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 Harbour 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 exhilaration; 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 contained 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 requirements 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 atmosphere. They should have existed in billions, not mere thousands. Then she discovered that their numbers were dwindling 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 chemicals 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. Resolution 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 reluctant 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 apparent 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. Photographs taken from the Hub also indicated that each complex 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 kilometre of buildings and machinery, some of which towered 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 complex, 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 curvature 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 underground. And if that was the case, where were the entrances, 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 indications 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?’