faber castell pencils

It was the first time in weeks that every member of the
Rama Committee had made himself available. Professor
Solomons had emerged from the depths of the Pacific,
where he had been studying mining operations along the
faber castell pencils mid-ocean trenches. And to nobody's surprise, Dr Taylor
had reappeared, now that there was at least a possibility
that Rama held something more newsworthy than lifeless
artifacts.

The Chairman had fully expected Dr Carlisle Perera
to be even more dogmatically assertive than usual, now
faber castell pencils that his prediction of a Raman hurricane had been con-
firmed. To His Excellency's great surprise, Perera was re-
markably subdued, and accepted the congratulations of
his colleagues in a manner as near to embarrassment as
he was ever likely to achieve.

The exobiologist, in fact, was deeply mortified. The
spectacular break-up of the Cylindrical Sea was a much
more obvious phenomenon than the hurricane winds - yet
he had completely overlooked it. To have remembered
that hot air rises, but to have forgotten that hot ice con-
tracts, was not an achievement of which he could be very
proud. However, he would soon get over it, and revert to
his normal Olympian self-confidence.

When the Chairman offered him the floor, and asked
what further climatic changes he expected, he was very
careful to hedge his bets.

'You must realize,' he explained, 'that the meteorology
of a world as strange as Rama may have many other sur-
prises. But if my calculations are correct, there will be no
further storms, and conditions will soon be stable. There
will be a slow temperature rise until perihelion - and
beyond - but that won't concern us, as Endeavour will
have had to leave long before then.'

'So it should soon be safe to go back inside?'
'Er - probably. We should certainly know in forty-
faber castell pencils eight hours.'

'A return is imperative,' said the Ambassador for Mer-
cury. 'We have to learn everything we possibly can about
Rama. The situation has now changed completely.'

'I think we know what you mean, but would you care
to elaborate?'

'Of course. Until now, we have assumed that Rama is
lifeless - or at any rate uncontrolled. But we can no
longer pretend that it is a derelict. Even if there are no
faber castell pencils life-forms aboard, it may be directed by robot mech-
anisms, programmed to carry out 'some mission - per-
haps one highly disadvantageous to us. Unpalatable
though it may be, we must consider the question of self-
defence.'

There was a babble of protesting voices, and the
Chairman had to hold up his hand to restore order.

'Let His Excellency finish!' he pleaded. 'Whether we
like the idea or not, it should be considered seriously.'

'With all due respect to the Ambassador,' said Dr Con-
faber castell pencils rad Taylor in his most disrespectful voice, 'I think we can
rule out as nave the fear of malevolent intervention.
Creatures as advanced as the Ramans must have corres-
pondingly developed morals. Otherwise, they would have
destroyed themselves - as we nearly did in the twentieth
century. I've made that quite clear in my new book Ethos
and Cosmos. I hope you received your copy.

'Yes, thank you, though I'm afraid the pressure of other
matters has not allowed me to read beyond the introduc-
tion. However, I'm familiar with the general thesis. We
may have no malevolent intentions towards an ant-heap.
faber castell pencils But if we want to build a house on the same site ...

'This is as bad as the Pandora Party! It's nothing less
than interstellar xenophobia!'

'Please, gentlemen! This is getting us nowhere. Mr
Ambassador, you still have the floor.'

The Chairman glared across three hundred and
eighty thousand kilometres of space at Conrad Taylor,
who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its
tune.

'Thank you,' said the Ambassador for Mercury. 'The
danger may be unlikely, but where the future of the
human race is involved, we can take no chances. And,
if I may say so, we Hermians may be particularly con-
cerned. We may have more cause for alarm than anyone
faber castell pencils else.'

Dr Taylor snorted audibly, but was quelled by another
glare from the Moon.

'Why Mercury, more than any other planet?' asked the
Chairman.

