The SC numbers had a more straightforward explanation. They too were based on a battery of standardized tests administered to all students between the ages of twelve and twenty, but the interpretation here was easier to understand. The highest SC score was 100. A person scoring close to 100 was liked and respected by virtually everybody, would fit into most any group, was almost never quarrelsome or moody, and was very dependable. A footnote to the explanation of the SC scores acknowledged that written tests could not accurately measure personality traits in all cases, so the numbers should be used with discretion.

Nicole reminded herself to do a comparison sometime of all the cosmonaut IE and SC scores. Then she accessed the Chronological Summary file for Janos Tabori. The next sixty minutes was an eye-opening experience for Nicole. As the life science officer, she had of course studied the official ISA personnel files for the entire crew. But if the information about Janos Tabori on the cube given to her by King Henry was correct (and she had no way of knowing one way or the other), then the ISA files were woefully incomplete. Nicole had known previously that Janos had twice been selected as the outstanding engineering student at the University of Hungary; she had not known that he had been president for two years of the Gay Students a.s.sociation of Budapest. She was aware that he had entered the s.p.a.ce Academy in 2192 and had graduated in only three years (because of his previous experience with major Soviet engineering projects); she had never been told that he had applied to the Academy twice previously and had been rejected both times. Despite sensational entrance scores, he had twice failed his personal interview-both times the interview committee had been headed by General Valeriy Borzov. Janos had been active in various gay organizations until 2190. Subsequently he had resigned from them all and never rejoined or partic.i.p.ated in any organized gay activities. None of this information had been in his ISA file. Nicole was stunned by what she had learned. It wasn't that Janos had been (or was) gay that disturbed her; she was free of prejudices where s.e.xual orientation was concerned. What bothered her most was the likelihood that his official file had been deliberately censored to remove all references both to his h.o.m.os.e.xuality and to his earlier interactions with General Borzov.

The last entries in the Tabori Chronological Summary were also surprising for Nicole. According to the dossier, Janos had purportedly signed a contract with Schmidt and Hagenest, the German publishing conglomerate, in the last week of December, just before launch. His task was to perform unspecified "consulting" for a wide variety of postNewton media endeavors in support of what was referred to as the Brown-Sabatini project. Cosmonaut Tabori was paid an initial fee of three hundred thousand marks for signing. Three days later his mother, who had been waiting almost a year for one of the new artificial brain implants that reversed the damage from Alzheimer's disease, entered the Bavarian Hospital in Munich for neurological surgery. Her eyes weary and burning, Nicole finished reading the extensive dossier on Dr. David Brown. During the hours that she had been studying his Chronological Summary, she had created a special subfile for herself of those items in the summary that were of particular interest to her. Before trying again to sleep, Nicole scrolled through this special subfile one more time.

Summer 2161: Brown, eleven, enrolled in Camp Longhom by father over strenuous objections of mother. Typical outdoor summer camp in hill country of Texas for upper cla.s.s boys, featuring athletics of all kinds, riflery, crafts, and hiking. Boys lived ten to a barracks, Brown was extremely unpopular immediately. On fifth day bunkmates seized him coming out of shower and painted his genitals black. Brown refused to move from bed until mother had traveled almost two hundred miles to pick him up and take him home. Father apparently ignored son altogether after this incident. September 2166: After being valedictorian from private high school, Brown enrolled as freshman in physics at Princeton. Remained in New Jersey only eight weeks. Completed undergraduate work at SMU while living at home.

June 2173: Awarded Ph.D. in physics and astronomy by Harvard. Dissertation advisor Wilson Brownwell called Brown "an ambitious, diligent student."

June 2175: Brown completed post-doctorate research on the evolution of stars with Brian Murchison at Cambridge. April 2180: Married Jeannette Hudson of Pasadena, California. Ms. Hudson had been graduate student in astronomy at Stanford. Only child, daughter Angela, born in December 2184.

November 2181: Was refused tenure in astronomy department at Stanford because two members of evaluation committee believed Brown had falsified scientific data in several of his many scholarly publications. Issue was never resolved.

January 2184: Appointed to first ISA Advisory Committee. Prepared comprehensive plans for series of major new astronomical telescopes on far side of the moon.

May 2187: Brown named chairman of Department of Physics and Astronomy at SMU in Dallas, Texas.

