acceleration would be very feeble. Dr Perera's
calculations had been most convincing; Rama could not
possibly accelerate at more than a fiftieth of a gravity, or
the Cylindrical Sea would climb the southern cliff and
flood an entire continent. But Perera had been in a com-
fortable study back on Earth, not with kilometres of
overhanging metal apparently about to crash down upon
his head. And perhaps Rama was designed for periodic
flooding-

  No, that was ridiculous. It was absurd to imagine that
all these trillions of tons could suddenly start moving
with sufficient acceleration to shake him loose. Neverthe-
less, for all the remainder of the ascent, Norton never let
himself get far from the security of the handrail.
Lifetimes later, the stairway ended; - only a few hun-
dred metres of vertical, recessed ladder were left. It was
no longer necessary to climb this section since one man at
the Hub, hauling on a cable, could easily hoist another
against the rapidly diminishing gravity. Even at the bot-
tom of the ladder a man weighed less than five kilos; at
the top, practically zero.

  So Norton relaxed in the sling, grasping a rung from
time to time to counter the feeble Coriolis force still try-
ing to push him off the ladder. He almost forgot his knot-
ted muscles, as he had his last view of Rama.
It was about as bright now as a full moon on Earth; the
overall scene was perfectly clear, but he could no longer
make out the finer details. The South Pole was now par-
tially obscured by a glowing mist; only the peak of Big
Horn protruded through it - a small, black dot, seen ex-
actly head-on.

  The carefully-mapped but still unknown continent be-
yond the Sea was the same apparently random patchwork
that it had always been. It was too foreshortened, and too
full of complex detail, to reward visual examination, and
Norton scanned it only briefly.

  He swept his eyes round the encircling band of the Sea,
and noticed for the first time a regular pattern of dis-
turbed water, as if waves were breaking over reefs set at
geometrically precise intervals. Rama's manoeuvring was
having some effect, but a very slight one. He was sure that
Sergeant Barnes would have sailed forth happily under
these conditions, had he asked her to cross the Sea in her
lost Resolution.

  New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Rome ... he said
farewell to all the cities of the northern continent, and
hoped the Ramans would forgive him for any damage he
had done. Perhaps they would understand that it was all
in the cause of science.

  Then, suddenly, he was at the Hub, and eager hands
reached out to grab him, and to hurry him through the
airlocks. His overstrained legs and arms were trembling
so uncontrollably that he was almost unable to help him-
self, and he was content to be handled like a half-para-
lysed invalid.

  The sky of Rama contracted above him, as he des-
cended into the central crater of the Hub. As the door of
the inner airlock shut off the view for ever, he found him-
self thinking: 'How strange that night should be falling,
now that Rama is closest to the sun!'

   CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR - Space Drive

A hundred kilometres was an adequate safety margin,
Norton had decided. Rama was now a huge black rect-
angle, exactly broadside-on, eclipsing the sun. He had
used this opportunity to fly Endeavour completely into
shadow, so that the load could be taken off the ship's
cooling systems and some overdue maintenance could be
carried out. Rama's protective cone of darkness might
disappear at any moment, and he intended to make as
much use of it as he could.

  Rama was still turning; it had now swung through al-
most fifteen degrees, and it was impossible to believe that
some major orbit change was not imminent. On the
United Planets, excitement had now reached a pitch of
hysteria, but only a faint echo of this came to Endeavour.
Physically and emotionally, her crew was exhausted;
apart from a skeleton watch, everyone had slept for
twelve hours after take-off from the North Polar Base. On
doctor's orders, Norton himself had used electro-sedation;
even so, he had dreamed that he was climbing an infinite
stairway.

  The second day back on ship, everything had almost
returned to normal; the exploration of Rama already
seemed part of another life. Norton started to deal with
the accumulated office work and to make plans for the
future; but he refused the requests for interviews that
had somehow managed to insinuate themselves into the
Survey and even SPACEGUARD radio circuits. There were
no messages from Mercury, and the UP General Assembly
had adjourned its session, though it was ready to meet
again at an hour's notice.

  Norton was having his first good night's sleep, thirty
hours after leaving Rama, when he was rudely shaken
back to consciousness. He cursed groggily, opened a
bleary eye at Karl Mercer - and then, like any good com-
mander, was instantly wide awake.

