Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Johann tried to gather his wits. “Let’s get the hell out of here, Kwame,” he managed to say.

  “I hear you, Johann,” Kwame said. “But it looks like our problems are just beginning.”

  Beyond Kwame, coming from the direction of the central hole, was a large white thing, resembling a giant snowman riding on a skateboard. It was made of two huge snowballs, the larger one on the bottom resting on a flat white plate with six red wheels. This snowman had no eyes, no ears, and no arms. At least not until it reached Kwame. When the creature was less than a meter away from Kwame, the smaller, upper snowball suddenly convulsed and a white appendage appeared. The creature then wrapped its hand, or whatever it was at the end of the long skinny appendage, firmly around Kwame’s arm and began pulling him toward the central hole.

  Johann was paralyzed. When he recovered enough to try to help his friend, the ribbon transformed itself into a baseball again and began detonating against Johann’s faceplate. Johann was blinded by the light and jolted by the frequent impacts. At length he gave up trying to help Kwame. The formation of dancing particles changed back into a ribbon and rose high enough in the tunnel that Johann could see what was happening.

  Oh my God, Johann thought. He’s going to be thrown down into the hole.

  “Are you all right?” Johann screamed in panic.

  “I’m scared shitless,” Kwame replied. “This fiend has a vise grip on my arm and is dragging me toward the big hole… When I struggle, the grip tightens. I’m afraid the son of a bitch is going to tear a hole in my spacesuit!”

  “Jesus, Kwame,” Johann said. “I’m sorry I got us into this. It was stupid, really stupid.”

  “It’s too late for that, Mein Herr,” Kwame said breathlessly. “We’re almost to the—Wait, Johann, what is this? Johann, the hole’s not there.”

  Johann was frantic. He could barely see Kwame and the snowman in the distance. “What, Kwame… What do you mean it’s not there?”

  “There’s a platform connecting the two tunnels on either side. The snowman is dragging me—Shit, Johann, it’s moving. It’s a damn elevator. We’re going up. Good-bye, Johann, good-bye.”

  9

  The remaining two hours Johann stayed in the subsurface world were like a dream. Later, when he would try to describe to someone what he saw during those two hours, and what he felt, he would understand completely the meaning of the word “ineffable.”

  The snowman, or another creature exactly like the one who kidnapped Kwame, disembarked from the elevator on Johann’s level about five minutes after Kwame had been kidnapped. The ribbon of particles raced away down the tunnel as soon as the snowman was within ten meters of Johann. An appendage shaped like a skinny tapered arm without a hand popped out of the snowman’s torso after a brief convulsion in the amazingly smooth surface, but Johann was not grabbed. The white arm made a gesture that obviously meant “Follow me.” The snowman was Johann’s guide for the next two hours.

  They began in the area behind the ceiling-to-floor white door Johann had seen from the top of the toadstool. Beyond the open door the tunnel, now illuminated by white lights mounted in the ice that formed the ceiling, stretched in front of them as far as Johann could see. Objects were stored in open compartments that lined both sides of the tunnel. Johann had no idea what he was seeing. All he could tell for certain was that all the objects were white, with smooth surfaces and rounded edges, that each of them had some type of red band or marking, and that each compartment contained only one kind of item. Every variation in size, shape, or marking had its own separate compartment.

  Johann was dazzled by the profusion of white light that was everywhere. It reflected off the ice and all the white objects. He had to close his eyes repeatedly to keep from being blinded.

  Johann followed his snowman guide for several hundred meters without stopping. He tried without success to make some sense out of his surroundings. The objects and their open compartments varied enormously in size. In one compartment cut into the ice, about the size of the box a large television set would occupy, there were thousands of identical tiny white rings, each smaller than a fingernail, each with a thin red band running completely around its midsection. Another compartment was mammoth, occupying the entire area beside the right side of the tunnel for twenty-five or thirty meters. It contained a dozen long white cylinders lying on their sides.

