Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  VALHALLA

  1

  Giovanni Lamberti pulled the long lever back with his right arm. Through the goggles fixed tightly about his eyes, he watched as the huge scoop entered the shallow Martian ice trench. After a brief pause, he began exerting tension on the lever on his left. The scoop pulled toward him, its powerful teeth ripping through the ice and filling the body of the scoop with hundreds of kilograms of material.

  “It’s really not that difficult,” Giovanni said to the young black man sitting beside him in the control room. “You just have to remember that Melvin is more than three hundred kilometers away, and allow for the delay in the reception of the signal.”

  Kwame Hassan was also wearing a pair of the strange goggles. He was sitting next to Giovanni, on a lower level, in what was called the copilot’s seat. Kwame observed intently while his teacher Giovanni, handling both levers with consummate ease, lifted the full scoop out of the trench without dropping any of the ice, and deposited the contents in the open bed at the rear of the machine. He then returned the scoop to a position in front of the ice harvester and switched the controls to idle.

  “Are you ready to try it on your own?” Giovanni said. He unstrapped his goggles and slid out of the large padded chair between the levers.

  “I guess so,” said Kwame, wishing that he had more time to learn his new job. “Johann told me that you’ll be leaving early next week.”

  “That’s right,” Giovanni said with a broad grin. “After two and a half years, I’m finally out of here.”

  Kwame climbed the three steps and sat down in the chair. He adjusted his position several times until he felt comfortable with where his body was placed with respect to the levers. When he pulled the goggles over his eyes, Kwame found himself again in the middle of a scene far to the north of where he was physically located. Melvin the ice harvester was still sitting idly on that distant plateau on the Martian polar ice.

  “Why don’t we just use Melvin’s automatic trenching subroutines?” Kwame asked. “The manuals I was sent to study said—”

  “The manufacturers always exaggerate what these babies can do on their own,” Giovanni interrupted. “Melvin’s not nearly as smart and independent as his designers would have you believe. In the automatic mode, which we sometimes use at night if we’re behind on our quotas, he rarely operates longer than two or three hours without going into safing. The machine simply cannot integrate and synthesize all the environmental parameters as well as a human operator.”

  “But the manual said that this particular version number had a mean time between failures of nineteen hours.”

  “That’s marketing hype,” Giovanni said, adjusting his goggles in the copilot’s seat. “When Melvin first arrived, he would dig for ten or fifteen hours without stopping. But he was also likely to injure one of his subsystems by keeping them operating in stress conditions. The repairs damn near drove us crazy. Until Narong rewrote his software and adjusted all the fault tolerances, Melvin spent more time idle than he did working. Anyway, trooper, we can talk about all this later. Let’s see what you can do.”

  The nervous Kwame went through the entire cycle very slowly, only spilling a fraction of the ice contents before reaching the open bed of the harvester. “Not too bad,” said Giovanni. “At least you’re going to be trainable. Not like that last character they sent me from Mutchville.”

  Kwame took a deep breath and started the operation anew. For just an instant, when he first touched the levers, he imagined that he was again sitting in his favorite crane, working on a construction site in the suburbs of Dar es Salaam. He shook the flashback off and concentrated on what he was doing. I’m not in Tanzania anymore, he thought. Hell, I’m not even on the earth… But at least I finally have a good job again.

  On the second pass, Kwame tried to speed up the process. Giovanni had finished his last full cycle in eighty-four seconds. Kwame knew that he would be expected, once he was fully trained, to complete thirty cycles per hour. Although he was pleased with the end result of his first attempt, it had taken more than six minutes.

  Kwame’s second trenching did not fill the scoop completely, and he spilled almost half of the ice before he reached the bed. The time for the cycle was just under four minutes. In the copilot’s seat Giovanni was frowning.

  “That was about a forty-percent run,” Giovanni said. “You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to figure out that it’s better to take six minutes, and dump a full scoop, than to do a forty-percenter in four.”

