Rama 3 – The Garden of Rama by Clarke, Arthur C.

Richard pressed on slowly, painfully, for another fifteen minutes. Then his right hip cramped and in his body’s

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involuntary response he smashed his head against the top of the passage. A little woozy from the blow, he became alarmed when he felt blood running down the side of his head.

There was no light in front of him. The dim illumination that had allowed him to monitor Prince Hal’s progress had vanished. He struggled to roll over and see behind him. It was dark everywhere and he was becoming cold again. Richard felt his head and tried to determine how severely he had been cut. His panic started when he realized that he was still hemorrhaging.

Until that moment he had not felt claustrophobic. Now, all of a sudden, wedged into a dark passage that Richard could feel pressing against him from all sides, he felt as if he could not breathe. The walls seemed to be crushing him. He could not control himself. He screamed.

In less than half a minute some kind of light was being shone into the passage from his rear. He heard the funny English accent of the Garcia biot but could not understand what it was saying. Almost certainly, he thought, it is filing an emergency report. I’d better move quickly.

He began to crawl again, ignoring his fatigue, his bleeding head, and his skinless knees and elbows. Richard estimated that he had only ten more meters to go, fifteen at the most, when the passage seemed to shrink. He couldn’t get through! He strained every muscle, but it was useless. He was definitely stymied. While he was trying to find a different crawling position that might be more geometrically favorable, he heard a soft pitter-patter approaching him from the direction of the avian habitat.

Moments later they were all over him. Richard spent five seconds of absolute terror before his mind informed him mat the tickling sensations he was feeling all over his skin were caused by the leggies. He remembered seeing them on television—little spherical creatures about two centimeters in diameter attached to six radially symmetrical, multijointed legs almost ten centimeters long if fully extended.

One had stopped and was directly on his face, its legs straddling his nose and mouth. He tried to brush it off but

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bumped his head again. Richard began squirming around to shake off the leggies and somehow managed to make forward progress. With the leggies still all over him, he crawled the final meters to the exit.

He reached the outer avian annulus just as he heard a human voice behind him. “Hello, is mere somebody in there?” it said. “Whoever you are, please identify yourself. We’re here to help you.” A strong searchlight illuminated the passage.

Richard now discovered he had another problem. His exit was one meter above the floor of the annulus. / should have crawled backward, he thought, and dragged my pack and clothes. It would have been much easier.

It was too late for hindsight. With his pack and clothes on the floor below him and a second human voice now asking questions from behind, Richard continued to crawl forward until his body was halfway out of the passage. When he felt himself falling, Richard put his hands behind his head, tucked his chin against his chest, and, tried to make himself into a ball. He then bounced and rolled into the avian annulus. As he was falling the leggies jumped off and disappeared in the darkness.

The lights the humans were shining into the passage reflected off the inner wall of the annulus. After first ascertaining that he was not injured, and that his head was no longer seriously bleeding, Richard picked up his belongings and hobbled two hundred meters to the left. He stopped just under the porthole where Prince Hal had been captured by the avian.

Despite his fatigue, Richard wasted no time scaling the wall. As soon as he had finished dressing and tending to his wounds, he started the ascent. He was certain that a deployable camera would soon be pushed into the annulus to look for him.

Fortunately, there was a small ledge in front of the porthole that was large enough to accommodate Richard. He sat there while he cut through the metal mesh screen and then pushed it aside. He expected the leggies to show up at any minute, but he remained alone. Richard didn’t

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see or hear anything from the habitat interior. Although he twice tried to summon Prince Hal on his radio, there was no response to his call.

Richard stared into the complete darkness of the avian habitat. What is in there? he wondered. The atmosphere in the interior, he reasoned, must be the same as that in the annulus, because air was allowed to circulate freely back and forth. Richard had just decided to pull out his flashlight for a look into the habitat interior when he heard sounds below and behind him. Seconds later he saw a light beam coming in his direction down on the floor of the annulus.

He scrunched himself over toward the interior of .the habitat as far as he dared, to avoid the light, and listened carefully to the sounds. It’s the deploy/able camera, he thought. But it has limited range. It cannot operate without the tether.

Richard sat very still. What do I do now? he said to himself, when it became apparent that the light attached to the camera was continuing to sweep the same, area below the porthole. They must have seen something. If I turn on my flashlight and there’s any reflection, they’ll know where I am.

He dropped a small object from his pack into the habitat to ensure that its floor level was the same as the annulus. He heard nothing. Richard tried another, slightly larger object, but still there was no sound of it striking the floor.

His heart rate surged as his mind told him that the floor of the habitat interior was far below the floor of the annulus. He recalled the basic structure of Rama, with its thick external shell, and realized that the habitat bottom could be several hundred meters below where he was sitting. Richard leaned over and stared again into the void.

The deployable camera suddenly stopped moving and its light remained focused on a specific spot in the annulus. Richard guessed that something must have fallen out of his pack while he was hurriedly hobbling from the passage to the area underneath the porthole. He knew mat other lights and cameras would be coming soon. In his mind’s eye Richard envisioned being captured and taken back to New Eden. He did not know specifically which colony

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laws he had broken, but he knew that he had ‘committed many violations. A deep resentment coursed through him as he contemplated spending months or even years in detention. Under no circumstances, he told himself, will 1 let that happen.

He reached down the inside wall of the habitat to ascertain if there were enough irregularities to find places to put his feet and hands. Satisfied that it was not an impossible descent, he fumbled in his pack for his climbing line and anchored one end of it to the hinges supporting the mesh door. Just in case I should slip, he told himself.

A second light was now in the annulus behind him. Richard eased himself into the habitat with the line wrapped securely around his waist. He did not rappel, but he did use the line for occasional support while he was groping for footholds in the dark. The climb was not technically difficult; there were many small ledges on which Richard could place his feet.

Down and down he went. When he estimated that he had descended sixty or seventy meters, Richard decided to stop and take his flashlight out of his pack. He was not comforted when he shone the light down the wall. He still could not see the bottom. What he could see, maybe fifty more meters below him, was very diffuse, like a cloud, or even fog. Great, thought Richard sarcastically, that’s just great.

Another thirty meters and he had reached the end of his climbing line. Richard could already feel the moisture from the fog. By now he was extremely tired. Since he was not willing to give up the security of the line, he backtracked up the wall a few meters, wrapped the line around himself several times, and went to sleep with his body pressed against the wall.

2

H

Us dreams were very strange. Often he was falling, head over heels, down, down, and never hitting a bottom. In the last dream before Richard awakened, To-shio Nakamura and two Oriental toughs were interrogating him in a small room with white walls.