Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  "So what's the verdict, Doc?" Takagishi asked.

  "I haven't decided," she answered. "You could help. Have another one of your incidents in the next few hours and make it easy for me." She waved good-bye. "See you at breakfast."

  Richard Wakefield was coming out of his room as Nicole headed down the hall after leaving Takagishi. She made a spontaneous decision to talk to him about the RoSur software.

  "Good morning, princess," he said as he approached. "What are you doing awake at this hour? Something exciting, I hope."

  "As a matter of fact," Nicole replied in the same playful tone, "I was coming to talk to you." He stopped to listen. "Do you have a minute?"

  "For you, Madame Doctor," he answered with an exaggerated smile, "I have two minutes. But no more. Mind you, I'm hungry. And if I am not fed quickly when I'm hungry, I turn into an awful ogre." Nicole laughed. "What's on your mind?" he added lightly.

  "Could we go into your room?" she asked.

  "I knew it. I knew it," he said, spinning around and sliding quickly toward his door. "It's finally happened, just like in my dreams. An intelligent, beautiful woman is going to declare her undying affection—"

  Nicole could not suppress a chortle. "Wakefield," she interrupted, still grinning, "you are hopeless. Are you never serious? I have some business to discuss with you."

  "Oh, darn," Richard said dramatically. "Business. In that case I'm going to limit you to the two minutes I allocated you earlier. Business also makes me hungry … and grumpy."

  Richard Wakefield opened the door to his room and waited for Nicole to enter. He offered her the chair in front of his computer monitor and sat down behind her on the bed. She turned around to face him. On the shelf above his bed were a dozen tiny figurines similar to the ones she had seen before in Tabori's room and at the Borzov banquet.

  "Allow me to introduce you to some of my menagerie," Richard said, noticing her curiosity. "You've met Lord and Lady Macbeth, Puck, and Bottom. This matched pair is Tybalt and Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet Next to them are Iago and Othello, followed by Prince Hal, Falstaff, and the wonderful Mistress Quickly. The last one on the right is my closest friend, The Bard, or TB for short."

  As Nicole watched, Richard activated a switch near the head of his bed and TB climbed down a ladder from the shelf to the bed. The twenty-centimeter-high robot carefully navigated the folds in the bed coverings and came over to greet Nicole.

  "And what be your name, fair lady?" TB said.

  "I am Nicole des Jardins," she replied.

  "Sounds French," the robot said immediately. "But you don't look French. At least not Valois." The robot appeared to be staring at her. "You look more like a child of Othello and Desdemona."

  Nicole was astonished. "How did you do that?" she asked.

  "I'll explain later," Richard said with a wave of his hand. "Do you have a favorite Shakespearean sonnet?" he now inquired. "If you do, recite a line, or give TB a number."

  "Full many a glorious morning…" recalled Nicole.

  "…have I seen," the robot added,

  "Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,

  Kissing with golden face the meadows green.

  Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy…"

  The little robot recited the sonnet with fluid head and arm movements as well as a wide range of facial expressions. Again Nicole was impressed by Richard Wakefield's creativity. She remembered the key four lines of the sonnet from her university days and mumbled them along with TB:

  "Even so my sun one early morn did shine,

  With all-triumphant splendor on my brow;

  But, out alack, he was but one hour mine,

  The region cloud hath masked him from me now…"

  After the robot finished the final couplet, Nicole, who was moved by the almost forgotten words, found herself applauding. "And he can do all the sonnets?" she asked.

  Richard nodded. "Plus many, many of the more poetic dramatic speeches. But that's not his most outstanding capability. Remembering passages from Shakespeare only requires plenty of storage. TB is also a very intelligent robot. He can carry on a conversation better than—"

  Richard stopped himself in midsentence. "I'm sorry, Nicole. I'm monopolizing the time. You said you had some business to discuss."

  "But you've already used my two minutes," she said with a twinkle in her eye. "Are you certain that you won't die of starvation if I take five more minutes of your time?"

