Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke [90]
'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.