Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Stella Goldschlag served them a typical German lunch, with three different kinds of wurst. Helmut opened one of his few remaining bottles of good wine. The girl, her mother, and Sister Beatrice conversed in English, talking about America mostly. At one point Elke asked Beatrice why she had become a nun, and if it was true that she could never marry.

  Helmut and Johann discussed Hitler, the Nazis, and world politics. Dr. Goldschlag suggested that since the Poles had now been defeated, perhaps the leaders of Europe would declare a truce and some semblance of normality might return to everyone’s life.

  The doctor had just offered Johann a postprandial cigar when there was a loud pounding on the front door, followed swiftly by a brick crashing through the window of the living room.

  “Jew Goldschlag,” a nasty voice called. “Open the door… We have come to take you away.”

  Helmut Goldschlag acted immediately. “Will you help us?” he asked Johann.

  “Of course,” Johann replied.

  The doctor handed Johann the car keys. “You know how to drive, nicht war? Take Stella and Elke to your boat. The river runs into the Rhine after twenty-five more kilometers. If you wait until nightfall before moving out into the Rhine, you can make it to Switzerland before daylight tomorrow.”

  He handed a slip of paper to Johann. “Please take them to this address in Basel. I will cooperate with these hooligans and make my own escape later.”

  Stella and Elke had vanished from the dining room the instant the pounding on the door had begun. They returned now, each with her own suitcase, dressed for travel. The family had obviously been prepared for flight.

  The beating on the door became louder. Another brick was hurled through the window. “Jew Goldschlag,” the voice said. “Open this door now or we will break it down.”

  The doctor hurriedly embraced his wife and daughter. “Now go,” he said, fighting back the tears.

  Johann picked up the little girl and her bag and raced out the back door. The four of them jumped into the car. Johann followed Stella’s directions, leaving the house in a direction that could not be seen from the front door.

  They were back on the two-lane highway in less than five minutes. It was not until they passed the country restaurant with the cuckoo clocks that Johann noticed that they were being followed. He increased his speed. The other car remained the same distance behind them.

  Sister Beatrice recognized the spot where they had been standing beside the highway. Johann stopped abruptly, pulling the Volkswagen off the road on the river side. The Goldschlags and their bags were barely out of the car when the men who had been pursuing them came to a screeching halt on the other side of the road. Three security policemen, all wearing greenish uniforms with Nazi armbands, leaped out and ran across the highway.

  “What are you doing here?” the oldest policeman said menacingly to Johann. He was the only one with a gun.

  “We decided to stop and take a look at the river,” Johann replied.

  The lead policeman screwed up his face. “Here?” he said. “What is so special about this place?” He glanced at Stella and Elke Goldschlag. “And why do the woman and the little girl have suitcases?”

  Johann did not say anything. “This is very suspicious,” the policeman asserted, his eyes narrowing.

  One of the other men had climbed down the bank toward the river. “There is a boat here,” he shouted as he came back up the slope to rejoin his colleagues.

  The lead policeman drew his gun and waved it at Johann. “Was heissen Sie? Was tun Sie hier?” he yelled.

  “I am Johann Eberhardt, a civil engineer from Berlin. These are my friends, Sister Beatrice, and Stella and Elke Goldschlag. We decided to stop—”

  “Goldschlag?” interrupted one of the two other policemen. “I know them. They are Jews… The Jew doctor is her husband.”

  Johann struck the lead policeman a thunderous blow across the forearm. The gun flew out of his hand and into the bushes. “Run,” Johann shouted. “Go to the boat now.”

  Another of the policemen grabbed Elke, but he released her when Johann smashed him in the face with his fist. “Nazi pigs,” Johann roared, picking up the smallest of the men and hurling him against the ground.

