Chapter 22 Chapter 22 Breaking Dawn

In the near-dark twilight, Richard Walkerfield was still moving quickly.He's in the middle of the Alpha Staircase, where the gravity created by the rotation is one-quarter of Earth's gravity.The light on the helmet illuminated a small area nearby, where he was about to complete a pylon installation. He checked his oxygen system and it was below midline.According to the plan, they should now go deeper into the interior of Rama, where they can breathe the air of Rama.However, they underestimated the time it would take to install a lightweight chair lift.It was not difficult to install it, but they tried it several times before finally getting it right.The first half of the work went fairly smoothly, and it was done close to the ladder, where there was practically no gravity.However, what happened next was different.The design of each tower gate device and the data adjustment required are different, because the further you go down, the greater the gravity.

On the thousand-level ladder above Walkerfield's head, Garros has already fixed the guiding cables on the handrail.After four hours of dull and monotonous work, he was tired.He thought of Richard and his argument with the chief engineer.At the time, they suggested using a robot to do the lift installation work, but the chief engineer said it wasn't worth designing a robot to do such a non-repetitive thing.The fellow stubbornly insisted: "Robots are only good for monotonous, repetitive things." Gallos looked down, it was so dark that he couldn't even see a tower gate device 250 steps away below.

"Why isn't it time for lunch yet?" he said to Walkerfield on the intercom. "Almost." Walkerfield replied, "We were already late. We didn't send Yamanaka Hiroshi and Elena down the Gamma ladder until 10:30. According to this speed, if we can finish the light chairlift today We'll be lucky if we're working with the improvised camp. Looks like we'll have to postpone the assembly of the cargo lift and rover until tomorrow." "Hiroshi Yamanaka and I are eating," the two of them heard Elena's voice from the other side of the steps, "we are starving. It only took half an hour for us to fix the seat frame and lift motor, wait a minute." Go to Tower No. 12."

"Not a bad job." Walkerfield praised, "But I have to remind you that the initial work is very easy. Near the ladder, because there is no gravity, the installation is very fast. After the gravity appears, adjust the parameters of each place. It's all different." "According to the laser scanner measurement, the Walkerfield astronaut is 8,130 meters away from me." Everyone heard the voice of Dr. Takagishi interjecting. "Professor, you say nothing. Unless you tell us where the hell you are." "I'm standing on the edge of the relay station, and the Alpha Step is at my feet."

"Okay, Mr. Takagishi, can you tell me, have you Easterners ever experienced such a quiet world? Now that the Newton is moored on Rama, and you are standing on the other side of this daunting staircase, if none of us Up or down, how do we communicate our inner feelings? I really want to play chess with you again." "Thank you for your kindness, Gallos. By the way, why is your position changing so quickly?" "I'm sliding down the escalator to have lunch with Richard, I don't want to be alone with fish and chips." "I'm coming to lunch too," Frances said. "I just made a fantastic video demonstrating the Coriolis effect using Hiroshi Yamanaka and Elena as examples. It will be great for teaching physics classes." Great. I'll be at your place in five minutes."

"I say, Frances..." It was Walkerfield's voice again, "Can you do us a favor and do us a favor? Us, stop and let you take a video. It could be a deal too Bar." "Okay, it's a deal," Frances replied, "I'll help after lunch. But now I'm thinking it's a little brighter, can you cast one of your flares and let me snap you and Gallus climbing up the 'ladder of God' lens." Walkerfire fired a delayed flare, then climbed onto the nearest platform.Half a minute later, the Galos astronauts also arrived here. The flares lit up, and a corner of this huge world was illuminated.Frances was above 2,000 meters, and she slowly panned the camera over three huge steps, then locked on two small figures, and then slowly moved closer.Two astronauts, Walkerfield and Gallos, sat cross-legged on the platform.Looking from here, they seem to be two goshawks, standing in the nest among the cliffs of the high mountains.

By late afternoon, the Alpha Step chair lift was assembled and ready for test runs. "We thank you for your help by chartering you as the first customer of the chair lift," Walkerfield joked to Frances. They stood firmly at the foot of a step ladder with the gravity of the earth.From here, the 30,000 steps gradually disappeared into the darkness of this artificial sky, making it impossible to believe its authenticity.Around them, on the edge of the central plain, ultralight motors and portable power sources were assembled and ready to go.Astronauts shipped the parts for the devices and assembled them in less than an hour.

