Rendezvous With Rama

chapter 42. Temple of Glass
"If we try it," said Karl Mercer, "do you think the biots will stop us?"

"They may; that's one of the things I want to find out. Why are you looking at me like that?"

Mercer gave his slow, secret grin, which was liable to be set off at any moment by a private joke he might or might not share with his shipmates.

"I was wondering, Skipper, if you think you own Rama. Until now, you've vetoed any attempt to cut into buildings. Why the switch? Have the Hermians given you ideas?"

Norton laughed, then suddenly checked himself. It was a shrewd question, and he was not sure if the obvious answers were the right ones.

"Perhaps I have been ultra-cautious - I've tried to avoid trouble. But this is our last chance; if we're forced to retreat we won't have lost much."

"Assuming that we retreat in good order."

"Of course. But the biots have never shown hostility; and except for the Spiders, I don't believe there's anything here that can catch us - if we do have to run for it."

"You may run, Skipper, but I intend to leave with dignity. And incidentally, I've decided why the biots are so polite to us."

"It's a little late for a new theory."

"Here it is, anyway. They think we're Ramans. They can't tell the difference between one oxy-eater and another."

"I don't believe they're that stupid."

"It's not a matter of stupidity. They've been programmed for their particular jobs, and we simply don't come into their frame of reference."

"Perhaps you're right. We may find out - as soon as we start to work on London."

Joe Calvert had always enjoyed those old bank-robbery movies, but he had never expected to be involved in one. Yet this was, essentially, what he was doing now.

The deserted streets of "London" seemed full of menace, though he knew that was only his guilty conscience. He did not really believe that the sealed and windowless structures ranged all around them were full of watchful inhabitants, waiting to emerge in angry hordes as soon as the invaders laid a hand on their property. In fact, he was quite certain that this whole complex - like all the other towns - was merely some kind of storage area.

Yet a second fear, also based on innumerable ancient crime dramas, could be better grounded. There might be no clanging alarm bells and screaming sirens, but 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 Sergeant 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 towards 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 metres a minute. In a remarkably short time, a section large enough to admit a man had been sliced out.

As the cut-away section showed no signs of moving, Myron tapped it gently - then harder - then banged on it with all his strength. It fell inwards with a hollow, reverberating crash.

Once again, as he had done during that very first entrance into Rama, Norton remembered the archaeologist 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 metre wide and stretching from floor to ceiling. There were hundreds of them, marching away into the darkness beyond the reach of his light.

Norton walked towards 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 one column. It sounded solid, though more metallic than crystalline. He was completely baffled, and so 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 still completely transparent.

"You can't see it?" said Mercer incredulously. "Come around this side. Damn - now I've lost it!"

"What's going on here?" demanded Calvert. It was several minutes before he got even the first approximation to 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 which 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 catalogue, 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' hard thinking. One could play this game for hours, he decided, with increasing degrees of impropriety.

"That's the idea," replied Norton. "This may be an indexed catalogue for 3-D images - templates - solid blueprints, if you like to call them that."

"For what purpose?"

"Well, you know the theory about the biots... the idea that they don't exist until they're needed and then they're created - synthesized - from patterns stored somewhere?"

"I see," said Mercer slowly and thoughtfully. "So when a Raman needs a left-handed blivet, he punches out the correct code number, and a copy is manufactured from the pattern in here."

"Something like that. But please don't ask me about the practical details."

The pillars through which they had been moving had been steadily growing in size, and were now more than two metres in diameter. The images were correspondingly larger; it was obvious that, for doubtless excellent reasons, the Ramans believed in sticking to a one-to-one scale. Norton wondered how they stored anything really big, if this was the case.

To increase their rate of coverage, the four explorers had now spread out through the crystal columns and were taking photographs as quickly as they could get their cameras focused on the fleeting images. This was an astonishing piece of luck, Norton told himself, though he felt that he had earned it; they could not possibly have made a better choice than this Illustrated Catalogue of Raman Artifacts. And yet, in another way; it could hardly have been more frustrating. There was nothing actually here, except impalpable patterns of light and darkness; these apparently solid objects did not really exist.

Even knowing this, more than once Norton felt an almost irresistible urge to laser his way into one of the pillars, so that he could have something material to take back to Earth. It was the same impulse, he told himself wryly, that would prompt a monkey to grab the reflection of a banana in a mirror.

He was photographing what seemed to be some kind of optical device when Calvert's shout started him running through the pillars.

"Skipper - Karl - Will - look at this!"

Joe was prone to sudden enthusiasms, but what he had found was enough to justify any amount of excitement.

Inside one of the two-metre columns was an elaborate harness, or uniform, obviously made for a vertically-standing creature, much taller than a man. A very narrow central metal band apparently surrounded the waist, thorax or some division unknown to terrestrial zoology. From this rose three slim columns, tapering outwards and ending in a perfectly circular belt, an impressive metre in diameter. Loops equally spaced along it could only be intended to go round upper limbs or arms. Three of them...

There were numerous pouches, buckles, bandoliers from which tools (or weapons?) protruded, pipes and electrical conductors, even small black boxes that would have looked perfectly at home in an electronics lab on Earth. The whole arrangement was almost as complex as a spacesuit, though it obviously provided only partial covering for the creature wearing it.

And was that creature a Raman? Norton asked himself. We'll probably never know; but it must have been intelligent - no mere animal could cope with all that sophisticated equipment.

"About two and a half metres high," said Mercer thoughtfully, "not counting the head - whatever that was like."

"With three arms - and presumably three legs. The same plan as the Spiders, on a much more massive scale. Do you suppose that's a coincidence?"

"Probably not. We design robots in our own image; we might expect the Ramans to do the same."

Joe Calvert, unusually subdued, was looking at the display with something like awe.

"Do you suppose they know we're here?" he half-whispered.

"I doubt it," said Mercer. "We've not even reached their threshold of consciousness - though the Hermians certainly had a good try."

They were still standing there, unable to drag themselves away, when Pieter called from the Hub, his voice full of urgent concern.

"Skipper - you'd better get outside."

"What is it - biots heading this way?"

"No - something much more serious. The lights are going out."