  He had no time to see if Sister Beatrice and the Goldschlags reached the boat. He was too busy fighting. He was winning, too, in spite of the fact that he had three opponents, until one of the officers hit him in the back of the head with a club. Dazed, Johann was not able to continue his ferocious fight. Sensing that he was weakening, the policemen moved in for the kill. Over and over Johann was struck on the head with the club. Finally he fell to the ground and lost consciousness.

  His head ached when he awakened an hour later. Sister Beatrice and Johann were again on the boat, moving slowly down a narrow river between two towering white walls of stone. Johann was lying across his pair of seats.

  “What happened?” he said to Sister Beatrice.

  “They knocked you out,” she said. “We had already reached the boat, but one of the policemen waded into the water and grabbed us before we could escape.”

  “Where are the Goldschlags?” Johann asked.

  “They were taken into custody by the Nazis… The policemen were going to arrest us, too, until your cousin Ludwig arrived.”

  “My cousin Ludwig?” Johann said, sitting up and looking at Beatrice with astonishment. “What are you talking about?”

  “While you were still lying unconscious beside the road,” Sister Beatrice said, “a bigger car with the same insignia arrived. It was driven by a young man in a fancy green uniform. He asked a few questions about the situation, and then told the others to take Stella and Elke to town. When they were gone, the new officer informed me that he was your cousin Ludwig, and that he would not be able to intercede on our behalf again.”

  Johann shook his head. “This whole thing is just too bizarre,” he said.

  “Is there a real Cousin Ludwig back in Germany?” Beatrice asked.

  “Yes, there is,” Johann said. “And he is indeed an officer with the National Security Police.”

  Johann talked to Sister Beatrice for several minutes about Cousin Ludwig, the NSP, his friend Bakir, and the general problem of the foreign workers in Germany. He also explained in more detail why he had been so startled when Stella Goldschlag had looked exactly like Sylvie Demirel.

  Sister Beatrice was quiet for several seconds at the end of Johann’s long monologue. “Are you familiar, Brother Johann,” she said, “with the English word ‘expiation’?”

  “I have heard it,” he said. “But I don’t know exactly what it means.”

  “It’s a great word,” she said, “generally used in a religious context… Anyway, to ‘expiate’ is to ‘atone for.’ I believe what we just experienced was God’s way of giving you a chance to expiate your earlier mistakes. And maybe those of Germany as well… You did very well, Brother Johann. I’m proud of you.”

  7

  Johann and Sister Beatrice talked easily as their boat drifted slowly downstream between the two white walls. Beatrice suggested that God and His angels were still testing the two of them in some way, attempting to obtain more information about the character and values of the human species. Although Johann readily admitted that her explanation was plausible, he still favored the idea that the astonishing scenes replicating Hiroshima and Nazi Germany had been designed by aliens.

  Their long conversation then turned to their childhoods, hers in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina and his in Potsdam. Johann and Beatrice shared a few poignant memories from those earlier, innocent days of their lives.

  “‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,’” Sister Beatrice quoted, “‘the earth, and every common sight, to me did seem apparelled in celestial light…‘ I lost that light for several years, Brother Johann,” she said. “And I did not find it again until I met Michael.”

  “When I was a child,” Johann said, after Beatrice explained how St. Mic
hael had introduced her to a new and different kind of God, “I thought that God was a superfather of some kind… Like my own in some ways, only much better and more powerful. I guess I let Him go at the same time it was becoming apparent to me that my father was just another man, with all the warts and foibles of every other member of our species.”

  They were approaching another dark tunnel. Sister Beatrice leaned forward. “I think our respite is about to end,” she said. “God or the aliens or whoever is choreographing our lives must think we are ready for something else.”

  The tunnel was not very long. When they emerged, the towering wall was still on Beatrice’s right, but on the left side of the boat, right next to the shoreline, a train track now ran parallel to the river.

  The boat moved over closer to the shore. They heard a loud whistle. “Here we go again,” Sister Beatrice said as a train came into view behind them.

  Riding in the engine at the front of the train were three men wearing the green Nazi police uniforms. The engine had a swastika painted on its side. One of the officers leaned out of the engine window and waved at Johann and Beatrice.

