Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,3

high-speed trajectory to meet Rama. There was no hope of a rendezvous; it would be the fastest fly-by on record, for the two bodies would pass each other at two hundred thousand kilometers an hour. Rama would be observed intensively for only a few minutes, and in real close-up for less than a second. But with the right instrumentation, that would be long enough to settle many questions.

Although Davidson took a jaundiced view of the Neptune probe, it had already been approved and he saw no point in sending more good money after bad. He spoke eloquently on the follies of asteroid-chasing, and on the urgent need for a new high-resolution interferometer on the Moon to prove the newly revived “big bang” theory of creation, once and for all.

That was a grave tactical error, because the three most ardent supporters of the “modified steady state” theory were also members of the Council. They secretly agreed with Davidson that asteroid-chasing was a waste of money; nevertheless….

He lost by one vote.

Three months later, the space-probe, rechristened Sita, was launched from Phobos, the inner moon of Mars. The flight time was seven weeks, and the instrument was switched to full power only five minutes before interception. Simultaneously, a cluster of camera pods was released, to sail past Rama, so that it could be photographed from all sides.

The first images, from ten thousand kilometers away, brought to a halt the activities of all mankind. On a billion television screens, there appeared a tiny, featureless cylinder, growing rapidly second by second. By the time it had doubled its size, no one could pretend any longer that Rama was a natural object.

Its body was a cylinder so geometrically perfect that it might have been turned on a lathe—one with centers fifty kilometers apart. The two ends were quite flat, apart from some small structures at the center of one face, and were twenty kilometers across; from a distance, when there was no sense of scale, Rama looked almost comically like an ordinary domestic boiler.

Rama grew until it filled the screen. Its surface was a dull, drab gray, as colorless as the Moon, and completely devoid of markings except at one point. Halfway along the cylinder there was a kilometer-wide stain or smear, as if something had once hit and splattered, ages ago.

There was no sign that the impact had done the slightest damage to Rama’s spinning walls; but this mark had produced the slight fluctuation in brightness that had led to Stenton’s discovery.

The images from the other cameras added nothing new. However, the trajectories their pods traced through Rama’s minute gravitational field gave one other vital piece of information: the mass of the cylinder.

It was far too light to be a solid body. To nobody’s great surprise, it was clear that Rama must be hollow.

The long-hoped-for, long-feared encounter had come at last. Mankind was about to receive the first visitor from the stars.

CHAPTER 4

RENDEZVOUS

Commander Norton remembered those first TV transmissions, which he had replayed so many times, during the final minutes of the rendezvous. But there was one thing no electronic image could possibly convey—and that was Rama’s overwhelming size.

He had never received such an impression when landing on a natural body like the Moon or Mars. Those were worlds, and one expected them to be big. Yet he had also landed on Jupiter VIII, which was slightly larger than Rama—and that had seemed quite a small object.

It was easy to resolve the paradox. His judgment was wholly altered by the fact that this was an artifact, millions of times heavier than anything that man had ever put into space. The mass of Rama was at least ten trillion tons; to any spaceman, that was not only an awe-inspiring but also a terrifying thought. No wonder that he sometimes felt a sense of insignificance, and even depression, as that cylinder of sculptured, ageless metal filled more and more of the sky.

There was also a sense of danger here that was wholly novel to his experience. In every earlier landing, he had known what to expect; there was always the possibility of accident, but never of surprise. With Rama, surprise was the only certainty.

Now, Endeavour was hovering less than a thousand meters above the North Pole of the cylinder, at the very center of the slowly turning disc. This end had been chosen because it was the one in sunlight; as Rama rotated, the shadows of the short, enigmatic structures near the axis swept steadily across the