Arthur Clarke - Rama Revealed

“Are you all right now?” Richard asked, concern reflected in his voice.

“Yes,” Nicole replied. She smiled in the dark and kissed her husband. “As well as can be expected after narrowly escaping from a gaggle of octospiders.”

Nicole slept fitfully with her I back against the wall and her head resting on Richard’s shoulder. She had one nightmare after another, always waking with a start before dozing off again. In the last nightmare Nicole was on an island by the ocean with all her children. A huge tidal wave headed toward them on her dream screen. Nicole was frantic because her children were scattered all over the island. How could she possibly save all of them? She awakened with a shudder.

She nudged her husband in the dark. “Richard,” Nicole said, “wake up. Something’s not right.”

At first Richard did not move. When Nicole touched him a second time, he slowly opened his eyes. “What’s the matter?” he said at length.

“I have the feeling we’re not safe here,” she said. “I think we should go.”

Richard switched on his flashlight and moved the beam slowly around the room. “There’s nobody here,” he said softly. “And I don’t hear anything either. Don’t you think we should rest some more?”

Nicole’s fears increased as they sat HI silence. “I’m still feeling a sense of danger, Richard,” she said finally. “I know that you don’t believe in anything you can’t analyze, but I have learned to trust my premonitions.”

“All right,” Richard said unenthusiastically. He stood up and walked across the room, opening the back door, which led to a similar, adjacent area. He glanced inside. “Nothing here either,” he said after several seconds. Richard next came back across the room and opened the door to the corridor they had used to escape from the pentagon. The moment the door was open, Nicole and he both heard the unmistakable sound of dragging brushes.

Nicole jumped to her feet. Richard closed the door without a sound and hurried over beside her. “Come on,” he said in a whisper. “We have to find another way out of here.”

They walked through the next room, then another and another. All were dark and empty. They lost their sense of direction as they raced through the unfamiliar territory. Eventually they came to a large double door at the far side of one of the many identical rooms. Richard told Nicole to stand back as he cautiously pushed open the door. “Holy shit!” he exclaimed as soon as he looked into the room. “What in the world is this?”

Nicole came up beside Richard and her eyes followed his flashlight beam as it fell on the bizarre contents of the adjoining chamber. The room was cluttered with large objects. The one closest to the door looked like a large amoeba on a skateboard, the next one like a gigantic ball of twine with two antennae sticking out of its center. There was no sound in the room and nothing moved. Richard lifted his beam higher and let it move quickly around the rest of the crowded room.

“Go back,” Nicole said excitedly, catching a glimpse of something familiar. “Over there. A few meters to the left of the other door.”

Seconds later the beam illuminated four humanlike figures, dressed in helmets and space suits, that were sitting against the far wall. “It’s the human biots,” Nicole said excitedly, “the ones we saw in Rama II out on the Central Plain.”

“Norton and company?” Richard asked incredulously, a shiver of fear running down his spine.

“I bet it is,” Nicole responded.

They entered the room slowly and tiptoed around the many objects as they made their way toward the figures in question. Both Richard and Nicole knelt down beside the four apparent humans. “This must be a biot dump,” Nicole said, after they had verified that the face behind the transparent helmet was indeed a copy of the Commander Norton who led the first Rama expedition.

Richard stood up and shook his head. “Absolutely unbelievable,” he said. “What are they doing here?” He let his flashlight beam wander around the room.

A second later Nicole screamed. No more than four meters away from her, an octospider was moving, or at least so it seemed in the peculiar light. Richard rushed to her side. The two of them quickly verified that what they were seeing was only an octospider biot, and then they both laughed for several minutes.

“Richard Wakefield,” Nicole said when she could finally contain her nervous laughter, “may I go home now? I’ve had enough.”

“I guess so,” Richard said with a smile. “As long as we can find the way.”

As they penetrated deeper and deeper into the maze of rooms and tunnels in the area around the pentagon, Nicole became convinced that they would never find their way out. Eventually Richard slowed the pace and started storing information in his portable computer. Afterward he was at least able to prevent their going in circles, but Richard never connected his growing map to any of the landmarks they had seen before they fled from the octospiders.

When both Richard and Nicole were starting to feel desperate, they chanced upon a small truck biot carrying an odd collection of small objects down a narrow corridor. Richard became more relaxed. ‘Those things look as if they have been custom-made to someone’s specifications,” he said to Nicole, “like the objects delivered to us in the White Room. If we go back in the direction from which the biot came, then maybe we will locate where all our objects are manufactured. From there, it should be easy to find the path to our lair.”

It was a long hike. They were both worn out several hours later when their corridor widened into a huge factory area with a very high ceiling. At the center of the factory were twelve fat cylinders that looked like old-fashioned boilers on the Earth. Each was four or five meters high and a meter and a half wide. The boilers were arranged in four rows of three.

Conveyor belts, or at least the Rama equivalent, led into and out of each of the boilers, two of which were in operation at the moment. Richard was fascinated. “Look over there,” he said, pointing at a vast warehouse floor covered with stacks of objects of all sizes and descriptions. “That must be all the raw material. A request arrives at the central computer, which is probably in that hut behind the boilers, where it is processed and allocated to one of these machines. Biots go out, gather up the proper items, and place them on the conveyor belts. Inside the boilers these raw materials are altered significantly, for what comes out is the object ordered by whatever intelligent species is using the keyboard or its equivalent to communicate with the Ramans.”

Richard approached the closest active boiler. “But the real question,” he said, overflowing with excitement, “is what kind of process takes place inside these boilers? Is it chemical? Is it perhaps nuclear, involving element transmutations? Or have the Ramans some other technology for manufacturing completely beyond our ken?”

He knocked several times very hard on the outside of the active boiler. “The walls are very thick,” he announced. Richard then bent down where the conveyor belt entered the boiler and started to stick his hand inside. “Richard,” Nicole yelled, “don’t you think that’s foolish?”

Richard glanced up at his wife and shrugged. As he bent down again to study the belt/boiler interface, a bizarre biot that looked like a camera box with legs scurried over from the back of the large room. It quickly wedged itself between Richard and the active conveyor belt and then expanded in size, forcing Richard away from the active process.

“Nice move,” Richard said appreciatively. He turned to Nicole. “The system has excellent fault protection.”