  Nicole quickly summarized her investigation into the RoSur software malfunction, including her conclusion that the fault protection algorithms must have been disabled by manual commands. She indicated that she could go no further with her own analysis and that she would like some help from Richard. She did not discuss her suspicions.

  "Should be a snap," he said with a smile. "All I have to do is find the place in memory where the commands are buffered and stored. That could take a little time, given the size of the storage, but these memories are generally designed with logical architectures. However, I don't understand why you're doing all this detective work. Why don't you simply ask Janos and the others if they input any commands?"

  "That's the problem," Nicole replied. "Nobody recalls commanding RoSur at any time after the final load and verify. When Janos hit his head during the maneuver, I thought his fingers were on the control box. He doesn't remember and I can't be certain."

  Richard's brow furrowed. "It would be very unlikely that Janos just happened to toggle the fault protection enable switch with a random command. That would mean the overall design was stupid." He thought for a moment. "Oh well," he continued, "there's no need to speculate. Now you've aroused my curiosity. I'll look at the problem as soon as I have—"

  "Break break. Break break." Otto Hermann's voice on the communicator interrupted their conversation. "Will everyone come immediately to the science control center for a meeting. We have a new development. The lights inside Rama just came on again."

  Richard opened the door and followed Nicole into the corridor. "Thanks for your help," Nicole said. "I appreciate it very much."

  "Thank me after I do something," Richard said with a grin. "I'm notorious for promises… Now, what do you think is the meaning of all these games with the lights?"

  26

  SECOND SORTIE

  David Brown had placed a single large sheet of paper on the table in the middle of the control center. Francesca had divided it into partitions, representing hours, and was now busy writing down whatever he told her, "The damn mission planning software is too inflexible to be useful in a situation like this," Dr. Brown was saying to Janos Tabori and Richard Wakefield. "It's only good when the sequence of activities being planned is consistent with one of the preflight strategies."

  Janos walked over to one of the monitors. "Maybe you can use it better than I can," Dr. Brown continued, "but I have found it much easier this morning to rely on pencil and paper." Janos called up a software program for mission sequencing and began to key in some data.

  "Wait a minute," Richard Wakefield interjected. Janos stopped typing on the keyboard and turned to listen to his colleague. "We're getting all worked up over nothing. We don't need to plan the entire next sortie at this moment. In any case, we know the first major activity segment must be the completion of the infrastructure. That will take another ten or twelve hours. The rest of the sortie design can be done in parallel."

  "Richard's right," Francesca added. "We're trying to do everything too fast. Let's send the space cadets into Rama to finish setting up. While they're gone we can work out the details of the sortie."

  "That's impractical," Dr. Brown replied. "The academy graduates are the only ones who know how long each of the various engineering activities should take. We can't make meaningful timelines without them."

  "Then one of us will stay here with you," Janos Tabori said. He grinned. "And we can use Heilmann or O'Toole inside, as an extra worker. That shouldn't slow us down too much."

&n
bsp; A consensus decision was reached in half an hour. Nicole would stay onboard the Newton again, at least until the infrastructure was completed, and represent the cadets in the mission planning process, Admiral Heilmann would go into Rama with the four other professional cosmonauts. They would finish the remaining three infrastructure tasks: the assembly of the rest of the vehicles, the deployment of another dozen portable monitoring stations in the Northern Hemicylinder, and the construction of the Beta campsite/communications complex on the north side of the Cylindrical Sea.

  Richard Wakefield was in the process of reviewing all the detailed subtasks with his small team when Reggie Wilson, who had been virtually silent during the entire morning, suddenly jumped up from his chair. "This is all bullshit," he shouted. "I can't believe all the nonsense I'm hearing."

  Richard stopped his review. Brown and Takagishi, who had already started discussing the sortie design, were suddenly silent. All eyes were focused on Reggie Wilson.

