Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “No, Narong,” Johann said. “Any conspiracy or hoax theory is too farfetched. I am convinced that this journal is telling the truth… By the way, how do you imagine Dr. Won died?”

  Narong shrugged. “It’s impossible to know. She might have taken off on foot after the icemobile broke down, and lost her way. It’s easy to become confused when there’s nothing but ice in every direction.”

  Johann stood up. “So what do we do now, boss?” Narong asked.

  “Ask Yasin to array all our radio transmitters in the direction of Mutchville. I’m going to report the discovery of Dr. Won’s body, as required, and read selected excerpts from her diary.” Johann paused for a moment. “I don’t know if they can still hear us in Mutchville, even at full power, but we’ll give it a try.”

  “Anything else?” Narong said, sensing that Johann was not finished.

  “I’m going to go out on the ice myself,” Johann said. “To verify as much as I can of the information in Dr. Won’s journal… I’ll take Kwame with me. I want you to stay here and take care of things in Valhalla. The outpost needs capable leadership in case…” His voice trailed off.

  “Will you descend into the caverns?” Narong asked.

  “If they are indeed there,” Johann replied.

  8

  Kwame read the last part of Dr. Won’s journal in the conference room that adjoined Johann’s office. “What do you think?” Johann asked when Kwame handed the papers back to him.

  “I don’t know yet,” the Tanzanian replied. “I haven’t had any time to digest what I just read… It’s such an incredible story. Could it possibly be true?”

  “That’s the right question,” Johann said. “For reasons I will explain to you in a moment, I think there’s some chance that Dr. Won’s story is true. More importantly, at least part of it is verifiable. The maps in her journal are quite detailed. I intend to search for that rectangular hole myself next week. I would like for you to join me in the search. It’s your choice either way, but before you answer, I want to share with you a couple of my own unusual experiences.”

  Kwame listened intently as Johann described his pair of encounters with the sparkling particles, as well as his discussions with Beatrice and Vivien in Mutchville.

  “Wow,” said Kwame when Johann was finished. “So you believe that the ribbon Dr. Won mentions is the same phenomenon you and the priestesses saw?” he asked. “And that all these incidents are somehow related?”

  “Yes,” Johann said. “Although I couldn’t begin to tell you how or why.”

  Kwame smiled. “I like Sister Beatrice’s concept. It would be comforting to believe that the particle formations might be messenger angels, sent by a benevolent God. Any other explanation would be frightening, especially in view of what happened to Dr. Won and her colleagues.”

  “Are you saying that you don’t want to go with me?” Johann asked after a short silence.

  “No, no,” Kwame said. “Don’t misunderstand me. I would be honored to accompany you… But it’s easy to imagine that those particles or whoever created the subsurface caverns Dr. Won described has capabilities that we could not even begin to understand. Or explain. That’s why I like Sister Beatrice’s idea of the angels. It makes a possible encounter with the particles somehow less daunting.”

  “Based on my own experience,” Johann said, “I don’t think we can conclude that the particles are hostile.”

  Kwame smiled again. “When the first Europeans appeared in Africa, they were welcomed by tribes who thought at the time that the white men were friendly gods. Little did the Africans know that their tribal way of life was about to be irrevocably destroyed by the newcomers.”

  “Narong and I were discussing something similar last night,” Johann said. “If the particles and the caverns have extraterrestrial origins, and their technological prowess is as advanced as it appears, then contact between us and them could mean the end of human history as we know it.”

  “And it doesn’t really matter if the aliens are friendly or hostile,” Kwame said. “The end result will be the same. Look at what happened in the Amazon at the end of the twentieth century. The anthropologists who were the first to make contact with those reclusive Indian tribes meant well, but just by exposing the Indians to the idea that other ways of life existed, the anthropologists doomed their primitive lifestyle forever.”

  It was Johann’s turn to smile. “I had no idea you were so interested in history,” he said.

  “I’ve been fascinated by history ever since I was a young man,” Kwame said. “Even though I wasn’t able to go to the university—mostly for financial reasons—I have managed to read and study. My interest in the historical significance of an extraterrestrial contact was piqued fourteen years ago, when that Rama spaceship zoomed into our solar system. I was in heavy-machinery school at the time. I followed the reports every day, thinking that some alien civilization had finally decided to announce itself to us. I was crushed when Rama disappeared without answering any of my burning questions.”

  “So you think there are alien civilizations out there among the stars?” Johann asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Kwame said. “It seems preposterous to me that only on Earth, on that one small planet, has life and intelligence evolved. The process that created us cannot have been unique.”

  Johann feigned a frown. “That doesn’t sound like an answer I would expect from a good Muslim.”

  Kwame laughed. “There are all kinds of Muslims, just as there are all kinds of Christians. I have never believed that my religion constrained me to a particular kind of thinking. In my opinion, it is unlikely that either Allah or God expects us to be mindless followers.”

  Johann smiled at the tall, lithe African with the clear eyes. Kwame would be an excellent companion on the adventure of their lives.

