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 intelligence – and then it had been completed, like a machine devised for some specific purpose. After that, there was no possibility of growth or change.
The beam of the searchlight slowly tracked along those distant towers and domes and interlocked spheres and 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 theorized 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 predicted, ‘there must be docks and harbours – and ships. You can learn everything about a culture by studying the way it builds boats.’ Her colleagues thought this a rather restricted point of view, but at least it was a stimulating one.
Dr Ernst had almost given up the search, and was preparing to m4e a descent by rope, when Lt Rodrigo spotted the narrow stairway. It could easily have been overlooked in the shadowed darkness below the edge of the cliff, for there was no 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 pattern of cracks radiated from the impact point, and she had no difficulty in collecting as many pieces as she wished. Some had already melted when she held up the sample holder to the light; the liquid appeared to be slightly turbid water, and she took a cautious sniff.
‘Is that safe?’ Rodrigo called down, with a’ trace of anxiety.
‘Believe me, Boris,’ she answered, ‘if there are any pathogens around here that have slipped through my 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 unknown disease. In normal circumstances, Dr Ernst would not have taken even this minuscule chance. Now, however, time was short and the stakes were enormous. If it became necessary to quarantine Endeavour, that would be a very small price to pay for her cargo of knowledge.
‘It’s water, but I wouldn’t care to drink it – it smells like an algae culture that’s gone bad. I can hardly wait to get it to the lab.’
‘Is the ice safe to walk on?’
‘Yes, solid as a rock.’
‘Then we can get to New York.’
‘Can we, Pieter? Have you ever tried to walk across four kilometres of ice?’
‘Oh – I see what you mean. Just imagine what Stores would say, if we asked for a set of skates! Not that many of us would know how to use them, even if we had any aboard.’
‘And there’s another problem,’ put in Boris Rodrigo. ‘Do you realize that the temperature is already above freezing? Before long, that ice is going to melt. How many spacemen can swim four kilometres? Certainly not this one…’
Dr Ernst rejoined them at the edge of the cliff, and held up the small sample bottle in triumph.
‘It’s a long walk for a few cc’s of dirty water, but it may teach us more about Rama than anything we’ve found so far. let’s head for home.’
They turned towards the distant lights of the Hub, moving with the gentle, loping strides which had proved the most comfortable means of walking under this reduced gravity. Often they looked back, drawn by the 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 suspicion 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 information I’ve received, it’s already above freezing point. The Cylindrical Sea will soon start to thaw; and unlike bodies of water on Earth, it will melt from the bottom upwards. That may produce some odd effects; but I’m much more concerned with the atmosphere.
‘As it’s heated, the air inside Rama will expand – and will attempt to rise towards the central axis. And this is the problem. At ground level, although it’s apparently stationary, it’s actually sharing the spin of Rama – over eight hundred kilometres an hour. As it rises towards the axis it will try to retain that speed – and it won’t be able to do so, of course. The result will be violent winds and turbulence; I estimate velocities of between two and three hundred kilometres an hour.
‘Incidentally, very much the same thing occurs on Earth. The heated air at the Equator – which shares the Earth’s sixteen-hundred-kilometres-an-hour spin – runs into the same problem when it rises and flows north and south.’
‘Ah, the Trade Winds! I remember that from my geography lessons’
‘Exactly, Sir Robert. Rama will have 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 himself, he could pretend that this was an improvised night camp at the foot of some mountain in a remote region of Asia or America. The clutter of sleeping pads, collapsible chain and tables, portable power plant, lighting equipment, electrosan toilets, and miscellaneous scientific 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 braking 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, impossible. There were times when Commander Norton felt an irrational shame at leaving so much human litter in this strangely immaculate place. When they finally departed, he was prepared to sacrifice some of their precious time to leave everything in good order. Improbable though it was, perhaps millions of years hence, when Rama shot through some other star system, it might have visitors again. He would like to give them a good impression of Earth.
Meanwhile, he had a rather more immediate problem. During the last twenty-four hours he had received almost identical messages from both Mars and Earth. It seemed an odd coincidence; perhaps they had been 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 responsibilities.