Still he procrastinated, He drove the entire length of the coastline, examining New York and the other vistas from different vantage points and observing the five-hundred-meter cliff on the opposite side of the sea. On one last pass through the Beta campsite, O’Toole decided to pick up some odds and ends, including a few personal mementos left behind by the other crew members in their hasty retreat from Rama. Not many items had escaped the hurricane, but he found some souvenirs that had been trapped in comers against the supply crates.
General O’Toole took a long nap before he guided the rover back to the bottom of the chairlift. Realizing what he was going to do when he reached the Newton, O’Toole knelt down and prayed one last time before ascending. Shortly into his ride, when he was still less than half a kilometer above the Central Plain, he turned in his chair and looked back across the Raman panorama. Soon this will all be gone, O’Toole thought, enveloped in a solar furnace unleashed by man. His eyes lifted from the plain and focused on New York. He thought he saw a moving black speck in the Raman sky.
With trembling hands he lifted his binoculars to his eyes. In a few seconds O’Toole located the enlarged speck. He quickly changed the binocular resolution and the speck split into three parts, each a bird soaring in formation far off in the distance. O’Toole blinked but the image did not change. There were indeed three birds flying in the Raman sky!
Joy filled General O’Toole. He yelled with delight as he followed the birds with his binoculars until he could no longer see them. The remaining thirty minutes of the ride to the top of the Alpha stairway seemed like a lifetime.
The American officer immediately climbed into another chair and descended again into Rama. He wanted desperately to see those birds one more time. If I could somehow photograph them, he thought, planning to drive back to the Cylindrical Sea if necessary, then I could prove to everyone that there are also living creatures in this amazing world.
Starting two kilometers above the floor O’Toole searched in vain for the birds as he descended. Only slightly disheartened by his failure to find them, he was subsequently dumbfounded by what he saw when he dropped his binoculars from his eyes and prepared to disembark from the chair. Richard Wakefield and Nicole des Jardins were standing side by side at the bottom of the lift.
General O’Toole embraced them each with a vigorous hug and then, with tears of happiness running down his cheeks, he knelt on the soil of Rama. “Dear God,” he said as he offered his silent prayer of thanks. “Dear God,” he repeated.
57
THREE’S COMPANY
The three cosmonauts talked avidly for over an hour. There was so much to tell. When Nicole told of her fright upon encountering the dead Takagishi in the octospider lair, O’Toole was momentarily silent and then shook his head. “There are so many unanswered questions here!” he said, staring up at the high ceiling. “Are you really malevolent after all?” he asked rhetorically.
Richard and Nicole both praised the general’s courage in not entering his code to activate the weapons. They were also both horrified that the COG had ordered the destruction of Rama. “It is absolutely unforgivable for us to use nuclear weapons against this spaceship,” Nicole said. “I am convinced that it is not fundamentally hostile. And I believe that Rama maneuvered to intercept the Earth because it has a specific message for us.”
Richard lightly chided Nicole for developing her opinion more on the basis of emotions than facts. “Perhaps,” she rejoined, “but there is a serious logical flaw as well in this decision to destroy. We now have hard evidence that this vehicle communicated with its predecessor. There is good reason to suspect that a Rama III is out there somewhere, probably coming in this direction. If the Rama fleet is potentially hostile, there is no way the Earth will be able to escape. We may succeed in destroying this second craft — but in so doing we will almost certainly alert their next ship. Since their technology is so much more advanced than ours, we would have no possibility of surviving their concerted attack.”
General O’Toole looked at Nicole with admiration. “That’s an excellent point,” he said. “It’s a shame you weren’t available for the ISA discussions. We never considered—”
“Why don’t we postpone the rest of this conversation until we’re back on the Newton?” Richard said suddenly. “According to my watch, it will be dark again in another thirty minutes, before any of us have reached the top of the lift. I don’t want to ride in the dark any longer than is necessary.”
The three cosmonauts believed that they were leaving Rama for the last time. As the remaining minutes of light dwindled, each cosmonaut gazed intently at the magnificent alien landscape that stretched out into the distance. For Nicole, the dominant feeling was one of elation. Cautious by nature with her expectations, until this moment in the chairlift she had not allowed herself the intense pleasure of believing that she would ever again hold her beloved Genevieve in her arms. Her mind was now flooded by the bucolic beauty of Beauvois and she imagined in detail the joy of her reunion scene with her father and daughter. It could be as little as a week or ten days, Nicole said to herself expectantly. By the time she reached the top she was having difficulty containing her jubilation.
During his ride Michael O’Toole reviewed, one more time, his activation decision– When dark came to Rama, suddenly and at the predicted moment, he had finished developing his plan for communicating his decision to the Earth. They would phone ISA management immediately. Nicole and Richard would summarize their stories and Nicole would present her reasons for thinking that the destruction of Rama would be “unforgivable.” O’Toole was convinced that his order to activate the weapons would then be rescinded.
