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 streetcar 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 mothballing. 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 forced 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.”
15. 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.