“Wrong,” Nicole interrupted. She smiled. “With all due respect, Richard, now is not the time for any macho derring-do. Using the lattice is a great idea. But you’re too heavy. If something happened, I would never be able to pull you out.” She patted him on the shoulder. “And I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings, but I’m probably the more athletic of the two of us.”
Richard feigned hurt pride. “But whatever happened to tradition? The man always performs the feats of physical strength and agility. Don’t you remember your childhood cartoons?”
Nicole laughed heartily. “Yes, my dear,” she said lightly. “But you aren’t Popeye. And I’m not Olive Oyl.”
“I’m not certain I can deal with this,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “To discover at the age of thirty-four that I’m not Popeye… What a blow to my self-image.” He cuddled Nicole gently. “What do you say?” he continued. “Should we try to sleep some more before it’s light?”
Neither of them was able to sleep. They lay side by side on their mats in the open plaza, each occupied with his own thoughts. Nicole heard Richard’s body move. “You’re awake too?” she said in a whisper.
“Yeah,” he answered. “I’ve even counted Shakespearean characters with no success. I was up to more than a hundred.”
Nicole propped herself up on an elbow and faced her companion. “Tell me, Richard,” she said, “where did this preoccupation of yours with Shakespeare come from? I know you grew up in Stratford, but it’s hard for me to imagine how an engineer like you, in love with computers and calculations and gadgets, could become so fascinated with a playwright.”
“My therapist told me it was an “escapist compulsion,” Richard replied a few seconds later. “Since I didn’t like the real world or the people in it, he said, I made up another one. Except that I didn’t create it from scratch. I just extended a wonderful universe already fabricated by a genius.
“Shakespeare was my God,” Richard continued after a moment. “When I was nine or ten, I would stop in that park along the Avon — the one beside all the theaters, with the statues of Hamlet, Falstaff, Lady Macbeth, and Prince Hal — and spend the afternoon hours making up additional stories about my favorite characters. That way I put off going home until the last possible moment. I dreaded being around my father… I never knew what he would do —
“But you don’t want to hear this,” Richard interrupted himself suddenly, “everyone has memories of childhood pain. We should talk about something else.”
“We should talk about whatever we’re feeling,” Nicole responded, surprising even herself. “Which is something I hardly ever do,” she added softly.
Richard turned and looked in her direction, He extended his hand slowly. She gently wrapped her 6ngers around his. “My father worked for British Rail,” he said. “He was a very smart man, but socially clumsy, and he had difficulty finding a job that fit him after he finished the university at Sussex. Times were still tough. The economy had just started to recover from The Great Chaos…
“When my mother told him that she was pregnant, he was overwhelmed by the responsibility of it all. He looked for a safe, secure position. He had always scored well on tests and the government had forced all the national transportation monopolies, including the rail system, to staff positions based on objective test results. So my father became the manager of operations at Stratford.
“He hated the job. It was boring and repetitive, no challenge at all for a man who had an honors degree. Mother told me that when I was very small he applied for other positions, but he always seemed to botch the interviews. Later on, when I was older, he never even tried. He sat at home and complained. And drank. And then made everyone around him miserable.”
There was a long silence. Richard was having a difficult time struggling with the demons of his childhood. Nicole squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“So was I,” Richard replied with a slight break in his voice. “I was just a small child with an incredible sense of wonder and love of life. I would come home enthusiastic about something new I had learned or something that had happened at school, and my Dad would just growl.
“Once, when I was only eight, I came home from school in the early afternoon and I got into an argument with him. It was his day off and he had been drinking, as usual. Mother was out at the store. I don’t remember what it was about now, but I do recall telling him that he was wrong about some trivial fact. When I continued to argue with him, he suddenly hit me in the nose with all his might. I fell against the wall with my broken nose gushing blood. From that time on, until I was fourteen and felt I could protect myself, I never walked in that house when he was there unless I was certain that my mother was home.”
Nicole tried to imagine an adult man slugging an eight-year-old child. What kind of human being could break his own son’s nose? she wondered.
“I had always been very shy,” Richard was saying, “and had convinced myself that I had inherited my father’s social clumsiness, so I didn’t have many friends my own age. But I still yearned for human interaction!” He looked over at Nicole and paused, remembering, “I made Shakespeare’s characters my friends. I read his plays every afternoon in the park and immersed myself in his imaginative world. I even memorized entire scenes. Then I talked to Romeo or Ariel or Jaques while I was walking home.”
It was not difficult for Nicole to visualize the rest of Richard’s story. ! can picture you as an adolescent, she thought. Solitary, awkward, emotionally repressed. Your obsession with Shakespeare gave you an escape from your pain. All the theaters were near your home. You saw your friends become alive on the stage.
On impulse Nicole leaned over and kissed Richard lightly on the cheek. “Thanks for telling me,” she said.
