Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,88

rhetoric of the General Assembly had been utterly in vain.

What a cosmic irony, thought Norton as he looked at his final figures, if after a million years of safe guidance, Rama’s computers had made one trifling error—perhaps changing the sign of an equation from plus to minus.

Everyone had been so certain that Rama would lose speed, so that it could be captured by the Sun’s gravity and thus become a new planet of the solar system. It was doing just the opposite.

It was gaining speed—and in the worst possible direction. Rama was falling ever more swiftly into the Sun.

CHAPTER 45

PHOENIX

As the details of its new orbit became more and more clearly defined, it was hard to see how Rama could possibly escape disaster. Only a handful of comets had ever passed as close to the Sun; at perihelion it would be less than half a million kilometers above that inferno of fusing hydrogen. No solid material could withstand the temperature of such an approach. The tough alloy that composed Rama’s hull would start to melt at ten times that distance.

Endeavour had now passed its own perihelion, to everyone’s relief, and was slowly increasing its distance from the Sun. Rama was far ahead on its closer, swifter orbit, and already appeared well inside the outermost fringes of the corona. The ship would have a grandstand view of the drama’s final stage.

Then, five million kilometers from the Sun, and still accelerating, Rama started to spin its cocoon. Until now, it had been visible under the maximum power of Endeavour’s telescopes as a tiny bright bar; suddenly it began to scintillate, like a star seen through horizon mists. It almost seemed as if it was disintegrating. When he saw the image breaking up, Norton felt a poignant sense of grief at the loss of so much wonder. Then he realized that Rama was still there, but that it was surrounded by a shimmering haze.

And then it was gone. In its place was a brilliant, starlike object, showing no visible disc—as if Rama had contracted into a tiny ball.

It was some time before they figured out what had happened. Rama had indeed disappeared. It was now surrounded by a perfectly reflecting sphere, about a hundred kilometers in diameter. All that they could now see was the reflection of the Sun itself on the curved portion that was closest to them. Behind this protective bubble, Rama was presumably safe from the solar inferno.

As the hours passed, the bubble changed its shape. The image of the Sun became elongated, distorted. The sphere was turning into an ellipsoid, its long axis pointed in the direction of Rama’s flight. It was then that the first anomalous reports started coming in from the robot observatories, which, for almost two hundred years, had been keeping a permanent watch on the Sun.

Something was happening to the solar magnetic field in the region around Rama. The million-kilometer-long lines of force that threaded the corona and drove its wisps of fiercely ionized gas at speeds that sometimes defied even the crushing gravity of the Sun were shaping themselves around that glittering ellipsoid. Nothing was yet visible to the eye, but the orbiting instruments reported every change in magnetic flux and ultraviolet radiation.

And presently even the eye could see the changes in the corona. A faintly glowing tube or tunnel, a hundred thousand kilometers long, had appeared high in the outer atmosphere of the Sun. It was slightly curved, bending along the orbit Rama was tracing, and Rama itself—or the protective cocoon around it—was visible as a glittering bead racing faster and faster down that ghostly tube through the corona.

For it was still gaining speed. Now it was moving at more than two thousand kilometers a second, and there was no question of its ever remaining a captive of the Sun. Now, at last, the Ramans’ strategy was obvious. They had come so close to the Sun merely to tap its energy at the source and to speed themselves even faster on the way to their ultimate, unknown goal.

Soon it seemed that they were tapping more than energy. No one could ever be certain of this, because the nearest observing instruments were thirty million kilometers away, but there were definite indications that matter was flowing from the Sun into Rama itself, as if it was replacing the leakage and losses of ten thousand centuries in space.

Faster and faster Rama swept around the Sun, moving more swiftly than any object that had ever traveled through