Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Dr. Shigeru Takagishi stared in rapt silence at the towers and spheres of New York four kilometers away. From time to time he would walk over to the telescope that he had temporarily set up on the cliff overlooking the Cylindrical Sea and study a particular feature in that alien landscape.

  "You know," he said at length to Cosmonauts Wakefield and Sabatini, "I don't believe the reports the first crew gave on New York are entirely accurate. Or else this is a different spaceship." Neither Richard nor Francesca responded. Wakefield was engrossed in the last stages of assembly of the icemobile and Francesca, as usual, was busy video recording Wakefield's efforts.

  "It looks as if there are certainly three identical parts to the city," Dr. Takagishi continued, primarily to himself, "and three subdivisions within each of those parts. But all nine sections are not absolutely the same. There appear to be subtle differences."

  "There," said Richard Wakefield, standing up with a satisfied smile. "That ought to do it. A full day ahead of schedule. I'll just quickly test all the important engineering functions."

  Francesca glanced at her watch. "We're almost half an hour behind the revised timeline. Are we still going to take a fast look at New York before dinner?"

  Wakefield shrugged his shoulders and looked at Takagishi. Francesca walked over to the Japanese scientist. "What do you say, Shigeru? Shall we take a quick run across the ice and give the people on Earth a close-up view of the Rama version of New York?"

  "By all means," Takagishi answered. "I can't wait—"

  "Only if you will be back at camp by nineteen thirty at the latest," David Brown interrupted. He was in the helicopter with Admiral Heilmann and Reggie Wilson. "We need to do some serious planning tonight We may want to revise the deployments for tomorrow."

  "Roger," said Wakefield. "If we forget about the pulley system for now and have no problem carrying the icemobile down the stairs, we should be able to cross the sea in ten minutes each way. That would get us back to camp in plenty of time."

  "We've overflown many of the features of the Northern Hemicylinder this afternoon," Brown said. "No biots anywhere. The cities look like duplicates of each other. There were no surprises anywhere in the Central Plain. I personally think that maybe we should attack the mysterious south tomorrow."

  "New York," Takagishi shouted. "A detailed reconnaissance of New York should be our goal for tomorrow." Brown didn't answer. Takagishi walked out to the edge of the cliff and stared down at the ice fifty meters below. To his left the unimposing narrow stairway cut in the cliff descended in short steps. "How heavy is the icemobile?" Takagishi asked.

  "Not very," Wakefield answered. "But it's bulky. Are you certain you don't want to wait for me to install the pulleys? We can always go across tomorrow."

  "I can help carry it," Francesca interjected. "If we don't at least see New York, we will not be able to make educated inputs at the planning meeting tonight."

  "All right," Richard replied, shaking his head in amusement at Francesca. "Anything for journalism. I'll go first, so that most of the lifting is on my back. Francesca, get in the middle. Dr. Takagishi at the top. Watch out for the runners. They are sharp on the edges."

  The climb down to the surface of the Cylindrical Sea was uneventful. "Goodness," Francesca Sabatini said as they prepared to cross the ice, "that was easy. Why is a pulley system needed at all?"

  "Because sometimes we may be carrying something else or, perish the thought, we may need to defend ourselves during ascent or descent."

  Wakefield and Takagishi sat in the front of the icemobile. Francesca was in the back with her video camera. Takagishi became more and more animated as they drew closer to New York. "Just look at that place," he said when the icemobile was about five hundred meters from the opposite shore. "Can there be any doubt that this is the capital of Rama?"

  As the trio approached the shore, the breathtaking sight of the strange city silenced all conversation. Everything about New York's complicated structure spoke of order and purposeful creation by intelligent beings; yet the first set of cosmonauts, seventy years earlier, had found it as empty of life as the rest of Rama. Was this vast complex, broken into nine sections, indeed an enormously complicated machine, as the first visitors had suggested, or was the long thin island (ten kilometers by three) actually a city whose denizens had long ago disappeared?