  When the walls and the ceiling of the tunnel abruptly ended, the snowman stopped and extended its appendage upward. They had entered an enormous white warehouse whose towering ceiling could not have been far below the Martian surface. Johann felt giddy as he craned his neck to look around the vast underground room. The snowman then tapped him on the shoulder, and Johann followed his guide deeper into the warehouse.

  From the middle of the warehouse floor, Johann could See all four of the ice walls. They were each at least fifteen meters tall and contained both more compartments and more objects. The floor itself was as large as an American football field and contained arrays of tall ice shelves that were laid out in perpendicular rows and columns. These shelves also were subdivided into compartments and filled with objects. As Johann gazed around the room a bizarre vehicle, a giant white bowl mounted on wheels and carrying a bunch of twisted pieces that looked like pretzels, passed by him on its way to some unknown destination. Down an aisle beside him, Johann saw a similar white bowl convulse, extend a very thin arm upward out of its center, and deftly pluck five screwlike objects out of their compartment.

  The snowman allowed Johann to study the warehouse for a few minutes before it began sliding away down one of the aisles on its skateboard feet. Johann followed. They left the warehouse and entered a long, dark tunnel with blank walls of ice. The snowman was moving rapidly. It was difficult for Johann, in his spacesuit and backpack, to keep up with his guide. He was exhausted by the time they reached a platform elevator and went down several more levels in the underground realm.

  Again the snowman marched Johann along a dark tunnel with blank walls. They made a right turn, then a left, entering new tunnels that looked just like all the others. At length they came to another tall white door. It opened when the snowman touched it, and Johann followed his guide into another large, illuminated room buried deep beneath the Martian ice.

  On either side of the aisle were closed containers of different-colored liquids stored behind sheets of translucent plastic or glass. Sometimes two or three of these display cases were stacked on top of one another on one side of the aisle. The liquids were blue, green, or light brown.

  Most of the display cases appeared to be empty. A few contained one or more of the white objects that Johann had seen in the compartments. In one case filled with a green liquid, a dark red thing resembling a starfish had affixed itself to the glass. It looked to Johann as if it were alive, but before he could study the creature and its motions, the snowman tapped him on the shoulder again. Later he caught a fleeting glance, as they moved quickly past another display case, of a long white object with some kind of intricate red webbing growing out of one end.

  Johann had the sense that he was in some kind of museum or aquarium. Beyond that he did not have a clue about the nature of what he was being shown.

  The snowman had some definite destination in mind. They made several turns—this room, too, was laid out with perpendicular aisles—before reaching a window behind which was a beautiful blue liquid that reminded Johann of a mountain lake. The snowman stopped and knocked on the outside of the container. At first Johann could see nothing at all in the liquid. Then he saw it, or rather her, swimming toward him. Johann nearly fainted.

  What was swimming in the liquid was a white, blond, human girl, perhaps six years old, perfectly formed in every way except for flippers where her hands and feet should have been. She swam over to Johann, obviously saw him, and flashed a girlish smile. Johann was stupefied. The girl pirouetted in the water, blew bubbles out of her mouth, and tapped on the window with her flippers. Johann tapped
back without thinking.

  He stood there, transfixed, for several minutes. Never once did the girl leave the window. Johann’s mind was asking a thousand questions. Who is she? How did she get here? How is she breathing? What happened to her hands and feet? Just before the snowman indicated that it was time for them to leave, Johann imagined that he saw the beginnings of fingers forming in the girl’s hand flippers. At that point he knew that he had become completely insane.

  The giant sea serpent with the dragonlike head was an anticlimax for Johann. Even though the creature pounded on the window with its enormous tail and made horrible, threatening faces, Johann hardly paid attention. He could not remove the image of the strange blond girl with the flippers from his mind.

  In a daze he followed the snowman out of the aquarium and then through several more of the dark tunnels with the blank ice walls. Johann would vaguely remember later boarding the elevator platform and ascending to the surface. When he reached the tent, he collapsed in a heap on top of his sleeping bag. Kwame was unable to awaken him when he entered the hut a few minutes later.

