Rama II Part 17

When the meal was over the avians, who had not talked at all while they were eating, huddled in a circle for several seconds. The huddle broke up after the brown velvet one jabbered something that sounded to Nicole like a song. One at a time, they then flew over for another close-up look at her and disappeared out the door.

Nicole sat quietly and wondered what would happen next. The avians had left the lights on in the dining room (or banquet hall, or whatever it was), but it was pitch black in the corridor outside. They clearly intended for her to stay where she was, at least for the time being. It had been a long time since Nicole had had any sleep and she was pleasantly full from the meal. Oh well, she thought to herself, curling up on the floor after a short internal debate, maybe a short nap will refresh me.

In her dream she heard someone calling her name, but it was very far away. She had to strain to hear the voice. Nicole woke with a start and tried to remember where she was. She listened carefully but didn't hear anything. When she checked her watch, she learned that she had been asleep for four hours. I'd better get out of here, Nicole thought. It will be dark soon and I don't want to miss my chance to be rescued.

She moved out into the hallway and switched on her small flashlight. Nicole reached the vertical corridor in less than a minute. Immediately she began scrambling up the ledges. Just below where she had stopped during her descent for a drink of water, Nicole heard a strange noise above her. She stopped to catch her breath. She leaned slightly into the gaping hole and shone her light above, in the direction of the sound. Something large was moving back and forth on the portion of the first level that jutted out into the vertical corridor, Nicole cautiously climbed up to the ledge directly underneath the new phenomenon and crouched beneath it. Whatever it was, it was covering each square centimeter of the ledge in front of the tunnel entrance once every five seconds. There was no way Nicole could avoid it. She couldn't possibly pull herself up and then climb to the next ledge above in less than five seconds.

She moved down to one end of her ledge and listened intently to the sound above her. When the thing turned and went in the opposite direction, Nicole pulled her head over the edge of the next level. The object was moving rapidly on treads and looked altogether like an armored tank from the rear. She had only a brief glimpse, for the top half of the tank spun around quickly at the other end as it prepared to reverse its field.

One thing is certain, Nicole said to herself as she stood on the ledge below. That tank is some kind of sentinel. Nicole wondered whether or not it had any sensors-certainly it had given no indication that it had heard her-but decided that she couldn't afford to find out. It wouldn't be much of a guard if it couldn't at least stop an intruder.

Nicole climbed slowly down the ledges to the dining room level. She was sorely disappointed and now angry with herself for having come into the avian lair in the first place. It still did not make sense to her that the avians might be holding her as a captive. After all, hadn't the creature invited her to visit after Nicole had saved its life?

Nicole was also puzzled by the tank sentinel. Its existence was baffling, and completely inconsistent with the level of technological development of everything else in the lair. What was its purpose? Where did it come from? Things just get curiouser and curiouser, Nicole thought, recalling a phrase from one of her favorite books.

When she was back on the second underground level, Nicole looked around to see if there was any other way she could get out of the lair. There was an identical set of ledges on the opposite side of the vertical corridor. If she could jump across, then maybe . . .

Before considering seriously such a plan, Nicole had to determine whether or not a tank, or equivalent sentinel, was guarding the opposite horizontal tunnel on the first level. She couldn't tell from where she was standing, so Nicole, muttering to herself about her stupidity, climbed back up the ledges on her side to obtain a good view across the corridor. She was in luck. The ledge in front of the opposite tunnel was empty.

By the time she returned to the second underground level again, Nicole was fatigued from all the climbing. She stared across the corridor and at the lights in the abyss below her. She would almost certainly die if she fell. Nicole was a very good judge of distance and correctly reckoned that it was about four meters from the edge of the ledge extension in front of her tunnel to the edge on the opposite side. Four meters, she mused, four and a half at the most. Allowing for some room at both ends, I need a five-meter jump to clear it In flight suit with backpack.

Nicole remembered a Sunday afternoon at Beauvois four years earlier, when Genevieve was ten and both mother and daughter were watching the 2196 Olympics on television.