  They parked the icemobile on the edge of the frozen sea and walked along a path until they found a stairway leading to the ramparts of the wall surrounding the city. The excited Takagishi loped along about twenty meters in front of Wakefield and Sabatini. As they ascended, more and more of the details of the city became apparent.

  Richard was immediately intrigued by the geometrical shapes of the buildings. In addition to the normal tall, thin skyscrapers, there were scattered spheres, rectangular solids, even an occasional polyhedron. And they were definitely arranged in some kind of a pattern. Yes, he thought to himself as his eyes scanned the fascinating complex of structures, aver there is a dodecahedron, there a pentahedron…

  His mathematical ruminations were interrupted when all the lights were suddenly extinguished and the entire interior of Rama was plunged into darkness.

  24

  SOUNDS IN THE DARKNESS

  At first Takagishi could see absolutely nothing. It was as if he had suddenly been struck blind. He blinked twice and stood motionless in the total darkness. The momentary silence on the commlinks erupted into hopeless noise as all the cosmonauts began to talk at the same time. Calmly, fighting against his growing fear, Takagishi tried to remember the scene that had been in front of his eyes at the moment the lights were extinguished.

  He had been standing on the wall overlooking New York, about a meter from the dangerous edge. In the final second he had been looking off to the left and had just glimpsed a staircase descending into the city about two hundred meters away. Then the scene had vanished…

  "Takagishi," he heard Wakefield calling, "are you all right?"

  He turned around to acknowledge the question and noticed that his knees had become weak. In the complete darkness he had lost his orientation. How many degrees had he turned? Had he been facing the city directly? Again he recalled the last image. The elevated wall was twenty or thirty meters above the floor of the city. A fall would be fatal.

  "I'm here," he said tentatively, "But I'm too close to the edge." He dropped down on all fours. The metal was cold against his hands.

  "We're coming," Francesca said. "I'm trying to find the light on my video camera."

  Takagishi turned down the volume on his commpak and listened for the sound of his companions. A few seconds later he saw a light in the distance. He could barely make out the forms of his two associates.

  "Where are you, Shigeru?" Francesca asked. The light from her camera illuminated only the area immediately around her.

  "Up here. Up here." He waved before he realized that they could not see him.

  "I want complete quiet," David Brown shouted over the communications system, "until everyone is accounted for." The conversations ceased after a few seconds. "Now," he continued, "Francesca, what's going on down there?"

  "We're climbing the stairway up the wall, on the New York side, David, about a hundred meters from where we parked the icemobile. Dr. Takagishi was ahead of us, already at the top. We have the light from my camera. We're going to meet him."

  "Janos," Dr. Brown said next, "where are you in rover number two?"

  "About three kilometers from camp. The headlights are working fine. We could return in ten minutes or so."

  "Go back there and man the navigation console. We'll stay airborne until you verify that the homing system is operational from your side… Francesca;, be careful, but come back to camp as fast as you can. And give us a report every two minutes or so."

  "Roger, David," she said. Francesca switched off her commpak and called for Takagishi again. Despite the fact that he was only thirty meters away, it took Francesca and Richard over
a minute to find him in the dark.

  Takagishi was relieved to touch his colleagues. They sat down beside him on the wall and listened to the renewed chatter on the commpak. O'Toole and des Jardins verified that there had been no other observed changes inside Rama at the time the lights had gone out. The half dozen portable scientific stations that had already been deployed in the alien spaceship had exhibited no meaningful perturbations. Temperatures, wind velocities and directions, seismic readings, and near field spectroscopic measurements were all unchanged.

  "So the lights went out," Wakefield said. "I admit that it was scary, but it was no big deal. Probably—"

  "Shh," said Takagishi abruptly. He reached down and turned off both his and Wakefield's commpak. "Do you hear that noise?"

