Arthur C. Clarke - Rama 1 - Rendez-vous with Rama

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Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke

1 Spaceguard

2 Intruder

3 Rama and Sita

4 Rendezvous

5 First EVA

6 Committee

7 Two Wives

8 Through the Hub

9 Reconnaissance

10 Descent into Darkness

11 Men, Women and Monkeys

12 The Stairway of the Gods

13 The Plain of Rama

14 Storm Warning

15 The Edge of the Sea

16 Kealakekua

17 Spring

18 Dawn

19 A Warning from Mercury

20 Book of Revelation

21 After the Storm

22 To Sail the Cylindrical Sea

23 NY, Rama

24 Dragonfly

25 Maiden Flight

26 The Voice of Rama

27 Electric Wind

28 Icarus

29 First Contact

30 The Flower

31 Terminal Velocity

32 The Wave

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33 Spider

34 His Excellency Regrets ...

35 Special Delivery

36 Biot Watcher

37 Missile

38 General Assembly

39 Command Decision

40 Saboteur

41 Hero

42 Temple of Glass

43 Retreat

44 Space Drive

45 Phoenix

46 Interlude

CHAPTER ONE - Spaceguard

Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On 30 June 1908,

Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four

thousand kilometres - a margin invisibly small by the

standards of the universe. Again, on 12 February 1947,

yet another Russian city had a still narrower escape,

when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century

detonated less than four hundred kilometres from Vladi-

vostok, with an explosion rivalling that of the newly

invented uranium bomb.

In those days, there was nothing that men could do to

protect themselves against the last random shots in the

cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of

the Moon. The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck

uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-

first century, there was no region left on Earth that could

be safely used for celestial target practice. The human

race had spread from pole to pole. And so, inevitably.

At 09.46 GMT on the morning of 11 September, in the

exceptionally beautiful summer of the year 2077, most of

the inhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball appear

in the eastern sky. Within seconds it was brighter than

the sun, and as it moved across the heavens - at first in

utter silence - it left behind it a churning column of dust

and smoke.

Somewhere above Austria it began to disintegrate, pro-

ducing a series of concussions so violent that more than a

million people had their hearing permanently damaged.

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They were the lucky ones.

Moving at fifty kilometres a second, a thousand tons of

rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy,

destroying in a few flaming moments the labour of cen-

turies. The cities of Padua and Verona were wiped from

the face of the earth; and the last glories of Venice sank

for ever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic came -

thundering landwards after the hammer-blow from space.

Six hundred thousand people died, and the total dam

age was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to

history, to science - to the whole human race, for the rest

of time - was beyond all computation. It was as if a great

war had been fought and lost in a single morning; and

few could draw much pleasure from the fact that, as the

dust of destruction slowly settled, for months the whole

world witnessed the most splendid dawns and sunsets

since Krakatoa. -

After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a de-

termination and a unity that no earlier age could have

shown. Such a disaster, it was realized, might not occur

again for a thousand years - but it might occur tomor-

row. And the next time, the consequences could be even

worse.

Very well; there would be no next time.

A hundred years earlier a much poorer world, with far

feebler resources, had squandered its wealth attempting to

destroy weapons launched, suicidally, by mankind

against itself. The effort had never been successful, but

the skills acquired then had not been forgotten. Now

they could be used for a far nobler purpose, and on an

infinitely vaster stage. No meteorite large enough to

cause catastrophe would ever again be allowed to breach

the defences of Earth.

So began Project SPACEGUARD. Fifty years later - and

in a way that none of its designers could ever have an-

ticipated - it justified its existence.

CHAPTER TWO - Intruder

By the year 2130, the Mars-based radars were discovering

new asteroids at the rate of a dozen a day. The SPACE-

GUARD computers automatically calculated their orbits,

and stored away the information in their enormous mem-

ories, so that every few months any interested astronomer

could have a look at the accumulated statistics. These

were now quite impressive.

It had taken more than a hundred and twenty years to

collect the first thousand asteroids, since the discovery of

Ceres, largest of these tiny worlds, on the very first day of

the nineteenth century. Hundreds had been found and

lost and found again; they existed in such swarms that

one exasperated astronomer had christened them 'vermin

of the skies'. He would have been appalled to know that

SPACEGUARD was now keeping track of half a million.