"These seats are not completely welded on," Walkerfield explained to Frances, "every joint can snap on and off the seat, so that you don't have to install countless fixed seats." Frances sank timidly into the plastic seat.It seems that these seats are more like baskets hanging on cables. "Can you guarantee that this thing is safe?" She stared at the top of Heigulongdong, feeling a little scared in her heart. "Of course no problem." Walkerfield smiled, "This is exactly the same as the simulation training we have done. I will be in a seat behind you, 400 meters away from you, about a minute away. From the foot of the steps to It takes forty minutes total to hub, at an average speed of 24 kilometers per hour."

"I don't seem to need to do anything," she reviewed the essentials, "just sit tight, hold on tight, and turn on the respirator at a high place after twenty minutes." "Don't forget to fasten your seat belt." Walkerfield reminded her with a smile, "Otherwise, if the lift suddenly slows down or stops at a high place, the inertia will throw people out due to weightlessness. , causing you to slide into the void of Rama." Seeing her terrified look, he grinned: "Don't be afraid, because all the seats run on the outside of the steps, so if any unexpected emergency happens, you can step out of the seat chairs, hikes, steps and ladders to hubs."

After speaking, Richard nodded, indicating that it can start running.Gallos pressed the motor switch.Frances rose upward and was soon lost in the darkness above. "Once you are sure that you are on the road, I will go and fix the chair lift of the Gamma Staircase." Walkerfield said to Gallos, "The work everyone does together, it should be easier to come to the second part, maybe at the latest It can be over before nineteen o'clock." "By the time you get to the top, I'll have pitched the tent," Gallows said. "Do you think we're going to stay down here tonight?"

