Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,43

the safe side. And now that the fog had completely burned away, even such a cautious mariner as Ruby was prepared to put to sea without a compass.

She saluted smartly as she stepped ashore. “Maiden voyage of Resolution successfully completed, sir. Now awaiting your instructions.”

“Very good… Admiral. When will you be ready to sail?”

“As soon as stores can be loaded aboard, and the Harbor Master gives us clearance.”

“Then we leave at dawn.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Five kilometers of water does not seem much on a map; it is very different when one is in the middle of it. They had been cruising for only ten minutes, and the fifty-meter cliff facing the northern continent already seemed a surprising distance away. Yet, mysteriously, New York appeared hardly much closer than before.

Most of the time they paid little attention to the land; they were still too engrossed in the wonder of the sea. They no longer made the nervous jokes that had punctuated the start of the voyage. This new experience was too overwhelming.

Every time, Norton said to himself, I feel that I’ve grown accustomed to Rama, it produces some new wonder. As Resolution hummed steadily forward, it seemed again and again that they were caught in the trough of a gigantic wave, a wave that curved up on either side until it became vertical, then overhung until the two flanks met in a liquid arch sixteen kilometers above their heads. Despite everything that reason and logic told them, none of the voyagers could for long throw off the impression that at any minute those millions of tons of water would come crashing down from the sky.

Yet despite this, their main feeling was one of exhilaration; there was a sense of danger, without any real danger. Unless, of course, the sea itself produced more surprises.

That was a distinct possibility, for, as Mercer had guessed, the water was now alive. Every spoonful contained thousands of spherical, single-celled microorganisms, similar to the earliest forms of plankton that had existed in the oceans of Earth.

Yet they showed puzzling differences. They lacked a nucleus, as well as many of the other minimum requirements of even the most primitive terrestrial life forms. And although Laura Ernst—now doubling as research scientist and ship’s doctor—had proved that they definitely generated oxygen, there were far too few of them to account for the augmentation of Rama’s atmosphere. They should have existed in billions, not mere thousands.

Then she discovered that their numbers were dwindling rapidly, and must have been far higher during the first hours of the Raman dawn. It was as if there had been a brief explosion of life, recapitulating, on a trillionfold swifter time scale, the early history of Earth. Now, perhaps, it had exhausted itself; the drifting microorganisms were disintegrating, releasing their stores of chemicals back into the sea.

“If you have to swim for it,” Dr. Ernst had warned the mariners, “keep your mouths closed. A few drops won’t matter—if you spit them out right away. But all those weird organometallic salts add up to a fairly poisonous package, and I’d hate to have to work out an antidote.”

This danger, fortunately, seemed unlikely. Resolution could stay afloat if any two of her buoyancy tanks were punctured. (When told of this, Calvert had muttered darkly: “Remember the Titanic!”) And even if she sank, the crude but efficient life jackets would keep their heads above water. Although Dr. Ernst had been reluctant to give a firm ruling on this, she did not think that a few hours’ immersion in the sea would be fatal; but she did not recommend it.

After twenty minutes of steady progress, New York was no longer a distant island. It was becoming a real place, and details they had seen only through telescopes and photo enlargements were now revealing themselves as massive, solid structures. It was now strikingly apparent that the “city,” like so much of Rama, was triplicated. It consisted of three identical, circular complexes or superstructures, rising from a long, oval foundation. Photographs taken from the hub had also indicated that each complex was itself divided into three equal components, like a pie sliced into 120-degree portions. This would greatly simplify the task of exploration; presumably they had to examine only one-ninth of New York to see the whole of it. Even this would be a formidable undertaking. It would mean investigating at least a square kilometer of buildings and machinery, some of which towered hundreds of meters into the air.

The Ramans, it seemed, had