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Only the five giants - Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Eunomia and

Vesta - were more than two hundred kilometres in dia-

meter; the vast majority were merely oversized boulders

that would fit into a small park. Almost all moved in

orbits that lay beyond Mars; only the few that came far

enough sunwards to be a possible danger to Earth were

the concern of SPACEGUARD. And not one in a thousand of

these, during the entire future history of the solar system,

would pass within a million kilometres of Earth.

The object first catalogued as 31/439, according to the

year and the order of its discovery, was detected while

still outside the orbit of Jupiter. There was nothing un-

usual about its location; many asteroids went beyond

Saturn before turning once more towards their distant

master, the sun. And Thule II, most far-ranging of all,

travelled so close to Uranus that it might well have been

a lost moon of that planet.

But a first radar contact at such a distance was un-

precedented; clearly, 31/439 must be of exceptional size.

From the strength of the echo, the computers deduced a

diameter of at least forty kilometres; such a giant had not

- been discovered for a hundred years. That it had been

overlooked for so long seemed incredible.

Then the orbit was calculated, and the mystery was

resolved - to be replaced by a greater one. 31/439 was not

travelling on a normal asteroidal path, along an ellipse

which it retraced with clockwork precision every few

years. It was a lonely wanderer between the stars, making

its first and last visit to the solar system - for it was mov-

ing so swiftly that the gravitational field of the sun could

never capture it. It would flash inwards past the orbits of

Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury, gaining speed -

as it did so, until it rounded the sun and headed out once

again into the unknown.

It was at this point that the computers started flashing

their 'Hi there! We have something interesting' sign,

and for the first time 31/439 came to the attention of

human beings. There was a brief flurry of excitement at

SPACEGUARD Headquarters, and the interstellar vagabond

was quickly dignified by a name instead of a mere num-

ber. Long ago, the astronomers had exhausted Greek and

Roman mythology; now they were working through

the Hindu pantheon. And so 31/439 was christened

Rama.

For a few days, the news media made a fuss of the

visitor, but they were badly handicapped by the sparsity

of information. Only two facts were known about Rama

- its unusual orbit, and its approximate size. Even this

was merely an educated guess, based upon the strength of

the radar echo. Through the telescope, Rama still ap-

peared as a faint, fifteenth magnitude star - much too

small to show a visible disc But as it plunged in towards

the heart of the solar system, it would grow brighter and

larger, month by month; before it vanished for ever, the

orbiting observatories would be able to gather more pre-

cise information about its shape and size. There was

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plenty of time, and perhaps during the next 'few years

some spaceship on its ordinary business might be routed

close enough to get good photographs. An actual rendez-

vous was most unlikely; the energy cost would be far too

great to permit physical contact with an object cutting

across the orbits of the planets at more than a hundred

thousand kilometres an hour.

So the world soon forgot about Rama; but the as-

tronomers did not. Their excitement grew with the pass-

ing months, as the new asteroid presented them with

more and more puzzles.

First of all, there was the problem of Rama's light

curve. it didn't have one.

All known asteroids, without exception, showed a slow

variation in their brilliance, waxing and waning within a

period of a few hours. It had been recognized for more

than two centuries that this was an inevitable result of

their spin, and their irregular shape. As they toppled end

over end along their orbits the reflecting surfaces they

presented to the sun were continually changing, and

their brightness varied accordingly.

Rama showed no such changes. Either it was not spin-

ning at all or it was perfectly symmetrical. Both explana-

tions seemed equally unlikely.

There the matter rested for several months, because

none of the big orbiting telescopes could be spared from

their regular job of peering into the remote depths of

the universe. Space astronomy was an expensive hobby,

and time on a large instrument could easily cost a thou-

sand dollars a minute. Dr William Stenton would never

have been able to grab the Farside two-hundred-metre

reflector for a full quarter of an hour, if a more impor-

tant programme had not been temporarily derailed by

the failure of a fifty cent capacitor. One astronomer's bad

luck was his good fortune.

