Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke [7]
'Well, Skipper—are you going to turn it?'
Norton thought once more of his instructions. 'Use your own discretion, but proceed with caution.' If he checked every single move with Mission Control, he would never get anywhere.
'What's your diagnosis, Karl?' he asked Mercer. 'It's obviously a manual control for an airlock—probably an emergency back-up system in case of power failure. I can't imagine any technology, however advanced, that wouldn't take such precautions.'
'And it would be fail-safe,' Norton told himself. 'It could only be operated if there was no possible danger to the system . . .'
He grasped two opposing spokes of the windlass, braced his feet against the ground, and tested the wheel. It did not budge.
'Give me a hand,' he asked Mercer. Each took a spoke; exerting their utmost strength, they were unable to produce the slightest movement. Of course, there was no reason to suppose that clocks and corkscrews on Rama turned in the same direction as they did on Earth . . .
'Let's try the other way,' suggested Mercer. This time, there was no resistance. The wheel rotated almost effortlessly through a full circle. Then, very smoothly, it took up the load. Half a metre away, the curving wall of the pillbox started to move, like a slowly opening clamshell. A few particles of dust, driven by wisps of escaping air, streamed outwards like dazzling diamonds as the brilliant sunlight caught them.
The road to Rama lay open.
6
Committee
It had been a serious mistake, Dr. Bose often thought, to put the United Planets Headquarters on the Moon. Inevitably, Earth tended to dominate the proceedings—as it dominated the landscape beyond the dome. If they had to build here, perhaps they should have gone to the Farside, where that hypnotic disc never shed its rays . . . But, of course, it was much too late to change, and in any case there was no real alternative. Whether the colonies liked it or not, Earth would be the cultural and economic overlord of the solar system for centuries to come.
Dr. Bose had been born on Earth, and had not emigrated to Mars until he was thirty, so he felt that he could view the political situation fairly dispassionately. He knew now that he would never return to his home planet, even though it was only five hours away by shuttle. At 115, he was in perfect health, but he could not face the reconditioning needed to accustom him to three times the gravity he had enjoyed for most of his life. He was exiled for ever from the world of his birth; not being a sentimental man, this had never depressed him unduly.
What did depress him sometimes was the need for dealing, year after year, with the same familiar faces. The marvels of medicine were all very well, and certainly he had no desire to put back the clock—but there were men around this conference table with whom he had worked for more than half a century. He knew exactly what they would say and how they would vote on any given subject. He wished that, some day, one of them would do something totally unexpected—even something quite crazy.
And probably they felt exactly the same way about him . . .
The Rama Committee was still manageably small, though doubtless that would soon be rectified. His six colleagues—the UP representatives for Mercury, Earth, Luna, Ganymede, Titan and Triton—were all present in the flesh. They had to be; electronic diplomacy was not possible over solar system distances. Some elder statesmen, accustomed to the instantaneous communications which Earth had long taken for granted, had never reconciled themselves to the fact that radio waves took minutes, or even hours, to journey across the gulfs between the planets. 'Can't you scientists do something about it?' they had been heard to complain bitterly, when told that face-to-face conversation was impossible between Earth and any of its remoter children. Only the Moon had that barely acceptable one-and-a-half-second delay—with all the political and psychological consequences