Richard was snapping his fingers in front of her face. “Hello, hello. Anybody home?”
Nicole smiled. “Sure, Richard,” she replied. “Nikki’s just fine — as long as you don’t use it all the time.”
They continued to walk slowly along the tunnel. “So where did you go back there?” Richard asked.
Somewhere I can never tell you about, Nicole mused– Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate. The rest of us must live forever with everything we have ever been. She slid her arm through Richard’s. And must have the good sense to know when to keep it private.
The tunnel seemed endless. Richard and Nicole had almost decided to turn around when they came to a dark entryway off to their right. With no hesitation they both walked inside. The lights came on immediately. Inside the room, on the big wall to the left of them, were twenty-five flat rectangular objects, arranged in five orderly rows with five columns each. The opposite wall was empty. Within seconds after their entrance, the two cosmonauts heard a high-frequency squeaky sound coming from the ceiling. They tensed briefly, but relaxed as the squeaking continued and there were no new surprises.
They held hands and walked to one end of the long narrow room. The objects on the wall were photographs, most of them recognizable as having been taken somewhere inside Rama. The great octahedron near the central plaza was featured in several of the photos. The remaining pictures were a balance between scenes of the buildings of New York and wide-angle shots of panoramas around the interior of Rama.
Three of the photographs were particularly fascinating to Richard. They depicted sleek, aerodynamically curved boats plying the Cylindrical Sea; in one of the photographs a great wave was about to crash over the top of a large boat. “Now there’s what we need,” Richard said to Nicole excitedly. “If we could find one of them, our troubles would be over.”
The squeaking above them continued with very little modulation. A spotlight moved from picture to picture at moments when there was a pause in the squeak. Nicole and Richard easily concluded that they were in a museum on some kind of tour, but there was nothing else they could know for certain. Nicole sat down against a side wall. “I’m having a lot of trouble with all this,” she said. “I feel totally out of control.”
Richard sat down beside her. “Me too,” he said, nodding. “And I just arrived in New York. So I can imagine what all this is doing to you.”
They were silent for a moment. “You know what bothers me the most?” Nicole said, trying to give some expression to the helplessness she was feeling. “It’s how very little I understood and appreciated my own ignorance.
Before I came on this voyage, I thought I knew the general dimensions of the relationship between my own knowledge and the knowledge of mankind. But what is staggering about this mission is how very small the entire range of human knowledge might be compared to what could be known. Just think, the sum of everything all human beings know or have ever known might be nothing more than an infinitesimal fraction of the Encyclopedia Galactica—”
“It is really frightening,” Richard interrupted enthusiastically. “And thrilling at the same time… Sometimes when I’m in a bookstore or a library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the boob, one by one. Imagine what it would be like to be in the true library, one that combined the knowledge of all the species in the universe… The very thought makes me woozy.”
Nicole turned to him and slapped his leg. “All right, Richard,” she said jokingly, changing the mood, “now that we have reaffirmed how incredibly stupid we are, what’s our plan? I figure we have already covered about a kilometer in this tunnel. Where do we go from here?”
“I propose we walk another fifteen minutes in the same direction. In my experience tunnels always lead someplace. If we don’t find anything, we’ll turn around.”
He helped Nicole up and gave her a small hug. “All right, Nikki,” he said with a wink. “Half a league onward.”
Nicole frowned and shook her head. “Twice is enough for one day,” she said, extending her hand toward Richard.
46
THE BETTER PART OF VALOR
The huge circular hole below them extended into the darkness. Only the top five meters of the shaft were lit. Metal spikes, about a meter long, protruded from the wall, each separated from its neighbors by the same distance.
“This is definitely the destination of the tunnels,” Richard muttered to himself. He was having some difficulty integrating this huge, cylindrical hole with its walls of spikes into his overall conception of Rama. He and Nicole had walked around the perimeter twice. They had even backtracked several hundred meters down the other, adjacent tunnel, concluding from its slight curvature to the right that it had probably originated at the same cavern as the tunnel they had followed earlier.
“Well,” Richard said at length, shrugging his shoulders, “here we go,” He put his right foot on one of the spikes to test its ability to hold his weight. It was firm. He moved his left leg down to another of the spikes and descended one more level with his right leg. “The spacing is nearly perfect,” he said, glancing back at Nicole. “It shouldn’t be a difficult climb.”
“Richard Wakefield,” Nicole said from the rim of the hole, “are you trying to tell me that you intend to climb down into that chasm? And that you expect me to follow?”
“I don’t expect anything of you,” he replied. “But I can’t see turning back now. What’s our alternative? Should we go back down the tunnel to the ramps and exit? For what? To see if anyone has found us yet? You saw the photographs of the boats. Maybe they’re right here at the bottom. Maybe there’s even a secret river that runs underground into the Cylindrical Sea.” “Maybe,” Nicole said, starting to descend slowly now that Richard’s progress had triggered another bank of lights below them, “one of those things that made the bizarre noise is waiting for us down at the bottom.”
“I’ll find out,” Richard said. “Hallooo, down there. We two human-type beings are coming down.” He waved and momentarily lost his balance.