  On his third cycle Kwame kept the scoop in the trench until it was completely full. Then, just as the scoop crossed the plane of the Martian surface, the system suddenly shut down.

  “Shit,” said Giovanni. “Not another problem.”

  “What do we do now?” Kwame asked.

  “Melvin is running through self-test,” Giovanni replied. “When he is done, if the difficulty was only a transient power surge, or any similar problem that did not persist, you’ll see a green light on the panel on your right. If not, that blinking yellow light will change to red and Melvin’s main computer will enter the elaborate diagnostic subroutines that Narong designed.”

  As Giovanni was speaking the yellow light on the control panel changed to red. Moments later a message on the panel monitor indicated that component HY442, located in the receiver processor, had failed, and that its redundant backup component was not properly responding to commands.

  Giovanni pulled off his goggles. “That’s it for the day, folks,” he said to Kwame. “Melvin is dead in the water.”

  Johann was in the middle of preparing his requisition lists for his trip to Mutchville when Narong phoned. He thought for a moment about letting Narong handle the anomaly meeting by himself, but Johann reminded himself that he would soon be gone for two weeks and Narong would have enough decisions to make on his own during that period.

  He stopped and knocked on Narong’s office door before going to the meeting. Johann was the director of what was officially known as the VOF, or Valhalla Outpost Facility. Narong Udomphol, a Thai software engineer, was his deputy. Valhalla, as it was called by its sixty to seventy permanent residents and the occasional transient scientists who used the facility as a base camp for polar expeditions, was the northernmost inhabited outpost on Mars. Its primary purpose was to convert the Martian polar ice into water and pump it through pipelines to the other inhabited regions of the planet. Although there were two other similar facilities scattered in longitude around the planet, Valhalla was by far the largest, supplying roughly half the water used by the humans living on Mars.

  Johann had been in Valhalla, except for business trips to Mutchville and one remarkable vacation week touring the volcanoes of the Tharsis region, for the entire eighteen months since his arrival on Mars. He had been promoted to director of the VOF only six months earlier, in June of 2142, as measured by the earth calendar.

  “Melvin has crapped out again?” Johann asked, sticking his head into Narong’s office. “Isn’t that the third time this month?”

  “No,” Narong replied. He was a short man, early thirties, with a wonderfully open smile. “It was Martin the last two times,” he said. “He’s in the hangar now for a complete overhaul. We’re just waiting on the parts.”

  All three of the Valhalla ice harvesters had been given names beginning with the letter M. Out of the total of six of the mammoth machines that had been manufactured to mine the Martian ice, three of them were working at Valhalla.

  “So for the time being we have only Malcolm operating?” Johann said.

  Narong nodded. “We’ll be below our delivery quotas again this month,” he said. “But there’s nothing we can do about it. Considering the parts and personnel situations, we’re lucky to be pumping any water south.”

  The two men walked down the hall to the conference room, where six other people, including Giovanni and Kwame, were waiting. The anomaly meeting, like most at Valhalla, was loosely structured. In the earl
y discussion Giovanni pointed out that the backup HY442 in Melvin had supposedly just been repaired by the technicians, and that it was the second useless repair in the last ten days. Johann acknowledged that the lack of qualified technical personnel was causing them serious problems at Valhalla. He promised that he would not return from Mutchville until he had hired a competent test-and-repair engineer.

  Narong then suggested that since Martin was in the hangar anyway, and there would be no other replacement HY442s available until the train arrived next week, perhaps their best course of action would be to pull the necessary components out of Martin and install them in Melvin out in the field.

  Narong’s plan was quickly accepted. But who would do the installation? Ordinarily that would have been Giovanni’s job, since he was Melvin’s cognizant engineer. But he was busy training Kwame, and also preparing to leave Valhalla for good. The only certified engineering repairman who could be gone from the outpost for the next two days without significantly compromising the site operation was Johann.

