Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,29

toilets, and miscellaneous scientific apparatus would not have looked out of place on Earth—especially because there were men and women working here without life-support systems.

Establishing Camp Alpha had been hard work, for everything had had to be manhandled through the chain of air locks, sledded down the slope from the hub, and then retrieved and unpacked. Sometimes, when the braking parachutes failed, a consignment had ended up a good kilometer away, out on the plain. Despite this, several crew members had asked permission to make the ride; Norton had firmly forbidden it. In an emergency, however, he might be prepared to reconsider the ban.

Almost all this equipment would stay here, for the labor of carrying it back was unthinkable—in fact, impossible. There were times when Norton felt an irrational shame to be leaving so much human litter in this strangely immaculate place. When they finally departed, he was prepared to sacrifice some of their precious time to leave everything in good order. Improbable though it was, perhaps millions of years hence, when Rama shot through some other star system, it might have visitors again. He would like to give them a good impression of Earth.

Meanwhile, he had a rather more immediate problem. During the last twenty-four hours he had received almost identical messages from Mars and Earth. It seemed an odd coincidence; perhaps they had been commiserating with each other, as wives who lived safely on different planets were liable to do under sufficient provocation. Rather pointedly, they had reminded him that, even though he was now a great hero, he still had family responsibilities.

The Commander picked up a collapsible chair and walked out of the pool of light into the darkness surrounding the camp. It was the only way he could get any privacy, and he could also think better away from the turmoil. Deliberately turning his back on the organized confusion behind him, he began to speak into the recorder slung around his neck.

“Original for personal file, dupes to Mars and Earth. Hello, darling. Yes, I know I’ve been a lousy correspondent, but I haven’t been aboard ship for a week. Apart from a skeleton crew, we’re all camping inside Rama, at the foot of the stairway we’ve christened Alpha.

“I have three parties out now, scouting the plain, but we’ve made disappointingly slow progress, because everything has to be done on foot. If only we had some means of transportation. I’d be very happy to settle for a few electric bicycles; they’d be perfect for the job.

“You’ve met my medical officer, Surgeon Commander Ernst—” He paused uncertainly. Laura had met one of his wives, but which? Better cut that out.

Erasing the sentence, he began again.

“My M/O, Surgeon Commander Ernst, led the first group to reach the Cylindrical Sea, fifteen kilometers from here. She found that it was frozen water, as we’d expected—but you wouldn’t want to drink it. Dr. Ernst says it’s a dilute organic soup, containing traces of almost any carbon compound you care to name, as well as phosphates and nitrates and dozens of metallic salts. There’s not the slightest sign of life—not even any dead microorganisms. So we still know nothing about the biochemistry of the Ramans—though it was probably not wildly different from ours.”

Something brushed lightly against his hair. He had been too busy to get it cut, and would have to do something about that before he next put on a space helmet.

“You’ve seen the viddies of Paris and the other towns we’ve explored on this side of the sea—London, Rome, Moscow. It’s impossible to believe that they were ever built for anything to live in. Paris looks like a giant storage depot. London is a collection of cylinders linked together by pipes connected to what are obviously pumping stations. Everything is sealed up, and there’s no way to find out what’s inside without explosives or lasers. We won’t try these until there are no alternatives.

“As for Rome and Moscow—”

“Excuse me, Skipper. Priority from Earth.”

What now? Norton said to himself. Can’t a man get a few minutes to talk to his families?

He took the message from the Sergeant and scanned it quickly, just to satisfy himself that it was not immediate. Then he read it again, more slowly.

What the devil was the Rama Committee? And why had he never heard of it? He knew that all sorts of associations, societies, and professional groups—some serious, some completely crackpot—had been trying to get in touch with him. Mission Control had done a good job of