'Look at the dynamics of the situation. Rama is already
inside our orbit. It is only an assumption that it will go
round the sun and head on out again into space. Suppose
it carries out a braking manoeuvre? If it does so, this will
faber castell pencils be at perihelion, about thirty days from now. My scien-
tists tell rue that if the entire velocity change is carried
out there, Rama will end up in a circular orbit only
twenty-five million kilometres from the sun. From here, it
could dominate the solar system.'

For a long time nobody - not even Conrad Taylor -
spoke a word. Ml the members of the Committee were
marshalling their thoughts about those difficult people
the Hermians, so ably represented here by their Am-
faber castell pencils bassador.

To most people, Mercury was a fairly good approxi-
mation of Hell; at least, it would do until something
worse came along. But the Hermians were proud of their
bizarre planet, with its days longer than its years, its
double sunrises and sunsets, its rivers of molten metal ...
By comparison, the Moon and Mars had been almost tri-
vial challenges. Not until men landed on Venus (if they
even did) would they encounter an environment - more
hostile than that of Mercury.

And yet this world had turned out to be, in many ways,
the key to the solar system. This seemed obvious in retro-
faber castell pencils spect, but the Space Age had been almost a century old
before the fact was realized. Now the Hermians never let
anyone forget it.

Long before men reached the planet, Mercury's ab-
normal density hinted at the heavy elements it con-
tained; even so, its wealth was still a source of astonish-
ment, and had postponed for a thousand years any fears
that the key metals of human civilization would be ex-
hausted. And these treasures were in the best possible
place, where the power of the Sun was ten times greater
than on frigid Earth.

Unlimited energy - unlimited metal; that was Mer-
cury. Its great magnetic launchers could catapult manu-
faber castell pencils factured products to any point in the solar system. It
could also export energy, in synthetic transuranium iso-
topes or pure radiation. It had even been proposed that
Hermian lasers would one day thaw out gigantic Jupiter,
but this idea had not been well received on the other
worlds. A technology that could cook Jupiter had too
many tempting possibilities for interplanetary black-
mail.

That such a concern had ever been expressed said a
good deal about the general attitude towards the Her-
mians. They were respected for their toughness and engi-
neering skills, and admired for the way in which they had
faber castell pencils conquered so fearsome a world. But they were not liked,
and still less were they completely trusted.
- At the same time, it was possible to appreciate their
point of view. The Hermians, it was often joked, some-
times behaved as if the Sun was their, personal property.
They were bound to it in an intimate love-hate relation-
ship - as the Vikings had once been linked to the sea, the
Nepalese to the Himalayas, the Eskimos to the Tundra.
They would be most unhappy if something came be-
tween them and the natural force that dominated and
controlled their lives.

At last, the Chairman broke the long silence. He still
remembered the sun of India, and shuddered to contem-
plate the sun of Mercury. So he took the Hermians very
seriously indeed, even though he considered them un-
faber castell pencils couth technological barbarians.

'I think there is some merit in your argument, Mr Am-
bassador,' he said slowly. 'Have you any proposals?'

'Yes, sir. Before we know what action to take, we must
have the facts. We know the geography of Rama - if one
can use that term - but we have no idea of its capabili-
ties. And the key to the whole problem is this: does
Rama have a propulsion system? Can it change orbit? I'd
be very interested in Dr Perera's views.'

'I've given the subject a good deal of thought,' an-
swered the exobiologist. 'Of course, Rama must have
been given its original impetus by some launching device,
faber castell pencils but that could have been an external booster. If it does
have onboard propulsion, we've found no trace of it. Cer-
tainly there are no rocket exhausts, or anything similar,
anywhere on the outer shell.'

'They could be hidden.'

'True, but there would seem little point in it. And
where are the propellant tanks, the energy sources? The
main hull is solid - we've checked that with seismic sur-
veys. The cavities in the northern cap are all accounted
faber castell pencils for by the airlock systems.

'That leaves the southern end of Rama, which Com-