Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,87

as a rock.”

“Let’s go to the bridge.”

The whole ship was awake. Even the simps knew that something was afoot, and made anxious, meeping noises until McAndrews reassured them with swift hand signals. As Norton slipped into his chair and fastened the restraints around his waist, he wondered if this might be yet another false alarm.

Rama was now foreshortened into a stubby cylinder, and the searing rim of the Sun had peeked over one edge. Norton jockeyed Endeavour gently back into the umbra of the artificial eclipse, and saw the pearly splendor of the corona reappear across a background of the brighter stars. There was one huge prominence, at least half a million kilometers high, that had climbed so far from the Sun that its upper branches looked like a tree of crimson fire.

So now we have to wait, Norton told himself. The important thing is not to get bored, to be ready to react at a moment’s notice, to keep all the instruments aligned and recording, no matter how long it takes.

This was strange! The star field was shifting, almost as if he had actuated the roll thrusters. But he had touched no controls, and if there had been any real movement he would have sensed it at once.

“Skipper!” said Calvert urgently from the nav position. “We’re rolling—look at the stars! But I’m getting no instrument readings!”

“Rate gyros operating?”

“Perfectly normal. I can see the zero jitter. But we’re rolling several degrees a second!”

“That’s impossible!”

“Of course it is—but look for yourself.”

When all else failed, a man had to rely on eyeball instrumentation. Norton could not doubt that the star field was indeed slowly rotating. There went Sirius, across the rim of the port. Either the universe, in a reversion to pre-Copernican cosmology, had suddenly decided to revolve around Endeavour; or the stars were standing still, and the ship was turning.

The second explanation seemed rather more likely, yet it involved apparently insoluble paradoxes. If the ship was really turning at this rate he would have felt it—literally by the seat of his pants, as the old saying went. And the gyros could not all have failed, simultaneously and independently.

Only one answer remained. Every atom of Endeavour must be in the grip of some force—and only a powerful gravitational field could produce this effect. At least, no other known field could.

Suddenly, the stars vanished. The blazing disc of the Sun had emerged from behind the shield of Rama, and its glare had driven them from the sky.

“Can you get a radar reading? What’s the Doppler?”

Norton was fully prepared to find that this, too, was inoperative, but he was wrong.

Rama was under way at last, accelerating at the modest rate of 0.015 gravities. Dr. Perera, Norton thought, would be pleased; he had predicted a maximum of 0.02. And Endeavour was somehow caught in its wake like a piece of flotsam whirling round and round behind a speeding ship.

Hour after hour that acceleration held constant. Rama was falling away from Endeavour at steadily increasing speed. As the distance grew, the anomalous behavior of the ship slowly ceased; the normal laws of inertia started to operate again. They could only guess at the energies in whose backlash they had been briefly caught, and Norton was thankful that he had stationed Endeavour at a safe distance before Rama had switched on its drive.

As to the nature of that drive, one thing was now certain, even though all else was mystery. There were no jets of gas, no beams of ions or plasma thrusting Rama into its new orbit. No one put it better than Sergeant Professor Myron, when he said, in shocked disbelief: “There goes Newton’s Third Law.”

It was Newton’s Third Law, however, upon which Endeavour had to depend the next day, when she used her very last reserves of propellant to bend her own orbit outward from the Sun. The change was slight, but it would increase her perihelion distance by ten million kilometers. That was the difference between running the ship’s cooling system at ninety-five-percent capacity and a certain fiery death.

When they had completed their own maneuver, Rama was two hundred thousand kilometers away, and difficult to see against the glare of the Sun. But they could obtain accurate radar measurements of its orbit. And the more they observed, the more puzzled they became.

They checked the figures over and over again, until there was no escaping the unbelievable conclusion. It looked as if all the fears of the Hermians, the heroism of Rodrigo, and the