Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,27

southern shore five hundred meters high, instead of the fifty here?

It was as if they were approaching the edge of the world. Their oval of light, cut off abruptly ahead of them, became shorter and shorter. But far out on the curved screen of the sea their monstrous foreshortened shadows had appeared, magnifying and exaggerating every movement. Those shadows had been their companions every step of the way as they marched down the beam, but now that they were broken at the edge of the cliff they no longer seemed part of them. They might have been creatures of the Cylindrical Sea, waiting to deal with any intruders into their domain.

Because they were now standing on the edge of a fifty-meter cliff, it was possible for the first time to appreciate the curvature of Rama. But no one had ever seen a frozen lake bent upward into a cylindrical surface; that was distinctly unsettling, and the eye did its best to find some other interpretation. It seemed to Dr. Ernst, who had once made a study of visual illusions, that half the time she was really looking at a horizontally curving bay, not a surface that soared up into the sky. It required a deliberate effort of will to accept the fantastic truth.

Only in the line directly ahead, parallel to the axis of Rama, was normality preserved. In this direction alone was there agreement between vision and logic. Here, for the next few kilometers at least, Rama looked flat, and was flat. And out there, beyond their distorted shadows and the outer limit of the beam, lay the island that dominated the Cylindrical Sea.

“Hub Control,” Dr. Ernst radioed, “please aim your beam at New York.”

The night of Rama fell suddenly upon them as the oval of light went sliding out to sea. Conscious of the now invisible cliff at their feet, they all stepped back a few meters. Then, as if by some magical stage transformation, the towers of New York sprang into view.

The resemblance to old-time Manhattan was only superficial; this star-born echo of Earth’s past possessed its own unique identity. The more Dr. Ernst stared at it, the more certain she became that it was not a city at all.

The real New York, like all of man’s habitations, had never been finished; still less had it been designed. This place, however, had an over-all symmetry and pattern, though one so complex that it eluded the mind. It had been conceived and planned by some controlling intelligence, and then it had been completed, like a machine devised for some specific purpose. After that there was no possibility of growth or change.

The beam of the searchlight slowly tracked along those distant towers and domes and interlocked spheres and crisscrossed tubes. Sometimes there was a brilliant reflection as some flat surface shot the light back toward them. The first time this happened, they were all taken by surprise. It was exactly as if, over there on that strange island, someone was signaling to them.

But there was nothing that they could see here that was not already shown in greater detail on photographs taken from the hub. After a few minutes, they called for the light to return to them and began to walk eastward along the edge of the cliff. It had been plausibly theorized that, somewhere, there must surely be a flight of steps, or a ramp, leading down to the sea. And one crewman, who was a keen sailor, had raised an interesting conjecture.

“Where there’s a sea,” Sergeant Ruby Barnes had predicted, “there must be docks and harbors—and ships. You can learn everything about a culture by studying the way it builds boats.” Her colleagues thought this a rather restricted point of view, but at least it was a stimulating one.

Dr. Ernst had almost given up the search, and was preparing to make a descent by rope, when Rodrigo spotted the narrow stairway. It could easily have been overlooked in the shadowed darkness below the edge of the cliff, for there was no guardrail or other indication of its presence. And it seemed to lead nowhere; it ran down the fifty-meter vertical wall at a steep angle, and disappeared below the surface of the sea.

They scanned the flight of steps with their helmet lights, could see no conceivable hazard, and Dr. Ernst got Commander Norton’s permission to descend. A minute later, she was cautiously testing the surface of the sea.

Her foot slithered almost frictionlessly back and forth. The material