Arthur Clarke - Rama Revealed

Joan and Eleanor had drilled Nicole repeatedly on the procedure she should follow to locate the long tunnel that ran under the habitat wall. She switched on her flashlight and studied the aquaculture farm off to her left. Three hundred meters toward the center of the lake, directly perpendicular to the back wall of the salmon-feeding area, she remembered. Stay at a depth of twenty meters until you see the concrete platform below you.

Nicole swam easily, but she was tiring quickly nevertheless. She found the concrete platform, descended another fifteen meters while carefully watching all her gauges, and eventually located one of the eight large pumping stations that were scattered on the bottom of the lake to keep the water continuously circulating. Now, the tunnel entrance is supposed to be hidden just under one of these big motors. Nicole did not find it easily. She kept swimming past it because of all the new growth around the pumping complex.

The tunnel was a four-meter-diameter circular pipe,? completely full of water. It had been included as an emergency escape route in the original habitat design at the insistence of Richard, whose engineering background had taught him always to allow for unforeseen contingencies. From the entrance in Lake Shakespeare to the exit, out in the Central Plain beyond the walls of the habitat, was a swim of slightly over one kilometer. It had taken Nicole ten minutes longer than planned to find the entrance. She was already a very tired woman as she began her final swim.

During her two years in prison, Nicole’s only exercise had been the walking, sit-ups, and push-ups that she had done at irregular intervals. Her aging muscles were no longer able to endure extreme fatigue without cramping. Three times during her swim through the tunnel, Nicole’s leg muscles cramped. Each time she struggled, treading water, and forced herself to relax until the cramp completely dissipated. Her forward progress was very slow. Toward the end of her swim Nicole became frightened that she would run out of air before she reached the tunnel exit.

In the last hundred meters Nicole’s body ached all over. Her arms did not want to push through the water and her legs had no strength left to kick. It was then that the ache began in her chest. The dull, disconcerting pain stayed with her even after her depth gauge indicated that the tunnel had turned slightly upward.

When she finally reached the end of the passage and stood up in a small underground room with only half a meter of water on the floor, Nicole almost collapsed. For several minutes she tried unsuccessfully to regain an equilibrium level in her breathing and pulse rate. Nicole did not even have enough strength left to lift off the metal exit cover above her head. Worried that she had pushed herself beyond safe physical limits, Nicole decided to remain in the tunnel and take a short nap.

She awakened two hours later when she heard a bizarre pitter-patter above her. Nicole stood directly under me cover and listened carefully. She could hear voices, but could not isolate what was being said. What’s going on? she asked herself, her heart rate suddenly accelerating. If I’ve been discovered by the police, why don’t they just open the cover?

Nicole moved quietly in the darkness over to her diving gear, which was sitting against the wall on the opposite side of the tunnel. Suddenly there was a sharp knock on the cover. “Are you down there, Nicole?” the robot Joan asked. “If so, identify yourself immediately. We have some warm clothes up here for you, but we are not strong enough to remove the cover.”

“Yes, it’s me,” Nicole cried with relief. “I’ll climb out as soon as I can.”

In her wet suit Nicole became quickly chilled in the bracing outside air of Rama, where the temperature was only a few degrees above freezing. Her teeth chattered during the eighty-meter walk in the dark to where her food and dry clothing were cached.

When the trio reached the supplies, Joan and Eleanor instructed Nicole to put on the army uniform that Ellie and Eponine had left for her. When Nicole asked why, the robots explained that to reach New York, it was necessary for them to pass through the second habitat. “In case we are discovered,” Eleanor said when she was safely sitting in Nicole’s shirt pocket, “it will be easier to talk our way out of trouble if you are wearing a soldier’s uniform.”

Nicole put on the long underwear and the uniform.

When she was no longer cold, she realized that she was extremely hungry. While she was eating the food Eponine had packed in the cache, Nicole placed all the other items that had been wrapped in the sheet into the backpack she had been carrying under her diving vest.

There was a problem entering the second habitat. Nicole and the two robots in her pocket had not encountered any humans at all in the Central Plain, but the entrance to what had once been the home of the avians and sessiles was guarded by a sentry. Eleanor had gone forward to scout and had reported the difficulty. The trio stopped three to four hundred meters away from the main traffic route between the two habitats.

“This must be a new security precaution, added since your escape,” Joan said to Nicole. “We’ve never had any difficulties coming and going.”

“Are there no other routes that lead to the inside?” Nicole asked.

“No,” Eleanor answered. “The original probe site was here. It has since been considerably widened, of course, and a bridge was built across the moat so that the troops can move quickly. But there are no other entrances.”

“And must we absolutely go through this habitat to reach Richard and New York?”

“Yes,” Joan replied. “That huge gray barrier to the south, the one that forms the wall of the second habitat for many kilometers, prevents movement in and out of the Northern Hemicylinder of Rama. It’s possible that we could fly over it, if we had an airplane that could reach an altitude of two kilometers, and a very clever pilot, but we don’t. Besides, Richard is expecting us to come through the habitat.”

They waited and waited in the dark and cold. Periodically one of the two robots would check the entrance, but there was always a sentry present. Nicole became tired and frustrated. “Look,” she said at one point, “we can’t stay here forever. There must be some other plan.”

“We have no knowledge of any alternate or contingency

plans in this situation,” Eleanor said, reminding Nicole for once that they were only robots.

During a brief nap the exhausted Nicole dreamed that she was lying, naked, on the top of a very large and very flat ice cube. Avians were striking at her from the sky, and hundreds of little robots like Joan and Eleanor had surrounded her on the surface of the ice. They were chanting something in unison.

When Nicole awakened, she felt somewhat refreshed. She talked with the two robots and they worked out a new plan. The three of them decided not to move until there was a break in the traffic through the entrance to the second habitat. At that time, the robots would decoy the sentry so that Nicole could proceed inside. Joan and Eleanor instructed Nicole then to walk cautiously to the other side of the bridge and turn right along the shore of the moat. “Wait for us,” Eleanor said, “in the small cove about three hundred meters from the bridge.”

Twenty minutes later, Joan and Eleanor made a terrible commotion along the far wall, about fifty meters from the entrance. Nicole walked unmolested into the interior of the habitat when the sentry left his post to investigate the noise. On the inside, a long stairway wound back and forth, dropping the several hundred meters from the entrance altitude to the level of the wide moat that circumscribed the entire habitat. There were lights on the stairway at periodic intervals, and Nicole could see more lights on the bridge in front of her, but the overall illumination was quite sparse. Nicole tensed when she saw a pair of construction workers coming up the stairs in her direction. But they climbed right past her with only minimal acknowledgment. Nicole was thankful she was wearing the uniform.