“But I’ve got to have a specimen!”
“You may have to be content with Jimmy’s flower—unless one of these creatures cooperates with you. Force is out. How would you like it if something landed on Earth and decided that you would make a nice specimen for dissection?”
“I don’t want to dissect it,” said Laura, not at all convincingly. “I only want to examine it.”
“Well, alien visitors might have the same attitude towards you, but you could have a very uncomfortable time before you believed them. We must make no move that could possibly be regarded as threatening.”
He was quoting from Ship’s Orders, of course, and Laura knew it. The claims of science had a lower priority than those of space diplomacy.
In fact, there was no need to bring in such elevated considerations; it was merely a matter of good manners. They were all visitors here, and had never even asked permission to come inside…
The creature seemed to have finished its inspection. It made one more high speed circuit of the camp, then shot off at a tangent towards the stairway.
“I wonder how it’s going to manage the steps?” Laura mused. Her question was quickly answered; the spider ignored them completely, and headed up the gently sloping curve of the ramp without slackening its speed.
“Hub Control,” said Norton. “You may have a visitor shortly; take a look at the Alpha Stairway Section Six. And incidentally, thanks a lot for keeping such a good watch on us.”
It took a minute for the sarcasm to sink in; then the Hub observer started to make apologetic noises.
“Er—I can just see something, Skipper, now you tell me it’s there. But what is it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Norton answered, as he pressed the General Alert button. “Camp Alpha calling all stations. We’ve just been visited by a creature like a three-legged spider, with very thin legs, about two metres high, small spherical body, travels very fast with a spinning motion. Appears harmless but inquisitive. It may sneak up on you before you notice it. Please acknowledge.”
The first reply came from London, fifteen kilometres to the east.
“Nothing unusual here, Skipper.”
The same distance to the west, Rome answered, sounding suspiciously sleepy.
“Same here, Skipper. Uh, just a moment…”
“What is it?”
“I put my pen down a minute ago—it’s gone! What—oh!”
“Talk sense!”
“You won’t believe this, Skipper. I was making some notes—you know I like writing, and it doesn’t disturb anybody—I was using my favourite ball-point, it’s nearly two hundred years old—well, now it’s lying on the ground, about five metres away! I’ve got it—thank goodness—it isn’t damaged.”
“And how do you suppose it got there?”
“Er—I may have dozed off for a minute. It’s been a hard day.”
Norton sighed, but refrained from comment; there were so few of them, and they had so little time in which to explore a world. Enthusiasm could not always overcome exhaustion, and he wondered if they were taking unnecessary risks. Perhaps he should not split his men up into such small groups, and try to cover so much territory. But he was always conscious of the swiftly passing days, and the unsolved mysteries around them. He was becoming more and more certain that something was about to happen, and that they would have to abandon Rama even before it reached perihelion—the moment of truth when any orbit change must surely take place.
“Now listen, Hub, Rome, London—everyone,” he said. “I want a report at every half-hour through the night. We must assume that from now on we may expect visitors at any time. Some of them may be dangerous, but at all costs we have to avoid incidents. You all know the directives on this subject.”
That was true enough; it was part of their training—yet perhaps none of them had ever really believed that the long-theorized “physical contact with intelligent aliens” would occur in their lifetimes—still less that they would experience it themselves.
Training was one thing, reality another; and no one could be sure that the ancient, human instincts of self-preservation would not take over in an emergency. Yet it was essential to give every entity they encountered in Rama the benefit of the doubt, up to the last possible minute—and even beyond.
Commander Norton did not want to be remembered by history as the man who started the first interplanetary war. Within a few hours there were hundreds of the spiders, and they were all over the plain. Through the telescope, it could be seen that the southern continent was also infested with them—but not, it seemed, the island of New York.
They took no further notice of the explorers, and after a while the explorers took little notice of them—though from time to time Norton still detected a predatory gleam in his Surgeon-Commander’s eye. Nothing would please her better, he was sure, than for one of the spiders to have an unfortunate accident, and he would not put it past her to arrange such a thing in the interests of science.
It seemed virtually certain that the spiders could not be intelligent; their bodies were far too small to contain much in the way of brains, and indeed it was hard to see where they stored all the energy to move. Yet their behaviour was curiously purposeful and coordinated; they seemed to be everywhere, but they never visited the same place twice. Norton frequently had the impression that they were searching for something. Whatever it was, they did not seem to have discovered it.
They went all the way up to the central Hub, still scorning the three great stairways. How they managed to ascend the vertical sections, even under almost-zero gravity, was not clear; Laura theorized that they were equipped with suction pads.
And then, to her obvious delight, she got her eagerly desired specimen. Hub Control reported that a spider had fallen down the vertical face and was lying, dead or incapacitated, on the first platform. Laura’s time up from the plain was a record that would never be beaten.
