He had plenty of time; he would start with the most interesting scenery, even if it took him off his direct route. About a kilometer away to the right was a square that glittered like cut glass, or a gigantic display of jewelry. It was probably this thought that triggered Jimmy’s footsteps. Even a doomed man might reasonably be expected to take some slight interest in a few thousand square meters of gems.
He was not particularly disappointed when they turned out to be quartz crystals, millions of them, set in a bed of sand. The adjacent square of the checkerboard was rather more interesting. It was covered with an apparently random pattern of hollow metal columns, set close together and ranging in height from less than one to more than five meters. It was completely impassable; only a tank could have crashed through that forest of tubes.
Jimmy walked between the crystals and the columns until he came to the first crossroads. The square on the right was a huge rug or tapestry made of woven wire; he tried to prise a strand loose, but was unable to break it. On the left was a tesselation of hexagonal tiles, so smoothly inlaid that there were no visible joints between them. It would have appeared a continuous surface had the tiles not been colored all the hues of the rainbow. Jimmy spent many minutes trying to find two adjacent tiles of the same color, to see if he could then distinguish their boundaries, but he could not find a single example of such a coincidence.
As he did a slow pan right around the crossroads, he said plaintively to Hub Control: “What do you think this is? I feel I’m trapped in a giant jigsaw puzzle. Or is this the Raman Art Gallery?”
“We’re as baffled as you, Jimmy. But there’s never been any sign that the Ramans go in for art. Let’s wait until we have some more examples before we jump to any conclusions.”
The two examples he found at the next crossroads were not much help. One was completely blank—a smooth, neutral gray, hard but slippery to the touch. The other was a soft sponge, perforated with billions upon billions of tiny holes. He tested it with his foot, and the whole surface undulated sickeningly beneath him like a barely stabilized quicksand.
At the next crossroads he encountered something strikingly like a plowed field, except that the furrows were a uniform meter in depth, and the material of which they were made had the texture of a file or rasp. But he paid little attention to this, because the square adjacent to it was the most thought-provoking of all that he had seen. At last there was something that he could understand; and it was more than a little disturbing.
The entire square was surrounded by a fence, so conventional that he would not have looked at it twice had he seen it on Earth. There were posts, apparently of metal, five meters apart, with six strands of wire strung taut between them.
Beyond this fence was a second, identical one—and beyond that, a third. It was another example of Rama redundancy; whatever was penned inside this enclosure would have no chance of breaking out. There was no entrance—no gates that could be swung open to drive in the beast, or beasts, that were presumably kept here. Instead, there was a single hole, like a smaller version of Copernicus, in the center of the square.
Even in different circumstances, Jimmy would probably not have hesitated, but now he had nothing to lose. He quickly scaled all three fences, walked over to the hole, and peered into it.
Unlike Copernicus, this well was only fifty meters deep. There were three tunnel exits at the bottom, each of which looked large enough to accommodate an elephant. And that was all.
After staring for some time, Jimmy decided that the only thing that made sense about the arrangement was for the floor down there to be an elevator. But what it elevated he was never likely to know; he could only guess that it was quite large, and possibly quite dangerous.
During the next few hours, he walked more than ten kilometers along the edge of the sea, and the checkerboard squares had begun to blur together in his memory. He had seen some that were totally enclosed in tentlike structures of wire mesh, as if they were giant bird cages. There were others that seemed to be pools of congealed liquid,