  "A man died here four days ago," he said. "Killed, most likely, by whoever or whatever is operating that gigantic spacecraft. But we went inside exploring anyway. Next the lights go on and off unexpectedly." Wilson looked around the room at the rest of the crew. His eyes were wild. His forehead was sweating. "And what do we all do? Huh? How do we respond to this warning from alien creatures far superior to us? We sit down calmly and plan the rest of our exploration of their vehicle. Don't any of you get it? They don't want us in there. They want us to leave, to go home to Earth."

  Wilson's outburst was greeted by an uncomfortable silence. At length General O'Toole walked over beside Reggie Wilson. "Reggie," he said quietly, "we were all upset by General Borzov's death. But none of the rest of us see any connection—"

  "Then you're blind, man, you're blind. I was up in that goddamn helicopter when the lights went out. One minute it was bright as a summer day and the next, poof, it was pitch black. It was fucking weird, man. Somebody turned out all the lights. In this discussion never once have I heard anybody ask why the lights went out. What's the matter with you people? Are you too smart to be afraid?"

  Wilson ranted for several minutes. His recurring theme was always the same. The Ramans had planned Borzov's death, they were sending a warning with the lights going on and off, there would be more disasters if the crew insisted on continuing with the exploration.

  General O'Toole stood beside Reggie during the entire episode. Dr, Brown, Francesca, and Nicole had a hurried discussion on the side and then Nicole approached Wilson. "Reggie," she said informally, interrupting his diatribe, "why don't you and General O'Toole come with me? We can continue this conversation without delaying the rest of the crew."

  He looked at her suspiciously. "You, Doctor? Why should I come with you? You weren't even in there. You haven't seen enough to know anything." Wilson moved over in front of Wakefield. "You were there, Richard," he said. "You saw that place, You know what kind of intelligence and power it would take to make a space vehicle that large and then launch it on a trip between the stars. Hey, man, we're nothing to them. We're less than ants. We haven't got a chance."

  "I agree with you, Reggie," Richard Wakefield said calmly after a moment's hesitation. "At least where our comparative capabilities are concerned. But we have no evidence they're hostile. Or even care about whether or not we explore their craft. On the contrary, the very fact that we are alive—"

  "Look," shouted Irina Turgenyev suddenly. "Look at the monitor."

  A solitary image was frozen on the giant screen in the control center. A crablike creature filled the entire frame. It had a low, flat body, about twice as long as it was wide. Its weight was supported on six triple-jointed legs. Two scissorlike claws extended in front of the body and a whole row of manipulators, which looked uncannily like tiny human hands at first glance, nestled close to some kind of opening in the carapace. On closer inspection the manipulators were a veritable hardware store of capabilities—there were pincers, probes, rasps, and even something that resembled a drill.

  Its eyes, if that's indeed what they were, were deeply recessed in protective hoods and raised like periscopes above the top of the shell. The eyeballs themselves were crystal or jelly, vivid blue in color, and utterly expressionless.

  From the legend on the side of the image it was clear that the photograph had been taken just moments before, by one of the long-range drones, at a spot roughly five kilometers south of the Cylindrical Sea. The frame, filmed with a telescopic lens, covered an area roughly six meters square.

  "So we have company in Rama," said Janos Tabori. The rest of the cosmonauts stared at the monitor in amazement.

  All of the crew later agreed that the image of the crab biot on the giant screen would not have been so frightening if it had not occurred at that precise moment. Although Reggie's behavior was definitely aberrant, there was enough sense in what he was saying to remind each of them of the dangers in their expedition. None of the crew was completely free from fear. All of them had, in some private moment, confronted the disquieting fact that the super-advanced Ramans might not be friendly.

  But most of the time they pushed aside their fears. It was part of their job. Like the early space shuttle astronauts in America, who knew that every so often the vehicle would crash or explode, the Newton cosmonauts accepted that there were uncontrollable risks associated with their mission. Healthy denial caused the group to avoid discussion of the unsettling issues most of the time and to focus on the more bounded (and therefore more controllable) items, such as the sequence of events for the following day.