“Don’t be a show-off,” Nicole said, coming down beside him. She paused to catch her breath and look around. Her two feet were resting on spikes and she was holding tightly to two others with her hands. ! must be insane, she said to herself, just look at this place. It’s easy to imagine a hundred gruesome deaths. Richard had dropped down to another pair of spikes. And look at him. Is he totally immune to fear? Or just reckless? He actually seems to be enjoying all this.
The third bank of lights illuminated a lattice on the opposite wall below them. It was hanging among all the spikes and, from a distance in the dim light, looked startlingly like a smaller version of the object that had been attached to the two skyscrapers in New York. Richard hurried around the cylinder to examine the lattice. “Come over here,” he shouted at Nicole. “I think it’s the same damn material.”
The lattice was anchored to the wall by small bolts. At Richard’s insistence, Nicole cut off a piece and handed it to him. He stretched it and watched it regain its shape. He studied its internal structure. “It is the same stuff,” he said. His brow knitted into furrows. “But what the hell does it mean?”
Nicole stood beside him and idly shone her flashlight into the depths below them. She was about to suggest that they climb out and head for more familiar terrain when she thought she saw a reflection from a floor about twenty meters below. “I’m going to make you a proposition,” Nicole said to Richard. “While you’re studying that lattice cord, I’ll drop down another several meters. We may be near the bottom of this bizarre well of spikes, or whatever it is. If not, then we’ll abandon this place.”
“All right,” Richard said absentmindedly. He was already involved in his examination of the lattice cord using the microscope he had taken from his backpack.
Nicole nimbly descended to the floor. “I guess you�
��d better come down,” she called to Richard. “There are two more tunnels, one large and one small. Plus another hole in the center—” He was beside her immediately. He had climbed down as soon as he had seen the lower platform illuminated by lights.
Richard and Nicole were now standing on a ledge three meters wide at the bottom of the spiked cylinder. The ledge formed a ring around another smaller descending hole that also had spikes growing out of its walls. To their left and right, dark arched tunnels were cut into the rock or metal that was the base construction material for the extensive underground world. The tunnel on their left was five to six meters high; the tiny tunnel on the opposite side, one hundred and eighty degrees around the ring, was only half a meter tall.
Running out of each of the two tunnels, and penetrating half a ledge-width into the ring, were two small parallel strips of unknown material that were fastened to the floor. The strips were very close together in the smaller tunnel and more widely spaced in the other. Richard was sitting on his knees examining the strips in front of the large tunnel when he heard a distant rumble. “Listen,” he said to Nicole, as the two of them instinctively backed away from the entrance.
The rumbling increased and changed into a whining sound, as if something were moving swiftly through the air. Far off in the tunnel, which ran straight as an arrow, Richard and Nicole could see some lights switch on. They tensed. They didn’t need to wait long for an explanation. A vehicle that resembled a hovering subway burst into view and sped toward them, stopping suddenly with its front edge just over the farthest extension of the strips on the floor.
Richard and Nicole had recoiled as the vehicle had hurtled toward them. Both were dangerously close to the edge of the ring. For several seconds they stood in silence, each staring at the aerodynamic shape hovering in front of them. Then they looked at each other and laughed simultaneously. “Okay,” Nicole said nervously, “I get it. We’ve crossed into some new dimension. In this one it’s just a little difficult to find the subway station… This is so totally absurd. We climb down a spiked barrel and end up in a Metro station… I don’t know about you, Richard, but I’ve had enough. I’ll take a few normal avians and manna melon any day of the week…”
Richard had walked over beside the vehicle. A door in the side had opened and they could both see the lit interior. There were no seats, only thin cylindrical poles, spaced in no obvious pattern, that ran the three meters from the ceiling to the floor. “It can’t go far,” Richard said, sticking his head inside the door but leaving his feet on the ledge outside. “There’s no place to sit down!’
Nicole came over to inspect for herself. “Maybe they have no old or crippled people — and the grocery stores are all close to home.” She laughed again as Richard leaned farther into the car so he could see the ceiling and walls more clearly. “Don’t get any crazy ideas,” she said. “It would be certifiably insane for us to climb aboard that car. Unless we were out of food and it was our last hope.”
“I guess you’re right,” Richard replied. He was definitely disappointed as he withdrew from the subway car. “But what an amazing—” He stopped himself in midsentence. He was staring across the platform at the opposite side of the ledge. There, in the middle of the now illuminated entrance to the tiny tunnel, an identical vehicle, one-tenth the size of the one next to them, was hovering off the floor. Nicole followed Richard’s gaze.
“That must be the road to Lilliput over there” Nicole said. “Giants descend another floor and normal-size creatures take this subway. It’s all very simple.”
Richard walked swiftly around the ring. “That’s perfect,” he said out loud, taking off his backpack and setting it on the ledge beside him. He began to rummage in one of the large pockets.
“What are you doing?” Nicole asked.
