Rendezvous with Rama

by Arthur C. Clarke

  But to recognize a spot which no other human being can possibly have seen - that is quite shocking. For several seconds, Commander Norton stood rooted to the smooth crystalline surface on which he had been walking, trying to straighten out his emotions. His well-ordered universe had been turned upside down, and he had a dizzying glimpse of those mysteries at the edge of existence which he had successfully ignored for most of his life.

  Then, to his immense relief, common sense came to the rescue. The disturbing sensation of déjà-vu faded out, to be replaced by a real and identifiable memory from his youth.

  It was true - he had once stood between such steeply sloping walls, watching them drive into the distance until they seemed to converge at a point indefinitely far ahead. But they had been covered with neatly trimmed grass; and underfoot had been broken stone, not smooth crystal.

  It had happened thirty years ago, during a summer vacation in England. Largely because of another student (he could remember her face - but he had forgotten her name) he had taken a course of industrial archaeology, then very popular among science and engineering graduates. They had explored abandoned coal-mines and cotton mills, climbed over ruined blast-furnaces and steam engines, goggled unbelievingly at primitive (and still dangerous) nuclear reactors, and driven priceless' turbine powered antiques along restored motor roads.

  Not everything that they saw was genuine; much had been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life. But where it was necessary to make copies, they had been reconstructed with loving care.

  And so young Bill Norton had found himself bowling along, at an exhilarating hundred kilometres an hour, while he furiously shovelled precious coal into the firebox of a locomotive that looked two hundred years old, but was actually younger than he was. The thirty-kilometre stretch of the Great Western Railway, however, was quite genuine, though it had required a good deal of excavating to get it back into commission.

  Whistle screaming, they had plunged into a hillside and raced through a smoky, flame-lit darkness. An astonishingly long time later, they had burst out of the tunnel into a deep, perfectly straight cutting between steep grassy banks. The long-forgotten vista was almost identical with the one before him now.

  'What is it, Skipper?' called Lt Rodrigo. 'Have you found something?’

  As Norton dragged himself back to present reality, some of the oppression lifted from his mind. There was mystery here - yes; but it might not be beyond human understanding. He had learned a lesson, though it was not one that he could readily impart to others. At all costs, he must not let Rama overwhelm him. That way lay failure - perhaps even madness.

  'No,' he answered, 'there's nothing down here. Haul me up - we 11 head straight to Paris.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Storm Warning

  'I've called this meeting of the Committee,' said His Excellency the Ambassador of Mars to the United Planets, 'because Dr Perera has something important to tell us. He insists that we get in touch with Commander Norton right away, using the priority channel we've been able to establish after, I might say, a good deal of difficulty. Dr Perera's statement is rather technical, and before we come to it I think a summary of the present position might be in order; Dr Price has prepared one. Oh yes some apologies for absence. Sir Lewis Sands is unable to be with us because he's chairing a conference, and Dr Taylor asks to be excused?

  He was rather pleased about that last abstention. The anthropologist had rapidly lost interest in Rama, when it became obvious that it would present little scope for him. Like many others, he had been bitterly disappointed to find that the mobile worldlet was dead; now there would be no opportunity for sensational books and viddies about Raman rituals and behavioural patterns. Others might dig up skeletons and classify artefacts; that sort of thing did not appeal to Conrad Taylor. Perhaps the only discovery that would bring him back in a hurry would be some highly explicit works of art, like the notorious frescoes of Thera and Pompeii. Thelma Price, the archaeologist, took exactly the opposite point of view. She preferred excavations and ruins uncluttered by inhabitants who might interfere with dispassionate, scientific studies. The bed of the Mediterranean had been ideal - at least until the city planners and landscape artists had started getting in the way. And Rama would have been perfect, except for the maddening detail that it was a hundred million kilometres away and she would never be able to visit it in person.

  'As you all know,' she began, 'Commander Norton has completed one traverse of almost thirty kilometres, without encountering any problems. He explored the curious trench shown on your maps as the Straight Valley; its purpose is still quite unknown, but it's clearly important as it runs the full length of Rama - except for the break at the Cylindrical Sea - and there are two other identical structures 120 degrees apart round the circumference of -the world.

  'Then the party turned left - or East, if we adopt the North Pole convention - until they reached Paris. As you'll see from this photograph, taken by a telescope camera at the Hub, it's a group of several hundred buildings, with wide streets between them.

  'Now these photographs were taken by Commander Norton's group when they reached the site. If Paris is a city, it's a very peculiar one. Note that none of the buildings have windows, or even doors! They are all plain rectangular structures, an identical thirty-five metres high. And they appear to have been extruded out of the ground - there are no seams or joints - look at this close-up of the base of a wall - there's a smooth transition into the ground.

  'My own feeling is that this place is not a residential area, but a storage or supply depot. In support of that theory, look at this photo 'These narrow slots or grooves, about five centimetres wide, run along all the streets, and there's one leading to every building - going straight into the wall .There's a striking resemblance to the street-car tracks of the early twentieth century; they are obviously part of some transport system.

  '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 basement.’

  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 forc
ed 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 supply 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 expect 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 inside Rama - six of them down on the plain, the rest ferrying equipment and expendables through the airlock system 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-equivalent 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.’

  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 superficial; 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 crewman, 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 study
ing 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 detectors, 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.