When they had completed their own manoeuvre, Rama was two hundred thousand kilometres away, and difficult to see against the glare of the sun. But they could still obtain accurate radar measurements of its orbit; and the more they observed, the more puzzled they became.
They checked the figures over and over again, until there was no escaping from the unbelievable conclusion. It looked as if all the fears of the Hermians, the heroics of Rodrigo, and the rhetoric of the General Assembly, had been utterly in vain.
What a cosmic irony, said Norton as he looked at his final figures, if after a million years of safe guidance Rama’s computers had made one trifling error—perhaps changing the sign of an equation from plus to minus.
Everyone had been so certain that Rama would lose speed, so that it could be captured by the sun’s gravity and thus become a new planet of the solar system. It was doing just the opposite.
It was gaining speed—and in the worst possible direction.
Rama was falling ever more swiftly into the sun.
45. Phoenix
As the details of its new orbit became more and more clearly defined, it was hard to see how Rama could possibly escape disaster. Only a handful of comets had ever passed as close to the sun; at perihelion, it would be less than half a million kilometres above that inferno of fusing hydrogen. No solid material could withstand the temperature of such an approach; the tough alloy that comprised Rama’s hull would start to melt at ten times that distance.
Endeavour had now passed its own perihelion, to everyone’s relief, and was slowly increasing its distance from the sun. Rama was far ahead on its closer, swifter orbit, and already appeared well inside the outermost fringes of the corona. The ship would have a grandstand view of the drama’s final stage.
Then, five million kilometres from the sun, and still accelerating, Rama started to spin its cocoon. Until now it had been visible under the maximum power of Endeavour’s telescopes as a tiny bright bar; suddenly it began to scintillate, like a star seen through horizon mists. It almost seemed as if it was disintegrating. When he saw the image breaking up, Norton felt a poignant sense of grief at the loss of so much wonder. Then he realized that Rama was still there, but that it was surrounded by a shimmering haze.
And then it was gone. In its place was a brilliant, star-like object, showing no visible disc—as if Rama had suddenly contracted into a tiny ball.
It was some time before they realized what had happened. Rama had indeed disappeared: it was now surrounded by a perfectly reflecting sphere, about a hundred kilometres in diameter. All that they could now see was the reflection of the sun itself, on the curved portion that was closest to them. Behind this protective bubble, Rama was presumably safe from the solar inferno.
As the hours passed, the bubble changed its shape. The image of the sun became elongated, distorted. The sphere was turning into an ellipsoid, its long axis pointed in the direction of Rama’s flight. It was then that the first anomalous reports started coming in from the robot observatories, which, for almost two hundred years, had been keeping a permanent watch on the sun.
Something was happening to the solar magnetic field, in the region around Rama. The million-kilometre-long lines of force that threaded the corona, and drove its wisps of fiercely ionized gas at speeds which sometimes defied even the crushing gravity of the sun, were shaping themselves around that glittering ellipsoid. Nothing was yet visible to the eye, but the orbiting instruments reported every change in magnetic flux and ultra-violet radiation.
And presently, even the eye could see the changes in the corona. A faintly-glowing tube or tunnel, a hundred thousand kilometres long, had appeared high in the outer atmosphere of the sun. It was slightly curved, bending along the orbit which Rama was tracing, and Rama itself—or the protective cocoon around it—was visible as a glittering head racing faster and faster down that ghostly tube through the corona.
For it was still gaining speed; now it was moving at more than two thousand kilometres a second, and there was no question of it ever remaining a captive of the sun. Now, at last, the Raman strategy was obvious; they had come so close to the sun merely to tap its energy at the source, and to speed themselves even faster on the way to their ultimate unknown goal…
And presently it seemed that they were tapping more than energy. No one could ever be certain of this, because the nearest observing instruments were thirty million kilometres away, but there were definite indications that matter was flowing from the sun into Rama itself, as if it was replacing the leakages and losses of ten thousand centuries in space.
Faster and faster Rama swept around the sun moving now more swiftly than any object that had ever travelled through the solar system. In less than two hours, its direction of motion had swung through more than ninety degrees, and it had given a final, almost contemptuous proof of its total lack of interest in all the worlds whose peace of mind it had so rudely disturbed.
It was dropping out of the Ecliptic, down into the southern sky, far below the plane in which all the planets move. Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.
46. Interlude
“Come in,” said Commander Norton absentmindedly at the quiet knock on his door.
“Some news for you, Bill. I wanted to give it first, before the crew gets into the act. And anyway, it’s my department.”
Norton still seemed far away. He was lying with his hands clasped under his head, eyes half shut, cabin light low—not really drowsing, but lost in some reverie or private dream.
He blinked once or twice, and was suddenly back in his body.
“Sorry Laura—I don’t understand. What’s it all about?”
“Don’t say you’ve forgotten!”
“Stop teasing, you wretched woman. I’ve had a few things on my mind recently.”
Surgeon-Commander Ernst slid a captive chair across in its slots and sat down beside him.
“Though interplanetary crises come and go, the wheels of Martian bureaucracy grind steadily away. But I suppose Rama helped. Good thing you didn’t have to get permission from the Hermians as well.”
Light was dawning.
“Oh—Port Lowell has issued the permit!”
“Better than that—it’s already being acted on.” Laura glanced at the slip of paper in her hand. “Immediate,” she read. “Probably right now, your new son is being conceived. Congratulations.”
“Thank you. I hope he hasn’t minded the wait.”
Like every astronaut, Norton had been sterilized when he entered the service; for a man who would spend years in space, radiation-induced mutation was not a risk—it was a certainty. The spermatozoon that had just delivered its cargo of genes on Mars, two hundred million kilometres away, had been frozen for thirty years, awaiting its moment of destiny.
Norton wondered if he would be home in time for the birth. He had earned rest, relaxation—such normal family life as an astronaut could ever know. Now that the mission was essentially over, he was beginning to unwind, and to think once more about his own future, and that of both his families. Yes, it would be good to be home for a while, and to make up for lost time—in many ways…
“This visit,” protested Laura rather feebly, “was purely in a professional capacity.”
“After all these years,” replied Norton, “we know each other better than that. Anyway, you’re off duty now.”
“Now what are you thinking?” demanded Surgeon-Commander Ernst, very much later. “You’re not becoming sentimental, I hope.”