Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  The British engineer paused for a moment to reflect, "Francesca says that the polls on Earth are indicating that a huge majority of the average people as well, almost ten to one according to her, is terrified by Rama's approach. They are clamoring for the politicians to do something."

  Richard opened the hut and walked out into the dark plaza. He idly shone his flashlight on the octahedron. "At a second meeting eighteen hours later it was decreed that the Newton team would not go inside Rama again. Technically, I am not in violation of that order, because I left the Newton before the official proclamation. But it was obvious that the order was coming."

  "While the leaders of the planet Earth are discussing what to do with a spacecraft the size of an asteroid that is aimed directly at them," Nicole said as she walked out into the plaza behind him, "you and I have a more tractable problem. We must cross the Cylindrical Sea." She managed a wan smile. "Shall we do a little exploring while we talk?"

  Richard directed his flashlight beam into the bottom of the pit. The manna melon was clearly identifiable but the individual pieces in the pile of jumbled metal were very hard to resolve. "So those are spare parts from a centipede biot?"

  Nicole nodded. They were kneeling side by side on the lip. "Even in the daylight the ends of the pit are in shadows. I needed to be certain that I wasn't looking at Takagishi's body."

  "I would love to see a centipede biot repair itself." Richard stood up and walked over to the wall of the barn. He knocked. "And the material scientists would love this stuff. Normal radio waves are blocked both ways and you can't see in from the outside. Yet the wall is somehow transparent if you're inside the barn looking out." He turned to Nicole. "Bring your scalpel over here. Let's see if we can cut off a piece."

  Nicole was trying to decide if one of them should drop down into the pit and retrieve the melon. It wouldn't be too difficult, assuming the suture line would hold. At length she pulled out her scalpel and walked over beside Richard.

  "I'm not certain we should do this," she said. She hesitated before applying the scalpel to the barn wall. "In the first place, the scalpel could be damaged. We might need it later. Second, uh, it might be considered vandalism."

  "Vandalism?" he said rhetorically. Richard regarded Nicole with a peculiar look. "What a curiously homocentric concept." He shrugged his shoulders and headed toward one end of the barn. "Never mind," he said, "you're probably right about the scalpel."

  Richard had entered some data into his pocket computer and was studying the small monitor when Nicole came over beside him. "You and Francesca were standing right about here, correct?" Nicole gave him an affirmative reply. "Then you went back into the barn to look into one of the pits?"

  "We've been over this before," Nicole replied. "Why are you asking again?"

  "I think Francesca saw you fall into one of the pits and purposely misled us with that story about you wandering off to search for our Japanese professor. She didn't want anybody to find you."

  Nicole stared at Richard in the dark. "I agree," she responded slowly. "But why do you think so?"

  "It's the only explanation that makes any sense. I had a bizarre encounter with her right before I came back inside. She came into my room under the pretense of wanting an interview, supposedly to find out why I was returning to Rama. When I mentioned Falstaff and your navigation beacon, she switched off her camera. Then she became quite animated and asked me many detailed technical questions. Before she left, she told me she was convinced that none of us should ever have entered Rama in the first place. I thought she was going to beg me not to go back.

  "I can understand her not wanting me to find out that she had tried to maroon you in the pit," Richard continued after a brief pause. "What I can't fathom is why she left you there in the first place."

  "You remember the night you explained to me why RoSur's fault protection had failed?" Nicole said after a moment's reflection. "That same night I also asked you and Janos if either of you had seen General Borzov…"

  As they walked back in the direction of the central plaza and their hut, Nicole spent fifteen minutes explaining to Richard her entire hypothesis about the conspiracy. She told him about the media contract, the drugs Francesca had given to both David Brown and Reggie Wilson, and Nicole's personal interactions with all the principals. She did not tell him about the data cube. Richard agreed that the evidence was very compelling.

  "So you think she left you there in the pit to avoid being unmasked as a conspirator?"

