Welcome to this Walden Tapes program, part of a series of classic and contemporary science fiction and fantasy adapted on cassette.

In Arthur C. Clark's well-known story rendezvous with Rama, an immense

UFO is propelled through outer space towards Earth. When a team of astronauts

contacts the intruder, which is cod named R Drama, they discover that it is an ancient self-contained world. By the year 2 1st30, the Mars-based radars were discovering new asteroids at the rate of a dozen a day.

The Space Guard computers automatically calculated their orbits and stored the information in their own enormous memories.

The object first cataloged as 31-49, according to the year and the order of its discovery, was detected while it was still outside the orbit of Jupiter.

There was nothing unusual about its location, but a first radar contact at such a distance

was unprecedented.

Clearly, 31 slash 439 must be of exceptional size.

From the strength of the echo, the computers deduced the diameter of at least 40 kilometers.

It was not traveling on a normal

astroidal path along an ellipse which it retraced with clockwork precision every

few years. It was a lonely wanderer among the stars, making its first and last visit to the

solar system, for it was moving so swiftly that the gravitational field of the sun could never capture it.

It would flash inward past the orbits of Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury,

gaining speed as it did so, until it rounded the sun and headed out once again into the unknown.

It was at this point that the computers started flashing their,

we have something interesting sign,

and for the first time, 31 slash 439 came to the attention of human beings.

There was a brief flurry of excitement at Space Guard Headquarters

and the interstellar Vagabond was quickly dignified by a name instead of a mere number.

Long ago, the astronomers had exhausted Greek and Roman mythology.

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