"That's not necessary," David Brown said in the interface above. He and Takashi have been listening to the calls between all the astronauts all day. "The rover is not installed yet, we only hope to do some limited detection tomorrow. Activity." "If everyone brings in a few parts, Gallos and I can assemble one rover before going to bed. If there are no accidents, the second one can be assembled by noon tomorrow." "This plan may work," Dr. Brown replied. "There are still three hours of work. We have to see how much work everyone has and whether they are too tired." Walkerfield stepped into the chairlift, waited for the machine to automatically read into the program, and slowly jammed the cable. "By the way," Walkerfield said as the seat started to rise, "thank you for the humor and the jokes, I don't know how I would do without them." Gallos waved to his friend. Sitting on the fast-rising seat, Richard looked up. From here, he could barely see a star of light from Frances's helmet. "She is more than a hundred stories away from me! But this distance is only 2.5% of the distance from here to the axis. Rama is really scary!" he thought. He reached into his bag and pulled out a portable weather instrument.This is what Dr. Gao An asked him to bring.It's important that the professor wants to carefully record all the weather data for the Arctic bowl so he can map the temperature and pressure below the airlock and figure out how the air circulates. Walkerfield watched the air pressure readings.At ground level, the air pressure was 1,050 millibars and remained there for a considerable distance; then, as altitude increased, the numbers began to slowly decrease.The temperature has been fixed at minus 8 degrees Celsius. This measurement is also really tedious.He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.Sitting in a "basket" and rising rapidly, surrounded by darkness, gives a very strange feeling.Richard turned the channel switch of the intercom, only the occasional brief voices of Yamanaka Hiroshi and Elena could be heard in the earphone, and no one else made a sound.On another channel, he heard the beautiful melody of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, and he turned up the volume to immerse himself in the music. As Richard listened, a strong sense of homesickness came over him.The clear flowing water and the green fields on the earth all appeared in front of his eyes in an instant.He suddenly felt strange that he would come to Rama!It's unbelievable.As a child, he traveled from Stratford to Cambridge, to the Aerospace Institute in Colorado, and now to Rama; at this moment, he is sitting in the fast-rising seat, speeding up the "ladder of God". The past is far away, and life is as ethereal as a dream.He was a little dizzy and intoxicated. "No, Prospero," he said to himself, "no god conceived such marvels." He remembered seeing Shakespeare's The Tempest for the first time when he was a boy.He was extremely surprised and shocked by the mysterious world depicted in the play.It was a picture beyond any imagination. "There are no myths here, only natural laws that we cannot explain. Prospero is not a magician, he is just an amazing scientist." He laughed. After a few minutes, he was really stunned by the sight in front of him.Just as his seat rose silently parallel to the steps, suddenly dawn dawned on Rama!3,000 meters below him, from the edge of the central plain cut straight to the long valley of the ring column sea, shining bright and dazzling light. The dawn of Rama has come. The six strip-shaped "suns" of Rama are carefully designed and distributed on the two semi-cylindrical plains in the north and south, so as to evenly and softly illuminate the entire alien world. Walkerfield's initial reaction was dizziness and nausea.He was hanging on a thin cable, and below was an abyss of thousands of meters.He closed his eyes, trying to control himself. "I'm not going to fall," he kept saying to himself. "Hey!" He heard Yamanaka Hiroshi shout. Immediately afterwards, it could be heard that Hiroshi Yamanaka was startled by the sudden flashing lights, slipped and fell from the middle of the Gamma step ladder, and slid down for almost 30 meters before he was lucky enough to grab the railing of the railing , Fortunately, he is agile. "How are you?" Brown asked. "I think I'm fine." Hiroshi Yamanaka was still in shock. Then, the atmosphere immediately heated up. "It's unbelievable!" Dr. Gao An exclaimed, "This light is abnormal. Now that the seawater has not melted, it is bright ahead of time, which is completely different from before!" "Please get another mnemonic ready for me. I'll have to change it as soon as I get to the top. I'm running out of this one." Frances was also calling. "How wonderful it is beyond description and description!" General O'Toole exclaimed.He and Nicole were on the Newton, watching the video from Frances on the screen through the hub relay station. Richard Walkerfield didn't say anything, just stared at the world below in a daze.He could barely see Garros Tabry below the steps, the lift mechanism, and the half-raised tent.Even so, the distance gave him somewhat of an idea of ​​the space and distance of this alien world. Looking up, the central plain of hundreds of square kilometers is empty and far away. Looking from every direction, it makes people shake their minds and cannot hold on to themselves.The two images that shocked Walkerfield the most were the Sea of ​​Cylinders and the huge spire structure 50 kilometers away opposite him. They were too unusual and far beyond people's imagination. Gradually his eyes adjusted to the bright light, and the great spire to the south grew larger and longer.The people who first explored Rama called it the "Big Horn." "My God, it's eight kilometers long!" Walkerfield said to himself. Six "little horns" were arranged hexagonally around the major horn, and some huge buttresses connected them with the major horn and the inner wall of the cylindrical hull.Each of the small horns is also far larger than anything humans have built on Earth, yet they are dwarfed in comparison to the adjacent central space and bulky cylindrical hull. Looking ahead, between the North Pole where Walkerfell lay and the dreaded Horn, a bluish-white ring encircled the great cylindrical world of Rama.This frozen sea seems really illogical, and the sea water did not pour down. "It's also possible that it never melted, otherwise, the water would pour on the central axis." A thought popped into his mind.Of course he knew that the sea water was firmly grasped by the centrifugal force of Rama's rotation, and lay obediently on the embankment. The Rama people probably estimated that the earth people would stand on the edge of the space ocean. In the center of the Sea of ​​Columns is the island city of Rama - "New York".Walkerfield didn't see its skyscrapers as spectacular when illuminated by flares; but in the light of Rama's sun, it was clear that it was truly the center of the stage in this alien world.Your eye will involuntarily be drawn from any point of Lamari to it.This oval-shaped island crowded with various buildings is also the only place that breaks the perfect geometric symmetry of the cylindrical sea. "Look, 'New York'!" Dr. Gao An shouted excitedly, "There must be almost a thousand buildings over 200 meters high." He paused, "That's where they live, I can feel it .'New York' must be our goal." After the initial passion passed, there was a long silence.Every astronaut silently savored in his heart how he felt about the sun-kissed Rama.Walkerfield could now see Frances clearly, 400 meters above him.His chair lift was over the junction of the step ladder and the ladder, getting closer and closer to the hub. "I discussed it with Hellman," Brown broke the silence, "and also listened to Dr. Gao An's opinion. At least for now, we have no obvious reason to change our previous action plan. Unless something unexpected happens. , we're going to take Walkerfield's advice and send the rover down with two chairlifts installed and one assembled later today. Everyone spends the night in camp under the steps as planned .” "Don't forget I'm still here." Gallos yelled, "I'm going up to see the scenery." Walkerfield loosened his seat belt, took a few steps outside, and came to the edge of the platform.He looked down, and the step ladder gradually disappeared below, becoming a faint thin line. "Astronaut Taburi, we have arrived at Alpha Station. If you want to come up, please give a signal, we welcome you at any time."