“Say, signora” — it was Wakefield again — “do you think we could talk you into some honest-to-goodness work? We stop what we’re doing to accommodate your filming — maybe we can make a trade with you.”
“I’m willing,” answered Francesca. “I’ll help after lunch. But what I would like now is some light. Could you use one of your flares and let me capture you and Janos having a picnic on the Stairway of the Gods?”
Wakefield programmed a flare for a delayed ignition and climbed eighty steps to the nearest ledge. Cosmonaut Tabori arrived at the same spot half a minute before the light flooded them. From two kilometers above, Francesca panned across the three stairways and then zoomed in on the two figures sitting cross-legged on the ledge. From that perspective, Janos and Richard looked like two eagles nesting in a high mountain aerie.
By late afternoon the Alpha chairlift was finished and ready for testing. “We’ll let you be the first customer,” Richard Wakefield said to Francesca, “since you were good enough to help.” They were standing in full gravity at the foot of the incredible stairway. Thirty thousand steps stretched into the darkness of the artificial heavens above them. Beside them on the Central Plain the ultralight motor and the self-contained portable power station for the chairlift were already in operation. The cosmonauts had transported the electrical and mechanical subsystems in unassembled pieces on their backs and assembly had required less than an hour.
“The little chairs are not permanently connected to the cables,” Wake-field explained to Francesca. “At each end there is a mechanism that attaches or detaches the chairs. That way it’s not necessary to have an almost infinite number of seats.”
Francesca hesitantly sat down in the plastic structure that had been pulled away from a group of similar baskets hanging from a side cable. “You’re certain this is safe?” she said, staring at the darkness above her.
“Of course,” Richard said with a laugh. “It’s exactly like the simulation. And I’ll be in the next chair behind you, only one minute or four hundred meters below. Altogether the ride takes forty minutes from bottom to top. Average speed is twenty-four kilometers per hour.”
“And I don’t do anything,” Francesca remembered, “except sit tight, hold on, and activate my breathing system about twenty minutes from the summit.”
“Don’t forget to fasten your seat belt,” Wakefield reminded her with a smile. “If the cable were to slow down or stop near the top, where you are weightless, your momentum could cause you to sail out into the Raman void.” He grinned. “But since the entire chairlift runs beside the stairway, in the event of any emergency, you could always climb out of your basket and walk back up to the hub along the stairs.”
Richard nodded and Janos Tabori switched on the motor. Francesca was lifted off the ground and soon disappeared above them. “I’ll go right over to Gamma after I’m certain you’re on your way,” Richard said to Fanos. “The second system should be easier. With all of us working together, we should be finished by nineteen hundred at the latest.”
“I’ll have the campsite ready by the time you reach the summit,” Janos remarked, “Do you think we’re still going to stay down here tonight?”
“That doesn’t make much sense,” David Brown said from above. He or Takagishi had monitored all cosmonaut communications throughout the day. “The rovers aren’t ready yet. We had hoped to do some exploring tomorrow.”
“If we each bring down a few subsystems,” Wakefield replied, “Janos and I could assemble one rover tonight before we go to sleep. The second rover will probably be operational before noon tomorrow if we don’t encounter any difficulties.”
“That’s a possible scenario,” Dr. Brown responded. “Let’s see how much progress we have made and how tired everyone is three hours from now.” Richard climbed into his tiny chair and waited for the automatic loading algorithm in the processor to attach his seat to the cable. “By the way,” he said to his companion as he started his ascent, “thanks a lot for your good humor today. I might not have made it without the jokes.”
Janos smiled and waved at his friend. Looking upward from his moving chair, Richard Wakefield could barely make out the light from Francesca’s headgear. She’s more than a hundred floors above me, he thought. But only two and a half percent of the distance from here to the hub. This place is immense.
He reached in his pocket and pulled out the portable meteorological station that Takagishi had asked him to carry. The professor wanted a careful profile of all the atmospheric parameters in the north polar bowl of Rama. Of particular importance for his circulation models was the density and temperature of the air versus the distance below the airlock.
Wakefield watched the pressure readings, which started at 1.05 bars, fall below Earth levels, and continue their steady, monotonic decline. The temperature held fixed at a cold minus eight degrees Celsius. He leaned back and closed his eyes. It was a strange feeling, riding a basket upward, ever upward in the dark. Richard turned down the volume of one channel on his commpak; the only ongoing conversation was between Yamanaka and Turgenyev and neither of them ever had very much to say. He increased the volume on Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, which was playing in the background on another channel.
As he listened to the music, Richard was surprised at how his internal visions of brooks and flowers and green fields on Earth evoked a powerful feeling of homesickness. It was almost impossible for him to fathom the miraculous concatenation of events that had carried him from his boyhood home in Stratford to Cambridge to the Space Academy in Colorado and finally to here, to Rama, where he was riding a chairlift in the dark along the Stairway to the Gods.
