“That’s an excellent summary,” Dr. Brown replied. “Francesca will go with the four of you while you’re setting up the infrastructure this morning. When the lightweight lifts are installed and operational, Admiral Heilmann and I will join you along with Dr. Takagishi and Mr. Wilson. We’ll all sleep inside Rama tonight.”
“How many long-duration flares do you have?” Janos Tabori asked Irina Turgenyev.
“Twelve,” she answered. “That should be plenty for today.”
“And tonight, when we go to sleep in there, it will be the darkest night that any of us have ever seen,” Dr, Takagishi said. “There will be no moon and no stars, no reflection off the ground, nothing but blackness all around.”
“What will the temperature be?” Wakefield asked.
“We don’t know for certain,” the Japanese scientist answered. “The initial drones carried only cameras. But the temperature in the region around the end of the tunnel was the same as in Rama I. If thaf s any indication, then it should be about ten degrees below freezing at the campsites.” Takagishi paused for a moment. “And getting warmer!” he continued. “We’re now inside the orbit of Venus. We expect the lights to come on in another eight or nine days, and the Cylindrical Sea to melt from the bottom soon thereafter.”
“Hey,” kidded Brown. “It sounds as if you’re becoming converted. You no longer qualify all your statements, just some of them.” Takagishi replied, “With each datum that indicates this spaceship is like its predecessor seventy years ago, the probability that they are identical increases. Thus far, if we ignore the exact timing of the correction maneuver, everything about the two vehicles has been the same.”
Nicole approached the group. “Well look who’s here,” Janos said with his usual grin. “Our fifth and final space cadet.” He noticed her swollen eyes. “And our new commander was right. You do look as if you might benefit from some rest.”
“I, for one,” Richard Wakefield interjected, “am disappointed that my rover assembly assistant will now be Yamanaka instead of Madame des Jardins. At least our life science officer talks. I may have to recite Shakespeare to myself to stay awake.” He elbowed Yamanaka in the ribs. The Japanese pilot almost smiled.
“I wanted to wish you all good luck,” Nicole said. “As I’m sure Dr. Brown has told you, I felt I was still too tired to be very helpful. I should be fresh and ready by the second sortie.”
“Well,” Francesca Sabatini remarked impatiently after her camera had panned around the room and captured one final close-up of each face. “Are we finally ready?”
“Let’s go,” said Wakefield. They headed toward the airlock at the front of the Newton spacecraft.
22
DAWN
Richard Wakefield worked quickly in the near darkness. He was halfway down the Alpha stairway, where the gravity due to the centrifugal force created by the spin of Rama had grown to one-fourth of a gee. The light from his headgear illuminated the near field. He was almost finished with another pylon.
He checked his air supply. It was already below the midpoint. By now they have been deeper into Rama, closer to where they could breathe the ambient air. But they had underestimated how long it would take them to install the lightweight chairlift, The concept was extremely simple and they had practiced it several times in the simulations. The upper part of the job, when they had been in the vicinity of the ladders and virtually wieghtless, had been relatively straightforward. But at this level the installation of each pylon was a different process because of the increasing and changing gravity.
Exactly a thousand steps above Wakefield, Janos Tabori finished wrapping anchor lines around the metal banisters that lined the stairway. After almost four hours of tedious, repetitive work, he was becoming fatigued. He remembered the argument the engineering director had advanced when he and Richard had recommended a specialized machine for the installation of the lifts. “It’s not cost-effective to create a robot for nonrecurring uses,” the man had said. “Robots are only good for recurring tasks.”
Janos glanced below him but could not see as far as the next pylon, two hundred and fifty steps down the stairway. “Is it time for lunch yet?” he said to Wakefield on his commpak.
“Could be,” was the response. “But we’re way behind. We didn’t send Yamanaka and Turgenyev over to Gamma stairway until ten-thirty. At the rate we’re going, we’ll be lucky to finish these lightweight lifts and the crude campsite today. We’ll have to postpone the heavy load elevator and the rovers until tomorrow.”
“Hiro and I are already eating,” they both heard Turgenyev say from the other side of the bowl. “We were hungry. We finished the chair rack and the upper motor in half an hour. We’re down to pylon number twelve.”
“Good work,” Wakefield said. “But I’ll warn you that you’re in the easy part, around the ladders and the top of the stairway. Working weightless is a snap. Wait until the gravity is measurably different at each location.”
“According to the laser range finder, Cosmonaut Wakefield is exactly eight-point-one-three kilometers away from me,” everyone heard Dr. Takagi-shi interject.
“That doesn’t tell me anything, Professor, unless I know where the hell you are.”
“I’m standing on the ledge just outside our relay station, near the bottom of the Alpha stairway.”
“Come on, Shig, won’t you Orientals ever go along with the rest of the world? The Newton is parked on the top of Rama and you are at the top of the stairway. If we can’t agree on up and down, how can we ever hope to communicate our innermost feelings? Much less play chess together.”
“Thank you, Janos. I am at the top of the Alpha stairway. By the way, what are you doing? Your range is increasing rapidly.”
“I’m sliding down the banister to meet Richard for lunch. I don’t like eating fish and chips by myself.”
“I’m also coming down for lunch,” Francesca said. “I just finished filming an excellent demonstration of the Coriolis force using Hiro and Irina. It will be great for elementary physics classes. I should be there in five minutes.”
“Say, signora” — it was Wakefield again — “do you think we could talk you into some honest-to-goodness work? We stop what we’re doing to accommodate your filming — maybe we can make a trade with you.”
“I’m willing,” answered Francesca. “I’ll help after lunch. But what I would like now is some light. Could you use one of your flares and let me capture you and Janos having a picnic on the Stairway of the Gods?”
Wakefield programmed a flare for a delayed ignition and climbed eighty steps to the nearest ledge. Cosmonaut Tabori arrived at the same spot half a minute before the light flooded them. From two kilometers above, Francesca panned across the three stairways and then zoomed in on the two figures sitting cross-legged on the ledge. From that perspective, Janos and Richard looked like two eagles nesting in a high mountain aerie.
By late afternoon the Alpha chairlift was finished and ready for testing. “We’ll let you be the first customer,” Richard Wakefield said to Francesca, “since you were good enough to help.” They were standing in full gravity at the foot of the incredible stairway. Thirty thousand steps stretched into the darkness of the artificial heavens above them. Beside them on the Central Plain the ultralight motor and the self-contained portable power station for the chairlift were already in operation. The cosmonauts had transported the electrical and mechanical subsystems in unassembled pieces on their backs and assembly had required less than an hour.
“The little chairs are not permanently connected to the cables,” Wake-field explained to Francesca. “At each end there is a mechanism that attaches or detaches the chairs. That way it’s not necessary to have an almost infinite number of seats.”