The Commander picked up a collapsible chair, and walked out of the pool of light into the darkness surrounding the camp. It was the only way he could get any 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 recorder 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 everything has to be done on foot. If only we had some means of transport! I’d be very happy to settle for a few electric bicycles … they’d be perfect for the job.
‘You’ve met my medical officer, Surgeon-Commander Ernst-‘ He paused uncertainly; Laura had met one of his wives, but which? Better cut that out—
Erasing the sentence, he began again.
‘My MO, Surgeon-Commander Ernst, led the first group to reach the Cylindrical Sea, fifteen kilometres from here. She found that it was frozen water, as we’d expected – but you wouldn’t want to drink it. Dr Ernst says it’s a dilute organic soup, containing traces of almost any carbon compound you care to name, as well as 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 something about that before he next put on a space-helmet …
‘You’ve seen the viddies of Paris and the other towns we’ve explored on this side of the Sea … London, Rome, Moscow. It’s impossible to believe that they were ever built for anything to live in. Paris looks like a giant storage depot. London is a collection of cylinders linked together by pipes connected to what are obviously pumping stations. Everything is sealed up, and there’s no way of finding what’s inside without explosives or lasers. We won t try these until there are no alternatives.
‘As for Rome and Moscow-‘
‘Excuse me, Skipper. Priority from Earth.’
What now? Norton asked himself. Can’t a man get a few minutes to talk to his families?
He took the message from the Sergeant, and scanned it quickly, just to satisfy himself that it was not immediate. Then he read it again, more slowly.
What the devil was the Rama Committee? And why had he never heard of it? He knew that all sorts of associations, societies, and professional groups – some serious, some completely crackpot – had been trying to get in touch with him; Mission Control had done a good job of protection, and would not have forwarded this message unless it was considered important.
‘Two-hundred-kilometre winds – probably sudden 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 accident.
He had been captain of Endeavour for several months before he realized that it was named after one of the most famous ships in history. True, during the last four hundred years there had been a dozen Endeavours of sea and two of space, but the ancestor of them all was the 370-ton Whitby collier that Captain James Cook, RN, had sailed round the world between 1768 and 1771.
With a mild interest that had quickly turned to an absorbing curiosity – almost an obsession – Norton had begun to read everything he could find about Cook. He was now probably the world’s leading authority on the greatest explorer of all time, and knew whole sections of the Journals by heart.
It still seemed incredible that one man could have done so much, with such primitive equipment. But Cook had been not only a supreme navigator, but a scientist and – in an age of brutal discipline – a humanitarian. He treated his own men with kindness, which was unusual; what was quite unheard of was that he behaved in exactly the same way to the often hostile savages in the new lands he discovered.
It was Norton’s private dream, which he knew he would never achieve, to retrace at least one of Cook’s voyages around the world. He had made a limited but spectacular start, which would certainly have astonished the Captain, when he once flew a polar orbit directly above the Great Barrier Reef. It had been early morning on a clear day, and from four hundred kilometres up he had had a superb view of that deadly wall of coral, marked by its line of white foam along the Queensland coast.
He had taken just under five minutes to travel the whole two thousand kilometres of the Reef. In a single glance he could span weeks of perilous voyaging for that first Endeavour. And through the telescope, he had caught a glimpse of Cooktown and the estuary where the ship had been dragged ashore for repairs, after her near-fatal encounter with the Reef.
A year later, a visit to the Hawaii Deep-Space Tracking Station had given him an even more unforgettable experience. He had taken the hydrofoil to Kealakekua Bay, and as he moved swiftly past the bleak volcanic cliffs, he felt a depth of emotion that had surprised and even disconcerted him. The guide had led his group of scientists, engineers and astronauts 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 presence 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, Endeavour.’
He waited until the Sergeant had disappeared towards the blazing lights of the camp, then switched on his recorder again. But the train of thought was broken, and he could not get back into the mood. The letter would have to wait for some other time.
It was not often that Captain Cook came to his aid when he was neglecting his duty. But he suddenly remembered 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. Absence 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.