No, Prospero, he said to himself, no magician could ever have conceived of such a place. He remembered seeing The Tempest for the first time as a boy and being frightened by the portrayal of a world whose mysteries might be beyond our comprehension. There is no magic, he had said at the time. There are only natural concepts that we cannot yet explain. Richard smiled. Prospero was not a mage; he was only a frustrated scientist
A moment later Richard Wakefield was stupefied by the most amazing sight he had ever seen. As his chair was sailing soundlessly upward, parallel to the stairway, dawn burst upon Rama. Three kilometers below him, cut into the Central Plain, the long straight valleys that ran from the edge of the bowl to the Cylindrical Sea suddenly exploded with light. The six linear suns of Rama, three in each hemicylinder, were carefully designed to produce a balanced illumination throughout the alien world. Wakefield’s first feelings were of vertigo and nausea. He was suspended in air by a thin cable, thousands of meters above the ground. He closed his eyes and tried to maintain his bearings. You will not fall, he said to himself.
“Aieee,” he heard Hiro Yamanaka yell.
From the ensuing conversation he could tell that Hiro, startled by the burst of light, had lost his footing near the middle of the Gamma stairway. He had apparently fallen twenty or thirty meters before he had adroitly (and luckily) managed to grab part of the banister.
“Are you all right?” David Brown asked.
“I think so,” Yamanaka answered breathlessly.
With the short crisis over, everyone started talking at once. “This is fantastic!” Dr. Takagishi was shouting. “The light levels are phenomenal. And this is all happening before the thawing of the sea. It’s different. It’s altogether different.”
“Have another module ready for me as soon as I reach the top,” Francesca said. “I’m almost out of film.”
“Such beauty. Such indescribable beauty!” General O’Toole added. He and Nicole des Jardins were watching the monitor onboard the Newton. The real-time picture from Francesca’s camera was being transmitted to them through the relay station at the hub.
Richard Wakefield said nothing. He simply stared, entranced by the world below him. He could barely discern Janos Tabori, the chairlift apparatus, and the half-completed campsite down at the bottom of the stairway. Neverth
eless, the distance to them gave him some measure of this alien world. As he looked out across the hundreds of square kilometers of the Central Plain, he saw fascinating shapes in every direction. There were two features, however, that overwhelmed his imagination and vision: the Cylindrical Sea and the massive, pointed structures in the southern bowl opposite him, fifty kilometers away.
As his eyes grew more accustomed to the light, the gigantic central spire in the southern bowl seemed to grow larger and larger, It had been called Big Horn by the first explorers. Can it really be eight kilometers tall? Wakefield asked himself. The six smaller spires, surrounding the Big Horn in a hexagonal pattern and connected both to it and the walls of Rama by enormous flying buttresses, were each larger than anything made by man on Earth. Yet they were dwarfed by this neighboring prominence originating from the very center of the bowl and growing straight along the spin axis of the cylinder. In the foreground, halfway between Wakefield’s position near the north pole and that mammoth construction in the south, a band of bluish white ringed the cylindrical world. The frozen sea seemed illogical and out of place. It could never melt, the mind wanted to say, or all the water would fall toward the central axis. But the Cylindrical Sea was held in its banks by the centrifugal force of Rama. None knew better than the Newton crew that on its shore a human being would have the same weight as he would standing beside a terrestrial ocean.
The island city in the middle of the Cylindrical Sea was Rama’s New York. To Richard its skyscrapers had not been too imposing in the views that had been offered by the light from the flares. But under the light of the Raman suns, it was clear that this city held center stage. The eyes were drawn to New York from any point inside Rama — the dense oval island of buildings was the only break in the orderly annulus that formed the Cylindrical Sea.
“Just look at New York!” Dr. Takagishi was gushing excitedly into his commpak. “There must be almost a thousand buildings over two hundred meters tall.” He paused only a second. “That’s where they live. I know it. New York must be our target.”
After the initial outbursts there was a protracted silence while each of the cosmonauts privately integrated the sunlit world of Rama into his own consciousness. Richard could now clearly see Francesca, four hundred meters above him, as his chair crossed the transition between the stairways and the ladders and closed in on the hub.
“Admiral Heilmann and I have just had a quick conversation,” David Brown said, breaking the silence, “with some advice from Dr. Takagishi. There seems to be no obvious reason to change our plans for this sortie, at least not the early part. Unless something else unexpected occurs, we will go forward with Wakefield’s suggestion. We will finish the two chairlifts, carry the rover down for assembly later this evening, and all sleep in the campsite at the foot of the stairway as planned.”
“Don’t forget me,” Janos hollered into his commpak. “I’m the only one who doesn’t have much of a view!”
Richard Wakefield unfastened his seat belt and stepped out onto the ledge. He looked down to where the stairway disappeared from view. “Roger, Cosmonaut Tabori. We have arrived back at Station Alpha. Whenever you give the signal, we will hoist you up to join us.”