Richard pulled two tiny figures out of the pack and showed them to her. “It’s perfect,” he repeated, his excitement unmistakable. “We can send Prince Hal and Falstaff. I’ll only need a few minutes to adjust their software.”
Already Richard had spread his pocket computer out on the ledge beside the robots and was busily working away. Nicole sat down with her back against the wall between two spikes. She glanced over at Richard. He is truly a rare species, she said with admiration, thinking back over their hours together. A genius, that’s obvious. Almost without guile or meanness. And somehow he has retained the curiosity of a child.
Nicole suddenly felt very tired. She smiled to herself as she was watching Richard. He was absorbed in his work. Nicole closed her eyes for a moment.
“I’m sorry that I took so long,” Richard was saying. “I kept thinking of new things to add and I needed to rearrange the linkage…”
Nicole woke up from her nap very slowly. “How long have we been here?” she said as she yawned.
“A little over an hour!” Richard answered sheepishly. “But everything is all set. I’m ready to put the boys in the subway.” Nicole glanced around her. “Both the cars are still here,” she commented.
“I think they work like all the lights. I bet they will stay in the station as long as we’re on the platform.”
Nicole stood up and stretched. “So here’s the plan!” Richard said. “I have the controlling transceiver in my hand. Hal and Sir John each have audio, video, and infrared sensors that will acquire data continuously. We can choose which channel to monitor on our computers and send new commands as necessary.”
“But will the signals penetrate the walls?” Nicole asked, remembering her experience inside the barn.
“As long as they don’t have to travel through too much material. The system is way overdesigned in terms of signal to noise to accommodate some attenuation… Besides, the large subway came at us along a straight line. I’m hoping this one will be similar.”
Richard gingerly set the two robots down on the ledge and commanded them to walk toward the subway. Doors opened on both sides as they drew near. “Remember me to Mistress Quickly,” Falstaff said as he climbed aboard. “She was a stupid lass, but with a good heart.”
Nicole gave Richard a puzzled glance. “I didn’t overwrite all their earlier programming,” he said with a laugh. “From time to time they will probably make some absurd random comments.”
The two robots stood on the subway for a minute or two. Richard hastily checked their sensors and made one more set of calibrations on the monitor. At length the doors of the subway closed, the vehicle watted for another ten seconds, and then it rushed away into the tunnel.
Richard commanded Falstaff to face the front, but there was not much to be seen out the window. It was a surprisingly long ride at a very high speed. Richard estimated that the little subway had traveled more than a kilometer before it finally slowed to a stop.
Richard waited before commanding the two robots to leave the subway. He wanted to make certain that they did not get off at an intermediate stop. However, there was no need to worry: the first full set of imaging data from Prince Hal and Falstaff showed that the subway had indeed reached the end of the line.
The two robots walked around the flat platform beside the vehicle and photographed more of their surroundings. The subway station had arches and columns, but it was basically one long, connected room. Richard estimated from the images that the ceiling height was about two meters. He commanded Hal and Falstaff to follow a long hallway that moved off to the left, perpendicular to the subway track.
The hallway terminated in front of another tunnel, this one barely five centimeters high. As the robots examined the Boor, finding two tiny strips extending almost to their feet, a subway of minuscule proportions arrived in the station. With its doors open and its interior lit, Richard and Nicole could see that the new subway car was identical, except for its size, to the two they had seen before.
The cosmonauts were sitting together with their knees on the ledge, both avidly watching the small computer monitor. Richard commanded Falstaff to take a picture of Prince Hal standing next to th
e tiny subway. “The car itself,” Richard said to Nicole after studying the image, “is less than two centimeters tall. What’s going to ride in it? Ants?”
Nicole shook her head and said nothing. She was feeling bewildered again. At that moment she was also thinking about her initial reactions to Rama. Never in my wildest imagination, she thought, recalling her awe at that first panoramic sight, did I foresee that there would be so many new mysteries. The first explorers hardly scratched the surface —
“Richard,” Nicole said, interrupting her own thoughts.
He commanded the robots to walk back down the hallway and then glanced up from the monitor. “Yes?” he said.
“How thick is the outer shell of Rama?”
“I think the ferry covers about four hundred meters altogether,” he said with a slightly puzzled expression. “But that’s at one of the ends. We have no definite way of knowing how thick the shell is anywhere else. Norton and crew reported that the depth of the Cylindrical Sea was highly variable — as little as forty meters in some places and as much as a hundred and fifty elsewhere. That would suggest to me a shell thickness of several hundred meters at least.”
Richard checked the monitor quickly. Prince Hal and Falstaff were almost back at the station where they had climbed off the subway. He transmitted a stop command and turned to Nicole. “Why are you asking? It’s not like you to ask idle questions.”
“There’s obviously an entire unexplored world down here,” Nicole replied. “It would take a lifetime—”
“We don’t have that long,” Richard broke in with a laugh. “At least not a normal lifetime… But back to your thickness question, remember the entire Southern Hemicylinder has a floor level four hundred and fifty meters above the north. So unless there are some major structural irregularities — and we certainly haven’t seen any from the outside — the thickness should be substantially greater in the south.”
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