Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,17

I think Joe is right, and to hell with dignity. Here we go.”

The handrail—presumably it was designed for something like hands—was a smooth flat metal bar supported by widely spaced pillars a meter high. Mercer straddled it, carefully gauged the braking power he could exert with his hands, and let himself slide.

Sedately, slowly picking up speed, he descended into the darkness, moving in the pool of light from his helmet lamp. He had gone about fifty meters when he called the others to join him.

None of them would admit it, but they all felt like boys again, sliding down the banisters. In less than two minutes, they had made a kilometer descent in safety and comfort. Whenever they felt they were going too fast, a tightened grip on the handrail provided all the braking that was necessary.

“I hope you enjoyed yourselves,” Norton called when they stepped off at the second platform. “Climbing back won’t be quite so easy.”

“That’s what I want to check,” replied Mercer, who was walking experimentally back and forth, getting the feel of the increased gravity. “It’s already a tenth of a gee here. You really notice the difference.”

He walked—or, more accurately, glided—to the edge of the platform and shone his helmet light down the next section of the stairway. As far as his beam could reach, it appeared identical with the one above—though careful examination of photos had shown that the height of the steps steadily decreased with the rising gravity. The stair had apparently been designed so that the effort required to climb it was more or less constant at every point in its long curving sweep.

Mercer glanced up toward the hub of Rama, now almost two kilometers above him. The little glow of light, and the tiny figures silhouetted against it, seemed horribly far away. For the first time he was glad that he could not see the whole length of this enormous stairway. Despite his steady nerves and lack of imagination, he was not sure how he would react if he could see himself like an insect crawling up the face of a vertical saucer more than sixteen kilometers high—and with the upper half hanging above him. Until this moment, he had regarded the darkness as a nuisance; now he almost welcomed it.

“There’s no change of temperature,” he reported to Norton. “Still just below freezing. But the air pressure is up, as we expected—around three hundred millibars. Even with this low oxygen content, it’s almost breathable; farther down, there will be no problems at all. That will simplify exploration enormously. What a find—the first world on which we can walk without breathing gear! In fact, I’m going to take a sniff.”

Up on the hub, Norton stirred a little uneasily. But Mercer, of all men, knew exactly what he was doing. He would already have made enough tests to satisfy himself.

Mercer equalized pressure, unlatched the securing clip of his helmet, and opened it a crack. He took a cautious breath; then a deeper one.

The air of Rama was dead and musty, as if from a tomb so ancient that the last trace of physical corruption had disappeared ages ago. Even Mercer’s ultrasensitive nose, trained through years of testing life-support systems to and beyond the point of disaster, could detect no recognizable odors. There was a faint metallic tang, and he suddenly recalled that the first men on the Moon had reported a hint of burned gunpowder when they repressurized the lunar module. Mercer imagined that the moon-dust-contaminated cabin of Eagle must have smelled rather like Rama.

He sealed the helmet again and emptied his lungs of the alien air. He had extracted no sustenance from it; even a mountaineer acclimatized to the summit of Everest would die quickly here. But a few kilometers farther down, it would be a different matter.

What else was there to do here? He could think of nothing, except the enjoyment of the gentle, unaccustomed gravity. But there was no point in growing used to that, since they would be returning immediately to the weightlessness of the hub.

“We’re coming back, Skipper,” he reported. “There’s no reason to go farther—until we’re ready to go all the way.”

“I agree. We’ll be timing you, but take it easy.”

As he bounded up the steps, three or four at a stride, Mercer agreed that Calvert had been perfectly correct; these stairs were built to be walked up, not down. As long as one did not look back, and ignored the vertiginous steepness of the ascending curve,