The general switched on his flashlight just before his chair reached the top of the stairway. He stepped off in the weightless environment and stood beside Nicole. They waited for Richard Wakefield before proceeding together around the ramp to the ferry passageway, only a hundred meters away. After the trio had boarded the ferry and were ready to move through the Rama shell toward the Newton, Richard’s flashlight beam fell on a large metal object on the side of the passage. “Is that one of the bombs?” he asked.
The nuclear weapon system did indeed resemble an oversized bullet. How curious, Nicole thought, recoiling as an instant shudder ran through her system. It could be any shape, of course. I wonder what subconscious aberration made the designers choose that particular form…
“But what’s that weird contraption at the top?” Richard was asking O’Toole.
The general’s brow furrowed as he stared at a bizarre object illuminated by the center of the beam of light. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’ve never seen it before.” He disembarked from the ferry. Richard and Nicole followed him.
General O’Toole shuffled over to the weapon and studied the strange attachment fixed above the numerical keyboard. It was a fiat plate, slightly larger than the keyboard itself, that was anchored by angular joints to the sides of the weapon. On the underside of the plate, momentarily retracted, were ten tiny punches — at least that’s what they looked like to O’Toole. His observation was confirmed seconds later when one of the punches extended and hit the number “5” on the keyboard several centimeters below. The “5” was followed in rapid succession by a “7,” and then by eight more numbers before a green light flashed the successful completion of the first decade.
Within seconds the apparatus entered ten more digits and another green light flashed. O’Toole froze in terror. My God, he thought, that’s my code! Somehow they’ve broken — His panic subsided an instant later when, after the third decade of digits, the red light announced that an error had been made.
“Apparently,” General O’Toole said a short time later in response to an inquiry from Richard, “they have jerryrigged this scheme to try to enter the code in my absence, They only have the first two decades correct. For a moment I was afraid…” O’Toole paused, aware of strong emotions stirring within him.
“If Heilmann and Yamanaka did it,” O’Toole replied. “Of course we can’t rule out completely the possibility that the contraption might have been placed there by the aliens… or even the biots.”
“Extremely unlikely,” Richard commented. “The engineering is much too crude.”
“At any rate,” O’Toole said, opening his backpack for some tools to disconnect the apparatus, “I’m not taking any chances.”
At the Newton end of the passageway, O’Toole, Wakefield, and des Jardins found the second bomb fitted with the same apparatus. The trio watched it punch out one code attempt — with the same result, a failure somewhere in the third decade — and then they disabled it as well. Afterward they opened up the seal and exited from Rama.
Nobody greeted them when they stepped inside the Newton military ship. General O’Toole assumed that both Admiral Heilmann and Yamanaka were asleep and went immediately to the bedrooms. He wanted to talk to Heilmann in private anyway. But the two men were not in their rooms. It did not take long to confirm, in fact, that the other two cosmonauts were nowhere in the comparatively small living and working area of the military ship.
A search of the supply area in the back of the ship was also futile. However, the threesome did discover that one of the extravehicular activity (EVA) pods was missing. This discovery raised another perplexing set of questions. Where could Heilmann and Yamanaka have gone in the pod? And why had they violated the top-priority project policy that at least one crew member should always stay onboard the Newton?
The three cosmonauts were puzzled as they returned to the control center to discuss their possible courses of action. O’Toole was the first to raise the specter of foul play. “Do you think those octospiders, or even some of the biots, might have come onboard? After all, it’s not difficult to enter the Newton unless it’s in Self-Protection Mode.”
Nobody wanted to say what all three of them were thinking. If someone or something had captured or killed their two colleagues on the ship, then it might still be around and they might be in danger themselves…
“Why don’t we call the Earth and announce that we’re alive?” Richard said, breaking the silence.
“Great idea.” General O’Toole smiled. He moved over to the control center console and activated the panel. A standard system status display appeared on the large screen. “That’s strange,” the general commented. “According to this, we have no video link with the Earth presently. Only low-rate telemetry. Now, why would the data system configuration have been changed?”
He keyed in a simple set of commands to establish the normal multichannel high-rate link with the Earth. A swarm of error messages appeared on the monitor. “What the hell?” Richard exclaimed. “It looks as if the video system has died.” He turned to O’Toole. “This is your speciality, General, what do you make of all this?”
General O’Toole was very serious. “I don’t like it, Richard. I’ve only seen this many error messages one time before — during one of our early simulations when some nincompoop forgot to load the communications software. We must have a major software problem. The probability of that many hardware failures in such a short time span is essentially zero.”
