Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,82

a second fear, also based on innumerable ancient crime dramas, could be better grounded. Though there might be no clanging alarm bells and screaming sirens, it was reasonable to assume that Rama would have some kind of warning system. How otherwise did the biots know when and where their services were needed?

“Those without goggles, turn your backs,” ordered Willard Myron. There was a smell of nitric oxides as the air itself started to burn in the beam of the laser torch, and a steady sizzling as the fiery knife sliced toward secrets that had been hidden since the birth of man.

Nothing material could resist this concentration of power, and the cut proceeded smoothly at a rate of several meters a minute. In a remarkably short time, a section large enough to admit a man had been sliced out.

Since the cutaway section showed no sign of moving, Myron tapped it gently—then harder—then banged on it with all his strength. It fell inward with a hollow, reverberating crash.

Once again, as he had done during that first entrance into Rama, Norton remembered the archeologist who had opened the old Egyptian tomb. He did not expect to see the glitter of gold; in fact, he had no preconceived ideas at all as he crawled through the opening, his flashlight held in front of him.

A Greek temple made of glass—that was his first impression. The building was filled with row upon row of vertical crystalline columns, about a meter wide and stretching from floor to ceiling. There were hundreds of them, marching away into the darkness beyond the reach of his light.

He walked toward the nearest column and directed his beam into its interior. Refracted as through a cylindrical lens, the light fanned out on the far side to be focused and refocused, getting fainter with each repetition, in the array of pillars beyond. He felt that he was in the middle of some complicated demonstration in optics.

“Very pretty,” said the practical Mercer, “but what does it mean? Who needs a forest of glass pillars?”

Norton rapped gently on the column. It sounded solid, though more metallic than crystalline. He was completely baffled, and so he followed a piece of useful advice he had heard long ago: “When in doubt, say nothing and move on.”

As he reached the next column, which looked exactly like the first, he heard an exclamation of surprise from Mercer.

“I could have sworn this pillar was empty. Now there’s something inside it.”

Norton glanced quickly back. “Where?” he said. “I don’t see anything.”

He followed the direction of Mercer’s pointing finger. It was aimed at nothing; the column was completely transparent.

“You can’t see it?” said Mercer incredulously. “Come around to this side. Damn—now I’ve lost it!”

“What’s going on here?” demanded Calvert. It was several minutes before he got even an approximation of an answer.

The columns were not transparent from every angle or under all illuminations. As one walked around them, objects would suddenly flash into view, apparently embedded in their depths like flies in amber, and would then disappear again. There were dozens of them, all different. They looked absolutely real and solid, yet many seemed to occupy the identical volume of space.

“Holograms,” said Calvert. “Just like a museum on Earth.”

That was the obvious explanation, and therefore Norton viewed it with suspicion. His doubts grew as he examined the other columns, and conjured up the images stored in their interiors.

Hand tools (though for huge and peculiar hands), containers, small machines with keyboards that appeared to have been made for more than five fingers, scientific instruments, startlingly conventional domestic utensils, including knives and plates that apart from their size would not have attracted a second glance on any terrestrial table: they were all there, with hundreds of less identifiable objects, often jumbled up together in the same pillar. A museum, surely, would have some logical arrangement, some segregation of related items. This seemed to be a completely random collection of hardware.

They had photographed the elusive images inside a score of the crystal pillars when the sheer variety of items gave Norton a clue. Perhaps this was not a collection but a catalog, indexed according to some arbitrary but perfectly logical system. He thought of the wild juxtapositions that any dictionary or alphabetized list will give, and tried the idea on his companions.

“I see what you mean,” said Mercer. “The Ramans might be equally surprised to find us putting… ah… camshafts next to cameras.”

“Or books beside boots,” added Calvert after several seconds of hard thinking. One