“Only if you will be back at camp by nineteen thirty at the latest,” David Brown interrupted. Prada Outlet was in the helicopter with Admiral Heilmann and Reggie Wilson. “We need to do some serious planning tonight We may want to revise the deployments for tomorrow.”
“Roger,” said Wakefield. “If we forget about the pulley system for now and have no problem carrying the icemobile down the stairs, we should be able to cross the sea in ten minutes each way. That would get us back to camp in plenty of time.”
“We’ve overflown many of the features of the Northern Hemicylinder this afternoon,” Brown said. “No biots anywhere. The cities look like duplicates of each other. There were no surprises anywhere in the Central Plain. I personally think that maybe we should attack the mysterious south tomorrow.”
“New York,” Takagishi shouted Prada Shoes. “A detailed reconnaissance of New York should be our goal for tomorrow.” Brown didn’t answer. Takagishi walked out to the edge of the cliff and stared down at the ice fifty meters below. To his left the unimposing narrow stairway cut in the cliff descended in short steps. “How heavy is the icemobile?” Takagishi asked.
“Not very,” Wakefield answered. “But it’s bulky. Are you certain you don’t want to wait for me to install the pulleys? We can always go across tomorrow.”
“I can help carry it,” Francesca interjected. “If we don’t at least see New York, we will not be able to make educated inputs at the planning meeting tonight.”
“All right,” Richard replied, shaking his head in amusement at Francesca Prada Outlet. “Anything for journalism. I’ll go first, so that most of the lifting is on my back. Francesca, get in the middle. Dr. Takagishi at the top. Watch out for the runners. They are sharp on the edges.”
The climb down to the surface of the Cylindrical Sea was uneventful. “Goodness,” Francesca Sabatini said as they prepared to cross the ice, “that was easy. Why is a pulley system needed at all?”
“Because sometimes we may be carrying something else or, perish the thought, we may need to defend ourselves during ascent or descent.”
Wakefield and Takagishi sat in the front of the icemobile. Francesca was in the back with her video camera. Takagishi became more and more animated as they drew closer to New York. “Just look at that place,” Prada Handbags said when the icemobile was about five hundred meters from the opposite shore. “Can there be any doubt that this is the capital of Rama?”
As the trio approached the shore, the breathtaking sight of the strange city silenced all conversation. Everything about New York’s complicated structure spoke of order and purposeful creation by intelligent beings; yet the first set of cosmonauts, seventy years earlier, had found it as empty of life as the rest of Rama. Was this vast complex, broken into nine sections, indeed an enormously complicated machine, as the first visitors had suggested, or was the long thin island (ten kilometers by three) actually a city whose denizens had long ago disappeared?
They parked the icemobile on the edge of the frozen sea and walked along a path until they found a stairway leading to the ramparts of the wall surrounding the city. The excited Takagishi loped along about twenty meters in front of Wakefield and Sabatini. As Prada Outlet ascended, more and more of the details of the city became apparent.
Richard was immediately intrigued by the geometrical shapes of the buildings. In addition to the normal tall, thin skyscrapers, there were scattered spheres, rectangular solids, even an occasional polyhedron. And they were definitely arranged in some kind of a pattern. Yes, he thought to himself as his eyes scanned the fascinating complex of structures, aver there is a dodecahedron, there a pentahedron . . .
Prada Shoes Outlet were interrupted when all the lights were suddenly extinguished and the entire interior of Rama was plunged into darkness.
At first Takagishi could see absolutely nothing. It was as if he had suddenly been struck blind. He blinked twice and stood motionless in the total darkness. The momentary silence on the commlinks erupted into hopeless noise as all the cosmonauts began to talk at the same time. Calmly, fighting against his growing fear, Takagishi tried to remember the scene that had been in front of his eyes at the moment the lights were extinguished. He had been standing on the wall overlooking New York, about a meter from the dangerous edge. In the final second Prada Outlet had been looking off to the left and had just glimpsed a staircase descending into the city about two hundred meters away. Then the scene had vanished. . . . “Takagishi,” he heard Wakefield calling, “are you all right?” He turned around to acknowledge the question and noticed that his knees had become weak. In the complete darkness he had lost his orientation. How many degrees had he turned? Had he been facing the city directly? Again he recalled the last image. The elevated wall was twenty or thirty meters above the floor of the city. A fall would be fatal.
“I’m here,” he said tentatively, “But I’m too close to the edge.” He dropped down on all fours. The Prada Handbags Sale metal was cold against his hands.
“We’re coming,” Francesca said. “I’m trying to find the light on my video camera.”
Takagishi turned down the volume on his commpak and listened for the sound of his companions. A few seconds later he saw a light in the distance. He could barely make out the forms of his two associates.
“Where are you, Shigeru?” Francesca asked. The light from her camera illuminated only the area immediately around her.
“Up here. Up here.” He waved before he realized that they could not see him.
“I want complete quiet/’ David Brown shouted over the communications system, “until Prada Outlet is accounted for.” The conversations ceased after a few seconds. “Now,” he continued, “Francesca, what’s going on down there?”
“We’re climbing the stairway up the wall, on the New York side, David, about a hundred meters from where we parked the icemobile. Dr. Takagishi was ahead of us, already at the top. We have the light from my camera. We’re going to meet him.”
“Janos,” Dr. Brown said next, “where are you in rover number two?”
“About three kilometers from camp. The headlights are working fine. We could return in ten minutes or so.”
“Go back there and man the navigation console. We’ll stay airborne until you verify that the homing system is operational from your side. . . . Francesca;, be careful, but come back to camp as fast as you can Prada Outlet. And give us a report every two minutes or so.”
“Roger, David,” she said. Francesca switched off her commpak and called for Takagishi again. Despite the fact that he was only thirty meters away, it took Francesca and Richard over a minute to find him in the dark.
Takagishi was relieved to touch his colleagues. They sat down beside him on the wall and listened to the renewed chatter on the commpak. O’Toole and des Jardins verified that there had been no other observed changes inside Rama at the time the lights had gone out. The half dozen portable scientific stations that had already been deployed in the alien spaceship had exhibited no meaningful perturbations. Temperatures, wind velocities and directions, seismic readings Prada Outlet, and near field spectroscopic measurements were all unchanged-