brushes.
Nicole jumped to her feet. Richard closed the door without a sound and hurried over beside her. “Come on,” he said in a whisper. “We have to find another way out of here.”
They walked through the next room, then another and another. All were dark and empty. They lost their sense of direction as they raced through the unfamiliar territory. Eventually they came to a large double door at the far side of one of the many identical rooms. Richard told Nicole to stand back as he cautiously pushed open the door. “Holy shit!” he exclaimed as soon as he looked into the room. “What in the world is this?”
Nicole came up beside Richard and her eyes followed his flashlight beam as it fell on the bizarre contents of the adjoining chamber. The room was cluttered with large objects. The one closest to the door looked like a large amoeba on a skateboard, the next one like a gigantic ball of twine with two antennae sticking out of its center. There was no sound in the room and nothing moved. Richard lifted his beam higher and let it move quickly around the rest of the crowded room.
“Go back,” Nicole said excitedly, catching a glimpse of something familiar. “Over there. A few meters to the left of the other door.”
Seconds later the beam illuminated four humanlike figures, dressed in helmets and space suits, that were sitting against the far wall. “It’s the human biots,” Nicole said excitedly, “the ones we saw in Rama II out on the Central Plain.”
“Norton and company?” Richard asked incredulously, a shiver of fear running down his spine.
“I bet it is,” Nicole responded.
They entered the room slowly and tiptoed around the many objects as they made their way toward the figures in question. Both Richard and Nicole knelt down beside the four apparent humans. “This must be a biot dump,” Nicole said, after they had verified that the face behind the transparent helmet was indeed a copy of the Commander Norton who led the first Rama expedition.
Richard stood up and shook his head. “Absolutely unbelievable,” he said. “What are they doing here?” He let his flashlight beam wander around the room.
A second later Nicole screamed. No more than four meters away from her, an octospider was moving, or at least so it seemed in the peculiar light. Richard rushed to her side. The two of them quickly verified that what they were seeing was only an octospider biot, and then they both laughed for several minutes.
“Richard Wakefield,” Nicole said when she could finally contain her nervous laughter, “may I go home now? I’ve had enough.”
“I guess so,” Richard said with a smile. “As long as we can find the way.”
As they penetrated deeper and deeper into the maze of rooms and tunnels in the area around the pentagon, Nicole became convinced that they would never find their way out. Eventually Richard slowed the pace and started storing information in his portable computer. Afterward he was at least able to prevent their going in circles, but Richard never connected his growing map to any of the landmarks they had seen before they fled from the octospiders.
When both Richard and Nicole were starting to feel desperate, they chanced upon a small truck biot carrying an odd collection of small objects down a narrow corridor. Richard became more relaxed. ‘Those things look as if they have been custom-made to someone’s specifications,” he said to Nicole, “like the objects delivered to us in the White Room. If we go back in the direction from which the biot came, then maybe we will locate where all our objects are manufactured. From there, it should be easy to find the path to our lair.”
It was a long hike. They were both worn out several hours later when their corridor widened into a huge factory area with a very high ceiling. At the center of the factory were twelve fat cylinders that looked like old- fashioned boilers on the Earth. Each was four or five meters high and a meter and a half wide. The boilers were arranged in four rows of three.
Conveyor belts, or at least the Rama equivalent, led into and out of each of the boilers, two of which were in operation at the moment. Richard was fascinated. “Look over there,” he said, pointing at a vast warehouse floor covered with stacks of objects of all sizes and descriptions. “That must be all the raw material. A request arrives at the central computer, which is probably in that hut behind the boilers, where it is processed and allocated to one of these machines. Biots go out, gather up the proper items, and place them on the conveyor belts. Inside the boilers these raw materials are altered significantly, for what comes out is the object ordered by whatever intelligent species is using the keyboard or its equivalent to communicate with the Ramans.”
Richard approached the closest active boiler. “But the real question,” he said, overflowing with excitement, “is what kind of process takes place inside these boilers? Is it chemical? Is it perhaps nuclear, involving element transmutations? Or have the Ramans some other technology for manufacturing completely beyond our ken?”
He knocked several times very hard on the outside of the active boiler. “The walls are very thick,” he announced. Richard then bent down where the conveyor belt entered the boiler and started to stick his hand inside. “Richard,” Nicole yelled, “don’t you think that’s foolish?”
Richard glanced up at his wife and shrugged. As he bent down again to study the belt/boiler interface, a bizarre biot that looked like a camera box with legs scurried over from the back of the large room. It quickly wedged itself between Richard and the active conveyor belt and then expanded in size, forcing Richard away from the active process.
“Nice move,” Richard said appreciatively. He turned to Nicole. “The system has excellent fault protection.”
“Richard,” Nicole now said, “if you don’t mind, can we please return to our major task? Or have you forgotten that we do not know the way back to our lair?”
“Just a little while longer,” Richard answered. “I want to see what comes out of the active boiler closest to us. Maybe by seeing the output, after having already seen the input, I can infer the kind of intervening process.”
Nicole shook her head. “I had forgotten what a knowledge junkie you are. You’re the only human I have ever met who would stop to study a new plant or animal while he was completely lost in a forest.”
Nicole found another long passageway on the opposite side of the huge room. An hour later she finally convinced Richard to leave the fascinating alien factory. They had no way of knowing where this new passageway led, but it was their only hope. Again they walked and walked. Each time Nicole started to become tired or despondent, Richard would lift her spirits by extolling the wonder of everything they had seen since they had left their lair.
“This place is absolutely amazing, stupendous,” he said at one point, barely able to contain himself, “I can’t begin to assess what it all means… Not only are humans not alone in this universe, we are not even near the top of the pyramid in terms of capability…”
Richard’s enthusiasm sustained them until finally, when they were both close to exhaustion, they saw ahead of them a branching in the corridor. Because of the angles, Richard felt certain that they had returned to the original no more than two kilometers from their lair. “Yippee,” Richard yelled, picking up his pace. “Look”-he shouted over at Nicole, his flashlight pointed in front of him—”we’re almost home.”
Something Nicole heard at that moment made her stop dead in her tracks. “Richard,” she cried, “turn off the light.”
He spun quickly around, nearly falling, and switched off his flashlight. In the next few seconds there was no doubt. The sound of dragging brushes was growing louder.
“Run for it,” yelled Nicole, bolting past her husband in a full sprint. Richard reached the intersection no more than fifteen seconds before the first of the octospiders. The aliens were coming up from the canal. As he was running away from them, Richard turned around and shone his flashlight behind him. In that brief instant he could see at least four colored patterns moving in the darkness.
They brought all the furniture they could find into the White Room and created a barrier across the bottom of the black screen. For several hours Richard and Nicole watched and waited, expecting that at any moment the screen would lift up and their lair would be invaded by the octospiders. But nothing happened. At length they left Joan and Eleanor in the White Room as sentries and spent the night in the nursery with Tammy and Timmy.
“Why didn’t the octospiders follow us?” Richard said to Nicole early the next morning. “They almost certainly know the screen raises automatically. If they had come to the end of the corridor—”
“Maybe they didn’t want to frighten us again,” Nicole interrupted gently. Richard’s brow furrowed and he gave Nicole a quizzical look. “We still have no hard evidence that the octospiders are hostile,” Nicole continued,