23
NIGHTFALL
Considering the regular abuse that he received from his neurotic rather and the emotional scars that must remain from his youthful marriage to British actress Sarah Tydings, Cosmonaut Wakefield is remarkably well adjusted. He underwent two years of professional therapy after his celebrated divorce, concluding a year before he entered the Space Academy in 2192. His scholastic record at the academy is still unequaled to this day; his professors in electrical engineering and computer sciences all insist that by the time of his graduation, Wakefield knew more than any member of the faculty…
“…Except for a wariness where intimacy is concerned (particularly with women — he has apparently had no sustained emotional involvements since the breakup of his marriage), Wakefield exhibits none of the antisocial behavior usually found in abused children. Although his SC was low as a youth, he has grown less arrogant as he has matured and is now less likely to force his brilliance upon others. His honesty and character are unassailable. Knowledge, not power or money, seems to be his goal…”
Nicole finished reading the Psychological Assessment for Richard Wake-field and rubbed her eyes. It was very late. She had been studying the dossiers ever since the crew inside Rama had settled down to sleep. They would be awakening for their second day in that strange world in less than two hours. Her six-hour shift as communications officer would start in another thirty minutes. So out of this entire bunch, Nicole was thinking, there are only three that are beyond question. Those four with their illegal media contract have already compromised themselves. Yamanaka and Turgenyev are unknowns. Wilson is marginally stable and has his own agenda anyway. That leaves O’Toole, Takagishi, and Wakefield.
Nicole washed her face and hands and sat down again at the terminal. She exited from the Wakefield dossier and returned to the main menu of the data cube. She scanned the comparative statistics available and keyed a pair of displays to appear side by side on the screen. On the left-hand side was the ordered set of IE scores for each member of the crew; opposite, for comparison, Nicole had displayed the SC indices for the Newton dozen.
IE
SC
Wakefield
+ 5.58
O’Toole
86
Sabatini
+4.22
Borzov
84
Brown
+4.17
Takagishi
82
Takagishi
+4.02
Wilson
78
Tabori
+3.37
des Jardins
71
Borzov
+ 3.28
Heilmann
68
Des Jardins
+ 3.04
Tabori
64
O’Toole
+2.92
Yamanaka
62
Turgenyev
+ 2.87
Turgenyev
60
Yamanaka
+ 2.66
Wakefield
58
Wilson
+2.48
Sabatini
56
Heilmann
+2.24
Brown
49
Although Nicole had very quickly glanced through most of the information in the dossiers earlier, she had not read all the charts on all the crew members. Some of the indices she now saw for the first time. She was particularly surprised by the very high intelligence rating for Francesca Sabatini. What a waste, Nicole thought immediately. All that potential being used for such ordinary pursuits.
The overall intelligence level of the crew was quite impressive. Every cosmonaut was in the top one percent of the population. Nicole was “one in a thousand” and she was only in the middle of the dozen. Wakefield’s intelligence rating was truly exceptional and placed him in the supergenius category; Nicole had never before personally known someone with such high scores on the standardized tests.
Although her training in psychiatry had taught her to distrust attempts to quantify personality traits, Nicole was intrigued by the SC indices as well. She herself would have intuitively placed O’Toole, Borzov, and Takagishi at the top of the list. All three men seemed confident, balanced, and sensitive to others. But she was astonished by Wilson’s high socialization coefficient. He must have been an altogether different person before he became involved with Francesca. Nicole wondered for a brief moment why her own SC index was no higher than a seventy-one; then she remembered that as a young woman she had been more withdrawn and self-centered.
5o what about Wakefield? she asked herself, realizing that he was the only viable candidate to help her understand what had happened inside the RoSur software during Borzov’s op
eration. Could she trust him? And could she enlist Richard’s help without revealing some of her farfetched suspicions? Again the thought of abandoning her investigation altogether seemed very appealing. Nicole, she said to herself, if this conspiracy idea of yours turns out to be a waste of time…
But Nicole was convinced that there were enough unanswered questions to warrant continuing her investigation. She resolved to talk to Wakefield. After determining that she could add her own files to the king’s data cube, she created a new file, a nineteenth file, simply called nicole. She called in her word processing subroutine and wrote a brief memorandum:
3-3-00 — Have determined for certain that RoSur malfunction during Borzov procedure due to external manual command after initial load and verification. Enlisting Wakefield for support.
Nicole pulled a blank data cube from the supply drawer adjacent to her computer. She copied onto it both her memorandum and all the information stored on the cube that she had been given by King Henry. When she dressed for her work shift in her flight suit, she put the duplicate cube in her pocket.
General O’Toole was dozing in the CCC (Command and Control Complex) of the military spacecraft when Nicole arrived to give him a break. Although the visual displays in this smaller vehicle were not quite as breathtaking as those in the scientific ship, the layout of the military “C-Cubed” as a communications center was far superior, especially from a human engineering point of view. All the controls could easily be handled by a single cosmonaut.
O’Toole apologized for not being awake. He pointed to the three monitors that showed three different views of the same scene — the rest of the crew fast asleep inside the crude campsite at the foot of Alpha stairway. “This last five hours has not been what you would call exciting,” he said.
Nicole smiled. “General, you don’t need to apologize to me. I know you’ve been on duty for almost twenty-four hours.”
Rama II r-2 Page 18