  'It's stopped turning?'

  'Yes. Steady as a rock.'

  'Let's go to the bridge.'

  The whole ship was awake; even the simps knew that
something was afoot, and made anxious, meeping noises
until Sergeant McAndrews reassured them with swift
hand-signals. Yet as Norton slipped into his chair and
fastened the restraints round his waist, he wondered if
this might be yet another false alarm.

  Rama was now foreshortened into a stubby cylinder,
and the searing rim of the sun had peeked over one edge.
Norton jockeyed Endeavour gently back into the umbra
of the artificial eclipse, and saw the pearly splendour of
the corona reappear across a background of the brighter
stars. There was one huge prominence, at least half a mil-
lion kilometres high, that had climbed so far from the
sun that its upper branches looked like a tree of crimson
fire.

  So now we have to wait, Norton told himself. The im-
portant thing is not to get bored, to be ready to react at a
moment's notice, to keep all the instruments aligned and
recording, no matter how long it takes

  That was strange. The star field was shifting, almost as
if he had actuated the Roll thrusters. But he had touched
no controls, and if there had been any real movement, he
would have sensed it at once.

  'Skipper!' said Calvert urgently from the Nay position,
'we're rolling - look at the stars! But I'm getting no in-
strument readings!'
'Rate gyros operating?'

  'Perfectly normal - I can see the zero jitter. But we're
rolling several degrees a second!'

  'That's impossible!'

  'Of course it is - but look for yourself...'

  When all else failed, a man had to rely on eyeball in-
strumentation. Norton could not doubt that the star field
was indeed slowly rotating - there went Sirius, across the
rim of the port. Either the universe, in a reversion of
pre-Copernican cosmology, had suddenly decided to re-
volve around Endeavour; or the stars were standing still,
and the ship was turning.

  The second explanation seemed rather more likely, yet
it involved apparently insoluble paradoxes. If the ship
was really turning at this rate, he would have felt it -
literally by the seat of his pants, as the old saying went.
And the gyros could not all have failed, simultaneously
and independently.

  Only one answer remained. Every atom of Endeavour
must be in the grip of some force - and only a powerful
gravitational field could produce this effect. At least, no
other known field...

  Suddenly, the stars vanished. The blazing disc of the
sun had emerged from behind the shield of Rama, and its
glare had driven them from the sky.

  'Can you get a radar reading? What's the doppler?'

  Norton was fully prepared to find that this too was
inoperative, but he was wrong.

  Rama was under way at last, accelerating at the modest
rate of O.O15 gravities. Dr Perera, Norton told himself,
would be pleased; he had predicted a maximum of 0.02.
And Endeavour was somehow caught in its wake like a
piece of flotsam, whirling round and round behind a
speeding ship...

  Hour after hour, that acceleration held constant;
Rama was falling away from Endeavour at steadily in-
creasing speed. As its distance grew, the anomalous be-
haviour of the ship slowly ceased; the normal laws of in-
ertia started to operate again. They could only guess at
the energies in whose backlash they had been briefly
caught, and Norton was thankful that he had stationed
Endeavour at a safe distance before Rama had switched
on its drive.

  As to the nature of that drive, one thing was now cer-
tain, even though all else was mystery. There were no jets
of gas, no beams of ions or plasma thrusting Rama into
its new orbit. No one put it better than Sergeant-Profes-
sor Myron when he said, in shocked disbelief: 'There
goes Newton's Third Law.'

  It was Newton's Third law, however, upon which En-
deavour had to depend the next day, when she used her
very last reserves of propellent to bend her own orbit out-
wards from the sun. The change was slight, but it would
increase her perihelion distance by ten million kilometres.
That was the difference between running the ship's cool-
ing system at ninety-five per cent capacity - and a certain
fiery death.

  When they had completed their own manoeuvre,
Rama was two hundred thousand kilometres away, and
difficult to see against the glare of the sun. But they could
still obtain accurate radar measurements of its orbit;
and the more they observed, the more puzzled they be-
came.