"Can you still jump a long way, Mama?" the little girl had asked, having a hard time picturing her mother as an Olympic champion.

Pierre had cajoled her into taking Genevieve to the athletics field adjacent to the secondary school at Luynes. Her timing had been way off in the triple jump, but after thirty minutes of warmup and practice Nicole had managed to long jump six and a half meters. Genevieve had not been that impressed. "Shoot, Mama," her daughter had said while they were bicycling home through the green countryside, "Danielle's big sister can jump almost that far, and she's only a university student."

The memory of Genevieve stirred a profound sadness in Nicole. She longed to hear her daughter's voice, help her with her hair, or go boating with her on their small private pond beside the Bresme. We never value enough the time we have, she thought, until they're no longer around. Nicole started back down the tunnel to where the avians had left her. She wouldn't try the jump. It was too dangerous. If she slipped . . .

"Nicole des Jardins, where the h.e.l.l are you?" Nicole froze the moment she heard the call, very faint, off in the distance. Had she imagined it? "Nicole," she heard again. It was definitely Richard Wakefield's voice. She ran back to the vertical corridor and started to shout. No, she thought rapidly, that will wake them. It will not take me more than five minutes. I can jump . . .

Nicole's adrenaline was pumping at an incredible rate. She marked off her steps and soared across the chasm with plenty of room to spare. She climbed up the ledges at breakneck speed. Toward the top she beard Wakefield calling her again.

"I'm here, Richard. Below you," she shouted. "Underneath the plaza."

Nicole reached the top ledge and started pus.h.i.+ng on the covering. It wouldn't budge. "s.h.i.+t," she shouted as the puzzled Richard paced around in the vicinity. "Richard, come over here. Where you hear my voice. Beat on the ground." Richard began to knock hard on the covering. They were shouting at each other. The noise was deafening. From far below Nicole heard the flapping of wings. As the avians rose in the corridor, they began to shriek and jabber.

"Help me," Nicole hollered at them as they drew close. She pointed up at the cover. "My friend is out there." Richard continued to pound. Only the two avians who had originally found Nicole in the pit came up to where she was. They hovered around her, flapping their wings and jabbering back at the five others who were one level below. The creatures were apparently having an argument, for the black velvet avian twice extended its neck down toward its a.s.sociates and uttered a fearsome screech.

The covering suddenly opened. Richard had to scramble to keep from falling in. When he looked down into the hole he saw Nicole and two gigantic bird creatures, one of which flew right by him as Nicole crawled out of the opening. "Holy s.h.i.+t'" he exclaimed, his eyes following the flight of the avian. Nicole was overcome with joy. She ran into Wakefield's arms. "Richard, oh Richard," she said, "I'm so glad to see you."

He grinned at her and returned the hug. "If I had known you felt like this," he said, "I would have come earlier." 42 TWO EXPLORERS Let me get this straight. You're telling me that you're alone?

And we have no way to cross the Cylindrical Sea?" Richard nodded. It was too much for Nicole. Five minutes earlier she had been exultant. Her ordeal had finally been over. She had imagined returning to the Earth and seeing her father and daughter again. Now he was telling her ... She walked away quickly and leaned her head against one of the buildings surrounding the plaza. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she gave vent to her disappointment. Richard followed her at a distance.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"It's not your fault/' Nicole replied after she had regained her composure. "It just never occurred to me that I might see one of the crew again and still not be rescued-" She stopped herself. It was not fair for her to make Richard suffer. She walked over to him and forced a smile.

"I'm not usually this emotional," Nicole said. "And I interrupted your story right in the middle." She paused a second to wipe her eyes. "You were telling me about the shark biots chasing the motorboat. You saw them first when you were about halfway across the sea?"

"More or less," Richard replied. Her disappointment had subdued him. He tried a nervous laugh. "Do you remember, after one of the simulations, when the review board criticized us for not having sent a pilotless version of our motorboat into the water first, just to make sure that there wasn't something peculiar to the new design that would disturb the 'ecological equilibrium' in some way? Well, I thought their suggestion at the time was ridiculous. Now I'm not so certain. Those shark biots hardly bothered the Newton vessels, but they were definitely angry about my high-speed motorboat."