Bill Stenton did not know what he had caught until

the next day, when he was able to get computer time to

process his results. Even when they were finally flashed on

his display screen, it took him several minutes to under-

stand what they meant.

The sunlight reflected from Rama was not, after all,

absolutely constant in its intensity. There was a very

small variation - hard to detect, but quite unmistakable,

and extremely regular. Like all the other asteroids, Rama

was indeed spinning. But whereas the normal 'day' for an

asteroid was several hours, Rama's was only four minutes.

Dr Stenton did some quick calculations, and found it

hard to believe the results. At its equator, this tiny world

must be spinning at more than a thousand kilometres an

hour; it would be rather unhealthy to attempt a landing

anywhere except at the poles. The centrifugal force at

Rama's equator must be powerful enough to flick any

loose objects away from it at an acceleration of almost one

gravity. Rama was a rolling stone that could never have

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gathered any cosmic moss; it was surprising that such a

body had managed to hold itself together, and- had not

long ago shattered into a million fragments.

An object forty kilometres across, with a rotation period

of only four minutes - where did that fit into the astro-

nomical scheme of things? Dr Stenton was a somewhat

imaginative man, a little too prone to jump to conclusions.

He now jumped to one which gave him a very uncom-

fortable few minutes indeed.

The only specimen of the celestial zoo that fitted this

description was a collapsed star. Perhaps Rama was a

dead sun - a madly spinning sphere of neutronium, every

cubic centimetre weighing billions of tons...

At this point, there flashed briefly through Dr Stenton's

horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G.

Wells's The Star. He had first read it as a very small boy,

and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy.

Across more than two centuries of time, it had lost none

of its magic and terror. He would never forget the images

of hurricanes and tidal waves, of cities sliding into the

sea, as that other visitor from the stars smashed into

Jupiter and then fell sunwards past the Earth. True, the

star that old Wells described was not cold, but incandes-

cent, and wrought much of its destruction by heat. That

scarcely mattered; even if Rama was a cold body, reflect-

ing only the light of the sun, it could kill by gravity as

easily as by fire.

Any stellar mass intruding into the solar system would

completely distort the orbits of the planets. The Earth

had only to move a few million kilometres sunwards - or

starwards - for the delicate balance of climate to be

destroyed. The Antarctic icecap could melt and flood all

:low4ying land; or the oceans could freeze and the whole

world be locked in an eternal winter. Just a nudge in

either direction would be enough

Then Dr Stenton relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief.

This was all nonsense; he should be ashamed of himself.

Rama could not possibly be made of condensed matter.

No star-sized mass could penetrate so deeply into the

solar system without producing disturbances which

would have betrayed it long ago. The orbits of all the

planets would have been affected; that, after all, was how

Neptune, Pluto and Persephone had been discovered.

No, it was utterly impossible for an object as massive as a

dead sun to sneak up unobserved.

In a way, it was a pity. An encounter with a dark star

would have been quite exciting.

While it lasted...

CHAPTER THREE - Rama and Sita

The extraordinary meeting of the Space Advisory Coun-

cil was brief and stormy. Even in the twenty-second cen-

tury, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly

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and conservative scientists from occupying crucial ad-

ministrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the prob

lem ever would be solved.

To make matters worse, the current Chairman of the

SAC was Professor (Emeritus) Olaf Davidson, the distin-

guished astrophysicist. Professor Davidson was not very

much interested in objects smaller than galaxies, and

never bothered to conceal his prejudices. And though he

had to admit that ninety per cent of his science was now

based upon observations from space-borne instruments,

he was not at all happy about it. No less than three

times during his distinguished career, satellites specially

launched to prove one of his pet theories had done pre-

cisely the opposite.

The question before the Council was straightforward

enough. There was no doubt that Rama was an unusual

object - but was it an important one? In a few months it

would be gone for ever, so there was little time in which

to act. Opportunities missed now would never recur.

At rather a horrifying cost, a space-probe soon to be

launched from Mars to beyond Neptune could be modi-

fied and sent on a high-speed trajectory to meet Rama.

There was no hope of a rendezvous; it would be the fast-

est fly-by on record, for the two bodies would pass each

other at two hundred thousand kilometres an hour.

