Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  As he trudged along carrying his heavy diving equipment and backpack, he had the feeling that he was being followed. Twice Richard thought he saw someone out of the corner of his eye, but when he stopped and looked around, he saw nothing. Finally he reached the lake. It was after midnight. He took one final look at the lights of the colony and began to put on his diving apparatus. Richard's blood ran cold as a Garcia came out of the bushes while he was undressing.

  He expected to be killed. After several long seconds the Garcia spoke. "Are you Richard Wakefield?" it asked.

  Richard did not move or say anything. "If you are," the biot said at length, "I am bringing a message from your wife. She says she loves you and Godspeed."

  Richard took a long slow breath. "Tell her I love her also," he said.

  THE TRIAL

  1

  In the deepest part of Lake Shakespeare there was an open entrance to a long submarine channel that ran under both the village of Beauvois and the habitat wall. During the design of New Eden, Richard, who had had considerable practical experience with contingency engineering, had stressed the importance of an emergency exit from the colony.

  "But what would you need it for?" the Eagle had asked.

  "I don't know," Richard had said. "But unforeseen situations often arise in life. A robust engineering design always has contingency protection."

  Richard swam carefully through the tunnel, slowing down every several minutes to check his air supply. When he reached the end he moved through a series of locks that left him eventually in a dry subterranean passage. He walked for about a hundred meters before he removed his diving apparatus and stored it at the side of the tunnel. When he reached the exit, which was at the eastern edge of the enclosed area that included both the habitats in the Northern Hemicylinder of Rama, Richard pulled his thermal jacket out of his waterproof pack.

  Even though he realized that nobody could possibly know where he was, Richard opened the round door in the passage ceiling very cautiously. Then he eased out into the Central Plain. So far, so good, he thought, breathing a sigh of relief. Now for Plan B.

  For four days Richard remained on the eastern side of the plain. Using his excellent small binoculars, he could see the lights indicating activities around the control center, the Avalon region, or the second habitat probe site. As Richard had anticipated, there were search parties out in the interhabitat region for a day or two, but only one group came in his direction and they were easy for him to avoid.

  His eyes grew accustomed to what he had thought was total darkness in the Central Plain. Actually there was a small amount of background light, due to reflection off the surfaces of Rama. Richard conjectured that the source or sources of the light must be in the Southern Hemicylinder, on the other side of the far wall of the second habitat.

  Richard wished that he could fly, so that he would be able to soar over the walls and move freely in the vastness of the cylindrical world. The existence of the very low levels of reflected light piqued his interest in the rest of Rama. Was there still a Cylindrical Sea to the south of the barrier wall? Did New York still exist as an island in that sea? And what, if anything, was in the Southern Hemicylinder, a region even larger than the one that contained the two northern habitats?

  On the fifth day after his escape Richard awoke from an especially disturbing dream about his father and started to walk in the direction of what he now called the avian habitat. He had shifted his sleeping pattern to be directly opposite the diurnal cycle in New Eden, so the time inside the colony was about seven in the evening. He assumed that all the humans who were working at the probe site had already finished for the day.

  When he was about half a kilometer away from the opening in the avian habitat wall, Richard stopped to verify, using his binoculars, that there were no longer any people in the region. He then sent Falstaff to decoy the site watchman biot.

  Richard was not certain how uniform the passage was that led into the second habitat. He had drawn an eighty-centimeter square on the floor of his study, and had convinced himself that he should be able to crawl through it. But what if the size of the passage was irregular? We'll find out soon enough, Richard said to himself as he approached the site.

  Only one set of cables and instruments had been reinserted into the passage, so it was not difficult for Richard to clear them out. Falstaff had also been successful—Richard neither heard nor saw the watchman biot. He threw his small pack into the opening and then tried to climb in himself. It was impossible. He took off his jacket first, then his shirt, pants, and shoes. Wearing only his underwear and socks, Richard could barely fit into the passage. He tied his clothes together in a bundle, affixed them to the side of his pack, and squeezed into the opening.

  It was a very slow crawl. Richard inched forward on his stomach using his hands and elbows, pushing his pack in front of him. He brushed his body against the walls and the ceiling with every movement. He stopped, his muscles already beginning to tire, after he was fifteen meters into the tunnel. The other side was still almost forty meters away.

  As he rested Richard realized that his elbows, knees, and even the top of his balding head were already scraped and bleeding. Retrieving bandages from his pack was out of the question-just rolling over on his back and looking behind him was a monumental effort in the cramped quarters.

  He also realized that he was very cold. While he had been crawling, the energy required to make forward progress had kept him warm. Once he had stopped, however, his exposed body had chilled rapidly. Having so much of his body resting against cold, metallic surfaces did not help either. His teeth began to chatter.

  Richard pressed on slowly, painfully, for another fifteen minutes. Then his right hip cramped and in his body's involuntary response he smashed his head against the top of the passage. A little woozy from the blow, he became alarmed when he felt blood running down the side of his head.