  Johann and Kwame spent three busy days preparing for their expedition. They each read Dr. Won’s journal several more times, including her logs recording the comments the other three scientists made during the time they were below the surface in the caverns. As the two men planned together they began to appreciate one another’s strengths. Johann was organized, efficient, deductive. Kwame was less obsessive, more creative, more intuitive.

  The back of the icemobile that trailed behind their rover was overflowing with equipment and supplies when they departed. Narong had helped Johann and Kwame wrap a heavy net around everything, and secure it tightly to the sides of the icemobile. Nevertheless, Johann was afraid that the jostling of the trailer would unsettle their cargo and they would lose something critical.

  “If you’d like,” Kwame said with a bemused smile the third time Johann stopped the rover to check that the cargo was still intact, “I could ride in the icemobile and make certain that nothing falls out.”

  Johann realized that he was being compulsive and tried to relax. He asked Kwame about his African childhood. Kwame had been raised in a small village in western Tanzania, not far from the Serengeti Reserve. Even Johann, with his limited imagination, could easily picture life in rural Tanzania, and see the fabled wild animals of the Serengeti, when Kwame told stories of his youth in his rich, descriptive language.

  Their speed increased after they parked the rover and transferred to the icemobile. Johann stayed on routes across the ice that were well established until he reached the region of the ice hills and the small valleys where Dr. Won’s map said the rectangular hole was located. Just before sunset they found the other icemobile and the long, white, flat rectangular plate. Soon thereafter they located the hole and set up their tent on a flat space in the vicinity.

  Neither man was able to fall asleep at first. They talked through their helmets, lying side by side in sleeping bags, for over an hour. Kwame admitted that he was feeling apprehensive, and more than a little excited. He recalled for Johann a night he had spent out in the Serengeti, when he was a teenager earning extra money during the summer by being an assistant cook and dishwasher for a camera safari
of Americans.

  “This other boy and I decided we would sleep away from everyone else,” Kwame said. “So we carried our sleeping bags several hundred meters to the south, near where the stream created a lovely pool beneath a small waterfall. It was a beautiful but hot moonlit night and we slept without a tent. I fell asleep counting the stars I could see… A couple of hours later I awakened, feeling very sticky, and decided to take a midnight swim. When I was out in the middle of the pool I saw a huge crocodile watching me from about thirty meters away. It glided slowly toward me, its eyes reflecting the moonlight. I was terrified… Fortunately, the crocodile was not hungry, otherwise I would not be here telling this story. But the mixture of excitement and fear I feel right now is similar to what I was feeling while I was treading water and watching that crocodile.”

  In the morning neither man had much to say. They followed the sequence of events they had designed together at Valhalla. They carefully unrolled the two long rope ladders and checked each rung for strength and stability. Kwame pounded four new stanchions into the ice near the corner of the hole (the two stanchions mentioned in Dr. Won’s journal were still there, but there was no rope descending into the dark abyss) while Johann tested the small mobile camera units. The final step was to anchor one end of each heavy rope ladder around the stanchions and push the body of the ladder into the hole. There was no sound of contact at the bottom when either of the ladders finished unrolling. The depth of the hole was obviously greater than twenty meters.

  Johann and Kwame attached mining lamps to their space helmets before they began their first descent. “Don’t you find it peculiar,” Johann said while adjusting his lamp, “that the icemobile has apparently not been touched in over a year, and the two stanchions put in place by Dr. Won’s team have not been removed?”

  Kwame shrugged. “No more peculiar than anything else,” he said.

  They climbed carefully all the way down the rope ladder, passing five pairs of broad, rectangular tunnels cut into the ice on either side of them. Using their flashlights while standing near the bottom of the ladder, Johann and Kwame could see that there were two more levels beneath them, and that the central hole was apparently no more than eight to ten meters deeper than the length of their ladders. They deployed the ten mobile cameras without incident, one in each tunnel at each level, and then returned to the bottom to begin retrieving their robot assistants. Eight of the ten cameras performed perfectly, showing up as expected at their assigned positions twelve minutes after starting their sequence. As planned, the two backups were sent into the tunnels from which two of the original cameras did not return. These backups were programmed with a shorter reconnaissance sequence.

  Johann and Kwame spent the next two hours looking at the raw video information recorded by the mobile cameras. On one side of their tent they had set up an electronic system that included a television monitor. It turned out that very little of the video information recorded by the cameras was usable without the image-enhancement algorithms stored in the portable processors.

  The work was tedious. Many of the frames were of blank walls of ice. It wasn’t until late in the day, when Johann and Kwame were exhausted, that any sort of coherent picture of the subsurface world began to emerge.

  “I believe,” Kwame said during a short break, “that the first two levels are essentially without function. They are a combination of mazes and dead ends with no real purpose except to confuse and decoy anyone who happens upon this structure by chance.”

  “But what about the strange writing on the wall, if that’s what it is, and that weird group of ice sculptures on the second level?” Johann asked.

  “Unless there’s something else beyond the range of the mobile cameras, deeper into the tunnels,” Kwame said, “I still don’t think the second level is important. My intuition tells me that what this place is all about does not begin until the third level beneath the surface… And we can’t tell what all that stuff the cameras photographed really is unless we go see it ourselves.”