Rama would be observed intensively for only a few min-

utes - and in real closeup for less than a second. But with

the right instrumentation, that would be long enough to

settle many questions.

Although Professor Davidson took a very jaundiced

view of the Neptune probe, it had already been approved

and he saw no point in sending more good money after

bad. He spoke eloquently on the follies of asteroid-chas-

ing, and the urgent need for a new high-resolution inter-

ferometer on the Moon to prove the newly-revived Big

Bang theory of creation, once and for all. -

That was a grave tactical error, because the three most

ardent supporters of the Modified Steady State Theory

were also members of the Council. They secretly agreed

with Professor Davidson that asteroid-chasing was a waste

of money; nevertheless...

He lost by one vote.

Three months later the space-probe, rechristened Sita,

was launched from Phobos, the inner moon of Mars. The

flight time was seven weeks, and the instrument was

switched to full power only five minutes before intercep-

tion. Simultaneously, a cluster of camera pods was re-

leased, to sail past Rama so that it could be photo-

graphed from all sides.

The first images, from ten thousand kilometres away,

brought to a halt the activities of all mankind. On a bib

lion television screens, there appeared a tiny, featureless

cylinder, growing rapidly second by second. By the time

it had doubled its size, no one could pretend any longer

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that Rama was a natural object.

Its body was a cylinder so geometrically perfect that it

might have been turned on a lathe - one with centres

fifty kilometres apart. The two ends were quite flat, apart

from some small structures at the centre of one face, and

were twenty kilometres across; from a distance, when

there was no sense of scale, Rama looked almost comic-

ally like an ordinary domestic boiler.

Rama grew until it filled the screen. Its surface was a

dull, drab grey, as colourless as the Moon, and completely

devoid of markings except at one point. Halfway along

the cylinder there was a kilometre-wide stain or smear, as

if something had once hit and splattered, ages ago.

There was no sign that the impact had done the slight-

est damage to Rama's spinning walls; but this mark had

produced the slight fluctuation in brightness that had led

to Stenton's discovery.

The images from the other cameras added nothing

new. However, the trajectories their pods traced .through

Rama's minute gravitational field gave one other vital

piece of information - the mass of the cylinder.

It was far too light to be a solid body. To nobody's

great surprise, it was clear that Rama must be hollow.

The long-hoped-for, long-feared encounter had come at

last. Mankind was about to receive its first visitor from the

stars.

CHAPTER FOUR - Rendezvous

Commander Norton remembered those first TV trans-

missions, which he had replayed so many times, during

the final minutes of the rendezvous. But there was one

thing no electronic image could possibly convey - and

that was Rama's overwhelming size.

He had never received such an impression when land-

ing on a natural body like the Moon or Mars. Those were

worlds, and one expected them to be big. Yet he had also

landed on Jupiter VIII, which was slightly larger than

Rama - and that had seemed quite a small object.

It was very easy to resolve the paradox. His judgement

was wholly altered by the fact that this was an artifact,

millions of times heavier than anything that Man had

ever put into space. The mass of Rama was at least ten

million million tons; to any spaceman, that was not only

an awe-inspiring, but a terrifying thought. No wonder

that he sometimes felt a sense of insignificance, and even

depression, as that cylinder of sculptured, ageless metal

filled more and more of the sky.

There was also a sense of danger here, that was wholly

novel to his experience. In every earlier landing he had

known what to expect; there was always the possibility of

accident, but never of surprise. With Rama, surprise was

the only certainty.

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Now Endeavour was hovering less than a thousand

metres above the North Pole of the cylinder, at the very

centre of the slowly turning disc. This end has been

chosen because it was the one in sunlight; as Rama

rotated, the shadows of the short enigmatic structures near

the axis swept steadily across the metal plain. The north-

ern face of Rama was a gigantic sundial, measuring out

the swift passage of its four-minute day.

Landing a five-thousand-ton spaceship at the centre of

a spinning disc was the least of Commander Norton's

worries. It was no different from docking at the axis of a

large space-station; Endeavour's lateral jets had - already

given her a matching spin, and he could trust Lieutenant

Joe Calvert to put her down as gently as a snowflake, with

or without the aid of the nay computer.

