Rendezvous with Rama

Norton confers with Surgeon-Commander Laura Ernst, with whom he had sex many years ago. He harbors sexist thoughts about women serving on ships, believing that their bodies are too “distracting” to male servicemen. Ernst tells Norton that Mercer and Calvert appear healthy after the mission, while Myron is exhausted because of his lack of exercise. Ernst urges Norton to ensure that all crew members maintain a prescribed fitness level to meet the physical demands of exploring Rama.

The two discuss the logistics of traversing the Hub efficiently. Crew members are developing a sled to ascend the ladders and stairs and are placing searchlights to illuminate the entire path. They plan for the next probe team to reach the Central Plain. Norton will lead the party, which elicits Mercer’s concern. Norton reassures him that he’ll take precautions and evacuate at the first sign of trouble. Calvert will go with Norton, and the results of Ernst’s physical fitness assessments will determine the third member of their party.

Norton envies the crew’s freedom to liaise with each other. As a captain, he feels the need to withdraw from such associations to avoid accusations of favoritism. The closest form of affection he feels is for Goldie, one of the ship’s super-chimps (or “simps”), a genetically modified set of chimpanzee clones whose prehensile tails allow them to complete routine maintenance tasks around the ship. However, Norton understands that crew members shouldn’t become emotionally attached to the simps. In case of an emergency, they promptly euthanize the simps. In one case, a simp handler was so attached to his simps that he died by suicide.

The second probe team reaches the first stairway platform. Norton encourages his teammates to discard their respiratory gear. At the edge of the bowl, gravity exerts its full force, making it a challenge to descend the stairs without slipping. Norton compares Rama to an Aztec ruin he once visited but then realizes that Rama is even older than those ruins.

Executive Sergeant Jerry Kirchoff complains that Norton didn’t give him any quotes to pass on to the press. Norton promises to give him something once they reach the Central Plain. He otherwise gives general observations about climate and sound. Kirchoff asks for general impressions from the other team members. Calvert speculates on the Raman form based on the vessel’s natural features.

Calvert prods the third team member and communications officer, Boris Rodrigo, to offer his opinion. Unlike most of the crew members, Rodrigo is popular though reserved. This is due to Rodrigo’s membership in the Fifth Church of Christ, Cosmonaut, a religious group that believes that Jesus Christ came to Earth from outer space. Few of their other tenets are publicly known, though Norton is generally bewildered that a man might trust in science and believe in religion at the same time. Norton soon realizes that he picked Rodrigo for the mission to test his faith. To his disappointment, Rodrigo is unfazed.

Rodrigo agrees with Calvert’s speculations but remains open to possibility. His answer raises the opportunity of visiting the nearby town that they designated “Paris.” Ernst approves of their excursion on the condition that they recover and replenish their energy.

The scale of the plain creates the illusion of a valley flatland. During a detour through a canal designated the “Straight Valley,” the team observes that it’s one of three symmetrical valleys that stop before the Cylindrical Sea. The pattern repeats on the other side of the sea. The bottom of the canal is filled with a material resembling ice. Norton rappels down to take a specimen and finds that it’s actually closer to crystal.

Once again surprised by the mysteries of Rama, Norton gets the disquieting sense that he has been to this canal before. He realizes that he’s remembering a vacation to England 30 years earlier, when he explored the abandoned Great Western Railway with a classmate. They emerged from a tunnel into a canal that the Straight Valley resembles.

Norton decides not to take anything from the canal and asks the others to pull him back up. He cautions himself not to let Rama’s mysteries overwhelm him for the sake of his psychological health.

Dr. Perera urges Dr. Bose to reconvene the Rama Committee. To begin the meeting, Dr. Price summarizes recent developments. Norton has already completed the journey to Paris, where none of the structures have doors or windows leading inside. Price theorizes that Paris isn’t a city but a storage depot. Supporting her theory is the presence of transport tracks leading to each building. Solomons recalls a design strategy called “cocooning” or “mothballing,” which involves sealing an object in a chamber filled with inert gases. This preserves the object for hundreds of years.

Perera impatiently interjects to state his reasons for calling the meeting: Rama’s temperature is rising. Given its current position near Venus, Rama’s outer shell is beginning to heat up, which means that the solar heat will eventually penetrate Rama’s interior. This will affect the climate within Rama, setting off hurricanes that could threaten the explorers’ lives. Perera wants to issue an alert to evacuate Rama within 12 hours.