  It did not surprise them that neither of the telephones would work. Nor were Johann and Kwame surprised that their tent had been visited while they were inside the subsurface world, and that all their video information had been erased.

  “So we have no proof of what we saw down there,” Kwame said.

  “Only our eyewitness accounts,” Johann said. It was now dark outside. Johann had slept for nine hours. Although he had been awake for some time now, he was groggy, and still disoriented from his experience. Talking with Kwame was slowly bringing him back to reality.

  “I wonder why they let Dr. Won escape with the maps and the journal,” Kwame said.

  “Maybe they didn’t,” Johann said. “Maybe the particles, or our snowman, or some other creature or thing from their world was instrumental in her death. Maybe they even sabotaged her computer, never dreaming that we would find her and extract the information about their existence. It was probably a million-to-one shot.”

  The two men continued to gather up their belongings and pack them in the large bags. “Why did they give you the complete tour?” Kwame said. “And keep me from seeing anything?”

  Johann shrugged. “We can no more answer those questions than understand what they were trying to show me… But I have learned something important, perhaps even profound, from this entire experience. I may be too close to it, and still temporarily out of my mind, but what I saw down there, beneath the ice, tells me that any aliens we ever encounter will be far stranger than we can imagine.”

  There was a short silence. “Do you think they’ll let us leave now?” Kwame asked, hoisting a bag on his shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” Johann said. “I guess that depends on whether they are threatened by what we know.” He stopped his packing and looked at his friend. “Whatever they decide, it’s obvious that we are completely in their power.”

  “That’s not a very comforting thought,” Kwame said.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be,” Johann replied.

  With the bags, which were much lighter now without the heavy rope ladders, upon their shoulders, Johann and Kwame trudged across the ice toward the icemobile. The ribbon of particles joined them while they were placing the bags in the back of the vehicle. To Johann’s astonishment, the icemobile started without difficulty.

  “Maybe they don’t want to kill us too close to their home,” Kwame said nervously.

  The ribbon continued to hover above them as they drove south across the Martian ice. Johann began to worry about a new problem. “What if the ribbon of particles follows us all the way to Valhalla?” he said. “Are we going to expose everyone else at the outpost to some terrible new danger?”

  “There’s no way we can know,” Kwame replied. “But I bet that the particles and their friends already know all about Valhalla, and that the damn ribbon is following us for some other purpose.

  The icemobile suddenly stopped functioning when the men were near the edge of the main polar cap, no more than a kilometer from where they had parked the rover. “Uh-oh,” said Kwame. “I don’t like this at all… This would not be a good place to die.”

  The ribbon moved closer to them. “Leave everything,” Johann said suddenly. “Take off all your packs and pouches and put them in the back of the icemobile. We’ll show them that we’re willing to leave behind every shred of evidence.”

  Kwame looked at Johann quizzically. “All right,” he said after several seconds. “If you think it’s important.”

  They continued on foot in the direction of the rover. The bright ribbon of particles dropped down to eye level and stayed between them, no more than fifty centimeters away from Johann. His fear grew every time he looked over at the glowing ribbon. Finally his nerves overwhelmed him. “Look, whatever you are,” he screamed. “If you’re going to kill us, just get it over with.”

  The white ribbon curled itself into a halo and slowly levitated. It danced back and forth above their heads for a few seconds. Then, suddenly, there was a burst of light that temporarily blinded both men. They didn’t see the ribbon explode into thousands of tiny, tiny particles that flew down and adhered to both of their spacesuits. To Johann and Kwame, it seemed as if the ribbon had simply disappeared.

  Valhalla was in the middle of its own crisis when Johann and Kwame returned. “I know you have many things to tell me,” Narong said to Johann, “but I need your immediate help. Deirdre Robertson has accused Yasin of attacking her last night in her room. She says he was about to rape her when Anna came to her rescue. I’ve scheduled a hearing two hours from now… Since you’re back, you’ll have to preside.”