Richard suggested that O’Toole subject the video communications software to its standard self-test. During the test, the diagnostic printout reported that the error buffers in the self-test algorithm had overflowed when the procedure was less than one percent complete. “So the vidcomm software is definitely the culprit,” Richard said, analyzing the data in the diagnostic. He entered some commands. “It’s going to take a while to straighten it out—”
“Just a minute,” Nicole interrupted. “Shouldn’t we spend our time trying to make some sense out of all this new information before we start on any specific tasks?” The two men stopped their activity and waited for her to continue. “Heilmann, Yamanaka, and one pod are missing from this ship,” Nicole said, walking slowly around the control center, “and someone was trying to automatically activate the two nuclear bombs in the passageway. Meanwhile the vidcomm software, after functioning properly for hundreds of days — counting all the preflight simulations — has suddenly gone haywire. Do either of you have a coherent explanation for all this?”
There was a long silence. “General O’Toole’s suggestion of a hostile invasion of the Newton might work!” Richard offered. “Heilmann and Yamanaka might have fled to save themselves and the aliens could have purposely screwed up the software.”
Nicole was not convinced. “Nothing I have seen suggests that any aliens — or even any biots, for that matter — have been inside the Newton. Unless we see some evidence—”
“Maybe Heilmann and Yamanaka were trying to break the general’s code,” Wakefield invented, “and they were afraid—”
“Stop. Stop,” Nicole shouted suddenly. “Something’s happening to the screen.” The two men turned around just in time to see Admiral Otto Heilmann’s face materialize on the monitor.
“Hello, General O’Toole,” Heilmann said with a smile from the huge screen. “This videotape was triggered by your entering the Newton airlock. Cosmonaut Yamanaka and I prepared it just before we departed in one of the pods three hours before 1-9 days. We were ordered to evacuate less than an hour after you went inside to explore Rama. We delayed as long as we could but eventually had to follow our instructions.
“Your personal orders are simple and straightforward. You are to enter your activation code into the two weapons in the ferry passageway and the three remaining in the bay. You should depart in the final pod no more than eight hours thereafter. Don’t be concerned about the electronic devices in operation on the two bombs in the Raman shell. COG military headquarters ordered them put in place to test some new top secret decryption techniques. You will discover they can easily be disabled with pliers and!or wirecutters.
“An extra, emergency propulsion system has been added to the pod and its software has been programmed to guide you to a safe location, where you will rendezvous with an ISA tug. All you need to do is code in the exact time of your departure. However, I must stress that the new pod navigation algorithms are valid only if you leave the Newton before 1-6 days. After that time, I am told the guidance parameters become increasingly invalid and it will be almost impossible to rescue you.”
There was a short pause in Heilmann’s delivery and his voice took on an increased sense of urgency. “Don’t waste any more time, Michael. Activate the weapons and go directly to the pod. We have already supplied it with the food and other essentials that you will need… Good luck on your voyage home. We’ll see you back on Earth.”
58
HOBSON’S CHOICE
I’m certain that Heilmann and Yamanaka were being extremely cautious,” Richard Wakefield explained. “They probably left early so they could take extra supplies. And with these lightweight pods, each extra kilogram can be critical.”
“How critical?” asked Nicole.
“Well — it could make all the difference between getting into a safe orbit around Earth — or shooting past it so quickly that we couldn’t be rescued.”
“Does that mean,” O’Toole inquired somberly, “that only one of us might be able to use the pod?”
Richard paused before answering. “I’m afraid that’s possible; it’s a function of the time of departure. We’ll have to do some quick calculations to determine exactly. But personally I see no reason why we shouldn’t consider flying this entire spacecraft. I was trained as a backup pilot, after all. . We have only limited control authority, since the ship is so large, but if we jettison everything we don’t absolutely need, we may be able to do it Again, we’ll need to do the computations.”
Nicole’s assignments from General O’Toole and Richard were to check the supplies that had been placed in the pod, determine their adequacy, and then approximate both the
mass and packaging volume required to support either two or three travelers. In addition Richard, still favoring flying back to Earth in the military ship, asked Nicole to go through the Newton supply manifest and estimate how much mass could be thrown overboard.
While O’Toole and Wakefield used the computers in the control center, Nicole worked alone in the huge bay. First she examined the remaining pod very carefully. Although the pods were normally used by a single person for local extravehicular activity (EVA), they had also been designed as emergency escape vehicles. Two people could sit behind the tough, transparent front window with a week’s supplies on the shelves at the rear of the small cabin. But three people? Nicole wondered. Impossible. Someone would have to squeeze into the shelf space. And then there would not be adequate room for the supplies. Nicole thought momentarily about being confined to the tiny shelves for seven or eight days. It would be even worse than the pit in New York.
She looked through the supplies that had been hastily thrown into the pod by Heilmann and Yamanaka. The food allocation was more or less correct, both in quantity and variety, for a one-week voyage; the medical kit, however, was woefully inadequate. Nicole made a few notes, constructed what she considered to be a proper supply list for either a two or three person crew, and estimated the mass and packaging requirements. She then started to cross the bay.
Her eyes were drawn to the bullet-shaped nuclear weapons lying placidly on their sides right beside the pod airlock. Nicole walked over and touched the bombs, her hands idly running across the polished metal surface. So these are the first great weapons of destruction, she thought, the outcome of the brilliant physics of the twentieth century.
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