“I 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 spacecraft.

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, repetitive 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 I 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 I know where the hell 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 classes. 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 Gods?”

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 self-contained portable power station for the chairlift were already in operation. The cosmonauts had transported the electrical and mechanical subsystems in unassembled pieces on their backs and assembly 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 assemble 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.”