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"Fishing once more? "free pencils free pencilstfree pencilse 128 .In using this system, absentee voterstion if he had been liable to the wilder flights of fancy.
Yet now, for the first time, he had a sense - not exactly of
foreboding, but of anticipation. Things were not what
they seemed; there was something very, very odd about a
place that was simultaneously brand new - and a million
years old.

Very thoughtfully, he began to walk slowly along the
free pencils length of the little valley, while his companions. still
holding the rope that was attached to his waist, followed
him along the rim. He did not expect to make any
further discoveries, but he wanted to let his curious emo-
tional state run its course. For something else was worry-
ing him; and it had nothing to do with the inexplicable
newness of Rama.

He had walked no more than a dozen metres when it
hit him like a thunderbolt.

He knew this place. He had been here before. Even on
free pencils Earth, or some familiar planet, that experience is dis-
quieting, though it is not particularly rare. Most men
have known it at some time or other, and usually they
dismiss it as the memory of a forgotten photograph, a
pure coincidence - or, if they are mystically inclined,
some form of telepathy from another mind, or even a
flashback from their own future.

But to recognize a spot which no other human being
can possibly have seen - that is quite shocking. For sev-
eral seconds, Commander Norton stood rooted to the
smooth crystalline surface on which he had been walk-
ing, trying to straighten out his emotions. His well-ordered
free pencils universe had been turned upside down, and he had
a dizzying glimpse of those mysteries at the edge of exist-
ence which he had successfully ignored for most of his
life.

Then, to his immense relief, common sense came to the
rescue. The disturbing sensation of dj-vu faded out, to
be replaced by a real and identifiable memory from his
youth.

It was true - he had once stood between such steeply
free pencils sloping walls, watching them drive into the distance until
they seemed to converge at a point indefinitely far ahead.
But they had been covered with neatly trimmed grass;
and underfoot had been broken stone, not smooth crys-
tal.

It had happened thirty years ago, during a summer
vacation in England. Largely because of another student
(he could remember her face - but he had forgotten her
name) he had taken a course of industrial archaeology,
then very popular among science and engineering gradu-
ates. They had explored abandoned coal-mines and cot-
ton mills, climbed over ruined blast-furnaces and steam-
free pencils engines, goggled unbelievingly at primitive (and still dan-
gerous) nuclear reactors, and driven priceless' turbine-
powered antiques along restored motor roads.

Not everything that they saw was genuine; much had
been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to
preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life. But
free pencils where it was necessary to make copies, they had been re-
constructed with loving care.

And so young Bill Norton had found himself bowling
along, at an exhilarating hundred kilometres an hour,
while he furiously shovelled precious coal into the firebox
of a locomotive that looked two hundred years old, but
was actually younger than he was. The thirty-kilometre
stretch of the Great Western Railway, however, was quite
genuine, though it had required a good deal of excavat-
ing to get it back into commission.

Whistle screaming, they had plunged into a hillside
and raced through a smoky, flame-lit darkness. An aston-
free pencils ishingly long time later, they had burst out of the tunnel
into a deep, perfectly straight cutting between steep
grassy banks. The long-forgotten vista was almost identi-
cal with the one before him now.

'What is it, Skipper?' called Lt Rodrigo. 'Have you
found something?'

As Norton dragged himself back to present reality,
some of the oppression lifted from his mind. There was
mystery here - yes; but it might not be beyond human
understanding. He had learned a lesson, though it was
not one that he could readily impart to others. At all
costs, he must not let Rama overwhelm him. That way
lay failure - perhaps even madness.