  There was no light in front of him. The dim illumination that had allowed him to monitor Prince Hal's progress had vanished. He struggled to roll over and see behind him. It was dark everywhere and he was becoming cold again. Richard felt his head and tried to determine how severely he had been cut. His panic started when he realized that he was still hemorrhaging.

  Until that moment he had not felt claustrophobic. Now, all of a sudden, wedged into a dark passage that Richard could feel pressing against him from all sides, he felt as if he could not breathe. The walls seemed to be crushing him. He could not control himself. He screamed.

  In less than half a minute some kind of light was being shone into the passage from his rear. He heard the funny English accent of the Garcia biot but could not understand what it was saying. Almost certainly, he thought, it is filing an emergency report. I'd better move quickly.

  He began to crawl again, ignoring his fatigue, his bleeding head, and his skinless knees and elbows. Richard estimated that he had only ten more meters to go, fifteen at the most, when the passage seemed to shrink. He couldn't get through! He strained every muscle, but it was useless. He was definitely stymied. While he was trying to find a different crawling position that might be more geometrically favorable, he heard a soft pitter-patter approaching him from the direction of the avian habitat.

  Moments later they were all over him. Richard spent five seconds of absolute terror before his mind informed him that the tickling sensations he was feeling all over his skin were caused by the leggies. He remembered seeing them on television—little spherical creatures about two centimeters in diameter attached to six radially symmetrical, multijointed legs almost ten centimeters long if fully extended.

  One had stopped and was directly on his face, its legs straddling his nose and mouth. He tried to brush it off but bumped his head again. Richard began squirming around to shake off the leggies and somehow managed to make forward progress. With the leggies still all over him, he crawled the final meters to the exit.

  He reached the outer avian annulus just as he heard a human
voice behind him. "Hello, is there somebody in there?" it said. "Whoever you are, please identify yourself. We're here to help you." A strong searchlight illuminated the passage.

  Richard now discovered he had another problem. His exit was one meter above the floor of the annulus. I should have crawled backward, he thought, and dragged my pack and clothes. It would have been much easier.

  It was too late for hindsight. With his pack and clothes on the floor below him and a second human voice now asking questions from behind, Richard continued to crawl forward until his body was halfway out of the passage. When he felt himself falling, Richard put his hands behind his head, tucked his chin against his chest, and, tried to make himself into a ball. He then bounced and rolled into the avian annulus. As he was falling the leggies jumped off and disappeared in the darkness.

  The lights the humans were shining into the passage reflected off the inner wall of the annulus. After first ascertaining that he was not injured, and that his head was no longer seriously bleeding, Richard picked up his belongings and hobbled two hundred meters to the left. He stopped just under the porthole where Prince Hal had been captured by the avian.

  Despite his fatigue, Richard wasted no time scaling the wall. As soon as he had finished dressing and tending to his wounds, he started the ascent. He was certain that a deployable camera would soon be pushed into the annulus to look for him.

  Fortunately, there was a small ledge in front of the porthole that was large enough to accommodate Richard. He sat there while he cut through the metal mesh screen and then pushed it aside. He expected the leggies to show up at any minute, but he remained alone. Richard didn't see or hear anything from the habitat interior. Although he twice tried to summon Prince Hal on his radio, there was no response to his call.

  Richard stared into the complete darkness of the avian habitat. What is in there? he wondered. The atmosphere in the interior, he reasoned, must be the same as that in the annulus, because air was allowed to circulate freely back and forth. Richard had just decided to pull out his flashlight for a look into the habitat interior when he heard sounds below and behind him. Seconds later he saw a light beam coming in his direction down on the floor of the annulus.

  He scrunched himself over toward the interior of .the habitat as far as he dared, to avoid the light, and listened carefully to the sounds. It's the deployable camera, he thought. But it has limited range. It cannot operate without the tether.

  Richard sat very still. What do I do now? he said to himself, when it became apparent that the light attached to the camera was continuing to sweep the same, area below the porthole. They must have seen something. If I turn on my flashlight and there's any reflection, they'll know where I am.

  He dropped a small object from his pack into the habitat to ensure that its floor level was the same as the annulus. He heard nothing. Richard tried another, slightly larger object, but still there was no sound of it striking the floor.

  His heart rate surged as his mind told him that the floor of the habitat interior was far below the floor of the annulus. He recalled the basic structure of Rama, with its thick external shell, and realized that the habitat bottom could be several hundred meters below where he was sitting. Richard leaned over and stared again into the void.

  The deployable camera suddenly stopped moving and its light remained focused on a specific spot in the annulus. Richard guessed that something must have fallen out of his pack while he was hurriedly hobbling from the passage to the area underneath the porthole. He knew that other lights and cameras would be coming soon. In his mind's eye Richard envisioned being captured and taken back to New Eden. He did not know specifically which colony laws he had broken, but he knew that he had committed many violations. A deep resentment coursed through him as he contemplated spending months or even years in detention. Under no circumstances, he told himself, will I let that happen.

