The few grammes of weight that Rama’s combined gravitational and centrifugal fields gave them were neither help nor hindrance; they had to rely entirely on their jets. As soon as possible, Norton told himself, he would string a cat’s-cradle of guide ropes between the ship and the pill-boxes, so that they could move around without wasting propellants. The nearest pill-box was only ten metres from the airlock, and Norton’s first concern was to check that the contact had caused no damage to the ship. Endeavour’s hull was resting against the curving wall with a thrust of see-real tons, but the pressure was evenly distributed. Reassured, he began to drift around the circular structure, trying to determine its purpose. Norton had travelled only a few metres when he came across an interruption in the smooth, apparently metallic wall. At first, he thought it was some peculiar decoration, for it seemed to serve no useful function. Six radial grooves, or slots, were deeply recessed in the metal, and lying in them were six crossed bars like the spokes of a rimless wheel, with a small hub at the centre. But there was no way in which the wheel could be turned, as it was embedded in the wall. Then he noticed, with growing excitement, that there were deeper recesses at the ends of the spokes, nicely shaped to accept a clutching hand (claw? tentacle?). If one stood so, bracing against the wall, and pulled on the spoke so…
Smooth as silk, the wheel slid out of the wall. To his utter astonishment – for he had been virtually certain that any moving parts would have become vacuum-welded ages ago – Norton found himself holding a spoked wheel. He might have been the captain of some old wind-jammer standing at the helm of his ship. He was glad that his helmet sunshade did not allow Mercer to read his expression. He was startled, but also angry with himself; perhaps he had already made his first mistake. Were alarms now sounding inside Rama, and had his thoughtless action already triggered some implacable mechanism?
But Endeavour reported no change; its sensors still detected nothing but faint thermal crepitations and his own movements.
‘Well, Skipper – are you going to turn it?’
Norton thought once more of his instructions. ‘Use your own discretion, but proceed with caution.’ If he checked every single move with Mission Control, he would never get anywhere.
‘What’s your diagnosis, Karl?’ he asked Mercer. ‘It’s obviously a-manual control for an airlock – probably an emergency back-up system in case of power failure. I can’t imagine any technology, however advanced, that wouldn’t take such precautions.’ ‘And it would be fail-safe,’ Norton told himself. ‘It could only be operated if there was no possible danger to the system…’
He grasped two opposing spokes of the windlass, braced his feet against the ground, and tested the wheel. It did not budge.
‘Give me a hand,’ he asked Mercer. Each took a spoke; exerting their utmost strength, they were unable to produce the slightest movement. Of course, there was no reason to suppose that clocks and corkscrews on Rama turned in the same direction as they did on Earth… – ‘Let’s try the other way,’ suggested Mercer. This time, there was no resistance. The wheel rotated almost effortlessly through a full circle. Then, very smoothly, it took up the load. Half a metre away, the curving wall of the pill-box started to move, like a slowly opening clamshell. A few particles of dust, driven by wisps of escaping air, streamed outwards like dazzling diamonds as the brilliant sunlight caught them.
The road to Rama lay open.
CHAPTER SIX – Committee
It had been a serious mistake, Dr Bose often thought, to put the United Planets Headquarters on the Moon. Inevitably, Earth tended to dominate the proceedings – as it dominated the landscape beyond the dome. If they had to build here, perhaps they should have gone to the Farside, where that hypnotic disc never shed its rays… But, of course, it was much too late to change, and in any case there was no real alternative. Whether the colonies liked it or not, Earth would be the cultural and economic overlord of the solar system for centuries to come.
Dr Bose had been born on Earth, and had not emigrated to Mars until he was thirty, so he felt that he could view the political situation fairly dispassionately. He knew now that he would never return to his home planet, even though it was only five hours away by shuttle. At 115, he was in perfect health, but he could not face the reconditioning needed to accustom him to three times the gravity he had enjoyed for most of his life. He was exiled for ever from the world of his birth; not being a sentimental man, this -had never depressed him unduly.
What did depress him sometimes was the need for dealing, year after year, with the same familiar faces. The marvels of medicine were all very well, and certainly he had no desire to put back the clock – but there were men around this conference table with whom he had worked for more than half a century. He knew exactly what they would say and how they would vote on any given subject. He wished that, some day, one of them would do something totally unexpected – even something quite crazy.
And probably they felt exactly the same way about him…
The Rama Committee was still manageably small, though doubtless that would soon be rectified. His six colleagues – the UP representatives for Mercury, Earth, Luna, Ganymede, Titan and Triton – were all present in the flesh. They had to be; electronic diplomacy was not possible over solar system distances. Some elder states-men, accustomed to the instantaneous communications which Earth had long taken for granted, had never re-conciled themselves to the fact that radio waves took minutes, or even hours, to journey across the gulfs between the planets. ‘Can’t you scientists do something about it?’ they had been heard to complain bitterly, when told that face-to-face conversation was impossible between Earth and any of its remoter children. Only the Moon had that barely acceptable one-and-a-half-second delay – with all the political and psychological consequences which it implied. Because of this fact of astronomical life, the Moon – and only the Moon – would always be a suburb of Earth.
Also present in person were three of the specialists who had been co-opted to the Committee. Professor Davidson, the astronomer, was an old acquaintance; today, he did not seem his usual irascible self. Dr Bose knew nothing of the infighting that had preceded the launch of the first probe to Rama, but the Professor’s colleagues had not let him forget it.
Dr Thelma Price was familiar through her numerous television appearances, though she had first made her reputation fifty years ago during the archaeological explosion that had followed the draining of that vast mar-ine museum, the Mediterranean.
Dr Bose could still recall the excitement of that time, when the lost treasures of the Greeks, Romans and a dozen other civilizations were restored to the light of day. That was one of the few occasions when he was sorry to be living on Mars.
The exobiologist, Carlisle Perera, was another obvious choice; so was Dennis Solomons, the science historian. Dr Bose was slightly less happy about the presence of Conrad Taylor, the celebrated anthropologist, who bad made his reputation by uniquely combining scholarship and eroti-cism in his study of puberty rites in late twentieth-cen- tury Beverley Hills.
No one, however, could possibly have disputed the right of Sir Lewis Sands to be on the Committee. A man whose knowledge was matched only by his urbanity, Sir Lewis was reputed to lose his composure only when called the Arnold Toynbee of his age.
The great historian was not present in person; he stubbornly refused to leave Earth, even for so momentous a meeting as this. His stereo image, indistinguishable from reality, apparently occupied the chair to Dr Bose’s right; as if to complete the illusion, someone had placed a glass of water in front of him. Dr Bose considered that this sort of technological tour de force was an unnecessary gim-mick, but it was surprising how many undeniably great men were childishly delighted to be in two places at once. Sometimes this electronic miracle produced comic disasters; he had been at one diplomatic reception where somebody had tried to walk through a stereogram – and discovered, too late, that it was the real person. And it was even funnier to watch projections trying to shake hands…
His Excellency the Ambassador for Mars to the United Planets called his wandering thoughts to order, cleared his throat, and said: ‘Gentlemen, the Committee is now in session. I think I am correct in saying that this is a gathering of unique talents, assembled to deal with a unique situation. The directive that the Secretary-Gen- eral has given us is to evaluate that situation, and to ad-vise Commander Norton when necessary.