February 2188: Fistfight with Wendell Thomas, Princeton professor, in atrium outside AAAS meeting in Chicago. Thomas insisted that Brown had stolen and published ideas they had discussed together.

April 2190: Electrified scientific world by not only publishing breakthrough models of supernova process, but also predicting nearby supernova to occur in mid-March 2191. Research done in collaboration with SMU doctoral student, Elaine Bernstein of New York. Strong suggestion from graduate a.s.sociates of Ms. Bernstein that she was actually one with the new insights. Brown catapulted to fame as a result of his bold and correct prediction.

June 2190: Brown divorced wife, from whom he had been separated for eighteen months. Separation had started three months after Elaine Bernstein had begun graduate work.

December 2190: Married Ms. Bernstein in Dallas.

March 2191: Supernova 2191a filled night sky with light, as predicted by Brown etal.

June 2191: Brown signed two-year science reporting contract with CBS. Jumped to UBC in 2194 and then, at recommendation of agent, to INN in 2197.

December 2193: Brown awarded top ISA medal for Distinguished Scientific Achievement.

November 2199: Signed exclusive multimillion mark, multiyear contract with Schmidt and Hagenest to "exploit" all possible commercial applications of Newton mission, including booh, videos, and educational material. Teamed with Francesca Sabatini as other princ.i.p.al, cosmonauts Heilmann and Tabori as consultants. Signing bonus of two million marks deposited in secret account in Italy. Her alarm awakened her after she had been asleep for only two hours. Nicole dragged herself out of bed and freshened up in the retractable wash-basin. She moved slowly into the corridor and turned toward the lobby. The other four s.p.a.ce cadets were gathered around David Brown in the control center, excitedly reviewing the details of the initial sortie.

"All right," Richard Wakefield was saying, "first priorities are the lightweight individual chairlifts by the right and left stairways and one heavy load elevator from the hub to the Central Plain. Then we set up a temporary control center at the edge of the plain and a.s.semble and test the three rovers. Crude campsite tonight, base camp at the Beta site near the edge of the Cylindrical Sea tomorrow. We will leave the a.s.sembly and deployment of the two helicopters for tomorrow, the icemobiles and motorboats for Day Three."

"That's an excellent summary," Dr. Brown replied.

"Francesca will go with the four of you while you're setting up the infrastructure this morning. When the lightweight lifts are installed and operational, Admiral Heilmann and I will join you along with Dr. Takagishi and Mr. Wilson. We'll all sleep inside Rama tonight."

"How many long-duration flares do you have?" Janos Tabori asked Irina Turgenyev.

"Twelve," she answered. "That should be plenty for today."

"And tonight, when we go to sleep in there, it will be the darkest night that any of us have ever seen," Dr, Takagishi said. "There will be no moon and no stars, no reflection off the ground, nothing but blackness all around."

"What will the temperature be?" Wakefield asked.

"We don't know for certain," the j.a.panese scientist answered. "The initial drones carried only cameras. But the temperature in the region around the end of the tunnel was the same as in Rama I. If thaf s any indication, then it should be about ten degrees below freezing at the campsites." Takagishi paused for a moment. "And getting warmer/' he continued. "We're now inside the orbit of Venus. We expect the lights to come on in another eight or nine days, and the Cylindrical Sea to melt from the bottom soon thereafter."

"Hey," kidded Brown. "It sounds as if you're becoming converted. You no longer qualify all your statements, just some of them." Takagishi replied, "With each datum that indicates this s.p.a.ceship is like its predecessor seventy years ago, the probability that they are identical increases. Thus far, if we ignore the exact timing of the correction maneuver, everything about the two vehicles has been the same."

Nicole approached the group. "Well look who's here," Janos said with his usual grin. "Our fifth and final s.p.a.ce cadet." He noticed her swollen eyes. "And our new commander was right. You do look as if you might benefit from some rest."

"I, for one," Richard Wakefield interjected, "am disappointed that my rover a.s.sembly a.s.sistant will now be Yamanaka instead of Madame des Jardins. At least our life science officer talks. I may have to recite Shakespeare to myself to stay awake." He elbowed Yamanaka in the ribs. The j.a.panese pilot almost smiled.

"1 wanted to wish you all good luck," Nicole said. "As I'm sure Dr. Brown has told you, I felt I was still too tired to be very helpful. I should be fresh and ready by the second sortie."