  They checked the figures over and over again, until
there was no escaping from the unbelievable conclusion.
It looked as if all the fears of the Hermians, the heroics of
Rodrigo, and the rhetoric of the General Assembly, had
been utterly in vain.

  What a cosmic irony, said Norton as he looked at his
final figures, if after a million years of safe guidance
Rama's computers had made one trifling error - per-
haps changing the sign of an equation from plus to
minus.

  Everyone had been so certain that Rama would lose
speed, so that it could be captured by the sun's gravity
and thus become a new planet of the solar system. It was
doing just the opposite.

  It was gaining speed - and in the worst possible direc-
tion.

  Rama was falling ever more swiftly into the sun.

   CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE - Phoenix

As the details of its new orbit became more and more
clearly defined, it was hard to see how Rama could pos-
sibly escape disaster. Only a handful of comets had ever
passed as close to the sun; at perihelion, it would be less
than half a million kilometres above that inferno of fus-
ing hydrogen. No solid material could withstand the
temperature of such an approach; the tough alloy that
comprised Rama's hull would start to melt at ten times
that distance.

  Endeavour had now passed its own perihelion, to every-
one's relief, and was slowly increasing its distance from
the sun. Rama was far ahead on its closer, swifter orbit,
and already appeared well inside the outermost fringes of
the corona. The ship would have a grandstand view of
the drama's final stage.

   Then, five million kilometres from the sun, and still
accelerating, Rama started to spin its cocoon. Until now,,
it had been visible under the maximum power of En-
deavour's telescopes as a tiny bright bar; suddenly it be-
gan to scintillate, like a star seen through horizon mists.
It almost seemed as if it was disintegrating; When he saw
the image breaking up, Norton felt a poignant sense of
grief at the loss of so much wonder. Then he realized that
Rama was still there, but that it was surrounded by a
shimmering haze.

  And then it was gone. In its place was a brilliant, star-
like object, showing no visible disc - as if Rama had sud-
denly contracted into a tiny ball.

  It was some time before they realized what had hap-
pened. Rama had indeed disappeared: it was now sur-
rounded by a perfectly reflecting sphere, about a hundred
kilometres in diameter. All that they could now see was
the reflection of the sun itself, on the curved portion that
was closest to them. Behind this protective bubble, Rama
was presumably safe from the solar inferno.

  As the hours passed, the bubble changed its shape. The
image of the sun became elongated, distorted. The sphere
was turning into an ellipsoid, its long axis pointed in the
direction of Rama's flight. It was then that the first ano-
malous reports started coming in from the robot observa-
tories, which, for almost two hundred years, had been
keeping a permanent watch on the sun.

  Something was happening to the solar magnetic field,
in the region around Rama. The million-kilometre-long
lines of force that threaded the corona, and drove its
wisps of fiercely ionized gas at speeds which sometimes de-
fied even the crushing gravity of the sun, were shaping
themselves around that glittering ellipsoid. Nothing was
yet visible to the eye, but the orbiting instruments re-
ported every change in magnetic flux and ultra-violet
radiation.

  And presently, even the eye could see the changes in
the corona. A faintly-glowing tube or tunnel, a hundred
thousand kilometres long, had appeared high in the
outer atmosphere of the sun. It was slightly curved, bend-
ing along the orbit which Rama was tracing, and Rama
itself - or the protective cocoon around it - was visible as a
glittering head racing faster and faster down that ghostly
tube through the corona.

  For it was still gaining speed; now it was moving at
more than two thousand kilometres a second, and there
was no question of it ever remaining a captive of the sun.
Now, at last, the Raman strategy was obvious; they had
come so close to the sun merely to tap its energy at the
source, and to speed themselves even faster on the way to
their ultimate unknown goal ...

  And presently it seemed that they were tapping more
than energy. No one could ever be certain of this, be-
cause the nearest observing instruments were thirty
million kilometres away, but there were definite indica-
tions that matter was flowing from the sun into Rama
itself, as if it was replacing the leakages and losses of ten
thousand centuries in space.

  Faster and faster Rama swept around the sun moving
now more swiftly than any object that had ever travelled
through the solar system. In less than two hours, its direc-
tion of motion had swung through more than ninety de-
grees, and it had given a final, almost contemptuous
proof of its total lack of interest in all the worlds whose
peace of mind it had so rudely disturbed.

