flexible pencils

Patience was not one of Carlisle Perera's virtues; he was
aching to drop his bombshell, and could restrain himself
flexible pencils no longer.

'Please, Mr Ambassador! This is all very interesting,
but I feel my information is rather more urgent.'

'If there are no other points - very well, Dr Perera.'

The exobiologist, unlike Conrad Taylor, had not
found Rama a disappointment. It was true that he no
longer expected to find life - but sooner or later, he had
flexible pencils been quite sure, some remains would be discovered of the
creatures who had built this fantastic world. The ex-
ploration had barely begun, although the time available
was horribly brief before Endeavour would be forced to
escape from her present sun-grazing orbit.

But now, if his calculations were correct, Man's contact
with Rama would be even shorter than he had feared.
For one detail had been overlooked - because it was so
large that no one had noticed it before.

'According to our latest information,' Perera began,
'one party is now on its way to the Cylindrical Sea, while
Commander Norton has another group setting up a sup-
flexible pencils ply base at the foot of Stairway Alpha. When that's estab-
lished, he intends to have at least two exploratory mis-
sions operating at all times. In this way he hopes to use
his limited manpower at maximum efficiency.
'It's a good plan, but there may be no time to carry it
out. In fact, I would advise an immediate alert, and a
preparation for total withdrawal at twelve hours' notice.
Let me explain...

'It's surprising how few people have commented on a
flexible pencils rather obvious anomaly about Rama. It's now well inside
the orbit of Venus - yet the interior is still frozen. But the
temperature of an object in direct sunlight at this point
is about five hundred degrees!

'The reason of course, is that Rama hasn't had time to
warm up. It must have cooled down to near absolute zero
- two hundred and seventy below - while it was in inter-
stellar space. Now, as it approaches the sun, the outer
hull is already almost as hot as molten lead. But the
flexible pencils inside will stay cold, until the heat works its way through
that kilometre of rock.

'There's some kind of fancy dessert with a hot exterior
flexible pencils and ice-cream in the middle - I don't remember what it's
called-'

'Baked Alaska. It's a favourite at UP banquets, unfor-
tunately.'

'Thank you, Sir Robert. That's the situation in Rama
at the moment, but it won't last. All these weeks, the
solar heat has been working its way through, and we ex-
pect a sharp temperature rise to begin in a few hours.
That's not the problem; by the time we'll have to leave
flexible pencils anyway, it will be no more than comfortably tropical.'

'Then what's the difficulty?'

'I can answer in one word, Mr Ambassador. Hurri-
canes.'

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - The Edge of the Sea

There were now more than twenty men and women in-
side Rama - six of them down on the plain, the rest ferry-
ing equipment and expendables through the airlock sys-
tem and down the stairway. The ship itself was almost
flexible pencils deserted, with the minimum possible staff on duty; the
joke went around that Endeavour was really being run
by the four simps and that Goldie had been given the
rank of Acting-Commander.

For these first explorations, Norton had established a
number of ground-rules; the most important dated back
to the earliest days of man's space-faring. Every group, he
had decided, must contain one person with prior experi-
ence. But not more than one. In that way, everybody
would have an opportunity of learning as quickly as pos-
sible.

And so the first party to head for the Cylindrical Sea,
though it was led by Surgeon-Commander Laura Ernst,
had as its one-time veteran Lt Boris Rodrigo, just back
from Paris. The third member, Sergeant Pieter Rousseau,
had been with the back-up teams at the Hub; he was an
expert on space reconnaissance instrumentation, but on
this trip he would have to depend on his own eyes and a
flexible pencils small portable telescope.

From the foot of Stairway Alpha to the edge of the Sea
was just under fifteen kilometres - or an Earth-equi-
valent of eight under the low gravity of Rama. Laura
Ernst, who had to prove that she lived up to her own
standards, set a brisk pace. They stopped for thirty min-
utes at the mid-way mark, and made the whole trip in a
completely uneventful three hours.

It was also quite monotonous, walking forward in the
beam of the searchlight through the anechoic darkness of
Rama. As the pool of light advanced with them, it slowly
elongated into a long, narrow ellipse; this foreshortening
of the beam was the only visible sign of progress. If the
observers up on the Hub had not given them continual
distance checks, they could not have guessed whether
they had travelled one kilometre, or five, or ten. They
just plodded onwards through the million-year-old night,
over an apparently seamless metal surface.

But at last, far ahead at the limits of the now weaken-
ing beam, there was something new. On a normal world,
- it would have been a horizon; as they approached, they
flexible pencils could see that the plain on which they were walking dame
to an abrupt stop. They were nearing the edge of the
Sea.