"Well," Francesca Sabatini remarked impatiently after her camera had panned around the room and captured one final close-up of each face. "Are we finally ready?"

"Let's go," said Wakefield. They headed toward the airlock at the front of the Newton s.p.a.cecraft.

22 DAWN.

Richard Wakefield worked quickly in the near darkness. He was halfway down the Alpha stairway, where the gravity due to the centrifugal force created by the spin of Rama had grown to one-fourth of a gee. The light from his headgear illuminated the near field. He was almost finished with another pylon.

He checked his air supply. It was already below the midpoint. By now they have been deeper into Rama, closer to where they could breathe the ambient air. But they had underestimated how long it would take them to install the lightweight chairlift, The concept was extremely simple and they had practiced it several times in the simulations. The upper part of the job, when they had been in the vicinity of the ladders and virtually wieghtless, had been relatively straightforward. But at this level the installation of each pylon was a different process because of the increasing and changing gravity.

Exactly a thousand steps above Wakefield, Janos Tabori finished wrapping anchor lines around the metal banisters that lined the stairway. After almost four hours of tedious, repet.i.tive work, he was becoming fatigued. He remembered the argument the engineering director had advanced when he and Richard had recommended a specialized machine for the installation of the lifts. "It's not cost-effective to create a robot for nonrecurring uses," the man had said. "Robots are only good for recurring tasks."

Janos glanced below him but could not see as far as the next pylon, two hundred and fifty steps down the stairway.

"Is it time for lunch yet?" he said to Wakefield on his commpak.

"Could be," was the response. "But we're way behind. We didn't send Yamanaka and Turgenyev over to Gamma stairway until ten-thirty. At the rate we're going, we'll be lucky to finish these lightweight lifts and the crude campsite today. We'll have to postpone the heavy load elevator and the rovers until tomorrow."

"Hiro and 1 are already eating," they both heard Turgenyev say from the other side of the bowl. "We were hungry. We finished the chair rack and the upper motor in half an hour. We're down to pylon number twelve."

"Good work," Wakefield said. "But I'll warn you that you're in the easy part, around the ladders and the top of the stairway. Working weightless is a snap. Wait until the gravity is measurably different at each location."

"According to the laser range finder, Cosmonaut Wakefield is exactly eight-point-one-three kilometers away from me," everyone heard Dr. Takagi-shi interject.

"That doesn't tell me anything, Professor, unless 1 know where the h.e.l.l you are."

"I'm standing on the ledge just outside our relay station, near the bottom of the Alpha stairway."

"Come on, Shig, won't you Orientals ever go along with the rest of the world? The Newton is parked on the top of Rama and you are at the top of the stairway. If we can't agree on up and down, how can we ever hope to communicate our innermost feelings? Much less play chess together."

"Thank you, Janos. I am at the top of the Alpha stairway. By the way, what are you doing? Your range is increasing rapidly."

"I'm sliding down the banister to meet Richard for lunch. I don't like eating fish and chips by myself."

"I'm also coming down for lunch," Francesca said. "I just finished filming an excellent demonstration of the Coriolis force using Hiro and Irina. It will be great for elementary physics cla.s.ses. I should be there in five minutes."

"Say, signora"-it was Wakefield again-"do you think we could talk you into some honest-to-goodness work? We stop what we're doing to accommodate your filming-maybe we can make a trade with you."

"I'm willing," answered Francesca. "I'll help after lunch. But what I would like now is some light. Could you use one of your flares and let me capture you and Janos having a picnic on the Stairway of the G.o.ds?"

Wakefield programmed a flare for a delayed ignition and climbed eighty steps to the nearest ledge. Cosmonaut Tabori arrived at the same spot half a minute before the light flooded them. From two kilometers above, Francesca panned across the three stairways and then zoomed in on the two figures sitting cross-legged on the ledge. From that perspective, Janos and Richard looked like two eagles nesting in a high mountain aerie.

By late afternoon the Alpha chairlift was finished and ready for testing. "We'll let you be the first customer," Richard Wakefield said to Francesca, "since you were good enough to help." They were standing in full gravity at the foot of the incredible stairway. Thirty thousand steps stretched into the darkness of the artificial heavens above them. Beside them on the Central Plain the ultralight motor and the selfcontained portable power station for the chairlift were already in operation. The cosmonauts had transported the electrical and mechanical subsystems in una.s.sembled pieces on their backs and a.s.sembly had required less than an hour.

