Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,57

same treatment? he wondered. He hoped the camera was not too unsteady as he showed Hub Control the rapidly approaching monster. “What do you advise?” he whispered anxiously, without much hope that he would get a useful answer. It was some small consolation to realize that he was making history, and his mind raced through the approved patterns for such a meeting. Until now, all of these had been purely theoretical. He would be the first man to check them in practice.

“Don’t run until you’re sure it’s hostile,” Hub Control whispered back at him. Run where? Jimmy asked himself. He thought he could outdistance the thing in a hundred-meter sprint, but he had a sick certainty that it could wear him down over the long haul.

Slowly, Jimmy held up his outstretched hands. Men had been arguing for two hundred years about this gesture; would every creature, everywhere in the universe, interpret this as “See—no weapons”? But no one could think of anything better.

The crab showed no reaction whatsoever, nor did it slacken its pace. Ignoring Jimmy completely, it walked straight past him and headed purposefully into the south. Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.

He had seldom been so humiliated in his life. Then his sense of humor came to the rescue. After all, it was no great matter to have been ignored by an animated garbage truck. It would have been worse if it had greeted him as a long-lost brother.

He walked back to the rim of Copernicus, and stared down into its opaque waters. For the first time, he noticed that vague shapes, some of them quite large, were moving slowly back and forth beneath the surface. Presently one of them headed toward the nearest spiral ramp, and something that looked like a multilegged tank started on the long ascent. At the rate it was going, Jimmy decided, it would take almost an hour to get here; if it was a threat, it was a very slow-moving one.

Then he noticed a flicker of much more rapid movement, near those cavelike openings down by the water line. Something was traveling swiftly along the ramp, but he could not focus clearly upon it, or discern any definite shape. It was as if he was looking at a small whirlwind or dust devil, about the size of a man.

He blinked and shook his head, keeping his eyes closed for several seconds. When he opened them again, the apparition was gone.

Perhaps the impact had shaken him up more than he had realized; this was the first time he had ever suffered from visual hallucinations. He would not mention it to Hub Control.

Nor would he bother to explore these ramps, as he had half thought of doing. It would obviously be a waste of energy.

The spinning phantom he had merely imagined seeing had nothing to do with his decision—nothing at all; for, of course, Jimmy did not believe in ghosts.

CHAPTER 30

THE FLOWER

Jimmy’s exertions had made him thirsty, and be was acutely conscious of the fact that in all this land there was no water that a man could drink. With the contents of his flask, he could probably survive a week—but for what purpose? The best brains of Earth would soon be focused on his problem, and doubtless Commander Norton would be bombarded with suggestions. But he could imagine no way in which he could lower himself down the face of that half-kilometer cliff. Even if he had a long-enough rope, there was no place to which he could attach it.

Nevertheless, it was foolish—and unmanly—to give up without a struggle. Any help would have to come from the sea, and while he was marching toward it he could carry on with his job as if nothing had happened. No one else would ever observe and photograph the varied terrains through which he must pass, and that would guarantee a posthumous immortality. Though he would have preferred many other honors, that was better than nothing.

He was only three kilometers from the sea as poor Dragonfly could have flown, but it seemed unlikely that he could reach it in a straight line; some of the terrain ahead of him might prove too great an obstacle. That was no problem, however, because there were plenty of alternative routes. He could see them all, spread out on the great curving map that swept up and away from him on either