Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,35

overhung completely until it merged into the arched roof of what was now the sky. Beneath him, the ladder descended more than five hundred meters, until it ended at the first ledge or terrace. There the stairway began, continuing almost vertically at first in this low-gravity region, then slowly becoming less and less steep until, after breaking at five more platforms, it reached the distant plain. For the first two or three kilometers he could see the individual steps, but thereafter they had merged into a continuous band.

The downward swoop of that immense stairway was so overwhelming that it was impossible to appreciate its true scale. Norton had once flown around Mount Everest, and had been awed by its size. He reminded himself that this stairway was as high as the Himalayas, but the comparison was meaningless.

And no comparison at all was possible with the other two stairways, Beta and Gamma, which slanted up into the sky and then curved far out over his head. Norton had now acquired enough confidence to lean back and glance up at them—briefly. Then he tried to forget that they were there.

Too much thinking along these lines evoked yet a third image of Rama, which he was anxious to avoid at all costs. This was the viewpoint that regarded it once again as a vertical cylinder, or well—but now he was at the top, not the bottom, like a fly crawling upside down on a domed ceiling, with a fifty-kilometer drop immediately below. Every time he found this image creeping up on him, he needed all his will power not to cling to the ladder in mindless panic.

In time, he was sure, all these fears would ebb. The wonder and strangeness of Rama would banish its terrors, at least for men who were trained to face the realities of space. Perhaps no one who had never left Earth, and had never seen the stars all around him, could endure these vistas. But if any men could accept them, Norton told himself with grim determination, it would be the captain and crew of the Endeavour.

He looked at his chronometer. This pause had lasted only two minutes, but it had seemed a lifetime. Exerting barely enough effort to overcome his inertia and the fading gravitational field, he started to pull himself slowly up the last hundred meters of the ladder. Just before he entered the air lock and turned his back upon Rama, he made one final swift survey of the interior.

It had changed, even in the last few minutes; a mist was rising from the sea. For the first few hundred meters the ghostly white columns were tilted sharply forward in the direction of Rama’s spin; then they started to dissolve in a swirl of turbulence, as the uprushing air tried to jettison its excess velocity. The trade winds of this cylindrical world were beginning to etch their patterns in its sky; the first tropical storm in unknown ages was about to break.

CHAPTER 19

A WARNING FROM MERCURY

It was the first time in weeks that every member of the Rama Committee had made himself available. Professor Solomons had emerged from the depths of the Pacific, where he had been studying mining operations along the midocean trenches. And to nobody’s surprise, Dr. Taylor had reappeared, now that there was at least a possibility that Rama held something more newsworthy than lifeless artifacts.

The Chairman had fully expected Dr. Perera to be even more dogmatically assertive than usual, now that his prediction of a Raman hurricane had been confirmed. To His Excellency’s great surprise, Perera was remarkably subdued, and accepted the congratulations of his colleagues in a manner as near to embarrassment as he was ever likely to achieve.

The exobiologist was, in fact, deeply mortified. The spectacular breakup of the Cylindrical Sea was a much more obvious phenomenon than the hurricane winds, yet he had completely overlooked it. To have remembered that hot air rises but to have forgotten that hot ice contracts was not an achievement of which he could be very proud. However, he would soon get over it and revert to his normal Olympian self-confidence.

When the Chairman offered him the floor, and asked what further climatic changes he expected, he was careful to hedge his bets.

“You must realize,” he explained, “that the meteorology of a world as strange as Rama may have many other surprises. But if my calculations are correct, there will be no further storms, and conditions will soon be stable. There will be