  He reached down the inside wall of the habitat to ascertain if there were enough irregularities to find places to put his feet and hands. Satisfied that it was not an impossible descent, he fumbled in his pack for his climbing line and anchored one end of it to the hinges supporting the mesh door. Just in case I should slip, he told himself.

  A second light was now in the annulus behind him. Richard eased himself into the habitat with the line wrapped securely around his waist. He did not rappel, but he did use the line for occasional support while he was groping for footholds in the dark. The climb was not technically difficult; there were many small ledges on which Richard could place his feet.

  Down and down he went. When he estimated that he had descended sixty or seventy meters, Richard decided to stop and take his flashlight out of his pack. He was not comforted when he shone the light down the wall. He still could not see the bottom. What he could see, maybe fifty more meters below him, was very diffuse, like a cloud, or even fog. Great, thought Richard sarcastically, that's just great.

  Another thirty meters and he had reached the end of his climbing line. Richard could already feel the moisture from the fog. By now he was extremely tired. Since he was not willing to give up the security of the line, he backtracked up the wall a few meters, wrapped the line around himself several times, and went to sleep with his body pressed against the wall.

  2

  His dreams were very strange. Often he was falling, head over heels, down, down, and never hitting a bottom. In the last dream before Richard awakened, Toshio Nakamura and two Oriental toughs were interrogating him in a small room with white walls.

  When he woke up Richard did not know where he was for several seconds. His first movement was to pull his right cheek away from the metallic surface of the wall. A few moments later, after Richard recalled that he had gone to sleep in a vertical position on the wall in the interior of the avian habitat, he switched on his flashlight and looked down. His heart skipped a beat when he saw that the fog was no longer there. Instead he could see the wall extending far, far below, and what appeared to be water where the wall finally terminated.

  He leaned his head back and gazed above him. Since he knew he was about ninety meters below the porthole (the climbing line was a hundred meters long), he estimated that the distance down to the water was about two hundred and fifty more meters. His knees became weak as his brain began to comprehend fully his predicament. When Richard started to untangle himself from the extra loops he had made in the line before going to sleep, he noticed that his arms and hands were trembling.

  He had a tremendous desire to flee, to ascend again to the porthole, and then leave this alien world altogether. No, Richard told himself, fighting his instinctive reaction. Not yet. Only if there are no other viable options.

  He decided he would first have something to eat. Very gingerly Richard freed himself from part of the line and pulled some food and water out of his pack. Then he turned partially around and pointed his light into the interior of the habitat. Richard thought he could see shapes and forms off in the distance, but he couldn't be certain. It could be just my imagination, he thought.

  When he was finished eating, he checked his food and water supplies and then made a mental list of his options. It's all very simple, Richard said to himself with a nervous laugh. I can return to New Eden and become a convict. Maybe even a corpse. Or I can give up the security of my line and continue on down the wall. He paused a moment, glancing up and down. Or I can stay here and hope for a miracle.

  Remembering that an avian had come quickly when Prince Hal had shrieked, Richard began to shout. After two or three minutes, he stopped shouting and started to sing. He sang intermittently for most of an hour. He began with tunes from his days at Cambridge University and then switched to songs that had been popular during his lonely teenage years. Richard was astonished by how well he remembered the lyrics. The memory is an amazing device, he mused to himself. What accounts for its selective reliability? Why can I remember almost all the words of these dumb songs from my adolescence and virtually nothing from my odyssey in
Rama?

  Richard was reaching into his pack for another drink of water when there was suddenly light in the habitat. He was so startled that his feet slipped off the wall and all his weight was on the climbing line for a few seconds. The light was not blinding, as it had been when dawn had arrived in Rama II while he was riding the chairlift, but it was light nevertheless. As soon as Richard was again secure, he surveyed the world that was now unveiled in front of him.

  The source of the illumination was a great, hooded ball hanging from the ceiling of the habitat. Richard estimated that the ball was about four kilometers away from him and roughly one kilometer directly above the top of the most prominent structure in sight, a large brown cylinder in the geometrical center of the habitat. An opaque hood covered the top three fourths of the glowing ball, so most of its light was directed downward.

  The basic design principle of the habitat interior was radial symmetry. At its center was the upright brown cylinder, looking as if it was made from soil, that probably measured fifteen hundred meters from top to bottom. Richard of course could only see one side of the structure, but from its curvature he estimated that its diameter was between two and three kilometers.

  There were no windows or doors on the outside of the cylinder. No light escaped anywhere from its interior. The only pattern on the side of the structure was a set of widely spaced curved lines, each one of which started at the top and ran entirely around the cylinder before reaching the bottom directly underneath its point of origination. The bottom of the cylinder was sitting on an elevated plateau at approximately the same altitude as the porthole through which Richard had entered.