  “That is your cousin Ludwig, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” a bewildered Johann answered, shaking his head again. He waved at his cousin without enthusiasm.

  The engine passed them. The first car was packed with passengers. Dozens of people were leaning out the windows, occupying every square centimeter of space. The passengers did not look happy. From their faces and their clothes, Johann deduced that they were Jewish. An empty feeling settled in his stomach.

  “Look, Brother Johann,” Sister Beatrice exclaimed. “There, in the middle of the car… It’s Dr. Goldschlag, and Stella, and Elke.”

  The boat was no more than twenty meters from the train. Johann could clearly see the Goldschlags, hanging out the window and waving in their direction. Beatrice and he waved back. The little girl, Elke, who was apparently being held off the ground by her father, broke into a wide smile. “Hello, Sister Beatrice,” they heard her say.

  The car was very long. Its sides were marked with a Nazi flag at the front and rear. In the middle the word “Deutschland” was written on its side.

  The first car finally passed. The second car was identical, except it was a different set of forlorn Jewish faces staring out the crowded, open windows. As the middle of the second car approached, however, what Johann saw sent a chill through his body. Helmut Goldschlag, his wife, Stella, and their daughter, Elke, were in this car also! Again they exchanged waves and the little girl said, “Hello, Sister Beatrice.”

  The Goldschlags were surrounded by another group of Jews being transported by the Nazis in the third car. They were also in the middle of the fourth car, still standing at the window and waving at Johann and Sister Beatrice in their little boat.

  The train increased its speed. The cars continued to pass. The sign on the side of the car changed from DEUTSCHLAND to FRANKREICH and then to POLAND. The train was interminable. From every car the Goldschlags waved.

  Johann could not watch any more. The empty feeling in his stomach had changed to nausea. As another packed carload of Polish Jews sped by, Johann leaned over the side of the boat and vomited into the river. His forehead broke into a sweat. He glanced up, watched two more cars pass, and retched again.

  “It’s not my fault!” he shouted at the train in between attacks of nausea. “It’s not my fault!”

  He felt Sister Beatrice’s comforting hands on his shoulders. “No, it’s not your fault, Brother Johann,” she said softly. “Not specifically… Yet in some measure all of us are to blame. Not just you, or even those Nazis who plotted to systematically exterminate the Jews. I am guilty too. Every human being is accountable in some way for every inhumane act committed by another person… That’s what the Order of St. Michael is all about. Michael often said that only—”

  “Don’t talk to me about God or St. Michael now, Johann shouted angrily. “If there is a God, how could He have let all this occur?” He motioned at the train. “Look,” he said, “it goes on and on.”

  As they gazed together at the train Johann and Beatrice noticed that there had been some changes. Nazi flags were no longer painted on the sides of each car. And the faces staring out were no longer Jewish. The car passing them at that moment, in fact, had American flags at the beginning and end. The people looking out the windows, except for the Goldschlag family, who still occupied the middle of each car, were American Indians.

  The train was now moving so fast that an entire car passed the boat in less than five seconds. Johann and Beatrice watched silently as more carloads of Native Americans raced by them. Then came three cars marked with the Australian flag. The aboriginal inhabitants of these cars stared blandly out the train windows as if they did not see anything at all. The Goldschlags were in these cars as well, still waving at Johann and Sister Beatrice.

  Behind the boat the train stretched to the limit of the horizon. The next cars that passed Johann and Beatrice were emblazoned with the bold-colored flag of the Council of Governments. The passengers, except for the Goldschlags, were all emaciated black people, their starving eyes bulging out of their pitiful faces. The African cars hurtled by one after the other. Johann’s discomfort became unbearable.

  “No more, please,” he yelled, tears streaming from his eyes. “Stop this goddamned train.”

