Francesca hesitantly sat down in the plastic structure that had been pulled away from a group of similar baskets hanging from a side cable. “You’re certain this is safe?” she said, staring at the darkness above her.
“Of course,” Richard said with a laugh. “It’s exactly like the simulation. And I’ll be in the next chair behind you, only one minute or four hundred meters below. Altogether the ride takes forty minutes from bottom to top. Average speed is twenty-four kilometers per hour.”
“And I don’t do anything,” Francesca remembered, “except sit tight, hold on, and activate my breathing system about twenty minutes from the summit.”
“Don’t forget to fasten your seat belt,” Wakefield reminded her with a smile. “If the cable were to slow down or stop near the top, where you are weightless, your momentum could cause you to sail out into the Raman void.” He grinned. “But since the entire chairlift runs beside the stairway, in the event of any emergency, you could always climb out of your basket and walk back up to the hub along the stairs.”
Richard nodded and Janos Tabori switched on the motor. Francesca was lifted off the ground and soon disappeared above them. “I’ll go right over to Gamma after I’m certain you’re on your way,” Richard said to Fanos. “The second system should be easier. With all of us working together, we should be finished by nineteen hundred at the latest.”
“I’ll have the campsite ready by the time you reach the summit,” Janos remarked, “Do you think we’re still going to stay down here tonight?”
“That doesn’t make much sense,” David Brown said from above. He or Takagishi had monitored all cosmonaut communications throughout the day. “The rovers aren’t ready yet. We had hoped to do some exploring tomorrow.”
“If we each bring down a few subsystems,” Wakefield replied, “Janos and I could assemble one rover tonight before we go to sleep. The second rover will probably be operational before noon tomorrow if we don’t encounter any difficulties.”
“That’s a possible scenario,” Dr. Brown responded. “Let’s see how much progress we have made and how tired everyone is three hours from now.” Richard climbed into his tiny chair and waited for the automatic loading algorithm in the processor to attach his seat to the cable. “By the way,” he said to his companion as he started his ascent, “thanks a lot for your good humor today. I might not have made it without the jokes.”
Janos smiled and waved at his friend. Looking upward from his moving chair, Richard Wakefield could barely make out the light from Francesca’s headgear. She’s more than a hundred floors above me, he thought. But only two and a half percent of the distance from here to the hub. This place is immense.
He reached in his pocket and pulled out the portable meteorological station that Takagishi had asked him to carry. The professor wanted a careful profile of all the atmospheric parameters in the north polar bowl of Rama. Of particular importance for his circulation models was the density and temperature of the air versus the distance below the airlock.
Wakefield watched the pressure readings, which started at 1.05 bars, fall below Earth levels, and continue their steady, monotonic decline. The temperature held fixed at a cold minus eight degrees Celsius. He leaned back and closed his eyes. It was a strange feeling, riding a basket upward, ever upward in the dark. Richard turned down the volume of one channel on his commpak; the only ongoing conversation was between Yamanaka and Turgenyev and neither of them ever had very much to say. He increased the volume on Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, which was playing in the background on another channel.
As he listened to the music, Richard was surprised at how his internal visions of brooks and flowers and green fields on Earth evoked a powerful feeling of homesickness. It was almost impossible for him to fathom the miraculous concatenation of events that had carried him from his boyhood home in Stratford to Cambridge to the Space Academy in Colorado and finally to here, to Rama, where he was riding a chairlift in the dark along the Stairway to the Gods.
No, Prospero, he said to himself, no magician could ever have conceived of such a place. He remembered seeing The Tempest for the first time as a boy and being frightened by the portrayal of a world whose mysteries might be beyond our comprehension. There is no magic, he had said at the time. There are only natural concepts that we cannot yet explain. Richard smiled. Prospero was not a mage; he was only a frustrated scientist
A moment later Richard Wakefield was stupefied by the most amazing sight he had ever seen. As his chair was sailing soundlessly upward, parallel to the stairway, dawn burst upon Rama. Three kilometers below him, cut into the Central Plain, the long straight valleys that ran from the edge of the bowl to the Cylindrical Sea suddenly exploded with light. The six linear suns of Rama, three in each hemicylinder, were carefully designed to produce a balanced illumination throughout the alien world. Wakefield’s first feelings were of vertigo and nausea. He was suspended in air by a thin cable, thousands of meters above the ground. He closed his eyes and tried to maintain his bearings. You will not fall, he said to himself.
“Aieee,” he heard Hiro Yamanaka yell.
From the ensuing conversation he could tell that Hiro, startled by the burst of light, had lost his footing near the middle of the Gamma stairway. He had apparently fallen twenty or thirty meters before he had adroitly (and luckily) managed to grab part of the banister.
“Are you all right?” David Brown asked.
“I think so,” Yamanaka answered breathlessly.
With the short crisis over, everyone started talking at once. “This is fantastic!” Dr. Takagishi was shouting. “The light levels are phenomenal. And this is all happening before the thawing of the sea. It’s different. It’s altogether different.”
“Have another module ready for me as soon as I reach the top,” Francesca said. “I’m almost out of film.”
“Such beauty. Such indescribable beauty!” General O’Toole added. He and Nicole des Jardins were watching the monitor onboard the Newton. The real-time picture from Francesca’s camera was being transmitted to them through the relay station at the hub.
Richard Wakefield said nothing. He simply stared, entranced by the world below him. He could barely discern Janos Tabori, the chairlift apparatus, and the half-completed campsite down at the bottom of the stairway. Nevertheless, the distance to them gave him some measure of this alien world. As he looked out across the hundreds of square kilometers of the Central Plain, he saw fascinating shapes in every direction. There were two features, however, that overwhelmed his imagination and vision: the Cylindrical Sea and the massive, pointed structures in the southern bowl opposite him, fifty kilometers away.
As his eyes grew more accustomed to the light, the gigantic central spire in the southern bowl seemed to grow larger and larger, It had been called Big Horn by the first explorers. Can it really be eight kilometers tall? Wakefield asked himself. The six smaller spires, surrounding the Big Horn in a hexagonal pattern and connected both to it and the walls of Rama by enormous flying buttresses, were each larger than anything made by man on Earth. Yet they were dwarfed by this neighboring prominence originating from the very center of the bowl and growing straight along the spin axis of the cylinder. In the foreground, halfway between Wakefield’s position near the north pole and that mammoth construction in the south, a band of bluish white ringed the cylindrical world. The frozen sea seemed illogical and out of place. It could never melt, the mind wanted to say, or all the water would fall toward the central axis. But the Cylindrical Sea was held in its banks by the centrifugal force of Rama. None knew better than the Newton crew that on its shore a human being would have the same weight as he would standing beside a terrestrial ocean.