  Nicole nodded.

  Richard whistled. "Then everything fits. It was apparent to me that Francesca was running the show when we returned to tie Newton. Both Brown and Heilmann were taking orders from her." He put his arm around Nicole. "I wouldn't want that woman as my enemy. She clearly has no scruples whatsoever."

  44

  ANOTHER LAIR

  Richard and Nicole had bigger concerns than Francesca. When they returned to the central plaza, they found their hut had disappeared. Repeated knocks on the avian cover produced no response. The precariousness of their situation became clearer to both of them.

  Richard grew moody and uncommunicative. He apologized to Nicole, saying that it was a characteristic of his personality for him to withdraw from people when he felt insecure. He played with his computer for several hours, only stopping occasionally to ask Nicole questions about the geography of New York.

  Nicole lay down on her sleeping mat and thought about swimming across the Cylindrical Sea. She was not an exceptionally good swimmer. During training it had taken her about fifteen minutes to swim one kilometer. That had been in a placid swimming pool. To cross the sea she would be forced to swim five kilometers through cold, choppy water. And she might be accompanied by lovely creatures like the shark biots.

  A jolly fat man twenty centimeters high interrupted her contemplation. "Would you like a drink, fair lass?" Falstaff asked her. Nicole rolled over and studied the robot from up close. He hoisted a large mug of fluid and drank it, spilling some on his beard. He wiped it off with his sleeve and then he burped. "And if you want nothing to drink," he said in a heavy British accent, thrusting his hand down into his codpiece, "then perhaps Sir John could teach you a thing or two between the sheets." The tiny face was definitely leering. It was crude, but very funny.

  Nicole laughed. So did Falstaff. "I am not only witty in myself," the robot said, "but the cause that wit is in other men."

  "You know," Nicole said to Richard, who was watching from several meters away, "if you ever became tired of being a cosmonaut, you could make millions in children's toys."

  Richard came over and picked up Falstaff. He thanked Nicole for her compliment. "As I see it, we have three options," he then said very seriously. "We can swim the sea, we can explore New York to see if we can forage enough material to construct some kind of boat, or we can wait here until someone comes. I'm not optimistic about our chances in any of the cases."

  "So what do you suggest?"

  "I propose a compromise. When it's light, let's carefully search the key areas of the city, particularly around the three plazas, and see if we can find anything that could be used to build a boat. We'll allot one Raman day, maybe two, to the exploration. If nothing turns up, well swim for it. I have no faith we'll ever see a rescue team."

  "Sounds all right to me. But I would like to do one other thing first. We don't have a lot of food, to make a rather obvious understatement, I'd feel better if we pulled up the manna melon first, before we did any more exploring. That way we could be protected against any surprises."

  Richard agreed that establishing the food supply would probably be a prudent initial action. But he didn't like the idea of using the suture thread again. "You were lucky in many ways," he told Nicole. "Not only did the line not break, it didn't even slip off that waistband you made. However, it did cut completely through your gloves in two places and almost through the waistband."

  "You have another idea?" Nicole asked.

  "The
lattice material is the obvious choice," Richard replied. "It should be perfect, provided that we don't have any trouble obtaining it. Then I can go down in the pit and spare you the trouble—"

  "Wrong," Nicole interrupted. She smiled. "With all due respect, Richard, now is not the time for any macho derring-do. Using the lattice is a great idea. But you're too heavy. If something happened, I would never be able to pull you out." She patted him on the shoulder. "And I hope it doesn't hurt your feelings, but I'm probably the more athletic of the two of us."

  Richard feigned hurt pride. "But whatever happened to tradition? The man always performs the feats of physical strength and agility. Don't you remember your childhood cartoons?"

  Nicole laughed heartily. "Yes, my dear," she said lightly. "But you aren't Popeye. And I'm not Olive Oyl."

