Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,79

know of his existence. He had an absolutely certain five minutes for uninterrupted work, and a ninety-nine-per-cent probability of much longer than that.

As soon as the scooter had drifted to a complete halt, Rodrigo grappled it to the missile framework so that the two formed a rigid structure. That took only seconds. He had already chosen his tools and was out of the pilot’s seat at once, only slightly hampered by the stiffness of his heavy-insulation suit.

The first thing he found himself inspecting was a small metal plate bearing this inscription:

DEPARTMENT OF POWER ENGINEERING

SECTION D

47 SUNSET BOULEVARD

VULCANOPOLIS, 17464

For information apply to HENRY K. JONES

Rodrigo suspected that in a very few minutes Mr. Jones might be rather busy.

The heavy wire cutters made short work of the cable. As the first strands parted, Rodrigo gave scarcely a thought to the fires of Hell that were pent up only centimeters away. If his actions triggered them, he would never know.

He glanced again at his watch; this had taken less than a minute, which meant that he was on schedule. Now for the back-up cable, and then he could head for home, in full view of the furious and frustrated Hermians.

He was just beginning to work on the second cable assembly when he felt a faint vibration in the metal he was touching. Startled, he looked back along the body of the missile.

The characteristic blue-violet glow of a plasma thruster in action was hovering around one of the attitude-control jets. The bomb was preparing to move.

The message from Mercury was brief, and devastating. It arrived two minutes after Rodrigo had disappeared around the edge of Rama.

COMMANDER ENDEAVOUR FROM MERCURY SPACE CONTROL, INFERNO WEST. YOU HAVE ONE HOUR FROM RECEIPT OF THIS MESSAGE TO LEAVE VICINITY OF RAMA. SUGGEST YOU PROCEED MAXIMUM ACCELERATION ALONG SPIN AXIS, REQUEST ACKNOWLEDGMENT. MESSAGE ENDS.

Norton read it with sheer disbelief, followed by anger. He felt a childish impulse to radio back that all his crew were inside Rama and it would take hours to get everyone out. But that would achieve nothing—except perhaps to test the will and nerve of the Hermians.

And why, several days before perihelion, had they decided to act? He wondered if the mounting pressure of public opinion was becoming too great and they had decided to present the rest of the human race with a fait accompli. It seemed an unlikely explanation, because such sensitivity would have been uncharacteristic.

There was no way in which he could recall Rodrigo, for the scooter was now in the radio shadow of Rama and would be out of contact until they were in line of sight again. That would not be until the mission was completed—or had failed.

He would have to wait it out. There was still plenty of time, a full fifty minutes. Meanwhile, he had decided on the most effective answer to Mercury.

He would ignore the message completely, and see what the Hermians did next.

Rodrigo’s first sensation when the bomb started to move was not one of physical fear; it was something much more devastating. He believed that the universe operated according to strict laws, which not even God could disobey—much less the Hermians. No message could travel faster than light; he was five minutes ahead of anything that Mercury could do.

This could only be a coincidence—fantastic, and perhaps deadly, but no more than that. By chance, a control signal must have been sent to the bomb at about the time he was leaving Endeavour. While he was traveling fifty kilometers, it had covered eighty million.

Or perhaps this was only an automatic change of attitude, to counter overheating somewhere in the vehicle. There were places where the skin temperature approached fifteen hundred degrees, and he had been very careful to keep in the shadows as far as possible.

A second thruster started to fire, checking the spin given by the first. No, this was not a mere thermal adjustment. The bomb was reorienting itself to point toward Rama.

Useless to wonder why this was happening, at this precise moment in time. There was one thing in his favor. The missile was a low-acceleration device; a tenth of a gee was the most that it could manage. He could hang on.

He checked the grapples attaching the scooter to the bomb framework, and rechecked the safety line on his own suit. A cold anger was growing in him, adding to his determination. Did this maneuver mean that the Hermians were going to explode the bomb without warning, giving Endeavour no chance to