Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,56

could be only from this direction. Moreover, he wanted to discover what the creature would do with its trophy; that should reveal something about its motivation and intelligence.

Because he was bruised and stiff, it took Jimmy several minutes to catch up with the purposefully moving crab. When he had done so, he followed it at a respectful distance, until he felt sure that it did not resent his presence. It was then that he noticed his water flask and emergency-ration pack among the debris of Dragonfly, and felt instantly both hungry and thirsty.

There, scuttling away from him at a remorseless five kilometers an hour, was the only food and drink in all this half of the world. Whatever the risk, he had to get hold of it.

He cautiously closed in on the crab, approaching from the right rear. While he kept station with it, he studied the complicated rhythm of its legs, until he could anticipate where they would be at any moment. When he was ready, he muttered a quick, “Excuse me,” and shot swiftly in to grab his property.

Jimmy had never dreamed that he would one day have to exercise the skills of a pickpocket, but he was delighted with his success. He was out again in less than a second, and the crab never slackened its steady pace.

He dropped back a dozen meters, moistened his lips from the flask, and started to chew a bar of meat concentrate. The little victory made him feel much happier; now he could even risk thinking about his somber future.

While there was life, there was hope; yet he could imagine no way in which he could possibly be rescued. Even if his colleagues crossed the sea, how could he reach them, half a kilometer below? “We’ll find a way down somehow,” Hub Control had promised. “That cliff can’t go right around the world, without a break anywhere.” He had been tempted to answer “Why not?” but had thought better of it.

One of the strangest things about walking inside Rama was that you could always see your destination. Here, the curve of the world did not hide; it revealed. For some time Jimmy had been aware of the crab’s objective; up there in the land that seemed to rise before him was a half-kilometer-wide pit. It was one of three in the Southern Hemisphere; from the hub, it had been impossible to see how deep they were. All had been named after prominent lunar craters, and he was approaching Copernicus. The name was hardly appropriate, for there were no surrounding hills and no central peaks. This Copernicus was merely a deep shaft, or well, with perfectly vertical sides.

When he came close enough to look into it, Jimmy was able to see a pool of ominous leaden-green water at least half a kilometer below. This would put it just about level with the sea, and he wondered if they were connected.

Winding down the interior of the well was a spiral ramp, completely recessed into the sheer wall, so that the effect was rather like that of rifling in an immense gun barrel. There seemed to be a remarkable number of turns; not until Jimmy had traced them for several revolutions, getting more and more confused in the process, did he realize that there was not one ramp, but three, totally independent and 120 degrees apart. In any other background than Rama, the whole concept would have been an impressive architectural tour de force.

The three ramps led straight down into the pool and disappeared beneath its opaque surface. Near the water line Jimmy could see a group of black tunnels, or caves. They looked rather sinister, and he wondered if they were inhabited. Perhaps the Ramans were amphibious.

As the crab approached the edge of the well, Jimmy assumed that it was going to descend one of the ramps—perhaps taking the wreckage of Dragonfly to some entity who would be able to evaluate it. Instead, the creature walked straight to the brink, extended almost half its body over the gulf without any sign of hesitation—though an error of a few centimeters would have been disastrous—and gave a brisk shrug. The fragments of Dragonfly went fluttering down into the depths. There were tears in Jimmy’s eyes as he watched them go. So much, he thought bitterly, for this creature’s intelligence.

Having disposed of the garbage, the crab swung around and started to walk toward Jimmy, standing only about ten meters away. Am I going to get the