Richard and Nicole had sat down together on one of the gray metal boxes that dotted the plaza area. "I managed to dodge them once," Richard continued, "but I was extremely lucky. When I had no other choice I simply jumped out and swam. Fortunately for me, they were mostly after the boat1 didn't see one again while I was swimming until I was only a hundred meters from sh.o.r.e."

"How long have you been inside Rama altogether now?" Nicole asked.

"About seventeen hours. I left the Newton two hours after dawn. I spent too much d.a.m.n time trying to repair the communications station at Beta. But it was impossible." Nicole felt his flight suit. "Except for your hair, I can't even tell you've been wet."

Richard laughed. "Ob, the miracles of fabric engineering. Would you believe that this suit was almost dry by the time I changed my thermals? By then I was having a hard time convincing even myself that I had spent that twenty minutes swimming in the cold water." He looked at his companion. She was loosening up very slowly. "But I'm surprised at you, Cosmonaut des Jardins. You haven't even asked me the most important question. How did I know where you were?" Nicole had pulled out her scanner and was reading Richard's biometry. Everything was within tolerances, despite his recent harrowing swim. She was a little slow to understand his question. "You knew where I was?" she said finally, knitting her brow. "I figured you were just wandering around-"

"Come on, lady. New York is small, but not that small. There's twenty-five square kilometers of territory inside these walls. And radio around here is completely unreliable." He grinned. "Let's see, if I stood and called your name in each square meter, I would have to call you twenty-five million times. At one call every ten seconds-allowing myself time to listen for a response and move to the next square meter-that would be six calls a minute. So it would take four million minutes, which is slightly more than sixty thousand hours, or twenty-6ve hundred Earth days-"

"Okay. Okay," Nicole interrupted. She was finally laughing.

"Tell me how you knew where I was."

Richard stood up. "May I?" he said dramatically, extending his fingers toward the breast pocket of Nicole's flight suit.

"I suppose so," she answered. "Although I can't imagine what-" Richard reached into her pocket and pulled out Prince Hal. "He led me to you," Wakefield said. "You're a good man, my prince, but for a while I thought you'd failed me."

Nicole had no idea what Richard was talking about. "Prince Hal and Falstaff have matching navigation beacons," he explained. "They put out fifteen strong pulses a second. With Falstaff fixed in my hut at Beta and with an equivalent transceiver over at Alpha campsite, I could follow you by triangulation. So I knew exactly where you were-at least in terms of x-y coordinates. My simple tracking algorithm wasn't designed for excursions inz."

"That's what an engineer would call my visit to the avian lair?" Nicole said with another smile. "An excursion in z?"

"That's one way of describing it."

Nicole shook her head. "I don't know about you, Wakefield. If you really knew where I was all this time, why the h.e.l.l did you wait so long-"

"Because we lost you, or thought we had, before we found you ... after I came back to retrieve Falstaff."

"Have I become a dullard in the last week, or is this roundabout explanation incredibly confusing?" It was Richard's turn to laugh. "Maybe I should try to make my presentation more orderly." He paused to arrange his mental notes. "I was really irritated," he began, "back in June when the Engineering Steering Group decided not to use navigation beacons as backup personnel locators. I had argued, unsuccessfully, that there might be emergency situations, or unforeseen circ.u.mstances, in which the signalto-noise ratio on the regular voice link would be below threshold. So I equipped three of my own robots just in case . . .".

Nicole studied Richard Wakefield while he talked. She had forgotten that he was both amazing and amusing. She was certain that if she asked the right questions, he could talk on this subject alone for a full hour.

". . . Then Falstaff lost the signal," he was saying. "I wasn't present myself at the time, for I was preparing to come with Hiro Yamanaka to pick you and Francesca up in the helicopter, But Falstaff has a small recorder and timetags all the data. After you didn't show up, 1 replayed the data from the recorder and found that the signal had abruptly disappeared.

