Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke [40]
'This is as bad as the Pandora Party! It's nothing less than interstellar xenophobia!'
'Please, gentlemen! This is getting us nowhere. Mr. Ambassador, you still have the floor.'
The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.
'Thank you,' said the Ambassador for Mercury. 'The danger may be unlikely, but where the future of the human race is involved, we can take no chances. And, if I may say so, we Hermians may be particularly concerned. We may have more cause for alarm than anyone else.'
Dr. Taylor snorted audibly, but was quelled by another glare from the Moon.
'Why Mercury, more than any other planet?' asked the Chairman.
'Look at the dynamics of the situation. Rama is already inside our orbit. It is only an assumption that it will go round the sun and head on out again into space. Suppose it carries out a braking manoeuvre? If it does so, this will be at perihelion, about thirty days from now. My scientists tell me that if the entire velocity change is carried out there, Rama will end up in a circular orbit only twenty-five million kilometres from the sun. From here, it could dominate the solar system.'
For a long time nobody—not even Conrad Taylor—spoke a word. All the members of the Committee were marshalling their thoughts about those difficult people, the Hermians, so ably represented here by their Ambassador.
To most people, Mercury was a fairly good approximation of Hell; at least, it would do until something worse came along. But the Hermians were proud of their bizarre planet, with its days longer than its years, its double sunrises and sunsets, its rivers of molten metal . . . By comparison, the Moon and Mars had been almost trivial challenges. Not until men landed on Venus (if they even did) would they encounter an environment more hostile than that of Mercury.
And yet this world had turned out to be, in many ways, the key to the solar system. This seemed obvious in retrospect, but the Space Age had been almost a century old before the fact was realized. Now the Hermians never let anyone forget it.
Long before men reached the planet, Mercury's abnormal density hinted at the heavy elements it contained; even so, its wealth was still a source of astonishment, and had postponed for a thousand years any fears that the key metals of human civilization would be exhausted. And these treasures were in the best possible place, where the power of the Sun was ten times greater than on frigid Earth.
Unlimited energy—unlimited metal; that was Mercury. Its great magnetic launchers could catapult manufactured products to any point in the solar system. It could also export energy, in synthetic transuranium isotopes or pure radiation. It had even been proposed that Hermian lasers would one day thaw out gigantic Jupiter, but this idea had not been well received on the other worlds. A technology that could cook Jupiter had too many tempting possibilities for interplanetary blackmail.
That such a concern had ever been expressed said a good deal about the general attitude towards the Hermians. They were respected for their toughness and engineering skills, and admired for the way in which they had conquered so fearsome a world. But they were not liked, and still less were they completely trusted. At the same time, it was possible to appreciate their point of view. The Hermians, it was often joked, sometimes behaved as if the Sun was their personal property. They were bound to it in an intimate love-hate relationship—as the Vikings had once been linked to the sea, the Nepalese to the Himalayas, the Eskimos to the Tundra. They would be most unhappy if something came between them and the natural force that dominated and controlled their lives.
At last, the