  “Shit,” said Johann. “I have just had the single most amazing experience of my life, maybe of any life, and now must I really deal with Yasin?”

  Narong shrugged. “Noblesse oblige and all that,” he said. “Everyone will know that you’ve returned. I certainly can’t hold the hearing without you, and if we announce a delay we’ll infuriate every woman at the outpost. But suit yourself.”

  “No, no,” Johann said. “Let’s get it over with. If anything will give me a dose of reality, it will be listening to Yasin arguing with two women.” He turned to Kwame. “We’ll need you as an official adviser at the hearing. You are at least a nominal Muslim, so Yasin will not be able to claim the hearing is culturally biased… Although I must warn you, Yasin has a history of vengeful acts.”

  Kwame smiled. “After what just happened to us, Johann, Mr. Yasin al-Kharif does not scare me one iota. I would a hundred times rather face his rage than ever again feel that snowman’s grip on my arm.”

  “Snowman?” Narong said with a look of surprise. “Maybe we should delay the hearing.”

  Both Johann and Kwame laughed. “Let’s have some lunch,” Johann said. “We’ll tell you the short version of our story."

  10

  The hearing took place in the only room at Valhalla large enough to accommodate comfortably all the people who wanted to attend, the gymnasium that was part of the recreation complex. Johann would have preferred a private hearing, but Narong convinced him that the widespread interest in the case dictated an open meeting. As the audience continued to file into the gymnasium, Johann leaned over to Kwame. “From the sublime to the ridiculous in a few short hours,” he said.

  “The real world always imposes itself,” the Tanzanian replied.

  Johann and his advisory board, which consisted of Narong, Kwame, and Lucinda Davis, sat behind a long table on the gymnasium floor. Yasin was seated in a folding chair on their right. Deirdre Robertson and Anna Kasper, who had jointly filed the complaint, were to the left of the table. Most of the remaining residents of Valhalla sat on bleachers that pulled out from the wall.

  “As the director of the Valhalla Outpost,” Johann began when everything was quiet, “one of my duties is to investigate any conduct by a resident that may have violated the statutes governing the entire Ma
rtian colony. If I find that there is sufficient reason to believe a law has been broken, I am required to remand the individual who has been accused to the authorities in Mutchville for a proper trial in a court of law… I recognize that under the unusual conditions currently existing on Mars, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish the transfer of the accused to Mutchville. Nevertheless, I intend to conduct this hearing as the proper first step in due process.”

  Johann paused. He felt very peculiar. Somehow this whole hearing didn’t seem very important after what had just happened to him. He summoned all his willpower and focused on Yasin.

  “Mr. Yasin al-Kharif, you have been accused of the attempted rape of Ms. Deirdre Robertson. How do you plead?”

  “Not guilty.”

  “Let the record of the hearing indicate that Mr. Yasin al-Kharif pleads not guilty,” Johann now said. “Each of the three of you”—he motioned to Deirdre, Anna, and Yasin—“will be given ten minutes to tell what you know about the alleged attempted rape that occurred in Ms. Robertson’s room last night… I would like to remind each of you that you are under oath. Watch the light above the computer in front of you when you are giving your testimony. If a red light flashes, the subroutine converting your speech into a written transcript has missed a word or words and some repetition may be necessary. When the three of you have finished, my advisory board and I will almost certainly ask some questions.”

  The testimonies contained no substantive disagreements about the basic events that had occurred prior to the alleged assault. Yasin had told Deirdre that he had some new ideas about how to improve the efficiency of the greenhouses. They had agreed upon a meeting, but because of both of their near-term work schedules, the most convenient time for them to get together had been the previous evening after dinner. Deirdre had been wary of seeing Yasin in the office complex at a time when there might not be any other workers around. After consulting with Anna Kasper, she had decided to hold the meeting in her room in the living quarters.