  To Wakefield the sudden silence was nearly as unnerving as the total darkness had been a few minutes before. "No," he said in a whisper, after listening for several seconds, "but my ears are not very—"

  "Shh." Now it was Francesca's turn. "Are you talking about that distant, high-pitched scraping sound?" she whispered.

  'Yes," said Takagishi, quietly but excitedly. "Like something is brushing against a metallic surface. It suggests movement."

  Wakefield listened again. Maybe he could hear something. Maybe he was imagining it. "Come on," he said to the others out loud, "let's go back to the icemobile."

  "Wait," said Takagishi as Richard stood up. "It seemed to stop just as you spoke." He leaned over to Francesca. "Turn off the light," he said softly. "Let's sit here in the darkness and see if we can hear it again."

  Wakefield sat back down beside his companions. With the camera light off it was absolutely black around them. The only sound was their breathing. They waited a full minute. They heard nothing. Just as Wakefield was about to insist that they leave, he heard a sound from the direction of New York. It was like hard brushes dragging across metal, but there was also an embedded high-frequency noise, as if a tiny voice were singing very fast, that punctuated the nearly constant scraping. The sound was definitely louder. And eerie. Wakefield felt his spine tingle.

  "Do you have a tape recorder?" Takagishi whispered to Francesca. The scraping stopped at the sound of Takagishi's voice. The trio waited another fifteen seconds.

  "Hey there, hey there," they heard David Brown's loud voice on the emergency interrupt channel. "Is everybody all right? You're way overdue for a report."

  "Yes, David," Francesca replied. "We're still here. We heard an unusual sound coming from New York."

  "Now's not the time for dilly-dallying. We have a major crisis on our hands. All our new plans have assumed that Rama would be constantly lit. We need to regroup."

  "All right," Wakefield responded. "We're leaving the wall now. If all goes well we should be back to the campsite in less than an hour."

  Dr. Shigeru Takagishi was reluctant to leave New York with the mystery of the strange sound unresolved. But he understood completely that now was not the appropriate time for a scientific foray into the city. As the icemobile raced across the frozen Cylindrical Sea, the Japanese scientist smiled to himself. He was happy. He knew that he had heard a new sound, something decidedly different from any of the sounds catalogued by the first Rama team. This was a good beginning.

  Cosmonauts Tabori and Wakefield were the last two to ride up the chair-lift beside the Alpha stairway. "Takagishi was really quite irritated with Dr. Brown, wasn't he?" Richard was saying to Janos as he helped the little Hungarian disembark from the chair. They glided along the ramp toward the ferry.

  "I've never seen him so angry," Janos replied. "Shig is a consummate professional and he has great pride in his knowledge of Rama. For Brown to discount the noise you guys heard in such an offhand manner suggests an absence of respect for Takagishi. I don't blame Shig for being irritated."

  They climbed onboard the ferry and activated the transportation module. The vast darkness of Rama retreated behind them as they eased through the lighted corridor toward the Newton.

  "It was a very strange sound," Richard said. "It really gave me the chills. I have no idea if it was a new sound, or if maybe Norton and his team heard the same thing seventy years ago. But I do know that I had a bad case of the willies while I was standing there on the wall."

  "Francesca was even pissed off at Brown at first. She wanted to do a feature interview with Shig for her nightly report. Brown talked her out of it, but I'm not certain he completely convinced her that strange noises are not news. Luckily she had enough of a story with just the lights going out."

  The two men descended from the ferry and approached the air lock. "Whew," said Janos. "I'm bushed. It has been a couple of long and hectic days."

  "Yeah," Richard agreed. "We thought we would be spending the next two nights at the campsite. Instead we're back up here. I wonder what surprises are in store for us tomorrow."

  Janos smiled at his friend. "You know what's funny about all this?" he said. He did not wait for Wakefield to answer. "Brown really believes he's in charge of this mission. Did you see how he reacted when Takagishi suggested that we could explore New York in the dark? Brown probably thinks it was his decision for us to return to the Newton and abort the first sortie."

