The advice he was continually receiving from Earth did little to alleviate Norton’s responsibility. If split-second decisions had to be made, no one could help him; the radio time-lag to Mission Control was already ten minutes, and increasing. He often envied the great navigators of the past, before the days of electronic communications, who could interpret their sealed orders without continual monitoring from headquarters. Why they made mistakes, no one ever knew.

Yet at the same time, he was glad that some decisions could be delegated to Earth. Now that Endeavour’s orbit had coalesced with Rama’s they were heading sunwards like a single body; in forty days they would reach perihelion, and pass within twenty million kilometres of the sun. That was far too close for comfort; long before then, Endeavour would have to use her remaining fuel to nudge herself into a safer orbit. They would have perhaps three weeks of exploring time, before they parted from Rama for ever.

After that, the problem would be Earth’s. Endeavour would be virtually helpless, speeding on an orbit which could make her the first ship to reach the stars—in approximately fifty thousand years. There was no need to worry, Mission Control had promised. Somehow, regardless of cost, Endeavour would be refuelled—even if it proved necessary to send tankers after her, and abandon them in space once they had transferred every gram of propellant. Rama was a prize worth any risk, short of a suicide mission.

And, of course, it might even come to that. Commander Norton had no illusions on this score. For the first time in a hundred years an element of total uncertainty had entered human affairs. Uncertainty was one thing that neither scientists nor politicians could tolerate. If that was the price of resolving it, Endeavour and her crew would be expendable.

5. First EVA

Rama was as silent as a tomb—which, perhaps, it was. No radio signals, on any frequency; no vibrations that the seismographs could pick up, apart from the micro-tremors undoubtedly caused by the sun’s increasing heat; no electrical currents; no radioactivity. It was almost ominously quiet; one might have expected that even an asteroid would be noisier.