Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,21

some great stairway on Earth. Norton had once visited the ruins of an Aztec temple, and the feelings he had then experienced now came echoing back to him—amplified a hundred times. Here was the same sense of awe and mystery, and the sadness of the irrevocably vanished past. Yet the scale here was so much greater, both in time and in space, that the mind was unable to do it justice; after a while, it ceased to respond. Norton wondered if, sooner or later, he would take even Rama for granted.

And there was another respect in which the parallel with terrestrial ruins failed completely. Rama was hundreds of times older than any structure that had survived on Earth, even the Great Pyramid. But everything looked absolutely new; there was no sign of wear and tear.

Norton had puzzled over this a good deal, and had arrived at a tentative explanation. Everything that they had so far examined was part of an emergency back-up system, seldom put to actual use. He could not imagine that the Ramans—unless they were physical-fitness fanatics of the kind not uncommon on Earth—ever walked up and down this incredible stairway, or its two identical companions completing the invisible Y far above his head. Perhaps they had been required only during the actual construction of Rama, and had served no purpose since that distant day.

That theory would do for the moment; yet it did not feel right. There was something wrong, somewhere.

They did not slide for the last kilometer, but went down the steps two at a time in long, gentle strides; this way, Norton decided, they would give more exercise to muscles that would soon have to be used. And so the end of the stairway came upon them almost unawares; suddenly, there were no more steps—only a flat plain, dull gray in the now weakening beam of the hub searchlight, fading away into the darkness a few hundred meters ahead.

Norton looked back along the beam, toward its source up on the axis more than eight kilometers away. He knew that Mercer would be watching through the telescope, so he waved to him cheerfully.

“Captain here,” he reported over the radio. “Everyone in fine shape—no problems. Proceeding as planned.”

“Good,” replied Mercer. “We’ll be watching.”

There was a brief silence; then a new voice cut in. “This is the Exec, on board ship. Really, Skipper, this isn’t good enough. You know the news services have been screaming at us for the last week. I don’t expect deathless prose, but can’t you do better than that?”

“I’ll try,” Norton said, chuckling. “But remember—there’s nothing to see yet. It’s like… well… being on a huge, darkened stage, with a single spotlight. The first few hundred steps of the stairway rise out of it until they disappear into the darkness overhead. What we can see of the plain looks perfectly flat. The curvature’s too small to be visible over this limited area. And that’s about it.”

“Like to give any impressions?”

“Well, it’s still very cold—below freezing—and we’re glad of our thermostats. And quiet, of course; quieter than anything I’ve ever known on Earth, or in space, where there’s always some background noise. Here, every sound is swallowed up. The space around us is so enormous that there aren’t any echoes. It’s weird, but I hope we’ll get used to it.”

“Thanks, Skipper. Anyone else? Joe, Boris?”

Joe Calvert, never at a loss for words, was happy to oblige.

“I can’t help thinking that this is the first time—ever—that we’ve been able to walk on another world, breathing its natural atmosphere—though I suppose ‘natural’ is hardly the word you can apply to a place like this. Still, Rama must resemble the world of its builders; our own spaceships are all miniature earths. Two examples are damned poor statistics, but does this mean that all intelligent life forms are oxygen eaters? What we’ve seen of their work suggests that the Ramans were humanoid, though perhaps about fifty per cent taller than we are. Wouldn’t you agree, Boris?”

Is Joe teasing Boris? Norton asked himself. I wonder how he’s going to react.

To all his shipmates, Lieutenant Boris Rodrigo was something of an enigma. The quiet, dignified communications officer was popular with the rest of the crew, but he never entered fully into their activities and always seemed a little apart—marching to the music of a different drummer.

As indeed he was, being a devout member of the Fifth Church of Christ, Cosmonaut. Norton had never been able to discover what had happened to