As soon as it was daylight they walked over to the lattice. Nicole was surprised to find that the incisions she had made when she had freed the avian had all been repaired. The lattice was like new. “Obviously a repair biot has already been here,” Richard commented, no longer extremely impressed after all the wonders he had already witnessed-
They cut off several long strands of the lattice and headed for the bam. On the way Richard tested the elasticity of the material. He found that it stretched about fifteen percent and always restored itself, albeit very slowly at times, to its original length. The restoration time varied significantly, depending on how long the piece had been fully stretched. Richard had already begun his examination of the inside structure of the cord when they arrived at the barn.
Nicole did not waste any time. She tied one end of the lattice material around a stumpy object just outside the barn and lowered herself down the wall. Richard’s function was to make certain that nothing untoward occurred and to be available if there was some kind of an emergency. Down in the bottom of the pit Nicole shuddered once as she remembered how helpless she had felt there just a few days earlier. But she quickly turned her attention to her task, inserting a makeshift handle made from her medical probes deep into the manna melon and then securing the other end of the handle to her backpack. Her ascent was vigorous and uneventful.
“Well.” She smiled at Richard as she handed him the melon to carry. “Should we now continue with Plan A?”
“Roger,” he replied. “Now we know where our next ten meals are coming from.”
“Nine,” Nicole corrected with a laugh. “I’ve made a slight adjustment in the estimate now that I’ve watched you eat a couple of times.”
Richard and Nicole marched quickly from the bam to the western plaza. They crisscrossed the open area and combed the narrow alleys nearby, but they did not find anything that would help them build a boat. Richard did have an encounter with a centipede biot, however, in the middle of their search one had entered the plaza and then moved diagonally across it. Richard had done everything possible, including lying in front of it and beating it over the head with his backpack, to try to induce the biot to stop. He had not been successful. Ni
cole was laughing at him when Richard returned, a little frustrated, to her side.
“That centipede is absolutely useless,” he complained. “What the hell is it for? It’s not carrying anything. It has no sensors that I can see. It just travels merrily along.”
“The technology of an advanced extraterrestrial species,” she reminded Richard of one of his favorite quotes, “will be indistinguishable from magic.” “But that damn centipede’s not magic,” he replied, a little annoyed at Nicole’s laughter, “it’s goddamn stupid!”
“And what would you have done if it had stopped?” Nicole inquired. “Why, I would have examined it, of course. What did you think?” “I think we’d be better off concentrating our energy in other areas,” she replied. “I don’t imagine a centipede biot is going to help us get off this island.”
“Well,” Richard said a little brusquely, “it’s obvious to me already we’re going about this process all wrong. We’re not going to find anything on the surface. The biots probably clean it up regularly. We should be looking for another hole in the ground, like the avian’s lair. We can use the multispectral radar to identify any places where the ground is not solid.”
It took them a long time to find the second hole, even though it was not more than two hundred meters from the center of the western plaza. At first Richard and Nicole were much too restrictive in their search. After an hour, though, they finally convinced themselves that the ground underneath the plaza area was solid everywhere. They expanded their search to include the small streets and lanes nearby, off the concentric avenues. On a dead-end alley with tall buildings on three sides, they found another covering in the center of the road. It was not camouflaged in any way. This second cover was the same size as the one at the avian lair, a rectangle ten meters long and six meters wide.
45
NIKKI
“Do you think the avian cover opens in the same way?” Nicole asked, after Richard had very carefully searched the environs and found a flat plate on one of the buildings that looked decidedly out of place. Pressing hard against the plate had caused the cover to open.
“Probably,” he answered. “Well have to go back and check.” “Then these places are not very secure,” Nicole said. The two of them walked back onto the street and knelt down to look in the hole. A broad, steep ramp descended from beside them and disappeared into the darkness below. They could only see about ten meters into the hole.
“It looks like one of those ancient parking lots,” Richard remarked. “Back when everybody had automobiles.” He stepped on the ramp. “It even feels like concrete.”
Nicole watched as her companion moved slowly down the ramp. When Richard’s head was below the ground level, he turned and spoke to her. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked. He had switched on his flashlight beam and had illuminated a small landing another few meters below.
“Richard,” Nicole said from above. “I think we should discuss this. I don’t want to be stuck—”
“Ah-ha!” Richard exclaimed. As soon as his foot hit the first landing, some lights around him automatically lit the next phase of the descent. “The ramp doubles back,” he shouted, “and continues down. Looks just the same.” He turned and disappeared from Nicole’s field of view.
“Richard,” Nicole now yelled, a little exasperated, “will you please stop for a minute? We must talk about what we’re doing.”
A few seconds later Richard’s smiling face reappeared. The two cosmonauts discussed their options. Nicole insisted that she was going to stay outside, in New York, even if Richard was going to continue with his exploration. At least that way, she argued, she could guarantee that they would not be stranded in the hole.
While she was talking, Richard was standing on the first landing and surveying the area around him. The walls were made of the same material Nicole had found in the avian lair. Small strip lights, looking not unlike normal fluorescent lights on Earth, ran along the wall to illuminate the path.
“Move away just a second, will you?” Richard shouted in the middle of their conversation.
At first puzzled, Nicole backed away from the entrance to the rectangular hole. “Farther,” she heard Richard yell. Nicole walked over and stood against one of the surrounding buildings.
