‘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 visible 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, breathing 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 intelligent 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 entered 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 understand 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 because 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 pictures, 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 kilometres back – and then there’s that overwhelming stairway 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 impossible 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 believe 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 kilometre, 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 repeated: 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 transparent crystal; when he touched it with his fingertips, it was cold, hard and unyielding.