‘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 building?’
‘No; when you listen to his report, you can tell he was quite frustrated. At one time he decided that the buildings 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. ‘Cocooning!’
‘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 exploration 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 established, he intends to have at least two exploratory missions operating at all times. In this way he hopes to use his limited manpower at maximum efficiency. � ‘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 interstellar 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, unfortunately.’
‘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. Hurricanes.’
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 experience. But not more than one. In that way, everybody would have an opportunity of learning as quickly as possible.
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 minutes 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 weakening 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. Although 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 conceivable reason was the cliff on the southern shore five hundred 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 movement. Those shadows had been their companions every step of the way, as they marched down the beam, but now that they were broken at the edge of the cliff they no longer seemed part of them. They might have been creatures of the Cylindrical Sea, waiting to deal with any intruders into their domain.
Because they were now standing on the edge of a fifty-metre cliff, it was possible for the first time to appreciate the curvature of Rama. But no one had ever seen a frozen lake bent upwards into a cylindrical surface;, that was distinctly unsettling, and the eye did its best to find some other interpretation. It seemed to Dr Ernst, who had once made a study of visual illusions, that half the time she was really looking at a horizontally curving bay, not a surface that soared up into the sky. It required a deliberate effort of will to accept the fantastic truth.
Only in the line directly ahead, parallel to the axis of Rama, was normalcy preserved. In this direction alone was there agreement between vision and logic. Here – for the next few kilometres at least – Rama looked flat, and was flat… And out there, beyond their distorted shadows and the outer limit of the beam, lay the island that dominated the Cylindrical Sea.
‘Hub Control,’ Dr Ernst radioed, ‘please aim your beam at New York.’