Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,25

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 kilometers 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 kilometers 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 is clearly important, because it runs the full length of Rama—except for the break at the Cylindrical Sea—and there are two identical structures 120 degrees apart on the circumference of the world.

“Next, 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 telescopic camera at the hub, it is 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 is a most peculiar one. Note that none of the buildings have windows, or even doors! They are all plain, rectangular structures, an identical thirty-five meters high. And they appear to have been extruded from 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 centimeters wide, run along all the streets, and there is one leading to every building—going straight into the wall. There is 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 meters. But if these buildings are being used for the storage of heavy materials, it would make sense.”

“May I ask a question?” said the Ambassador from 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 be entered only 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 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 Taylor, had not found Rama a disappointment. It was true that he no longer expected to find life; but sooner or later, he felt quite sure, some remains would be discovered of the creatures who had built this fantastic world. 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. 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