  Reggie's outburst and the simultaneous appearance of the crab biot on the monitor triggered one of the few philosophical group discussions that ever occurred on the project. O'Toole staked out his position early. Although he was fascinated by the Ramans, he did not fear them. God had seen fit to place him on this mission and, if He so chose, could decide that this extraordinary adventure would be O'Toole's last. In any case, whatever happened would be God's will.

  Richard Wakefield articulated a point of view that was apparently shared by several of the other crew members. To him, the entire project was both a challenging voyage of discovery and a test of personal mettle. The uncertainties were there, to be sure, but they produced excitement as well as danger. The intense thrill of new learning, together with the possible monumental significance of this extraterrestrial encounter, more than compensated for the risks. Richard had no qualms about the mission. He was certain that this was the apotheosis of his life; if he didn't live beyond the end of the project, it would still have been worth it, He would have done something important during his brief existence on Earth.

  Nicole listened attentively to the discussion. She didn't say much herself, but she found her own opinions crystallizing as she followed the flow of the conversation. She enjoyed watching the responses, both verbal and nonverbal, from the other cosmonauts. Shigeru Takagishi was clearly in the Wakefield camp. He was vigorously nodding his head the entire time Richard was talking about the excitement of participating in such a significant effort. Reggie Wilson, now subdued and probably embarrassed by his earlier tirade, did not say much. He commented only when asked a direct question. Admiral Heilmann looked uncomfortable from the beginning to the end. His entire contribution was to remind everyone of the passage of time.

  Surprisingly, Dr. David Brown did not add much to the philosophical discussion. He made several short comments and once or twice seemed on the verge of launching into a long, amplifying explanation. But he never did. His true beliefs about the nature of Rama were not revealed.

  Francesca Sabatini initially acted as a kind of moderator or interlocutor, asking questions of clarification and keeping the conversation on an even keel. Toward the end of the discussion, however, she offered several personal, candid comments of her own. Her philosophical view of the Newton mission was altogether different from that expressed by O'Toole and Wakefield.

  "I think you're making this entire thing much too complex an
d intellectual," she said after Richard had delivered a long panegyric on the joys of knowledge. "There was no need for me to do any deep soul-searching before I applied to be a Newton cosmonaut-I approached the issue the same way I do all my major decisions. I did a risk/reward trade-off. I judged that the rewards—considering all the factors, including fame, prestige, money, even adventure—more than warranted the risks. And I absolutely disagree with Richard in one respect. If I die on this mission I will not be at all happy. For me, most of the rewards from this project are delayed; I cannot benefit from them if I do not return to Earth."

  Francesca's comments aroused Nicole's curiosity. She wanted to ask the Italian journalist some more questions, but Nicole didn't think it was the proper time or place. After the meeting was over, she was still intrigued by what Francesca had said. Can life really be that simple to her? Nicole thought to herself. Can everything be evaluated in terms of risks and rewards? She remembered Francesca's lack of emotion when she drank the abortion liquid. But what about principles or values? Or even feelings? As the meeting broke up Nicole admitted to herself that Francesca was still very much a puzzle.

  Nicole watched Dr. Takagishi carefully. He was handling himself much better today. "I have brought a printout of the official sortie strategy, Dr. Brown," he was saying, waving a four-inch-thick set of papers in his hand, "to remind us of the fundamental tenets of sortie design that resulted from over a year of unhurried mission planning. May I read from the summary?"

  "I don't think you need to do that," David Brown responded. "We're all familiar with—"

  "I'm not," interrupted General O'Toole. "I would like to hear it. Admiral Heilmann asked me to pay close attention and brief him on the issues."

  Dr. Brown waved for Takagishi to continue. The diminutive Japanese scientist was borrowing a page from Brown's own portfolio. Even though he knew that David Brown personally favored going after the crab biots on the second sortie, Takagishi still was attempting to convince the other cosmonauts that the top-priority activity should be a scientific foray into the city of New York.