“Is this far enough?” she had just finished shouting when the covering on the hole began to close. Nicole ran forward and tried to stop the motion of the cover, but it was much too heavy. “Richard,” she cried as the hole disappeared beneath her.
Nicole pounded on the cover and remembered her own feelings of frustration when she had been locked in the avian lair. She quickly ran back over to the building and pressed the embedded flat panel. Nothing happened. Almost a minute passed. Nicole became anxious. She ran back into the street and called for her colleague.
“I’m right here, under the cover,” he answered, bringing Nicole considerable relief. “I found another plate near the first landing and pressed it. I think it toggles the cover closed or open, but it may have a timing delay constraint. Give me a few minutes. Don’t you try to open the cover. And don’t stand too near it.”
Nicole backed away and waited. Richard had been correct. Several minutes later the cover opened and he emerged from the hole with a big grin on his face. “See,” he said, “I told you not to worry… Now what’s for lunch?”
As they descended the ramp, Nicole heard the familiar sound of running water. In a little room about twenty meters behind the landing, they found the identical piping and cistern that had been in the avian lair. Richard and Nicole both filled their flasks with the fresh, delicious water.
Outside the room there were no horizontal tunnels leading off in both directions, only another descending ramp dropping five more meters beneath the floor. Richard’s flashlight beam crawled slowly across the dark walls near the water room. “Look here, Nicole!” he said, pointing at what was a very subtle variation in building material. “See, it arches around to the other side.”
She followed his beam as it inscribed a long circular arc on the wall. “It looks as if there were at least two phases of construction.”
“Exactly,” he replied. “Maybe there were horizontal tunnels here as well, at least in the beginning, and they were sealed off later.” Neither of them said anything else as they continued their descent. Back and forth went the identical ramps. Whenever Richard and Nicole touched a new landing, the next descending ramp was illuminated.
They were fifty meters underneath the surface when the ceilings above them opened up and the ramps terminated in a large cavern. The circular floor of the cave was about twenty-five meters in diameter. There were four dark tunnels, five meters in height and equally spaced at ninety degrees around the circle, that exited from the cavern.
“Eenie, Meenie, Mynie, Moe,” Richard said.
“I’ll take Moe,” Nicole said. She headed toward one of the tunnels. When she was within a few meters of the entrance, the lights in the near portion of the tunnel switched on.
This time it was Richard’s turn to be hesitant. He stared cautiously into the tunnel and made some quick entries into his computer. “Does it look to you as if this tunnel curves slightly to the right? See, there at the end of the lights?”
Nicole nodded. She looked over Richard’s shoulder to see what he was doing. “I’m making a map,” he said in response to her curiosity. “Theseus had string and Hansel and Gretel had bread. We have them both beat. Aren’t computers wonderful?”
She smiled. “So what’s your guess?” Nicole said while they were walking along in the near part of the tunnel. “Will it be a Minotaur or a gingerbread house with a wicked witch?”
We should be so lucky, Nicole thought. Her fear was increasing as they penetrated deeper and deeper into the tunnel. She recalled that awful moment of terror in the pit when she had first seen the avian hovering over her with its beak and talons extending in her direction. An icy chill ran down her spine. There it is again, she said to herself,
that feeling that something terrible is going to happen.
She stopped. “Richard,” she said, “I don’t like this. We should turn back—”
They both heard the noise at the same time. It was definitely behind them, back in the vicinity of the circular cavern they had just left– It sounded like hard brushes dragging against metal.
Richard and Nicole huddled together. “That’s the same sound,” he whispered, “that I heard the first night in Rama, when we were at the walls of New York.”
The tunnel behind them curved slightly to the left. When they looked back in that direction, the lights were off at the limit of their vision. The second time they heard the sound, however, some lights came on in the far distance almost simultaneously, indicating something was near the entrance to their tunnel.
Nicole bolted. She must have covered the next two hundred meters in thirty seconds, despite her Bight suit and backpack. She stopped and waited for Richard. Neither of them heard the sound again and no new lights were illuminated in the distant reaches of the tunnel.
“I’m sorry,” Nicole said when Richard finally arrived. “I panicked. I think I’ve been in this alien wonderland too long.”
“Jesus,” Richard responded with a disapproving frown. “Ive never seen anybody run that fast.” His frown changed into a smile. “Don’t feel bad, Nikki,” he said. “I was scared shitless too. But I was frozen in place.”
Nicole continued taking deep breaths and stared at Richard. “What did you call me?” she asked, somewhat belligerently.
“Nikki,” he replied. “I thought it was time for me to have my own special name for you. Don’t you like it?”
Nicole was speechless for ten full seconds. Her mind was millions of kilometers and fifteen years away, in a hotel suite in Los Angeles, her body experiencing wave after wave of pleasure. “That was remarkable, Nikki, truly wonderful,” the prince had said several minutes later. She had told Henry on that night fifteen years before not to call her Nikki, that it sounded like a name for a buxom showgirl or a tart.
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