"It came back on only briefly, while we were talking on the radio a few minutes later, but several seconds after our last conversation the signal was gone for good. The signature suggested a hardware failure to me. I thought Prince Hal had malfunctioned. When Francesca said that you had been with her up until the plaza, then I was virtually certain that Prince Hal-"

Nicole had only been listening with one ear but she bolted to attention when Richard mentioned Francesca. "Stop," Nicole interrupted, holding up her hand. "What did you say she told you?"

"That you and she had left the bam together and that you had walked away from her several minutes later to look for Takagis.h.i.+-"

"That's complete bulls.h.i.+t," Nicole said.

"What do you mean?" Richard asked.

"It's a lie. An absolute and total untruth. I fell into that pit I told you about while Francesca was there, or at least no more than a minute after she left. She never saw me again."

Richard thought for a moment. "That explains why Falstaff lost you. You were in the barn all that time and the signal was blocked." Now it was his turn to be puzzled. "But why would Francesca make up such a story?"

That's what I would like to know, Nicole thought to herself. She must have poisoned Borzov on purpose. Otherwise why would she deliberately . . .

"Was there something between the two of you?" Richard was saying. "I always thought I detected-"

"Probably some jealousy," Nicole interrupted, "going both ways. Francesca and I are light years apart."

"You can say that again," Richard said with a chuckle. "I've spent the better part of a year giving off signals that I find you intelligent and interesting and attractive. Yet I've never received anything but a restrained and courteous professional response. Francesca, on the other hand, notices if you happen to even glance at her."

"There are other, more substantive differences," Nicole replied, not altogether displeased that Richard had finally verbalized his interest in her as a woman.

There was a momentary pause in the conversation. Nicole glanced at her watch. "But I don't want to spend any more time talking about Francesca Sabatini," she said, "it's going to be dark again in an hour and we have an escape from this island to plan. We also have certain, uh, logistical issues to address, such as food, water, and other unmentionable items that made confinement in a small pit reasonably disgusting."

"I brought a portable hut-if we need one."

"That's great/' Nicole replied. "I'll remember that when it rains." She reached automatically into her backpack for some manna melon but did not pull it out. "By the way," she said to Richard, "did you bring any human food?" The hut came in handy when they were ready for sleep. They decided to pitch it just to the side of the central plaza. Nicole felt safer being close to the avians. In some sense they were her friends and they might help if an emergency arose. They were also the only known source of food. Between them, Richard and Nicole had barely enough food and water to last for another two Raman days.

Nicole had not objected to Richard's suggestion that they share the hut. He had gallantly offered to sleep outside, "if that would make you more comfortable," but the huts were plenty large enough for two sleeping mats as long as there were no other furnis.h.i.+ngs. Lying about half a meter apart made their conversation very easy. Nicole gave a detailed rendition of her hours alone, omitting only the part about the vial and the vision. That was too personal for her to share. Richard was fascinated by her entire story and absolutely intrigued by the avians.

"I mean, look," he said, propping his head up on his elbow, "try to figure out how the h.e.l.l they got here. From what you've said, except for that tank sentinel-and I completely agree with you that it's an anomaly-they're no more advanced than prehistoric man. What a boggle it would be to learn their secret.

"You can't rule out completely that they're biots," he continued, barely able to contain his enthusiasm. "They might not be impressive as biology, but Jesus, as artificial intelligence they would be state of the art." He sat up on his mat. "Just think about what it would mean either way. We must find out all these answers. You're a linguist-maybe you could learn to talk to them."

Nicole was amused. "Has it occurred to you, Richard," she asked, "that all of this discussion will be academic if n.o.body ever rescues us?"

"A couple of times," Richard said with a laugh. He was lying down again. "That d.a.m.n Heilmann took me aside, right before I came back inside Rama, and told me that I was acting 'in violation of all procedures' by returning here. He promised me that they would not come after me under any circ.u.mstances."

"So why did you come back?"

"I'm not completely certain," he said slowly. "I know I wanted to pick up Falstaff and see if, by some wild happenstance, he had ever received any more signals from your beacon. But 1 think there were other reasons. The mission was becoming more politics than science. It was obvious to me that the bureaucrats on Earth were going to abort the mission, 'for security reasons,' and the crew was not going to return to Rama. I knew the political discussions would continue for another day or two." He paused a second. "And I wanted one last look at the most incredible sight of my life."