Most of the crew have disembarked from the Endeavour to conduct missions on Rama. Norton institutes a rule that each mission party must have one crewmember who has already stepped on Raman soil. The mission to the Cylindrical Sea includes Rodrigo, reconnaissance technician Sergeant Pieter Rousseau, and Ernst. At the sea’s edge is a straight cliff with a 50-meter drop.

Ernst asks the Hub Control base to point a searchlight toward the lone island settlement that they named New York. From afar, the party observes a clear symmetrical pattern in New York’s design. The light reflects on the shapes of the towers, domes, and interconnected structures that mark the settlement.

Rodrigo spots stairs, built into the cliff, that seemingly lead nowhere, terminating below the surface of the Cylindrical Sea. Descending, Ernst finds that the sea is frozen, which she confirms by cracking the surface with a hammer. She collects ice samples. She’s confident that the ice is safe to study since any pathogens would have already resulted in infection now that a week has passed since they arrived on Rama.

Rousseau suggests that they walk across the ice to New York. Rodrigo disagrees, believing that the ice will soon melt given the gradual rise in temperature. Leaving the cliff, Ernst feels a faint breeze.

Bose asks Perera to elaborate on his forecast. Perera indicates that as the interior temperature of Rama rises, the Cylindrical Sea will melt, and the air inside Rama will expand toward the central axis. Because Rama is spinning at an extreme rate, the rising air will start to follow that rate, causing turbulence at violent speeds.

After several hours of transporting equipment down from Hub Control, Norton establishes a new camp on the plain of Rama, designating it “Camp Alpha.” He feels some guilt over the likelihood that they’ll have to leave their equipment behind, given the difficulty of carrying it back up the stairs later on. He reveres Rama’s beauty and wants to leave a good impression of humanity.

Norton receives nearly identical messages from his wives, each expressing her regret that he can’t attend to their family. He seeks some privacy to record duplicate messages for them, updating them on the situation inside Rama. He discusses the challenges of mobility and then reports Ernst’s findings about the Cylindrical Sea. The ice sample that she collected isn’t drinkable, though it doesn’t contain any microorganisms, leaving the Ramans’ biochemistry a mystery.

A priority message from Earth interrupts Norton’s recording session. He is frustrated when he learns about the Rama Committee’s meeting and is surprised by the forecast of an imminent hurricane. He’s skeptical about the committee’s report at first but then realizes that they’re right when he experiences the sensation of wind several times in an hour. Norton reflects back on Captain James Cook, the historical British explorer who circumnavigated Earth in the late 18th century on a ship also called the Endeavour.

Norton always considered Cook a role model. He admires Cook so much that his personal aspiration is to retrace one of Cook’s famous voyages. While traveling through Kealakekua Bay on a hydrofoil, he was moved by the sight of a memorial plaque marking the site of Cook’s death. Ever since then, Norton always invokes Cook’s spirit, asking what he might do in times of crisis.

Knowing that he can evacuate his crew within an hour, Norton acknowledges that he’ll take precautions against the coming storm. The emergency disturbs him too much to continue recording his message for his wives. Instead, he realizes how much better off they are than Cook’s wife, who hardly ever saw him during their marriage.

Norton has difficulty sleeping. A sudden crashing noise startles him, and he learns that the Cylindrical Sea has started to thaw. Massive blocks of ice melt into the boiling water underneath. Rodrigo reports that he and the other party members of the Cylindrical Sea mission are all right because the cliff has blocked the tidal waves from reaching them.

Norton evacuates the crew back to the ship, where they can wait out the hurricane. The ascent is challenging because of Rama’s gravity. Norton feels like a failure and remains cautious of any possibility. As the crew reaches the end of the Hub ladder, Norton observes a sudden difference in lighting. He turns to see that dawn has broken over Rama.

Norton shuts his eyes at the bright light. After confirming that everyone is safe, he orders them to carefully continue ascending with their eyes closed, relying on the decreasing gravity to keep from falling. When he feels confident enough to do it, he opens his eyes to behold Rama.

Light emits from the Straight Valley and its neighboring trenches, each serving as a linear sun. Norton oscillates between fear and awe as he wonders what caused the suns to activate. He reorients himself to the layout of the fully lit Rama several times before reaching the air lock. He takes one last look and sees mist rising from the Cylindrical Sea, marking Rama’s first storm in years.