When she arrived at the platform, she found that, despite the low velocity of impact, the creature had broken all its legs. Its eyes were still open, but it showed no reactions to any external tests. Even a fresh human corpse would have been livelier, Laura decided; as soon as she got her prize back to Endeavour, she started to work with her dissecting kit.
The spider was so fragile that it almost came to pieces without her assistance. She disarticulated the legs, then started on the delicate carapace, which split along three great circles and opened up like a peeled orange.
After some moments of blank incredulity—for there was nothing that she could recognize or identify—she took a series of careful photographs. Then she picked up her scalpel.
Where to start cutting? She felt like closing her eyes, and stabbing at random, but that would not have been very scientific.
The blade went in with practically no resistance. A second later, Surgeon-Commander Ernst’s most unladylike yell echoed the length and breadth of Endeavour.
It took an annoyed Sergeant McAndrews a good twenty minutes to calm down the startled simps.
34. His Excellency Regrets…
“As you are all aware, gentlemen,” said the Martian Ambassador, “a great deal has happened since our last meeting. We have much to discuss—and to decide. I’m therefore particularly sorry that our distinguished colleague from Mercury is not here.”
That last statement was not altogether accurate. Dr. Bose was not particularly sorry that HE the Hermian Ambassador was absent. It would have been much more truthful to say that he was worried. All his diplomatic instincts told him that something was happening, and though his sources of information were excellent, he could gather no hints as to what it might be.
The Ambassador’s letter of apology had been courteous and entirely uncommunicative. His Excellency had regretted that urgent and unavoidable business had kept him from attending the meeting, either in person or by video. Dr. Bose found it very hard to think of anything more urgent—or more important—than Rama.
“Two of our members have statements to make. I would first like to call on Professor Davidson.”
There was a rustle of excitement among the other scientists on the Committee. Most of them had felt that the astronomer, with his well-known cosmic viewpoint, was not the right man to be Chairman of the Space Advisory Council. He sometimes gave the impression that the activities of intelligent life were an unfortunate irrelevance in the majestic universe of stars and galaxies, and that it was bad manners to pay too much attention to it. This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr. Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To them, the only purpose of the Universe was the production of intelligence, and they were apt to talk sneeringly about purely astronomical phenomena. “Mere dead matter” was one of their favourite phrases.
“Mr. Ambassador,” the scientist began, “I have been analysing the curious behaviour of Rama during the last few days, and would like to present my conclusions. Some of them are rather startling.”
Dr. Perera looked surprised, then rather smug. He strongly approved of anything that startled Professor Davidson.
“First of all, there was the remarkable series of events when that young lieutenant flew over to the Southern hemisphere. The electrical discharges themselves, though spectacular, are not important; it is easy to show that they contained relatively little energy. But they coincided with a change in Rama’s rate of spin, and its attitude—that is, its orientation in space. This must have involved an enormous amount of energy; the discharges which nearly cost Mr.—er—Pak his life were merely a minor by-product—perhaps a nuisance that had to be minimized by those giant lightning conductors at the South Pole.”
“I draw two conclusions from this. When a spacecraft—and we must call Rama a spacecraft, despite its fantastic size—makes a change of attitude that usually means it is about to make a change of orbit. We must therefore take seriously the views of those who believe that Rama may be preparing to become another planet of our sun, instead of going back to the stars.”
“If this is the case, Endeavour must obviously be prepared to cast off—is that what spaceships do?—at a moment’s notice. She may be in very serious danger while she is still physically attached to Rama. I imagine that Commander Norton is already well aware of this possibility, but I think we should send him an additional warning.”
“Thank you very much, Professor Davidson. Yes—Dr. Solomons?”
“I’d like to comment on that,” said the science historian. “Rama seems to have made a change of spin without using any jets or reaction devices. This leaves only two possibilities, it seems to me.”
“The first one is that it has internal gyroscopes, or their equivalent. They must be enormous; where are they?”
“The second possibility—which would turn all our physics upside down—is that it has a reactionless propulsion system. The so-called Space Drive, which Professor Davidson doesn’t believe in. If this is the case, Rama may be able to do almost anything. We will be quite unable to anticipate its behaviour, even on the gross physical level.”
The diplomats were obviously somewhat baffled by this exchange, and the astronomer refused to be drawn. He had gone out on enough limbs for one day.
“I’ll stick to the laws of physics, if you don’t mind, until I’m forced to give them up. If we’ve not found any gyroscopes in Rama, we may not have looked hard enough, or in the right place.”
Ambassador Bose could see that Dr. Perera was getting impatient. Normally, the exobiologist was as happy as anyone else to engage in speculation; but now, for the first time, he had some solid facts. His long-impoverished science had become wealthy overnight.
“Very well—if there are no other comments—I know that Dr. Perera has some important information.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. As you’ve all seen, we have at last obtained a specimen of a Raman life form, and have observed several others at close quarters. Surgeon-Commander Ernst, Endeavour’s medical officer, has sent a full report on the spider-like creature she dissected.”
