Arthur Clarke - Rama Revealed

Patrick waved and followed the subway with his eyes until it disappeared around the first corner. Then he put his rifle on his shoulder and began climbing up the spikes. Please come back quickly, he was thinking, before the uncertainty becomes too much for all of us.

He returned to their living level in less than fifteen minutes. After taking a short drink from his water bottle, he hurried down the tunnel to the museum. While he was walking, he was thinking about what he was going to say to everybody.

Patrick did not even notice that the room was dark when he crossed the threshold. When he entered, however, and the lights came on, he was momentarily disoriented. I’m not in the right place, he thought first. I have taken the wrong tunnel. But no, his jumbled mind now said, as he glanced quickly around the room, this must be the room after all. I see a couple of feathers over there in the corner, and one of Nikki ‘s funny diapers…

With each passing second his heart beat faster. Where are they? Patrick said to himself, his eyes now darting frantically around the room for a second time. What could have happened to them? The longer he stared at the empty walls, carefully recalling all the conversation before he had departed, the more Patrick realized that his sister and friends could not possibly have left of their own volition. Unless there was a note! Patrick spent two minutes searching every nook in the room. There were no messages. So someone, or something, must have forced them to leave, he thought.

Patrick tried to think rationally, but it was impossible. His mind kept jumping back and forth between what he ought to do and terrible pictures of what might have happened to the others. At length he concluded that perhaps they had all moved back to the original room, the one his mother and Richard called the photo gallery, maybe because the lights in the museum were malfunctioning or for some other equally trivial reason. Buoyed by this thought, Patrick dashed out into the tunnel.

He reached the photo gallery three minutes later. It was also empty. Patrick sat down against the wall. There were only two directions his companions could have taken. Since Patrick had not seen anyone on his climb, the others must have gone toward the cathedral room and the sealed exit. As he walked down the long corridor, his hand tight around the rifle, Patrick convinced himself that the Nakamura troops had not left the island and that they had somehow broken into the lair and captured everybody else.

Just before he entered the cathedral room, Patrick heard Nikki crying. “Mom-my, Mom-my,” she screamed, and then let out a mournful wail. Patrick charged into the large room, not seeing anybody, and then turned up the ramp in the direction of his niece’s cry.

On the landing beneath the still-sealed exit was a chaotic scene. In addition to Nikki’s continued wailing, Robert Turner was walking around in a daze, his arms outstretched and his eyes upward, repeating over and over, “No, God, no.” Benjy was quietly sobbing in a corner while Nai was trying, without much success, to comfort her twin sons.

When Nai saw Patrick, she jumped up and ran toward him. “Oh, Patrick,” she said, tears running from her eyes, “Ellie has been kidnapped by the octospiders.”

It was several hours before I Patrick put together a coherent story about what had happened after his exploration party had left the museum room. Nai was still near shock from the experience, Robert could not talk for more than a minute without breaking into tears, and the children and Benjy frequently interrupted, often without making any sense. At first all Patrick knew for certain was that the octospiders had come and not only had kidnapped Ellie, but also had taken away the avians, the manna melons, and the sessile material. Eventually, however, after repeated questioning, Patrick thought he understood most of the details of what had occurred.

Apparently about an hour after the five explorers had departed, which would have been during the time that Richard, Patrick, and the others were down on the subway platform, the humans who had remained in the museum room heard the dragging brush sound outside the door. When Ellie went out to investigate, she saw octospiders approaching from both directions. She returned to the room with her news and tried to calm Benjy and the children.

When the first octospider appeared in the doorway, all the humans moved as far away as they could, making space for the nine or ten octos who came inside. At first the creatures stood together in a group, their heads bright with the moving, colored messages that they used to communicate. After a few minutes, one of the octospiders came slightly forward, pointed directly at Ellie by lifting one of its black and gold tentacles off the floor, and then went through a long sequence of colors that was quickly repeated. Ellie guessed (according to Nai-Robert, on the other hand, insisted that somehow Ellie knew what the octospider was saying) that the aliens were asking for the manna melons and the sessile material. She retrieved them from the corner and handed them to the lead octospider. It took the objects in three of its tentacles (“A sight to behold,” Robert exclaimed, “the way they use those trunk like things and the cite underneath”) and passed them to its subordinates.

Ellie and the others thought that the octospiders would then leave, but they were sadly mistaken. The lead octo continued to face Ellie and flash his colored messages. Another pair of octospiders started moving slowly in the direction of Tammy and Timmy. “No,” Ellie said. “No, you can’t.”

But it was too late. The pair of octospiders wrapped many arms each around the hatchlings and then, oblivious of the jabbers and shrieks, carried the two avians away. Galileo Watanabe raced out and attacked the octospider that had three of its tentacles wrapped around Timmy. The octo simply used a fourth tentacle to lift the boy off the ground and hand him to one of its colleagues. Galileo was passed among them until he was put down, unhurt, in the far corner of the room. The intruders allowed Nai to rush over to comfort her son.

By this time three or four octospiders, the avians, the melons, and the sessile material had all disappeared out into the hallway. There were still six of the aliens in the room. For about ten minutes they talked among themselves. All during this time, according to Robert (“I wasn’t paying close attention,” Nai said. “I was too frightened and too concerned about my children”), Ellie was watching the colored messages the octospiders were exchanging. At one point Ellie brought Nikki over to Robert and put their daughter in his arms. “I think I understand a little of what they’re saying,” Ellie said (again, according to Robert), her face absolutely white. “They intend to take me as well.”

Again the lead octospider moved toward them and started speaking in color, seemingly focusing on Ellie. Exactly what happened during the next ten minutes was a subject of considerable argument between Nai and Robert, with Benjy siding mostly with Nai. In Nai’s version of the story, Ellie tried to protect everyone else in the room, to make some kind of bargain with the octospiders. With repeated hand gestures as well as speech, Ellie told the aliens that she would go with them, provided that the octospiders guaranteed that all the other humans in the room would be allowed to leave the lair safely.

“Ellie was explicit,” Nai insisted. “She explained that we were trapped and did not have enough food. Unfortunately, they grabbed her before she was certain that they understood the bargain.”

“You’re naive, Nai,” Robert said, his eyes wild with confusion and pain. “You don’t understand how really sinister those creatures are. They hypnotized Ellie. Yes, they did. During the early part of their visit, when she was watching their colors so carefully. I’m telling you, she was not herself. All that malarkey about guaranteeing everyone safe passage was a subterfuge. She wanted to go with them. They altered her personality right there on the spot with those crazy colored patterns. And nobody saw it but me.”