  As the meeting was breaking up, Narong mentioned to Johann that the new Valhalla nurse, Satoko Hayakawa, had expressed a desire to see some of the “real Mars” at the first available opportunity. Since site procedures prohibited any solo human activity outside the protective bubble, would Johann be willing to have Ms. Hayakawa join him? Johann agreed, and asked Narong to have the new nurse ready to depart at sunrise the next morning.

  Satoko Hayakawa was a tiny woman, even by Japanese standards. Standing beside Johann in the isolation chamber for a routine vacuum test of their spacesuits, she stood barely above his waist. “Can you hear me all right?” Johann said, checking the microphone in his helmet.

  “Yes, I can,” she said. Satoko flashed a wide smile. She was very excited.

  The Valhalla operations team, using the most recent available data on the state of the ice sheet near the outpost, had plotted an optimal trek northward for the navigation computers of the rover and the icemobile. Johann had also input the planned route, as well as maps and emergency landmark information, into the portable computer he would be carrying in the waist pouch of his spacesuit.

  Satoko and he said good-bye to Narong and the others half an hour before sunrise. They walked through the door separating the inner bubble, surrounding Valhalla proper, from the empty outer bubble which served as an environmental buffer for the facility. After waiting five minutes for the required pressure changes, the pair stepped gingerly through another door, out onto the plains of Mars.

  This was the first time that Satoko had ever stood on the outside surface of Mars. Remembering his own initial moments without the protection of either a bubble or a vehicle, Johann paused and let Satoko savor the experience. She took a few steps away from the door and then turned around slowly, studying the nearby scattered rocks, the reddish Martian soil, and a small mountain range off to the southeast. “Kirei des,” she mumbled to herself.

  Johann and Satoko next adjusted the filters in the translucent faceplates of their helmets. The glare of the Martian sun was too powerful for their indoor settings.

  They began to walk toward the rover. It had been parked about forty meters away from the bubble. Connected to the rear of the rover, the icemobile was mounted on a low, flat trailer. Once they reached a spot where the surface had changed to ice, Johann and Satoko planned to park the rover and travel in the icemobile for the rest of their journey.

  The rover was an open, tracked vehicle, with three seats, suitable for a wide variation of terrain types. It moved comparatively slowly. The icemobile, on the other hand, had been designed especially for high-speed travel on the Martian polar ice. It rode on special skis and could reach a maximum velocity of eighty kilometers per hour on flat, unbroken ice.

  After they had been riding in the rover for about ten minutes, Johann commanded the vehicle to turn around so they could look back at Valhalla. The geodesic dome covering their facility looked like a mirage, completely alien among the boulder-strewn, rusty fields of Mars. Johann waited while Satoko recorded some images of Valhalla with her tiny personal video camera. He then disembarked, carrying her camera, and took some pictures of her sitting alone in the rover in her spacesuit with the Valhalla bubble in the background.

  During the first hour of their drive northward across the plains of Mars, Johann tried to engage Satoko in polite conversation. The young Japanese woman, however, was either too awestruck by the Martian landscape surrounding her, or too intimidated by Johann. She did not say much. Johann learned only that Satoko was twenty-four years old, that her father was a subway engineer in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo, and that she had lived her entire life on the island of Hokkaido with her parents and two younger siblings.

  The Martian terrain around them gradually became more covered with ice. There was not a distinct break between the Martian polar cap and the plains, so the decision of where to transfer from the rover to the icemobile was a subjective one. Finally, more than two hours after leaving Valhalla, a long sloping incline lifted them onto what appeared to be a part of the main polar cap. Johann radioed back to Valhalla to confirm his position and then lowered the trailer bed so that the icemobile could be driven off.

  Despite the fact that neither Johann nor Satoko could feel any wind inside their spacesuits, the sense of speed as they blasted northward in the icemobile was exhilarating. Within half an hour they had entered a totally white world. Ice mountains, ice canyons, ice plateaus—it was as if they had transferred to a totally new planet.