“I must say at once that some of her results are baffling, and in any other circumstances I would have refused to believe them.”
“The spider is definitely organic, though its chemistry differs from ours in many respects—it contains considerable quantities of light metals. Yet I hesitate to call it an animal, for several fundamental reasons.”
“In the first place, it seems to have no mouth, no stomach, no gut—no method of ingesting food! Also no air intakes, no lungs, no blood, no reproductive system…”
“You may wonder what it has got. Well, there’s a simple musculature, controlling its three legs and the three whiplike tendrils or feelers. There’s a brain—fairly complex, mostly concerned with the creature’s remarkably developed triocular vision. But eighty per cent of the body consists of a honeycomb of large cells, and this is what gave Dr. Ernst such an unpleasant surprise when she started her dissection. If she’d been luckier she might have recognized it in time, because it’s the one Raman structure that does exist on Earth—though only in a handful of marine animals.”
“Most of the spider is simply a battery, very much like that found in electric cells and rays. But in this case, it’s apparently not used for defence. It’s the creature’s source of energy. And that is why it has no provisions for eating and breathing; it doesn’t need such primitive arrangements. And incidentally, this means that it would be perfectly at home in a vacuum…”
“So we have a creature which, to all intents and purposes, is nothing more than a mobile eye. It has no organs of manipulation; those tendrils are much too feeble. If I had been given its specifications, I would have said it was merely a reconnaissance device.”
“Its behaviour certainly fits that description. All the spiders ever do is to run around and look at things. That’s all they can do…”
“But the other animals are different. The crab, the starfish, the sharks—for want of better words—can obviously manipulate their environment and appear to be specialized for various functions. I assume that they are also electrically powered since, like the spider, they appear to have no mouths.”
“I’m sure you’ll appreciate the biological problems raised by all this. Could such creatures evolve naturally? I really don’t think so. They appear to be designed like machines, for specific jobs. If I had to describe them, I would say that they are robots—biological robots—something that has no analogy on Earth.”
“If Rama is a spaceship, perhaps they are part of its crew. As to how they are born—or created—that’s something I can’t tell you. But I can guess that the answer’s over there in New York. If Commander Norton and his men can wait long enough, they may encounter increasingly more complex creatures, with unpredictable behaviour. Somewhere along the line they may meet the Ramans themselves—the real makers of this world.”
“And when that happens, gentlemen, there will be no doubt about it at all…”
35. Special Delivery
Commander Norton was sleeping soundly when his personal communicator dragged him away from happy dreams. He had been holidaying with his family on Mars, flying past the awesome, snow-capped peak of Nix Olympica—mightiest volcano in the solar system. Little Billie had started to say something to him; now he would never know what it was.
The dream faded; the reality was his executive officer, up on the ship.
“Sorry to wake you, Skipper,” said Lieutenant-Commander Kirchoff. “Triple A priority from Headquarters.”
“Let me have it,” Norton answered sleepily.
“I can’t. It’s in code—Commander’s Eyes Only.”
Norton was instantly awake. He had received such a message only three times in his whole career, and on each occasion it had meant trouble.
“Damn!” he said. “What do we do now?”
His Exec did not bother to answer. Each understood the problem perfectly; it was one that Ship’s Orders had never anticipated. Normally, a commander was never mor
e than a few minutes away from his office and the codebook in his personal safe. If he started now, Norton might get back to the ship—exhausted—in four or five hours. That was not the way to handle a Class AAA Priority.
“Jerry,” he said at length. “Who’s on the switchboard?”
“No one; I’m making the call myself.”
“Recorder off?”
“By an odd breach of regulations, yes.”
Norton smiled. Jerry was the best Exec he had ever worked with. He thought of everything.
“OK. You know where my key is. Call me back.”
He waited as patiently as he could for the next ten minutes, trying—without much success—to think of other problems. He hated wasting mental effort; it was very unlikely that he could outguess the message that was coming, and he would know its contents soon enough. Then he would start worrying effectively.
When the Exec called back, he was obviously speaking under considerable strain.
“It’s not really urgent Skipper—an hour won’t make any difference. But I prefer to avoid radio. I’ll send it down by messenger.”
“But why—oh, very well—I trust your judgement. Who will carry it through the airlocks?”
“I’m going myself; I’ll call you when I reach the Hub.”
“Which leaves Laura in charge.”
“For one hour, at the most. I’ll get right back to the ship.”
A medical officer did not have the specialized training to be acting commander, any more than a commander could be expected to do an operation. In emergencies, both jobs had sometimes been successfully switched; but it was not recommended. Well, one order had already been broken tonight…
“For the record, you never leave the ship. Have you woken Laura?”
“Yes. She’s delighted with the opportunity.”
“Lucky that doctors are used to keeping secrets. Oh—have you sent the acknowledgement?”
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