Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,51

yearnings and aspirations that drove mankind.

That was a chilling thought, quite alien to Jimmy’s usually not very profound philosophy. He felt an urgent need to resume human contact, and reported his situation back to his distant friends.

“Say again, Dragonfly,” replied Hub Control. “We can’t understand you; your transmission is garbled.”

“I repeat—I’m near the base of Little Horn number six, and am using the sticky-bomb to haul myself in.”

“Understand only partially. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, perfectly. Repeat, perfectly.”

“Please start counting numbers.”

“One, two, three, four….”

“Got part of that. Give us beacon for fifteen seconds, then go back to voice.”

“Here it is.”

Jimmy switched on the low-powered beacon that would locate him anywhere inside Rama, and counted off the seconds. When he went over to voice again, he asked plaintively: “What’s happening? Can you hear me now?”

Presumably Hub Control didn’t, because the controller then asked for fifteen seconds of TV. Not until Jimmy had repeated the question twice did the message get through.

“Glad you can hear us OK, Jimmy. But there’s something very peculiar happening at your end. Listen.”

Over the radio, he heard the familiar whistle of his own beacon, played back to him. For a moment it was perfectly normal; then a weird distortion crept into it. The thousand-cycle whistle became modulated by a deep, throbbing pulse so low that it was almost beneath the threshold of hearing. It was a kind of basso-profundo flutter in which each individual vibration could be heard. And the modulation was itself modulated; it rose and fell, rose and fell, with a period of about five seconds.

Never for a moment did it occur to Jimmy that there was something wrong with his radio transmitter. This was from outside; though what it was, and what it meant, was beyond his imagination.

Hub Control was not much wiser, but at least it had a theory.

“We think you must be in some kind of very intense field—probably magnetic—with a frequency of about ten cycles. It may be strong enough to be dangerous. Suggest you get out right away—it may be only local. Switch on your beacon again, and we’ll play it back to you. Then you can tell when you’re getting clear of the interference.”

Jimmy hastily jerked the sticky-bomb loose and abandoned his attempt to land. He swung Dragonfly around in a wide circle, listening as he did so to the sound that wavered in his earphones. After flying only a few meters, he could tell that its intensity was falling rapidly. As Hub Control had guessed, it was extremely localized.

He paused at the last spot where he could hear it, like a faint throbbing deep in his brain. So might a primitive savage have listened in awe-struck ignorance to the low humming of a giant power transformer. And even the savage might have guessed that the sound he heard was merely the stray leakage from colossal energies, fully controlled, but biding their time.

Whatever this sound meant, Jimmy was glad to be clear of it. This was no place, among the overwhelming architecture of the South Pole, for a lone man to listen to the voice of Rama.

CHAPTER 27

ELECTRIC WIND

As Jimmy turned homeward, the northern end of Rama seemed incredibly far away. Even the three giant stairways were barely visible, as a faint Y etched on the dome that closed the world. The band of the Cylindrical Sea was a wide and menacing barrier, waiting to swallow him, like Icarus, if his fragile wings should fail.

But he had come all this way with no problems, and though he was feeling slightly tired, he now felt that he had nothing to worry about. He had not even touched his food or water, and had been too excited to rest. On the return journey, he would relax and take it easy. He was also cheered by the thought that the homeward trip could be twenty kilometers shorter than the outward one, for as long as he cleared the sea, he could make an emergency landing anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. That would be a nuisance, because he would have a long walk, and, much worse, would have to abandon Dragonfly, but it gave him a comforting safety margin.

He was now gaining altitude, climbing back toward the central spike. Big Horn’s tapering needle still stretched for a kilometer ahead of him, and sometimes he felt it was the axis on which this whole world turned.

He had almost reached the tip of Big Horn when he became aware of a curious sensation. A feeling of