  Johann and Kwame spent the rest of their waking hours studying the enhanced images from the third level and formulating their plan for the following day. They decided their first objective would be to examine a set of large objects with rounded corners, about a hundred meters away from the central hole, that was blocking the southwesterly tunnel on the third level.

  Johann called Narong on the portable telephone just before Kwame and he climbed into their sleeping bags. He excitedly told Narong about everything they had discovered.

  “What about the inter-Asian team?” Narong asked. “You haven’t mentioned a word about them.”

  “Not a trace of evidence about what happened to the Asian scientists,” Johann replied. “No bones, no bits of clothing, no pieces of their rope—nothing. And we examined the images with great care.”

  “They can’t simply have vanished in thin air,” Narong said. “Oh, well, be careful tomorrow, and phone as soon as you find anything unusual.”

  “It does not make any sense, now that I think about it,” Kwame said after Johann hung up the phone, “that the bottom of the hole should have been so clean. We must have ourselves scattered some debris when we were deploying the ladders. And surely stuff blows in when the winds are high.”

  “I agree with you,” Johann said. “Let’s take a closer look at the bottom tomorrow.”

  Johann and Kwame climbed down the same rope ladder. They were on the side of the hole next to the southwesterly set of tunnels. Johann was below Kwame. Before be stepped off the ladder into one of the tunnels, he cast his flashlight beam below him, toward the bottom of the hole.

  He couldn’t see anything but darkness. “Weren’t we able to see the bottom of this hole from the third level yesterday?”

  "I can’t remember,” Kwame said from above him. “Maybe I should go down and look.”

  “No,” said Johann. “We can do that later… Let’s go ahead and explore this tunnel first.”

  Kwame joined Johann in the tunnel entrance. They switched their mining helmets to full output. They could then see about fifty meters into the tunnel. After a short walk the strange rounded objects loomed up in the shadows ahead of them.

  “Have you had any second thoughts about not bringing any weapons?” Kwame said into the microphone of his space helmet.

  “My reptilian instinct tells me I should have a gun now,” Johann replied. “But my cerebellum tells me it would be useless against whoever built this place.”

  Kwame chuckled. “Good point,” he said.

  The first of the strange objects, which was over against the left wall of the tunnel, resembled a giant bowling pin. It was taller than Johann, and much wider, with a smooth creamy-white surface broken only by a red band around its middle. Beyond the bowling pin were a pair of large spheres against the same wall. They were also smooth and white except for the red bands around their equators.

  “It’s a bowling alley,” Kwame said.

  Johann laughed as he walked past the spheres into the rest of the group of the smooth, rounded objects that stretched across the tunnel and blocked their progress. He paused, and then pulled himself up to the top of one of the smaller objects that looked like an overweight toadstool. From there Johann could see a large white door in the distance.

  “Hey, Kwame,” he yelled. “I’ve found something… It looks like a door.”

  “That’s just great, Johann,” he heard Kwame say in a strange tone. “But what I have hanging over my head back here should probably be our first priority.”

  Johann whirled around and nearly slipped off the toadstool. A long white ribbon of sparkling particles was suspended over Kwame’s head. Johann let himself down gently to the surface of the tunnel.

  “Where did it come from?” Johann asked, his eyes never leaving the bright ribbon formation, which had now dropped to eye level.

  “From behind us, I think,” Kwame said. “I was rubbing this bowling pin here, and the ribbon thing suddenly mat
erialized above my head… Maybe it’s the genie of the pin.”

  Kwame laughed nervously at his own joke. Meanwhile Johann was circling around, trying to come closer to Kwame. The ribbon kept moving also, staying between the two of them at eye level. The light from the ribbon was so bright that the two men could not see each other’s faces.

  Whenever Johann took a step toward Kwame, the ribbon became brighter and more active. Its formation danced about, as if it were agitated, and the individual, sparkling particles in its structure increased their speed. When Johann took a step away from Kwame, the exact opposite occurred.

  “So, boss man,” Kwame said after a moment, “do you have the feeling the ribbon thing is trying to keep us separated?”

  “Seems to be,” Johann replied apprehensively.

  “Then why don’t you just stop moving and lean against that toadstool. Let’s see what happens next.”

  “All right,” said Johann. “I guess we’re not yet in any danger—at least not as far as I can tell.”

  As Johann and Kwame watched, the ribbon levitated another meter, danced briefly at its ends, and then transformed itself into a double helix exactly like the one Johann had seen in the snow in the Tiergarten years before in Berlin. Johann’s heart went into overdrive. It’s not possible, he was thinking. It’s just not possible.

  Only seconds later, before either man had yet uttered a word, the double helix changed into a figure eight. Johann’s shock was so great that he almost stopped breathing. The figure eight turned on its side, the individual particles coalesced into eleven white spheres in rapid motion around the figure, and then the spheres reversed direction. Johann knew what was coming next. He ducked quickly as the white baseball with the red band darted over his head. The baseball turned around behind him, changed back into a ribbon, and flew back into the space between Kwame and him.