  “Dear God,” Sister Beatrice said from beside him. She was kneeling on her seat. “We see only too clearly what horrors human beings are capable of in the absence of Thy guidance. Forgive us all, we beseech Thee, not only for the terrible mistakes we have made, but also for our callous indifference to the suffering of our brethren. Share with us Thy wisdom and understanding so that we may create a world of harmony for our entire species. In St. Michael’s name. Amen.”

  Only a few seconds after she concluded her prayer, the lights were extinguished. Johann and Sister Beatrice were plunged into total darkness. They could hear nothing as well. The sound of the train had vanished.

  “Are you all right, Brother Johann?” she asked after a protracted silence.

  “I’m alive, Sister Beatrice,” he replied. “And I guess I have control of myself again. But I certainly wouldn’t say that I’m ‘all right.’ What we just saw must either be a taste of hell, or some sadistic alien’s way of reminding us how imperfect we humans are. In either case, I’m considering filing a complaint with the management.”

  He could hear her laugh in the dark. “It’s good to see that you have retained your sense of humor,” she said.

  “It’s my final self-protection mechanism,” Johann said. “My head is hurting in at least a dozen places, my back is completely roasted, and both my self-image and my view of the human species as a whole are at all-time lows… I have neither the courage nor the means to commit suicide. So I might as well laugh.”

  “You could try praying, Brother Johann,” she said. “It works for me.”

  “I’m glad it works for you, Sister Beatrice,” he said. “I really am… But I would feel like a hypocrite. I have not genuinely prayed for many years, since I was a child and believed in the trinity of God, Santa Claus, and the tooth fairy… And despite what we have experienced, I can’t conceive even at this moment of a God who listens to our prayers. I would be inclined, based on the evidence, to believe in a God who didn’t really give a shit about us at all.”

  “That would be a start,” Beatrice said several seconds later. “Acknowledging even a God who doesn’t give a shit could start the process.”

  The sudden forward acceleration of the boat pinned Beatrice against the back of her seat. Johann was thrown on the floor between them. He had just managed in the darkness to scramble back onto his seat when the boat made an abrupt ninety-degree turn, downward. Johann and Beatrice were thrown forward, away from the boat, by their horizontal momentum. They were now floating in space, surrounded in their weightlessness by some of the water from the river that had als
o been thrown free by the sharp turn.

  “Brother Johann,” Beatrice cried in the dark, “are you still there?”

  Johann turned to respond to the cry and began to tumble out of control. “Where are you?” he said as his disorientation became complete.

  “Over here,” he heard her say somewhere behind him.

  He seemed to be twisting and turning in all directions at once. Never had Johann’s senses been so utterly useless. He no longer had any idea which way was up or down, or where Beatrice might be with respect to him. Each time she called his name she seemed to be farther away.

  It was an amazing flight. For almost two minutes Johann was in total dark and without any kinesthetic references. Since there was no gravity until the last hundred meters of his free fall, his speed did not increase significantly. His fear, however, moved to progressively higher levels. Toward the end, Johann had convinced himself that he had been condemned to tumble forever in the unrelenting darkness.

  He saw the distant light to his left only moments before he heard both the splash and Beatrice’s cry. Seconds later he, too, plunged into the tepid water. Johann started to swim, but with no light and little gravity, it was difficult to find the surface. He finally worked out a search pattern and reached the surface with plenty of breath to spare.

  His first act when he broke the water was to yell her name. There was no response. Johann frantically searched the area around him in the water. The distant light provided enough illumination that Johann could see what looked like churning water about twenty meters to his right. There were no other signs of Beatrice. Adrenaline pouring into his system, he raced over to where the water was disturbed.

  Still he found nothing. Johann shouted Beatrice’s name. He waited a few seconds, and then in desperation began swimming again.

  He was underwater when he brushed against her leg the first time. Beatrice was floating unconscious just beneath the surface. Johann lifted her head out of the water and began to swim toward the distant light. Only twice during the next fifteen minutes did he allow himself to look briefly at her face. There was no sign of any life.