Rama II r-2

by Arthur C. Clarke

  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 furnishings. 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 hell 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 nobody ever rescues us?”

  “A couple of times,” Richard said with a laugh. He was lying down again. “That damn 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 circum­stances.”

  “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 I 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 shining his small flashlight in the gap between them.

  “This space vehicle is now headed for the Earth,” he said. “Even if the Newton leaves, there might be another human spacecraft 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 spaceship 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 shell 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 seven-hour 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 participated 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 paper-pushers as their critical mass.”

  “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 passive 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 sce
narios 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’? Hell 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 shit!” Richard sat down again and put his hands on his cheeks. “The whole thing was unbelievable.”

  Nicole was now fully awake. “I assume,” 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 participating 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 spacecraft is operating under different principles. I certainly agree with that conclusion. But what I cannot understand is why everyone necessarily as­sumes 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 spacecraft 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 Takagishi’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, assuming 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 homocentric 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?”

  “I think Francesca saw you fall into one of the pits and purposely misled us with that story about you wandering off to search for our Japanese profes­sor. She didn’t want anybody to find you.”

  Nicole stared at Richard in the dark. “I agree,” she responded slowly. “But why do you think so?”

  “It’s the only explanation that makes any sense. I had a bizarre encounter with her right before I came back inside. She came into my room under the pretense of wanting an interview, supposedly to find out why I was returning to Rama. When I mentioned Falstaff and your navigation beacon, she switched off her camera. Then she became quite animated and asked me many detailed technical questions. Before she left, she told me she was convinced that none of us should ever have entered Rama in the first place. I thought she was going to beg me not to go back.

  “I can understand her not wanting me to find out that she had tried to maroon you in the pit,” Richard continued after a brief pause. “What I can’t fathom is why she left you there in the first place.”

  “You remember the night you explained to me why RoSur’s fault protec­tion had failed?” Nicole said after a moment’s reflection. “That same night I also asked you and Janos if either of you had seen General Borzov…”

  As they walked back in the direction of the central plaza and their hut, Nicole spent fifteen minutes explaining to Richard her entire hypothesis about the conspiracy. She told him about the media contract, the drugs Francesca had given to both David Brown and Reggie Wilson, and Nicole’s personal interactions with all the principals. She did not tell him about the data cube. Richard agreed that the evidence was very compelling.

  “So you think she left you there in the pit to avoid being unmasked as a conspirator?”

  Nicole nodded.

  Richard whistled. “Then everything fits. It was apparent to me that Fran­cesca was running the show when we returned to tie Newton. Both Brown and Heilmann were taking orders from her.” He put his arm around Nicole. “I wouldn’t want that woman as my enemy. She clearly has no scruples whatsoever.”

  44

  ANOTHER LAIR

  Richard and Nicole had bigger con­cerns than Francesca. When they returned to the central plaza, they found their hut had disappeared. Re­peated knocks on the avian cover produced no response. The precariousness of their situation became clearer to both of them.

  Richard grew moody and uncommunicative. He apologized to Nicole, saying that it was a characteristic of his personality for him to withdraw from people when he felt insecure. He played with his computer for several hours, only stopping occasionally to ask Nicole questions about the geography of New York.

  Nicole lay down on her sleeping mat and thought about swimming across the Cylindrical Sea. She was not an exceptionally good swimmer. During training it had taken her about fifteen minutes to swim one kilometer. That had been in a placid swimming pool. To cross the sea she would be forced to swim five kilometers through cold, choppy water. And she might be accom­panied by lovely creatures like the shark biots.

  A jolly fat man twenty centimeters high interrupted her contemplation. “Would you like a drink, fair lass?” Falstaff asked her. Nicole rolled over and studied the robot from up close. He hoisted a large mug of fluid and drank it, spilling some on his beard. He wiped it off with his sleeve and then he burped. “And if you want nothing to drink,” he said in a heavy British accent, thrusting his hand down into his codpiece, “then perhaps Sir John could teach you a thing or two between the sheets.” The tiny face was definitely leering. It was crude, but very funny.
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  Nicole laughed. So did Falstaff. “I am not only witty in myself,” the robot said, “but the cause that wit is in other men.”

  “You know,’* Nicole said to Richard, who was watching from several me­ters away, “if you ever became tired of being a cosmonaut, you could make millions in children’s toys.”

  Richard came over and picked up Falstaff. He thanked Nicole for her compliment. “As I see it, we have three options,” he then said very seriously. “We can swim the sea, we can explore New York to see if we can forage enough material to construct some kind of boat, or we can wait here until someone comes. I’m not optimistic about our chances in any of the cases.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “I propose a compromise. When it’s light, let’s carefully search the key areas of the city, particularly around the three plazas, and see if we can find anything that could be used to build a boat. We’ll allot one Raman day, maybe two, to the exploration. If nothing turns up, well swim for it. I have no faith we’ll ever see a rescue team.”

  “Sounds all right to me. But I would like to do one other thing first. We don’t have a lot of food, to make a rather obvious understatement, I’d feel better if we pulled up the manna melon first, before we did any more explor­ing. That way we could be protected against any surprises.”

  Richard agreed that establishing the food supply would probably be a prudent initial action. But he didn’t like the idea of using the suture thread again. “You were lucky in many ways,” he told Nicole. “Not only did the line not break, it didn’t even slip off that waistband you made. However, it did cut completely through your gloves in two places and almost through the waistband.”

  “You have another idea?” Nicole asked.

  “The lattice material is the obvious choice,” Richard replied. “It should be perfect, provided that we don’t have any trouble obtaining it. Then I can go down in the pit and spare you the trouble—”