The tumult was swiftly subsiding; a temporary stalemate had been reached in the war between ice and water. In a few hours, as the temperature continued to rise, the water would win and the last vestiges of ice would disappear. But in the long run, ice would be the victor, as Rama rounded the sun and set forth once more into the interstellar night.
Norton remembered to start breathing again; then he called the party nearest the Sea. To his relief, Lieutenant Rodrigo answered at once. No, the water hadn’t reached them. No tidal wave had come sloshing over the edge of the cliff. “So now we know,” he added very calmly, “why there is a cliff.” Norton agreed silently; but that hardly explains, he thought to himself, why the cliff on the southern shore is ten times higher…
The Hub searchlight continued to scan round the world. The awakened Sea was steadily calming, and the boiling white foam no longer raced outwards from capsizing ice floes. In fifteen minutes, the main disturbance was over.
But Rama was no longer silent; it had awakened from its sleep, and ever and again there came the sound of grinding ice as one berg collided with another.
Spring had been a little late, Norton told himself, but winter had ended.
And there was that breeze again, stronger than ever. Rama had given him enough warnings; it was time to go.
As he neared the halfway mark, Commander Norton once again felt gratitude to the darkness that concealed the view above—and below. Though he knew that more than ten thousand steps still lay ahead of him, and could picture the steeply ascending curve in his mind’s eye, the fact that he could see only a small portion of it made the prospect more bearable.
This was his second ascent, and he had learned from his mistakes on the first. The great temptation was to climb too quickly in this low gravity; every step was so easy that it was very hard to adopt a slow, plodding rhythm. But unless one did this, after the first few thousand steps strange aches developed in the thighs and calves. Muscles that one never knew existed started to protest, and it was necessary to take longer and longer periods of rest. Towards the end he had spent more time resting than climbing, and even then it was not enough. He had suffered painful leg cramps for the next two days, and would have been almost incapacitated had he not been back in the zero-gravity environment of the ship.
So this time he had started with almost painful slowness, moving like an old man. He had been the last to leave the plain, and the others were strung out along the half-kilometre of stairway above him; he could see their lights moving up the invisible slope ahead.
He felt sick at heart at the failure of his mission, and even now hoped that this was only a temporary retreat. When they reached the Hub, they could wait until any atmospheric disturbances had ceased. Presumably, it would be a dead calm there, as at the centre of a cyclone, and they could wait out the expected storm in safety.
Once again, he was jumping to conclusions, drawing dangerous analogies from Earth. The meteorology of a whole world, even under steady-state conditions, was a matter of enormous complexity. After several centuries of study, terrestrial weather forecasting was still not absolutely reliable. And Rama was not merely a completely novel system; it was also undergoing rapid changes, for the temperature had risen several degrees in the last few hours. Yet still there was no sign of the promised hurricane, though there had been a few feeble gusts from apparently random directions.
They had now climbed five kilometres, which in this low and steadily diminishing gravity was equivalent to less than two on Earth. At the third level, three kilometres from the axis, they rested for an hour, taking light refreshments and massaging leg muscles. This was the last point at which they could breathe in comfort; like old-time Himalayan mountaineers, they had left their oxygen supplies here, and now put them on for the final ascent.
An hour later, they had reached the top of the stairway—and the beginning of the ladder. Ahead lay the last, vertical kilometre, fortunately in a gravity field only a few per cent of Earth’s. Another thirty-minute rest, a careful check of oxygen, and they were ready for the final lap.
Once again, Norton made sure that all his men were safely ahead of him, spaced out at twenty-metre intervals along the ladder. From now on, it would be a slow, steady haul, extremely boring. The best technique was to empty the mind of all thoughts and to count the rungs as they drifted by—one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred…
He had just reached twelve hundred and fifty when he suddenly realized that something was wrong. The light shining on the vertical surface immediately in front of his eyes was the wrong colour—and it was much too bright.
Commander Norton did not even have time to check his ascent, or to call a warning to his men. Everything happened in less than a second.
In a soundless concussion of light, dawn burst upon Rama.
18. Dawn
The light was so brilliant that for a full minute Norton had to keep his eyes clenched tightly shut. Then he risked opening them, and stared through barely-parted lids at the wall a few centimetres in front of his face. He blinked several times, waited for the involuntary tears to drain away, and then turned slowly to behold the dawn.
He could endure the sight for only a few seconds; then he was forced to close his eyes again. It was not the glare that was intolerable—he could grow accustomed to that—but the awesome spectacle of Rama, now seen for the first time in its entirety.
Norton had known exactly what to expect; nevertheless the sight had stunned him. He was seized by a spasm of uncontrollable trembling; his hands tightened round the rungs of the ladder with the violence of a drowning man clutching at a lifebelt. The muscles of his forearms began to knot, yet at the same time his legs—already fatigued by hours of steady climbing—seemed about to give way. If it had not been for the low gravity, he might have fallen.
Then his training took over, and he began to apply the first remedy for panic. Still keeping his eyes closed and trying to forget the monstrous spectacle around him, he started to take deep, long breaths, filling his lungs with oxygen and washing the poisons of fatigue out of his system.
Presently he felt much better, but he did not open his eyes until he had performed one more action. It took a major effort of will to force his right hand to open—he had to talk to it like a disobedient child—but presently he manoeuvred it down to his waist, unclipped the safety belt from his harness, and hooked the buckle to the nearest rung. Now, whatever happened, he could not fall.
Norton took several more deep breaths; then—still keeping his eyes closed—he switched on his radio. He hoped his voice sounded calm and authoritative as he called: “Captain here. Is everyone OK?”
As he checked off the names one by one, and received answers—even if somewhat tremulous ones—from everybody, his own confidence and self-control came swiftly back to him. All his men were safe, and were looking to him for leadership. He was the commander once more.
“Keep your eyes closed until you’re quite sure you can take it,” he called. “The view is—overwhelming. If anyone finds that it’s too much, keep on climbing without looking back. Remember, you’ll soon be at zero gravity, so you can’t possibly fall.”
It was hardly necessary to point out such an elementary fact to trained spacemen, but Norton had to remind himself of it every few seconds. The thought of zero-gravity was a kind of talisman, protecting him from harm. Whatever his eyes told him, Rama could not drag him down to destruction on the plain eight kilometres below.