  "I'm not certain I can deal with this," he said, shaking his head vigorously. "To discover at the age of thirty-four that I'm not Popeye… What a blow to my self-image." He cuddled Nicole gently. "What do you say?" he continued. "Should we try to sleep some more before it's light?"

  Neither of them was able to sleep. They lay side by side on their mats in the open plaza, each occupied with his own thoughts. Nicole heard Richard's body move. "You're awake too?" she said in a whisper.

  "Yeah," he answered. "I've even counted Shakespearean characters with no success. I was up to more than a hundred."

  Nicole propped herself up on an elbow and faced her companion. "Tell me, Richard," she said, "where did this preoccupation of yours with Shakespeare come from? I know you grew up in Stratford, but it's hard for me to imagine how an engineer like you, in love with computers and calculations and gadgets, could become so fascinated with a playwright."

  "My therapist told me it was an 'escapist compulsion,'" Richard replied a few seconds later. "Since I didn't like the real world or the people in it, he said, I made up another one. Except that I didn't create it from scratch. I just extended a wonderful universe already fabricated by a genius.

  "Shakespeare was my God," Richard continued after a moment. "When I was nine or ten, I would stop in that park along the Avon—the one beside all the theaters, with the statues of Hamlet, Falstaff, Lady Macbeth, and Prince Hal—and spend the afternoon hours making up additional stories about my favorite characters. That way I put off going home until the last possible moment. I dreaded being around my father… I never knew what he would do—

  "But you don't want to hear this," Richard interrupted himself suddenly, "everyone has memories of childhood pain. We should talk about something else."

  "We should talk about whatever we're feeling," Nicole responded, surprising even herself. "Which is something I hardly ever do," she added softly.

  Richard turned and looked in her direction, He extended his hand slowly. She gently wrapped her fingers around his. "My father worked for British Rail," he said. "He was a very smart man, but socially clumsy, and he had difficulty finding a job that fit him after he finished the university at Sussex. Times were still tough. The economy had just started to recover from The Great Chaos…

  "When my mother told him that she was pregnant, he was overwhelmed by the responsibility of it all. He looked for a safe, secure position. He had always scored well on tests and the government had forced all the national transportation monopolies, including the rail system, to staff positions based on objective test results. So my father became the manager of operations at Stratford.

  "He hated the job. It was boring and repetitive, no challenge at all for a man who had an honors degree. Mother told me that when I was very small he applied for other positions, but he always seemed to botch the interviews. Later on, when I was older, he never even tried. He sat at home and complained. And drank. And then made everyone around him miserable."

  There was a long silence. Richard was having a difficult time struggling with the demons of his childhood. Nicole squeezed his hand. "I'm sorry," she said.

  "So was I," Richard replied with a slight break in his voice. "I was just a small child with an incredible sense of wonder and love of life. I would come home enthusiastic about something new I had learned or something that had happened at school, and my Dad would just growl.

  "Once, when I was only eight, I came home from school in the early afternoon and I got into an argument with him. It was his day off and he had been drinking, as usual. Mother was out at the store. I don't remember what it was about now, but I do recall telling him that he was wrong about some trivial fact. When I continued to argue with him, he suddenly hit me in the nose with all his might. I fell against the wall with my broken nose gushing blood. From that time on, until I was fourteen and felt I could protect myself, I never walked in that house when he was there unless I was certain that my mother was home."

  Nicole tried to imagine an adult man slugging an eight-year-old child. What kind of human being could break his own son's nose? she wondered.

  "I had always been very shy," Richard was saying, "and had convinced myself that I had inherited my father's social clumsiness, so I didn't have many friends my own age. But I still yearned for human interaction," He looked over at Nicole and paused, remembering, "I made Shakespeare's characters my friends. I read his plays every afternoon in the park and immersed myself in his imaginative world. I even memorized entire scenes. Then I talked to Romeo or Ariel or Jaques while I was walking home."