'No,' he answered, 'there's nothing down here. Haul
me up - we 11 head straight to Paris.'

free pencils

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Storm Warning

'I've called this meeting of the Committee,' said His Ex-
cellency the Ambassador of Mars to the United Planets,
'because Dr Perera has something important to tell us.
He insists that we get in touch with Commander Norton
right away, using the priority channel we've been able to
establish after, I might say, a good deal of difficulty. Dr
Perera's statement is rather technical, and before we
come to it I think a summary of the present position
might be in order; Dr Price has prepared one. Oh yes -
some apologies for absence. Sir Lewis Sands is unable to
be with us because he's chairing a conference, and Dr
Taylor asks to be excused?

He was rather pleased about that last abstention. The
anthropologist had rapidly lost interest in Rama, when it
free pencils became obvious that it would present little scope for him.
Like many others, he had been bitterly disappointed to
find that the mobile worldlet was dead; now there would
be no opportunity for sensational books and viddies
about Raman rituals and behavioural patterns. Others
might dig up skeletons and classify artifacts; that sort of
thing did not appeal to Conrad Taylor. Perhaps the only
discovery that would bring him back in a hurry would be
some highly explicit works of art, like the notorious fres-
coes of Thera and Pompeii. -

Thelma Price, the archaeologist, took exactly the oppo-
site point of view. She preferred excavations and ruins
free pencils uncluttered by inhabitants who might interfere with dis-
passionate, scientific studies. The bed of the Mediter-
ranean had been ideal - at least until the city planners
and landscape artists had started getting in the way. And
Rama would have been perfect, except for the madden-
ing detail that it was a hundred million kilometres away
and she would never be able to visit it in person.

'As you all know,' she began, 'Commander Norton has
completed one traverse of almost thirty kilometres, with-
out encountering any problems. He explored the curious
trench shown on your maps as the Straight Valley; its
purpose is still quite unknown, but it's clearly important
as it runs the full length of Rama - except for the break
at the Cylindrical Sea - and there are two other identical
structures 120 degrees apart round the circumference of
free pencils -the world.

'Then the party turned left - or East, if we adopt the
North Pole convention - until they reached Paris. As
you'll see from this photograph, taken by a telescope
camera at the Hub, it's a group of several hundred build-
ings, with wide streets between them.

'Now these photographs were taken by Commander
Norton's group when they reached the site. If Paris is a
city, it's a very peculiar one. Note that none of the build-
ings have windows, or even doors! They are all plain
rectangular structures, an identical thirty-five metres
high. And they appear to have been extruded out of the
ground - there are no seams or joints - look at this close-
up of the base of a wall - there's a smooth transition into
the ground.

free pencils

'My own feeling is that this place is not a residential
area, but a storage or supply depot. In support of that
theory, look at this photo

'These narrow slots or grooves, about five centimetres
wide, run along all the streets, and there's one leading to
every building - going straight into the wall .There's a
striking resemblance to the street-car tracks of the early
twentieth century; they are obviously part of some trans-
port system.

'We've never considered it necessary to have public
transport direct to every house. It would be economically
absurd - people can always walk a few hundred metres.
free pencils But if these buildings are used for the storage of heavy
materials, it would make sense.

'May I ask a question?' said the Ambassador for Earth.

'Of course, Sir Robert.'

'Commander Norton couldn't get into a single build-
ing?'

'No; when you listen to his report, you can tell he was
quite frustrated. At one time he decided that the build-
ings could only be entered from underground; then he
discovered the grooves of the transport system, and
changed his mind.'

'Did he try to break in?'

free pencils

'There was no way he could, without explosives or
heavy tools. And he doesn't want to do that until all
other approaches have failed.'

'I have it!' Dennis Solomons suddenly interjected. 'Co-
cooning!'

'I beg your pardon?'

'It's a technique developed a couple of hundred years
ago,' continued the science historian. 'Another name for
it is moth-balling. When you have something you want to
free pencils preserve, you seal it inside a plastic envelope, and then
pump in an inert gas. The original use was to protect
military equipment between wars; it was once applied to
whole ships. It's still widely used in museums that are
short of storage space; no one knows what's inside some of
the hundred-year-old cocoons in the Smithsonian base-

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