Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

Three of the photographs were particularly fascinating to Richard. They depicted sleek, aerodynamically curved boats plying the Cylindrical Sea; in one of the photographs a great wave was about to crash over the top of a large boat. “Now there’s what we need,” Richard said to Nicole excitedly. “If we could find one of them, our troubles would be over.”

The squeaking above them continued with very little modulation. A spot­light moved from picture to picture at moments when there was a pause in the squeak. Nicole and Richard easily concluded that they were in a museum on some kind of tour, but there was nothing else they could know for certain. Nicole sat down against a side wall. “I’m having a lot of trouble with all this,” she said. “I feel totally out of control.”

Richard sat down beside her. “Me too,” he said, nodding. “And I just arrived in New York. So I can imagine what all this is doing to you.”

They were silent for a moment. “You know what bothers me the most?” Nicole said, trying to give some expression to the helplessness she was feel­ing. “It’s how very little I understood and appreciated my own ignorance.

Before I came on this voyage, I thought I knew the general dimensions of the relationship between my own knowledge and the knowledge of mankind. But what is staggering about this mission is how very small the entire range of human knowledge might be compared to what could be known. Just think, the sum of everything all human beings know or have ever known might be nothing more than an infinitesimal fraction of the Encyclopedia Galactica—”

“It is really frightening,” Richard interrupted enthusiastically. “And thrill­ing at the same time. . . . Sometimes when I’m in a bookstore or a library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the boob, one by one. Imagine what it would be like to be in the true library, one that combined the knowledge of all the species in the universe. . . . The very thought makes me woozy.”

Nicole turned to him and slapped his leg. “All right, Richard,” she said jokingly, changing the mood, “now that we have reaffirmed how incredibly stupid we are, what’s our plan? I figure we have already covered about a kilometer in this tunnel. Where do we go from here?”

“I propose we walk another fifteen minutes in the same direction. In my experience tunnels always lead someplace. If we don’t find anything, we’ll turn around.”

He helped Nicole up and gave her a small hug. “All right, Nikki,” he said with a wink. “Half a league onward.”

Nicole frowned and shook her head. “Twice is enough for one day,” she said, extending her hand toward Richard.

46 THE BETTER PART OF VALOR

The huge circular hole below them extended into the darkness. Only the top five meters of the shaft were lit. Metal spikes, about a meter long, protruded from the wall, each separated from its neighbors by the same distance.

“This is definitely the destination of the tunnels,” Richard muttered to himself. He was having some difficulty integrating this huge, cylindrical hole with its walls of spikes into his overall conception of Rama. He and Nicole had walked around the perimeter twice. They had even backtracked several hundred meters down the other, adjacent tunnel, concluding from its slight curvature to the right that it had probably originated at the same cavern as the tunnel they had followed earlier.

“Well,” Richard said at length, shrugging his shoulders, “here we go,” He put his right foot on one of the spikes to test its ability to hold his weight. It was firm. He moved his left leg down to another of the spikes and descended one more level with his right leg. “The spacing is nearly perfect,” he said, glancing back at Nicole. “It shouldn’t be a difficult climb.”

“Richard Wakefield,” Nicole said from the rim of the hole, “are you trying to tell me that you intend to climb down into that chasm? And that you expect me to follow?”

“I don’t expect anything of you,” he replied. “But I can’t see turning back now. What’s our alternative? Should we go back down the tunnel to the ramps and exit? For what? To see if anyone has found us yet? You saw the photographs of the boats. Maybe they’re right here at the bottom. Maybe there’s even a secret river that runs underground into the Cylindrical Sea.” “Maybe,” Nicole said, starting to descend slowly now that Richard’s pro­gress had triggered another bank of lights below them, “one of those things that made the bizarre noise is waiting for us down at the bottom.”

“I’ll find out,” Richard said. “Hallooo, down there. We two human-type beings are coming down.” He waved and momentarily lost his balance.

“Don’t be a show-off,” Nicole said, coming down beside him. She paused to catch her breath and look around. Her two feet were resting on spikes and she was holding tightly to two others with her hands. / must be insane, she said to herself, just look at this place. It’s easy to imagine a hundred gruesome deaths. Richard had dropped down to another pair of spikes. And look at him. Is he totally immune to fear? Or just reckless? He actually seems to be enjoying all this.

The third bank of lights illuminated a lattice on the opposite wall below them. It was hanging among all the spikes and, from a distance in the dim light, looked startlingly like a smaller version of the object that had been attached to the two skyscrapers in New York. Richard hurried around the cylinder to examine the lattice. “Come over here,” he shouted at Nicole. “I think it’s the same damn material.”

The lattice was anchored to the wall by small bolts. At Richard’s insis­tence, Nicole cut off a piece and handed it to him. He stretched it and watched it regain its shape. He studied its internal structure. “It is the same stuff,” he said. His brow knitted into furrows. “But what the hell does it mean?”

Nicole stood beside him and idly shone her flashlight into the depths below them. She was about to suggest that they climb out and head for more familiar terrain when she thought she saw a reflection from a floor about twenty meters below. “I’m going to make you a proposition,” Nicole said to Richard. “While you’re studying that lattice cord, I’ll drop down another several meters. We may be near the bottom of this bizarre well of spikes, or whatever it is. If not, then we’ll abandon this place.”

“All right,” Richard said absentmindedly. He was already involved in his examination of the lattice cord using the microscope he had taken from his backpack.

Nicole nimbly descended to the floor. “I guess you’d better come down,” she called to Richard. “There are two more tunnels, one large and one small. Plus another hole in the center—” He was beside her immediately. He had climbed down as soon as he had seen the lower platform illuminated by lights.

Richard and Nicole were now standing on a ledge three meters wide at the bottom of the spiked cylinder. The ledge formed a ring around another smaller descending hole that also had spikes growing out of its walls. To their left and right, dark arched tunnels were cut into the rock or metal that was the base construction material for the extensive underground world. The tunnel on their left was five to six meters high; the tiny tunnel on the opposite side, one hundred and eighty degrees around the ring, was only half a meter tall.

Running out of each of the two tunnels, and penetrating half a ledge-width into the ring, were two small parallel strips of unknown material that were fastened to the floor. The strips were very close together in the smaller tunnel and more widely spaced in the other. Richard was sitting on his knees examining the strips in front of the large tunnel when he heard a distant rumble. “Listen,” he said to Nicole, as the two of them instinctively backed away from the entrance.

The rumbling increased and changed into a whining sound, as if some­thing were moving swiftly through the air. Far off in the tunnel, which ran straight as an arrow, Richard and Nicole could see some lights switch on. They tensed. They didn’t need to wait long for an explanation. A vehicle that resembled a hovering subway burst into view and sped toward them, stopping suddenly with its front edge just over the farthest extension of the strips on the floor.

Richard and Nicole had recoiled as the vehicle had hurtled toward them. Both were dangerously close to the edge of the ring. For several seconds they stood in silence, each staring at the aerodynamic shape hovering in front of them. Then they looked at each other and laughed simultaneously. “Okay,” Nicole said nervously, “I get it. We’ve crossed into some new dimension. In this one it’s just a little difficult to find the subway station. . . . This is so totally absurd. We climb down a spiked barrel and end up in a Metro station. … I don’t know about you, Richard, but I’ve had enough. I’ll take a few normal avians and manna melon any day of the week. . . .”