Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,50

it; the whole assembly looked like a group of remarkably symmetrical stalactites, hanging from the roof of a cave; or, inverting the point of view, the spires of some Cambodian temple, set at the bottom of a crater.

Linking these slender, tapering towers, and curving down from them to merge eventually in the cylindrical plain, were flying buttresses that looked massive enough to bear the weight of a world. And this, perhaps, was their function, if they were indeed the elements of some exotic drive units, as had been suggested.

Jimmy approached the central spike cautiously, stopped pedaling while he was still a hundred meters away, and let Dragonfly drift to rest. He checked the radiation level and found only Rama’s very low background. There might be forces at work here that no human instruments could detect, but that was another unavoidable risk.

“What can you see?” Hub Control asked anxiously.

“Just Big Horn. It’s absolutely smooth—no markings—and the point’s so sharp you could use it as a needle. I’m almost scared to go near it.”

He was only half joking. It seemed incredible that so massive an object should taper to such a geometrically perfect point. Jimmy had seen collections of insects impaled upon pins, and he had no desire for his own Dragonfly to meet a similar fate.

He pedaled slowly forward until the spike had flared out to several meters in diameter, and stopped again. Opening a small container, he rather gingerly extracted a sphere about as big as a baseball and tossed it toward the spike. As it drifted away, it played out a barely visible thread.

The sticky-bomb hit the smoothly curving surface—and did not rebound. Jimmy gave the thread an experimental twitch, then a harder tug. Like a fisherman hauling in his catch, he slowly wound Dragonfly across to the tip of the appropriately christened Big Horn, until he was able to put out his hand and make contact with it.

“I suppose you could call this some kind of touchdown,” he reported to Hub Control. “It feels like glass—almost frictionless, and slightly warm. The sticky-bomb worked fine. Now I’m trying the mike…. Let’s see if the suction pad holds as well…. Plugging in the leads…. Anything coming through?”

There was a long pause, then Hub Control said disgustedly: “Not a damn thing, except the usual thermal noises. Will you tap it with a piece of metal? Then at least we’ll find if it’s hollow.”

“OK. Now what?”

“We’d like you to fly along the spike, making a complete scan every half-kilometer and looking out for anything unusual. Then, if you’re sure it’s safe, you might go across to one of the Little Horns. But only if you’re certain you can get back to zero gee without any problems.”

“Three kilometers from the axis—that’s slightly above lunar gravity. Dragonfly was designed for that. I’ll just have to work harder.”

“Jimmy, this is the captain. I’ve got second thoughts on that. Judging by your pictures, the smaller spikes are just the same as the big one. Get the best coverage of them you can with the zoom lens. I don’t want you leaving the low-gravity region—unless you see something that looks very important. Then we’ll talk it over.”

“OK, Skipper,” said Jimmy, and perhaps there was just a trace of relief in his voice. “I’ll stay close to Big Horn. Here we go again.”

He felt he was dropping straight downward into a narrow valley between a group of incredibly tall and slender mountains. Big Horn now towered a kilometer above him, and the six spikes of the Little Horns were looming up all around. The complex of buttresses and flying arches that surrounded the lower slopes was approaching rapidly. He wondered if he could make a safe landing somewhere down there in that Cyclopean architecture. He could no longer land on Big Horn itself, for the gravity on its widening slopes was now too powerful to be counteracted by the feeble force of the sticky-bomb.

As he came ever closer to the South Pole, he began to feel more and more like a sparrow flying beneath the vaulted roof of some great cathedral—though no cathedral ever built had been even one-hundredth the size of this place. He wondered if it was indeed a religious shrine, or something remotely analogous, but quickly dismissed the idea. Nowhere in Rama had there been any trace of artistic expression; everything was purely functional. Perhaps the Ramans felt that they already knew the ultimate secrets of the universe, and were no longer haunted by the