Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,19

have a beam playing on it.”

“Good—that should be a great help.”

“One other point: should we play safe and send a party only halfway down the stair and back or should we go the whole way, on the first attempt?”

“If we had plenty of time, I’d be cautious. But time is short, and I can see no danger in going all the way—and looking around when we get there.”

“Thanks, Laura—that’s all I want to know. I’ll get the Exec working on the details. And I’ll order all hands to the centrifuge—twenty minutes a day at half a gee. Will that satisfy you?”

“No. It’s point six gee down there in Rama, and I want a safety margin. Make it three-quarters—”

“Ouch!”

“For ten minutes—”

“I’ll settle for that.”

“Twice a day.”

“Laura, you’re a cruel, hard woman. But so be it. I’ll break the news just before dinner. That should spoil a few appetites.”

It was the first time Commander Norton had ever seen Karl Mercer slightly ill at ease. He had spent fifteen minutes discussing the logistics problems in his usual competent manner, but something was obviously worrying him. His captain, who had a shrewd idea of what it was, waited patiently until he brought it out.

“Skipper,” Mercer said, finally, “are you sure you should lead this party? If anything goes wrong, I’m considerably more expendable. And I’ve been farther inside Rama than anyone else—even if only by fifty meters.”

“Granted. But it’s time the commander led his troops, and we’ve decided that there’s no greater risk on this trip than on the last. At the first sign of trouble, I’ll be back up that stairway fast enough to qualify for the Lunar Olympics.”

He waited for any further objections, but none came, though Mercer still looked unhappy. So he took pity on him and added gently: “And I bet Joe will beat me to the top.”

The big man relaxed, and a slow grin spread across his face. “All the same, Bill, I wish you’d taken someone else.”

“I wanted one man who’d been down before, and we can’t both go. As for Herr Doctor Professor Sergeant Myron, Laura says he’s still two kilos overweight. Even shaving off that mustache didn’t help.”

“Who’s your number three?”

“I still haven’t decided. That depends on Laura.”

“She wants to go herself.”

“Who doesn’t? But if she turns up at the top of her own fitness list, I’ll be very suspicious.”

As Mercer gathered his papers and launched himself out of the cabin, Norton felt a brief stab of envy. Almost all the crew—about eighty-five per cent, by his minimum estimate—had worked out some sort of emotional accommodation to their lives in space. He had known ships where the captain had done the same, but theirs was not his way. Though discipline aboard Endeavour was based largely on the mutual respect between highly trained and intelligent men and women, the commander needed something more to underline his position. His responsibility was unique, and demanded a certain degree of isolation, even from his closest friends. Any liaison could be damaging to morale, for it was almost impossible to avoid charges of favoritism. For this reason, affairs spanning more than two degrees of rank were firmly discouraged; but apart from this, the only rule regulating shipboard sex was “So long as you don’t do it in the corridors and frighten the simps.”

There were four superchimps aboard Endeavour, though strictly speaking the name was inaccurate, because the ship’s nonhuman crew did not come from chimpanzee stock. In zero gravity, a prehensile tail is an enormous advantage, and all attempts to supply these to humans had turned into embarrassing failures. After equally unsatisfactory results with the great apes, the Superchimpanzee Corporation had turned to the monkey kingdom.

Blackie, Blondie, Goldie, and Brownie had family trees whose branches included the most intelligent of the Old and New World monkeys, plus synthetic genes that had never existed in nature. Their rearing and education had probably cost as much as that of the average spaceman, and they were worth it. Each weighed less than thirty kilos and consumed only half the food and oxygen of a human being, but each could replace 2.75 men for housekeeping, elementary cooking, tool-carrying, and dozens of other routine jobs.

That 2.75 was the Corporation’s claim, based on innumerable time-and-motion studies. The figure, though surprising and frequently challenged, appeared to be accurate, for simps were quite happy to work fifteen hours a day and did not get bored by the most menial and repetitious tasks. So they freed human beings for human