  It was dropping out of the Ecliptic, down into the
southern sky, far below the plane in which all the planets
move. Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal,
it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud,
and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.

   CHAPTER FORTY-SIX - Interlude

'Come in,' said Commander Norton absentmindedly at
the quiet knock on his door.

  'Some news for you, Bill. I wanted to give it first, before
the crew gets into the act. And anyway, it's my depart-
ment.'

  Norton still seemed far away. He was lying with his
hands clasped under his head, eyes half shut, cabin light
low - not really drowsing, but lost in some reverie or
private dream.

  He blinked once or twice, and was suddenly back in his
body.

  'Sorry Laura - I don't understand. What's it all
about?'

  'Don't say you've forgotten!'

  'Stop teasing, you wretched woman. I've had a few
things on my mind recently.'

  Surgeon-Commander Ernst slid a captive chair across
in its slots and sat down beside him.

  'Though interplanetary crises come and go, the wheels
of Martian bureaucracy grind steadily away. But I sup-
pose Rama helped. Good thing you didn't have to get
permission from the Hermians as well.'

  Light was dawning.

  'Oh - Port Lowell has issued the permit!'

  'Better than that - it's already being acted On.' Laura
glanced at the slip of paper in her hand. 'Immediate,' she
read. Probably right now, your new son is being con-
ceived. Congratulations.'

  Thank you. I hope he hasn't minded the wait.'

  Like every astronaut, Norton had been sterilized when
he entered the service; for a man who would spend years
in space, radiation-induced mutation was not a risk - it
was a certainty. The spermatazoon that had just deliv-
ered its cargo of genes on Mars, two hundred million
kilometres away, had been frozen for thirty years, await-
ing its moment of destiny.

  Norton wondered if he would be home in time for the
birth. He had earned rest, relaxation - such normal fam-
ily life as an astronaut could ever know. Now that the
mission was essentially over, he was beginning to unwind,
and to think once more about his own future, and
that of both his families. Yes, it would be good to be
home for a while, and to make up for lost time - in many
ways...

  'This visit,' protested Laura rather feebly, 'was purely
in a professional capacity.'

  'After all these years,' replied Norton, 'we know
each other better than that. Anyway, you're off duty
now.'

'Now what are you thinking?' demanded Surgeon-Com-
mander Ernst, very much later. 'You're not becoming
sentimental, I hope.'

  'Not about us. About Rama. I'm beginning to miss it.'

  'Thanks very much for the compliment.'

  Norton tightened his arms around her. One of the nic-
est things about weightlessness, he often thought, was
that you could really hold someone all night, without
cutting off the circulation. There were those who claimed
that love at one gee was so ponderous that they could no
longer enjoy it.

  'It's a well-known fact, Laura, that men, unlike women,
have two-track minds. But seriously - well, more seriously
 - I do feel a sense of loss.'

  'I can understand that.'

  'Don't be so clinical; that's not the only reason. Oh,
never mind.' He gave up. It was not easy to explain, even
to himself.

  He had succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation;
what his men had discovered in Rama would keep scien-
tists busy for decades. And, above all, he had done it
without a single casualty.

  But he had also failed. One might speculate endlessly,
but the nature and the purpose of the Ramans was still
utterly unknown. They had used the solar system as a
refuelling stop - as a booster station - call it what you
will, and had then spurned it completely, on their way to
more important business. They would probably never
even know that the human race existed; such monu-
mental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult.

  When Norton bad glimpsed Rama for the last time, a
tiny star hurtling outwards beyond Venus, he knew that
part of his life was over. He was only fifty-five, but he felt
he had left his youth down there on the curving plain,
among mysteries and wonders now receding inexorably
beyond the reach of man. Whatever honours and achieve-
ments the future brought him, for the rest of his life he
would be haunted by a sense of anticlimax, and the
knowledge of opportunities missed.

  So he told himself; but even then, he should have
known better.

  And on far-off Earth, Dr Carlisle Perera had as yet told
no one how he had woken from a restless sleep with the
message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain:

  The Ramans do everything in threes.

--
EOF