Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,5

before the skippers of Calypso, Beagle, and Challenger would speak to him again.

Even with all the extra propellant it had been a long, hard chase. Rama was already inside the orbit of Venus when Endeavour caught up with it. No other ship could have done so; this privilege was unique, and not a moment of the weeks ahead was to be wasted. A thousand scientists on Earth would have cheerfully mortgaged their souls for this opportunity; now they could only watch over the TV circuits, biting their lips and thinking how much better they could do the job. They were probably right, but there was no alternative. The inexorable laws of celestial mechanics had decreed that Endeavour would be the first, and the last, of all man’s ships to make contact with Rama.

The advice he was continually receiving from Earth did little to alleviate Norton’s responsibility. If split-second decisions had to be made, no one could help him; the radio time lag to Mission Control was already ten minutes, and increasing. He often envied the great navigators of the past, before the days of electronic communications, who could interpret their sealed orders without continual monitoring from headquarters. When they made mistakes, no one ever knew.

Yet at the same time, he was glad that some decisions could be delegated to Earth. Now that Endeavour’s orbit had coalesced with Rama’s, they were heading sunward like a single body. In forty days they would reach perihelion, and pass within twenty million kilometers of the Sun. That was far too close for comfort. Long before then Endeavour would have to use her remaining fuel to nudge herself into a safer orbit. The crew would have perhaps three weeks of exploring time before they parted from Rama forever.

After that, the problem would be Earth’s. Endeavour would be virtually helpless, speeding on an orbit that could make her the first ship to reach the stare—in approximately fifty thousand years. There was no need to worry, Mission Control had promised. Somehow, regardless of cost, Endeavour would be refueled, even if it proved necessary to send tankers and abandon them in space once they had transferred every gram of propellant. Rama was a prize worth any risk short of a suicide mission.

And, of course, it might even come to that. Commander Norton had no illusions on this score. For the first time in a hundred years, an element of total uncertainty had entered human affairs, and uncertainty was one thing that neither scientists nor politicians could tolerate. If that was the price of resolving it, Endeavour and her crew would be expendable.

CHAPTER 5

FIRST EVA

Rama was silent as a tomb—which, perhaps, it was. There were no radio signals, on any frequency; no vibrations that the seismographs could pick up, apart from micro-tremors undoubtedly caused by the Sun’s increasing heat; no electrical currents; no radioactivity. It was almost ominously quiet. One might have expected that even an asteroid would be noisier.

What did we expect? Norton asked himself. A committee of welcome? He was not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. The initiative, at any rate, appeared to be his.

His orders were to wait for twenty-four hours, then to go out and explore. Nobody slept much that first day. Even the crew members not on duty spent their time monitoring the ineffectually probing instruments or simply looking out the observation ports at the starkly geometrical landscape. Is this world alive? they asked themselves, over and over again. Is it dead? Or is it merely sleeping?

On the first EVA, Norton took only one companion: Lieutenant Commander Karl Mercer, his tough and resourceful life-support officer. He had no intention of getting out of sight of the ship, and if there was any trouble it was unlikely that a larger party would be safer. As a precaution, however, he had two more crew members, already suited up, standing by in the air lock.

The few grams of weight that Rama’s combined gravitational and centrifugal fields gave them were neither help nor hindrance; they had to rely entirely on their jets. As soon as possible, Norton decided, he would string a cat’s cradle of guide ropes between the ship and the pillboxes, so that they could move around without wasting propellant.

The nearest pillbox was only ten meters from the air lock, and Norton’s first concern was to check that the contact had caused no damage to the ship. Endeavour’s hull was resting against the curving wall with a thrust of several tons, but the pressure