Nicole was quiet for a moment. "You obviously weren't afraid," she said softly, "because you show no sign of fear even now. Doesn't the thought of being left to die onboard Rama bother you at all?"

"A little," Richard answered. "But dying in an exciting situation is much better than living in a boring one." Again he propped himself up on his elbow. "I have been looking forward to this mission for three years. I thought from the beginning that I had a good chance of being selected. Except for my robots and Shakespeare, there is nothing in my life but my work. I have no family or friends to think of .

His voice trailed off. "And I'm as much afraid of going back as I am of dying. At least Richard Wakefield, Newton cosmonaut, has a clearly defined purpose." He started to say something else but stopped himself. Richard lay back down and closed his eyes.

43 EXOBIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY.

There's another reason not to give up hope," Richard said cheerfully as soon as he saw Nicole open her eyes, "and I forgot to mention it last night."

Nicole had always awakened very slowly. Even as a child. She liked to savor the last part of her dream state before confronting harsh reality. At home Genevieve and Pierre both knew not to talk to her about anything important until after she had had her morning coffee. She blinked at Richard, who was s.h.i.+ning his small flashlight in the gap between them.

"This s.p.a.ce vehicle is now headed for the Earth," he said.

"Even if the Newton leaves, there might be another human s.p.a.cecraft here sooner or later."

"What's that?" Nicole said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

"In all the excitement last night," Richard replied, "I left out one of the most important points. The maneuver-I guess you missed it because you were unconscious at the bottom of that pit-put Rama on an Earth impact course. That made our evacuation imperative."

Richard noticed that Nicole was staring at him as if he had lost his mind. "The s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p is still on a hyperbola with respect to the Sun," he clarified, "but it's blasting full speed toward the Earth. We will impact in twenty-three days."

"Richard," Nicole said, longing intensely for that fresh cup of coffee, "I do not like jokes early in the morning. If you have spent your energy making up-"

"No, no," he interrupted. "I'm serious. It's true. Believe me." Nicole pulled out her pocket thermometer and checked it.

"Then tell me, my engineering genius, why is the temperature in here still increasing? If we are now going away from the Sun, shouldn't it be dropping?"

"You're smarter than that, Nicole." Richard shook his head.

"The thermal input from the Sun on the exterior of Rama diffuses very slowly through the outer sh.e.l.l and then into the interior. The thermal conductivity is obviously very low. I wouldn't expect the temperatures to reach a peak for another two weeks at least."

Nicole remembered enough of her basic thermodynamics to realize he was making sense. It was too early in the morning for thermal diffusion. Nicole struggled with the idea that Rama was now bound for the Earth, She asked Richard for a drink of water. What is going on here? she thought. Why is Rama now headed for our planet?

Richard must have been reading her mind. "You should have heard the silly discussions about why Rama had changed its trajectory and what it was likely to do. There was a sevenhour conference call on the subject." He laughed out loud. "The ISA has an employee-a Canadian, I think-whose specialty is exobiological psychology. Can you believe it? This jerk actually partic.i.p.ated in the conference call and offered insights into the motives behind the Raman maneuver." Richard shook his head vigorously.

"All bureaucracies are the same. They drain the life out of the truly creative people and develop mindless paperpushers as their critical ma.s.s."

"What was the final result of the call?" Nicole asked after a short silence.