"The little chairs are not permanently connected to the cables," Wake-field explained to Francesca. "At each end there is a mechanism that attaches or detaches the chairs. That way it's not necessary to have an almost infinite number of seats."

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 a.s.semble 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 s.p.a.ce Academy in Colorado and finally to here, to Rama, where he was riding a chairlift in the dark along the Stairway to the G.o.ds.

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 ma.s.sive, 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 b.u.t.tresses, 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 sh.o.r.e a human being would have the same weight as he would standing beside a terrestrial ocean.

The island city in the middle of the Cylindrical Sea was Rama's New York. To Richard its skysc.r.a.pers had not been too imposing in the views that had been offered by the light from the flares. But under the light of the Raman suns, it was clear that this city held center stage. The eyes were drawn to New York from any point inside Rama-the dense oval island of buildings was the only break in the orderly annulus that formed the Cylindrical Sea.

"Just look at New York!" Dr. Takagishi was gushing excitedly into his commpak. "There must be almost a thousand buildings over two hundred meters tall." He paused only a second. "That's where they live. I know it. New York must be our target."

After the initial outbursts there was a protracted silence while each of the cosmonauts privately integrated the sunlit world of Rama into his own consciousness. Richard could now clearly see Francesca, four hundred meters above him, as his chair crossed the transition between the stairways and the ladders and closed in on the hub.

"Admiral Heilmann and I have just had a quick conversation," David Brown said, breaking the silence, "with some advice from Dr. Takagishi. There seems to be no obvious reason to change our plans for this sortie, at least not the early part. Unless something else unexpected occurs, we will go forward with Wakefield's suggestion. We will finish the two chairlifts, carry the rover down for a.s.sembly later this evening, and all sleep in the campsite at the foot of the stairway as planned."

"Don't forget me," Janos hollered into his commpak. "I'm the only one who doesn't have much of a view!" Richard Wakefield unfastened his seat belt and stepped out onto the ledge. He looked down to where the stairway disappeared from view. "Roger, Cosmonaut Tabori. We have arrived back at Station Alpha. Whenever you give the signal, we will hoist you up to join us."

23 NIGHTFALL.

Considering the regular abuse that he received from his neurotic rather and the emotional scars that must remain from his youthful marriage to British actress Sarah Tydings, Cosmonaut Wakefield is remarkably well adjusted. He underwent two years of professional therapy after his celebrated divorce, concluding a year before he entered the s.p.a.ce Academy in 2192. His scholastic record at the academy is still unequaled to this day; his professors in electrical engineering and computer sciences all insist that by the time of his graduation, Wakefield knew more than any member of the faculty. . . .

". , . Except for a wariness where intimacy is concerned (particularly with women-he has apparently had no sustained emotional involvements since the breakup of his marriage), Wakefield exhibits none of the antisocial behavior usually found in abused children. Although his SC was low as a youth, he has grown less arrogant as he has matured and is now less likely to force his brilliance upon others. His honesty and character are una.s.sailable. Knowledge, not power or money, seems to be his goal. . . ."

Nicole finished reading the Psychological a.s.sessment for Richard Wake-field and rubbed her eyes. It was very late. She had been studying the dossiers ever since the crew inside Rama had settled down to sleep. They would be awakening for their second day in that strange world in less than two hours. Her six-hour shift as communications officer would start in another thirty minutes. So out of this entire bunch, Nicole was thinking, there are only three that are beyond question. Those four with their illegal media contract have already compromised themselves. Yamanaka and Turgenyev are unknowns. Wilson is marginally stable and has his own agenda anyway. That leaves O'Toole, Takagishi, and Wakefield.

Nicole washed her face and hands and sat down again at the terminal. She exited from the Wakefield dossier and returned to the main menu of the data cube. She scanned the comparative statistics available and keyed a pair of displays to appear side by side on the screen. On the lefthand side was the ordered set of IE scores for each member of the crew; opposite, for comparison, Nicole had displayed the SC indices for the Newton dozen.

IE.

SC.

Wakefield + 5.58.

O'Toole

86.

Sabatini +4.22.

Borzov

84.

Brown +4.17.