  Richard looked at Janos with a quizzical smile. "It wasn't, of course," Janos continued. "Rama made the decision for us to leave. And Rama will decide what we do next."

  25

  A FRIEND IN NEED

  In his dream he was lying on a futon in a seventeenth century ryokan. The room was very large, nine tatami mats in all. To his left, in the yard on the other side of the open screen, was a perfect miniaturized garden with tiny trees and a manicured stream. He was waiting for a young woman.

  "Takagishi-san, are you awake?"

  He stirred and reached out for the communicator. "Hello," he said, his voice betraying his grogginess. "Who is it?"

  "Nicole des Jardins," the voice said. "I'm sorry to call you so early, but I need to see you. It's urgent."

  "Give me three minutes," Takagishi said.

  There was a knock on his door exactly three minutes later. Nicole greeted him and entered the room. She was carrying a data cube. "Do you mind?" she said, pointing to the computer console. Takagishi shook his head.

  "Yesterday there were half a dozen separate incidents," Nicole said gravely, pointing at some blips on the monitor, "including the two largest aberrations I have ever seen in your heart data." She looked at him. "Are you certain that you and your doctor provided me with complete historical records?"

  Takagishi nodded.

  "Then I have reason for concern," she continued. "The irregularities yesterday suggest that your chronic diastolic abnormality has worsened. Perhaps the valve has sprung a new leak. Perhaps the long periods of weightlessness—"

  "Or perhaps," Takagishi interrupted with a soft smile, "I became overly excited and my extra adrenaline aggravated the problem."

  Nicole stared at the Japanese scientist. "That's possible, Dr. Takagishi. One of the major incidents occurred just after the lights went out. I guess it was when you were listening to your strange sound."

  "And the other, by chance, could it have been during my argument with Dr. Brown in the campsite? If so, that would support my hypothesis."

  Cosmonaut des Jardins touched several keys on the console and her software entered a new subroutine. She studied the data displayed on two sides of a split screen. "Yes," she said, "it looks right. The second incident took place twenty minutes before we started leaving Rama. That would have been toward the end of the meeting." She moved away from the monitor. "But I can't dismiss the bizarre behavior of your heart just because you were excited."

  They stared at each other for several long seconds. "What are you trying to tell me, Doctor?" Takagishi said softly. "Are you going to confine me to my quarters on the Newton? Now, at the most significant moment in my professional career?"

  "I'm considering it," Nicole answered directly. "Your health is more important to me than you
r career. I've already lost one member of the crew. I'm not certain that I could forgive myself if I lost another."

  She saw the entreaty in her colleague's face. "I know how critical these sorties into Rama are to you. I'm trying to find some kind of rationalization that will allow me to overlook yesterday's data." Nicole sat down at the far end of the bed and looked away. "But as a doctor, not a Newton cosmonaut, it's very very tough."

  She heard Takagishi approach and felt his hand gently on her shoulder. "I know how difficult it has been for you these last few days," he said. "But it was not your fault. All of us are aware that General Borzov's death was unavoidable."

  Nicole recognized the respect and friendship in Takagishi's gaze. She thanked him with her eyes, "I very much appreciate what you did for me before launch," he continued. "If you feel compelled to limit my activities now, I will not object."

  "Dammit," said Nicole, standing up quickly, "it's not that simple. I've been studying your overnight data for almost an hour. Look at this. Your chart for the last ten hours is perfectly normal. There's not a trace of any anomaly. And you had had no incidents for weeks. Until yesterday. What is it with you, Shig? Do you have a bad heart? Or just a weird one?"

  Takagishi smiled. "My wife told me once that I had a strange heart. But I think she was referring to something altogether different."

  Nicole activated her scanner and displayed the data on the monitor in real-time. "There we are again"—she shook her head—"the signature of a perfectly healthy heart. No cardiologist in the world would argue with my conclusion." She moved toward the door.