"Most of the sane people guessed that Rama would go into orbit around the Earth and conduct pa.s.sive remote observations. But they were in the minority. Sanity and logic took a holiday, in my opinion. Even David Brown -who acted very strangely, it seemed to me, after we returned to the Newton-acknowledged that there was a high probability that Rama would do something hostile. He clarified his position by stating that it would not, in reality, be a hostile act; however, its attempt to learn more about the Earth might result in actions that would be perceived by us as hostile." The agitated Richard was now standing up. "Have you ever heard such gobbledygook in your life? And Dr. Brown was one of the more coherent speakers. The entire ISA Advisory Board was polled as to which of the projected scenarios each of them favored. Do you think that bunch of plenipotentiaries could respond simply with 'I believe in Option A, direct impact with resultant destruction and climate alteration/ or 'I favor Option C, Earth orbit with bellicose intentions'? h.e.l.l no! Each one of them had to deliver a lecture of some kind. That weird Dr. Alexander, the one who asked you all the questions after your open biometry meeting in November,, even spent fifteen minutes explaining how Rama's existence had exposed a flaw in the ISA charter. As if anybody gave a s.h.i.+t!" Richard sat down again and put his hands on his cheeks. "The whole thing was unbelievable."

Nicole was now fully awake. "I a.s.sume," she said, sitting up on her mat, "judging from your obvious irritation, that you disagreed with the consensus."

Richard nodded. "Almost three-fourths of the large group partic.i.p.ating in the call-which included all the Newton cosmonauts as well as most of the senior scientists and executives in the ISA-were convinced that the Raman maneuver was likely to be harmful to the Earth in some significant way. Almost all of them focused on the same issue. Since the first Rama apparently ignored our existence altogether, they argued, the fact that Rama II altered its trajectory to achieve a rendezvous with the Earth shows that this s.p.a.cecraft is operating under different principles. I certainly agree with that conclusion. But what I cannot understand is why everyone necessarily a.s.sumes that the Raman action is hostile. It seems just as likely to me that the aliens could be motivated by curiosity, or even a desire to be our benefactors in some way."

The British engineer paused for a moment to reflect, "Francesca says that the polls on Earth are indicating that a huge majority of the average people as well, almost ten to one according to her, is terrified by Rama's approach. They are clamoring for the politicians to do something." Richard opened the hut and walked out into the dark plaza. He idly shone his flashlight on the octahedron. "At a second meeting eighteen hours later it was decreed that the Newton team would not go inside Rama again. Technically, I am not in violation of that order, because I left the Newton before the official proclamation. But it was obvious that the order was coming."

"While the leaders of the planet Earth are discussing what to do with a s.p.a.cecraft the size of an asteroid that is aimed directly at them," Nicole said as she walked out into the plaza behind him, "you and I have a more tractable problem. We must cross the Cylindrical Sea." She managed a wan smile. "Shall we do a little exploring while we talk?" Richard directed his flashlight beam into the bottom of the pit. The manna melon was clearly identifiable but the individual pieces in the pile of jumbled metal were very hard to resolve. "So those are spare parts from a centipede biot?" Nicole nodded. They were kneeling side by side on the lip.

"Even in the daylight the ends of the pit are in shadows. I needed to be certain that I wasn't looking at Takagis.h.i.+'s body."

"I would love to see a centipede biot repair itself." Richard stood up and walked over to the wall of the barn. He knocked. "And the material scientists would love this stuff. Normal radio waves are blocked both ways and you can't see in from the outside. Yet the wall is somehow transparent if you're inside the barn looking out." He turned to Nicole.

"Bring your scalpel over here. Let's see if we can cut off a piece."

Nicole was trying to decide if one of them should drop down into the pit and retrieve the melon. It wouldn't be too difficult, a.s.suming the suture line would hold. At length she pulled out her scalpel and walked over beside Richard.

"I'm not certain we should do this," she said. She hesitated before applying the scalpel to the barn wall. "In the first place, the scalpel could be damaged. We might need it later. Second, uh, it might be considered vandalism."

"Vandalism?" he said rhetorically. Richard regarded Nicole with a peculiar look. "What a curiously h.o.m.ocentric concept." He shrugged his shoulders and headed toward one end of the bam. "Never mind," he said, "you're probably right about the scalpel."

Richard had entered some data into his pocket computer and was studying the small monitor when Nicole came over beside him. "You and Francesca were standing right about here, correct?" Nicole gave him an affirmative reply. "Then you went back into the bam to look into one of the pits?"

"We've been over this before," Nicole replied. "Why are you asking again?"