'In three minutes,' said Joe, without taking his eyes

from the display, 'we'll know if it's made of anti-matter.'

Norton grinned, as he recalled some of the more hair-

raising theories about Rama's origin. If that unlikely

speculation was true, in a few seconds there would be the

biggest bang since the solar system was formed. The total

annihilation of ten thousand tons would, briefly, provide

the planets with a second sun. -

Yet the mission profile had allowed even for this re-

mote contingency; Endeavour had squirted Rama with

one of her jets from a safe thousand kilometres away.

Nothing whatsoever had happened when the expanding

cloud of vapour arrived on target - and a matter-anti-

matter reaction involving even a few milligrams would

have produced an awesome firework display.

Norton, like all space commanders, was a cautious

man. He had looked long and hard at the northern face

of Rama, choosing the point of touchdown. After much

thought, he had decided to avoid the obvious spot - the

exact centre, on the axis itself. A clearly marked circular

disc, a hundred metres in diameter, was centred on the

Pole, and Norton had a strong suspicion that this must be

the outer seal of an enormous airlock. The creatures who

had built this hollow world must have had some way of

taking' their ships inside. This was the logical place for

the main entrance, and Norton thought it might be UN-

wise to block the front door with his own vessel.

But this decision generated other problems. If Endive-

our touched down even a few metres from the axis,

Rama's rapid spin would start her sliding away from

the pole. At first, the centrifugal force would be very

weak, but it would be continuous and inexorable. Com-

mannered Norton did not relish the thought of 'his ship

slithering across the polar plain, gaining speed minute

by minute until it was slung off into space at a thou-

sand kilometres an hour when it reached the edge of the

disc.

It was possible that Rama's minute gravitational field -

about one thousandth of Earth's - might prevent this

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from happening. It would hold Endeavour against the

plain with a force of several tons, and if the surface was

sufficiently rough the ship might stay near the Pole. But

Commander Norton had no intention of balancing an UN-

known frictional force against a quite certain centrifugal

one.

Fortunately, Rama's designers had provided an answer.

Equally spaced around the polar axis were three low, pill-

box shaped structures, about ten metres in diameter. If

Endeavour touched down between any two of these, the

centrifugal drift would fetch her up against them and she

would be held firmly in place, like a ship glued against

a quayside by the incoming waves.

'Contact in fifteen seconds,' said Joe. As he tensed him-

self. above the duplicate controls, which he hoped he

would not have to touch, Commander Norton became

acutely aware of all that had come to focus on this instant

of time. This, surely, was the most momentous landing

since the first touchdown on the Moon, a century and a

half ago.

The grey pill-boxes drifted slowly upwards outside the

control port. There was the last hiss of a reaction jet, and

a barely perceptible jar.

In the weeks that had passed, Commander Norton had

often wondered what he would say at this moment. But

now that it was upon him, History chose his words, and

he spoke almost automatically, barely aware of the echo

from the past:

'Rama Base. Endeavour has landed.'

As recently as a month ago, he would never have believed

it possible. The ship had been on a routine mission,

checking and emplacing asteroid warning beacons, when

the order had come. Endeavour was the only spacecraft in

the solar system which could possibly make a rendezvous

with the intruder before it whipped round the sun and

hurled itself back towards the stars. Even so, it had been

necessary to rob three other ships of the Solar Survey,

which were now drifting helplessly until tankers could

refuel them. Norton feared that it would be a long time

before the skippers of Calypso, Beagle and Challenger

would speak to him again.

Even with all this extra propellant, it had been a long

hard chase; Rama was already inside the orbit of Venus

when Endeavour caught up with her. No other ship

could ever do so; this -privilege was unique, and not a

moment of the weeks ahead was to be wasted. A thousand

scientists on Earth would have cheerfully mortgaged

their souls for this opportunity; now they could only

watch over the TV circuits, biting their lips and thinking

how much better they could do the job. They were prob-

ably fight, but there was no alternative. The inexorable

laws of celestial mechanics had decreed that Endeavour

was the first, and the last, of all Man's ships that would

ever make contact with Rama.

The advice he was continually receiving from Earth did

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Arthur C. Clarke - Rama 1 - Rendez-vous with Rama

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