Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,67

Appears harmless but inquisitive. It may sneak up on you before you notice it. Please acknowledge.”

The first reply came from London, fifteen kilometers to the east.

“Nothing unusual here, Skipper.”

From 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—and 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—and I was using my favorite ballpoint; it’s nearly two hundred years old. Well, now it’s lying on the ground, about five meters 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 every half-hour through the night. We must assume that from now on we may have 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 inter-planetary 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 Hemisphere 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 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 behavior was curiously purposeful and co-ordinated. They appeared 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, 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 open, but it showed no reactions to any external tests. Even a fresh human corpse would have been livelier, Laura thought. As soon as she got her prize back to the Endeavour, she started to work with her dissecting kit.

The spider was so fragile that it almost came to pieces without