'Only a hundred metres,' said Hub Control. 'Better
slow down.'

That was hardly necessary, yet they had already done
so. It was a sheer straight drop of fifty metres from the
level of the plain to that of the Sea - if it was a sea, and not
another sheet of that mysterious crystalline material. Al-
though Norton had impressed upon everyone the danger
of taking anything for granted in Rama, few doubted
that the Sea was really made of ice. But for what conceiv-
flexible pencils able reason was the cliff on the southern shore five hun-
dred metres high, instead of the fifty here?

It was as if they were approaching the edge of the
world; their oval of light, cut off abruptly ahead of them,
became shorter and shorter. But far out on the curved
screen of the Sea their monstrous foreshortened shadows
had appeared, magnifying and exaggerating every move-
ment. Those shadows had been their companions every
step of the way, as they marched down the beam, but now
that they were broken at the edge of the cliff they no
longer seemed part of them. They might have been crea-
tures of the Cylindrical Sea, waiting to deal with any in-
flexible pencils truders into their domain.

Because they were now standing on the edge of a fifty-
metre cliff, it was possible for the first time to appreciate
the curvature of Rama. But no one had ever seen a frozen
lake bent upwards into a cylindrical surface;, that was
distinctly unsettling, and the eye did its best to find some
other interpretation. It seemed to Dr Ernst, who had once
made a study of visual illusions, that half the time she
was really looking at a horizontally curving bay, not a
surface that soared up into the sky. It required a deliber-
ate effort of will to accept the fantastic truth.

Only in the line directly ahead, parallel to the axis of
flexible pencils Rama, was normalcy preserved. In this direction alone
was there agreement between vision and logic. Here - for
the next few kilometres at least - Rama looked flat, and
was flat... And out there, beyond their distorted shadows
and the outer limit of the beam, lay the island that
dominated the Cylindrical Sea.

'Hub Control,' Dr Ernst radioed, 'please aim your
beam at New York.'

The night of Rama fell suddenly upon them, as the
flexible pencils oval of light went sliding out to sea. Conscious of the now
invisible cliff at their feet, they all stepped back a few
metres. Then, as if by some magical stage transformation,
the towers of New York sprang into view.

The resemblance to old-time Manhattan was only super-
ficial; this star-born echo of Earth's past possessed its
flexible pencils own unique identity. The more Dr Ernst stared at it, the
more certain she became that it was not a city at all.

The real New York, like all of Man's habitations, had
never been finished; still less had it been designed. This
place, however, had an overall symmetry and pattern,
though one so complex that it eluded the mind. It had
been conceived and planned by some controlling intelli-
gence - and then it had been completed, like a machine
devised for some specific purpose. After that, there was no
possibility of growth or change.

The beam of the searchlight slowly tracked along those
distant towers and domes and interlocked spheres and
flexible pencils criss-crossed tubes. Sometimes there would be a brilliant
reflection as some flat surface shot the light back towards
them; the first time this happened, they were all taken by
surprise. It was exactly as. if, over there on that strange
island, someone was signalling to them...

But there was nothing that they could see here that was
not already shown in greater detail on photographs taken
from the Hub. After a few minutes, they called for the
light to return to them, and began to walk eastwards
along the edge of the cliff. It had been plausibly theor-
ized that, somewhere, there must surely be a flight of
steps, or a ramp, leading down to the Sea. And one crew-
flexible pencils man, who was a keen sailor, had raised an interesting
conjecture.

'Where there's a sea,' Sergeant Ruby Barhes had pre-
dicted, 'there must be docks and harbours - and ships.
You can learn everything about a culture by studying the
way it builds boats.' Her colleagues thought this a rather
restricted point of view, but at least it was a stimulating
one.

Dr Ernst had almost given up the search, and was pre-
paring to m4e a descent by rope, when Lt Rodrigo spot-
ted the narrow stairway. It could easily have been over-
looked in the shadowed darkness below the edge of the
flexible pencils cliff, for there was no guard-rail or other indication of its
presence. And it seemed to lead nowhere; it ran down the
fifty-metre vertical wall at a steep angle, and disappeared
below the surface of the Sea.

They scanned the flight of steps with their helmet-
lights, could see no conceivable hazard, and Dr Ernst
got Commander Norton's permission to descend. A
minute later, she was cautiously testing the surface of the
Sea.

Her foot slithered almost frictionlessly back and forth.
The material felt exactly like ice. It was ice.