Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke [95]
Norton was having his first good night's sleep, thirty hours after leaving Rama, when he was rudely shaken back to consciousness. He cursed groggily, opened a bleary eye at Karl Mercer—and then, like any good commander, was instantly wide awake.
'It's stopped turning?'
'Yes. Steady as a rock.'
'Let's go to the bridge.'
The whole ship was awake; even the simps knew that something was afoot, and made anxious, meeping noises until Sergeant McAndrews reassured them with swift hand-signals. Yet as Norton slipped into his chair and fastened the restraints round his waist, he wondered if this might be yet another false alarm.
Rama was now foreshortened into a stubby cylinder, and the searing rim of the sun had peeked over one edge. Norton jockeyed Endeavour gently back into the umbra of the artificial eclipse, and saw the pearly splendour of the corona reappear across a background of the brighter stars. There was one huge prominence, at least half a million kilometres high, that had climbed so far from the sun that its upper branches looked like a tree of crimson fire.
So now we have to wait, Norton told himself. The important thing is not to get bored, to be ready to react at a moment's notice, to keep all the instruments aligned and recording, no matter how long it takes.
That was strange. The star field was shifting, almost as if he had actuated the Roll thrusters. But he had touched no controls, and if there had been any real movement, he would have sensed it at once.
'Skipper!' said Calvert urgently from the Nay position, 'we're rolling—look at the stars! But I'm getting no instrument readings!'
'Rate gyros operating?'
'Perfectly normal—I can see the zero jitter. But we're rolling several degrees a second!'
'That's impossible!'
'Of course it is—but look for yourself . . .'
When all else failed, a man had to rely on eyeball instrumentation. Norton could not doubt that the star field was indeed slowly rotating—there went Sirius, across the rim of the port. Either the universe, in a reversion of pre-Copernican cosmology, had suddenly decided to revolve around Endeavour; or the stars were standing still, and the ship was turning.
The second explanation seemed rather more likely, yet it involved apparently insoluble paradoxes. If the ship was really turning at this rate, he would have felt it—literally by the seat of his pants, as the old saying went. And the gyros could not all have failed, simultaneously and independently.
Only one answer remained. Every atom of Endeavour must be in the grip of some force—and only a powerful gravitational field could produce this effect. At least, no other known field . . .
Suddenly, the stars vanished. The blazing disc of the sun had emerged from behind the shield of Rama, and its glare had driven them from the sky.
'Can you get a radar reading? What's the doppler?'
Norton was fully prepared to find that this too was inoperative, but he was wrong.
Rama was under way at last, accelerating at the modest rate of 0.015 gravities. Dr. Perera, Norton told himself, would be pleased; he had predicted a maximum of 0.02. And Endeavour was somehow caught in its wake like a piece of flotsam, whirling round and round behind a speeding ship . . .
Hour after hour, that acceleration held constant; Rama was falling away from Endeavour at steadily increasing speed. As its distance grew, the anomalous behaviour of the ship slowly ceased; the normal laws of inertia started to operate again. They could only guess at the energies in whose backlash they had been briefly caught, and Norton was thankful that he had stationed