  At one point the control panel on the icemobile flashed an overheating warning and Johann, laughing at himself, was forced to slow down. At midday, in the vicinity of a dangerous ice crevasse, Johann stopped the icemobile temporarily and invited Satoko for a short stroll to relieve the monotony of sitting. While they were staring down into the deep crevasse, Johann told Satoko the story of the early Martian explorer who had died in the vicinity.

  They reached Melvin a couple of hours before sunset. Johann’s first task was to deploy the tent in which Satoko and he would spend the night. Although the ice harvester repairs would only take a couple of hours at the most, it would be necessary for them to spend the night in the vicinity, for it was considered too dangerous to travel across the Martian ice in darkness unless special navigation aids were available.

  After Johann set up the lights around Melvin to permit him to see what he was doing in the darkness, he passed the last hour of daylight reviewing the repair procedures that had been installed in his portable computer. His primary task was to replace the nonworking HY442 components. However, the engineering team at Valhalla had also decided that Johann should test another dozen or so of Melvin’s critical components for any sign of stress or degradation, and replace them if they did not completely meet specifications.

  Satoko volunteered to help Johann with the repairs. They trundled together across the ice, each carrying a small bag of tools and spare parts. Johann constructed a platform three meters off the ground so that he had easy access to the key electronic equipment buried inside Melvin’s belly. Then he readjusted the lights to maximize his visibility in the area where he would be working. Soon after the sun had set, Johann was already busy repairing the ice harvester.

  The mammoth gray machine dwarfed the two humans on the platform. Melvin was twelve meters tall and eighteen meters long. Its scoophead could contain more than ten cubic meters of ice at a time. When Melvin and his kindred machines had originally been designed, almost two decades earlier, they were considered to be precursor systems for the truly giant ice harvesters that would be necessary once the Martian population reached several hundred thousand.

  In the early 2120s, long-range projections for Mars had predicted that the total planet population would pass a hundred thousand before the middle of the century, and reach a quarter million by 2190. The Great Chaos completely altered the development of Mars. The economic depression on Earth reduced the worldwide availability of discretionary revenue,
from both governments and corporations, and brought an abrupt end to the miniboom that had been occurring on the red planet.

  In fact, as the Great Chaos tightened its grip on Earth, budgets allocated to support endeavors on Mars plummeted below the sustenance level, leading to critical shortages and inadequate maintenance of the planetary infrastructure. In 2136 the population on Mars declined for the first time in the twenty-second century. In 2138 and 2139, many of the multinational corporations, including the one that had designed and built Melvin and the other ice-harvesting machines, completely abandoned their Martian facilities.

  By 2141, when Johann Eberhardt first arrived on Mars, almost half the remaining Martian residents were on waiting lists to return to Earth. Nevertheless, attracted by guaranteed jobs at outstanding wages, as well as a sense of adventure, people still applied for positions on Mars, undaunted by what they believed were only temporary economic difficulties.

  For both Kwame Hassan and Satoko Hayakawa, assignment to Mars had been a cause for celebration. Kwame had a wife and four young children to support. Since construction was at a standstill throughout Tanzania, there had been little work for him, despite his considerable skills, for almost four years. Before he had been offered the job on Mars, Kwame had been forced to move his family into smaller quarters nearer the center of the teeming capital city. The job on Mars paid enough that Kwame’s wife and children were able to move back into the more comfortable suburbs of Dar es Salaam.

  Satoko had graduated with honors from her nursing college in Sapporo. When she had begun her studies, she had hoped eventually to land a desirable position at one of Japan’s leading research hospitals. Unemployment in Asia’s leading economic nation, however, reached double digits in 2137, and was nearing fifteen percent in 2140 when the Japanese government passed a set of laws essentially creating, through an elaborate structure of tax credits, a strict pecking order in employment practices. Men were favored over women for all categories of jobs, and individuals with families were given preference over those who were unmarried and/or had no children. After graduation the gifted Satoko had been unable to find anything but menial work. The opportunity to come to Mars and be the head nurse for the Valhalla Outpost Facility had been a godsend.