  It was not difficult for Nicole to visualize the rest of Richard's story. I can picture you as an adolescent, she thought. Solitary, awkward, emotionally repressed. Your obsession with Shakespeare gave you an escape from your pain. All the theaters were near your home. You saw your friends become alive on the stage.

  On impulse Nicole leaned over and kissed Richard lightly on the cheek. "Thanks for telling me," she said.

  As soon as it was daylight they walked over to the lattice. Nicole was surprised to find that the incisions she had made when she had freed the avian had all been repaired. The lattice was like new. "Obviously a repair biot has already been here," Richard commented, no longer extremely impressed after all the wonders he had already witnessed.

  They cut off several long strands of the lattice and headed for the barn. On the way Richard tested the elasticity of the material. He found that it stretched about fifteen percent and always restored itself, albeit very slowly at times, to its original length. The restoration time varied significantly, depending on how long the piece had been fully stretched. Richard had already begun his examination of the inside structure of the cord when they arrived at the barn.

  Nicole did not waste any time. She tied one end of the lattice material around a stumpy object just outside the barn and lowered herself down the wall. Richard's function was to make certain that nothing untoward occurred and to be available if there was some kind of an emergency. Down in the bottom of the pit Nicole shuddered once as she remembered how helpless she had felt there just a few days earlier. But she quickly turned her attention to her task, inserting a makeshift handle made from her medical probes deep into the manna melon and then securing the other end of the handle to her backpack. Her ascent was vigorous and uneventful.

  "Well." She smiled at Richard as she handed him the melon to carry. "Should we now continue with Plan A?"

  "Roger," he replied. "Now we know where our next ten meals are coming from."

  "Nine," Nicole corrected with a laugh. "I've made a slight adjustment in the estimate now that I've watched you eat a couple of times."

  Richard and Nicole marched quickly from the barn to the western plaza. They crisscrossed the open area and combed the narrow alleys nearby, but they did not find anything that would help them build a boat. Richard did have an encounter with a centipede biot, however, in the middle of their search one had entered the plaza and then moved diagonally across it. Richard had done everything possible, including lying in front of it and beating it over the head with his backpack, to try to induce the biot to stop. He had not been successful. Nicole was laughing at him when Ri
chard returned, a little frustrated, to her side.

  "That centipede is absolutely useless," he complained. "What the hell is it for? It's not carrying anything. It has no sensors that I can see. It just travels merrily along."

  "The technology of an advanced extraterrestrial species," she reminded Richard of one of his favorite quotes, "will be indistinguishable from magic."

  "But that damn centipede's not magic," he replied, a little annoyed at Nicole's laughter, "it's goddamn stupid!"

  "And what would you have done if it had stopped?" Nicole inquired. "Why, I would have examined it, of course. What did you think?"

  "I think we'd be better off concentrating our energy in other areas," she replied. "I don't imagine a centipede biot is going to help us get off this island."

  "Well," Richard said a little brusquely, "it's obvious to me already we're going about this process all wrong. We're not going to find anything on the surface. The biots probably clean it up regularly. We should be looking for another hole in the ground, like the avian's lair. We can use the multispectral radar to identify any places where the ground is not solid."

  It took them a long time to find the second hole, even though it was not more than two hundred meters from the center of the western plaza. At first Richard and Nicole were much too restrictive in their search. After an hour, though, they finally convinced themselves that the ground underneath the plaza area was solid everywhere. They expanded their search to include the small streets and lanes nearby, off the concentric avenues. On a dead-end alley with tall buildings on three sides, they found another covering in the center of the road. It was not camouflaged in any way. This second cover was the same size as the one at the avian lair, a rectangle ten meters long and six meters wide.

  45

  NIKKI

  "Do you think the avian cover opens in the same way?" Nicole asked, after Richard had very carefully searched the environs and found a flat plate on one of the buildings that looked decidedly out of place. Pressing hard against the plate had caused the cover to open.