Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  "It's also possible that he's a complete son of a bitch," said Wilson bitterly. He accelerated the rover to its maximum speed. "Beta campsite, here we come!"

  28

  EXTRAPOLATION

  Nicole completed her lunch of pressed duck, reconstituted broccoli, and mashed potatoes. The rest of the cosmonauts were still eating and it was temporarily quiet at the long table. In the corner, by the entrance, a monitor tracked the location of the crab biots. Their pattern had not changed. The blip representing the crabs would move in one direction for slightly more than ten minutes and then reverse itself.

  "What happens after they finish this parcel?" Richard Wakefield asked. He was looking at a computer map of the area that was posted on a temporary bulletin board.

  "Last time they followed one of those lanes between the checkerboard partitions until they came to a hole," Francesca responded from the other end of the table. "Then they dumped their garbage in it. They haven't picked up anything in this new territory, so what they will do when they finish is anybody's guess."

  "Everyone is convinced that our biots are in fact garbagemen?" Richard asked.

  "The evidence is fairly strong," David Brown said. "A similar solitary crab biot encountered by Jimmy Pak inside the first Rama was also believed to be a garbage collector."

  "Excuse me," Janos Tabori interjected, "but just what garbage are these crabs collecting?"

  "We flatter ourselves," Shigeru Takagishi said softly after a long silence. He finished chewing his last bite and swallowed. "Dr. Brown himself was the one who first said that it was unlikely we human beings could comprehend what Rama was about. Our conversation reminds me of that old Hindu proverb about the blind men who felt the elephant. They all described it differently, for each of them touched only a small part of the animal. None of them was correct."

  "So, you don't think our crabs work for the Rama Sanitation Department?" Janos inquired.

  "I didn't say that," Takagishi replied. "I merely suggested that it's hubris on our part to conclude so quickly that those six creatures have no purpose except cleaning up the garbage. Our observational data is woefully inadequate."

  "Sometimes it is necessary to extrapolate," Dr. Brown rejoined testily, "…and even speculate, based on minimal amounts of data. You know yourself that new science is based on maximum likelihood rather than certainty."

  "Before we become involved in an esoteric discussion about science and its methodology," Janos now interrupted with a grin, "I have a sporting proposition for you all." He stood up at his place. "Actually it was Richard's idea originally, but I've figured out how to make it into a game. It has to do with the lights."

  Janos took a quick drink of water from his cup. "Since we first arrived here in Ramaland," he intoned formally, "there have been three transitions in the illumination state."

  "Boo. Hiss," shouted Wakefield. Janos laughed.

  "Okay, you guys," the little Hungarian then continued in his normal offhand way, "what's the deal with the lights? They've come on, gone off, and now come on again. What's going to happen in the future? I propose that we have a pool and contribute, say, twenty marks apiece. Each of us will make a prediction about the behavior of the lights for the rest of the mission and whoever is closest will win the pot."

  "Who will judge the winner?" Reggie Wilson inquired sleepily. He had yawned several times during the preceding hour. "Despite the impressive set of brains around this table, I don't think anyone has figured out Rama yet. My personal belief is that the lights will not follow any pattern. They will go on and off at random times to keep us guessing."

  "Write it down and send it on the modem to General O'Toole. Richard and I agreed that he would make a perfect judge. When the mission is over, he'll compare the predictions with actuality and someone will win a lucky dinner for two."

  Dr. David Brown pushed his chair back from the table. "Are you finished with your game, Tabori?" he asked. "If so," he added, without waiting for an answer, "perhaps we can clean up this lunch mess and get on with our schedule."

  "Hey skipper," Janos replied, "I'm just trying to loosen things up. Everybody's getting tense—"

  Brown walked out of the hut before Cosmonaut Tabori had finished his sentence.

  "What's bothering him?" Richard asked Francesca.

  "I guess he's anxious about the hunt," Francesca answered. "He has been in a bad mood since this morning. Maybe he's feeling all the responsibility."

  "Maybe he's just a jerk," said Wilson. He too rose from his seat. "I'm going to take a nap."

  As Wilson was leaving the large hut Nicole remembered that she wanted to check everyone's biometry before the hunt. It was a simple enough task. All she needed was to stand close to each cosmonaut for about forty-five seconds with her activated scanner and then read the critical data off the monitor. If there were no entries in the warning files, the entire procedure was quite straightforward. On this particular check everyone was clean, including Takagishi. "Nice going," Nicole said to her Japanese colleague very quietly.

  She walked outside to look for David Brown and Reggie Wilson. Dr. Brown's hut was at the far end of the campsite. Like the rest of the individual dwellings, his hut resembled a tall skinny hat sitting on the ground. All the huts were off-white in color, about two and a half meters tall, with a circular base just under two meters in diameter. They were manufactured with super-lightweight, flexible materials that combined easy packing and storage with formidable strength. Nicole remarked to herself that the huts looked something like native American Indian teepees.

  David Brown was in his hut, sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of a portable computer monitor. On the screen was text from the chapter on biots in Takagishi's Atlas of Rama. "Excuse me, Dr. Brown," Nicole said as she stuck her head in his door.

  "Yes," he said, "what is it?" He made no attempt to hide his annoyance at the interruption.

  "I need to check your biometry data," Nicole said. "You haven't been dumped since right before the first sortie."

  Brown gave her an irritated glance. Nicole held her ground. The American shrugged his shoulders, half grunted, and turned back to the monitor. Nicole knelt beside him and activated her scanner.

  "There are some folding chairs over in the supply hut," Nicole offered as Dr. Brown shifted his weight uncomfortably on the ground. He ignored her comment. Why is he so rude to me? Nicole found herself wondering. Is it because of that report on Wilson and him? No, she thought, answering her own question, it's because I have never been properly deferential,

  Data began to appear on Nicole's screen. She carefully keyed in several inputs that permitted a synopsis of the warning data to be shown. "Your blood pressure has been too high for intermittent intervals during the last seventy-two hours, including almost all of today," she said without emotion. "This particular kind of pattern is usually associated with stress."

  Dr. Brown stopped reading about biots and turned to face his life science officer. He looked at the displayed data without understanding it. "This graph shows the amplitudes and durations of your out-of-tolerance excursions," Nicole said, pointing at the screen. "None of the individual occurrences would be serious by itself. But the overall pattern is cause for concern."

  "I have been under some pressure," he mumbled. David Brown watched while Nicole called up other displays showing data that corroborated her original statements. Many of Brown's warning files were overflowing.

  The lights continued to flash on the monitor. "What's the worst-case scenario?" he inquired.

  Nicole eyed her patient. "A stroke with paralysis or death," she replied. "If the condition persists or worsens."

  He whistled. "What should I do?"

  "In the first place," Nicole answered, "you must start by getting more sleep. Your metabolic profile shows that since the death of General Borzov you have only had a total of eleven hours of solid rest. Why didn't you tell me you were having trouble sleeping?"

  "I thought it was just exci
tement. I even took a sleeping pill one night and it had no effect."

  Nicole's brow furrowed. "I don't remember giving you any sleeping pills."

  Dr. Brown smiled. "Shit," he said, "I forgot to tell you. I was talking to Francesca Sabatini about my insomnia one night and she offered me a pill. I took it without thinking."

  "Which night was that?" Nicole asked. She changed displays again on her monitor and called for more data from the storage buffers.

  "I'm not certain," Dr. Brown said after some hesitation. "I think it was—"

  "Oh, here it is," Nicole said. "I can see it in the chemical analysis. That was March third, the second night after Borzov's death. The day you and Heilmann were selected as joint commanders. From the breakout in this spectrometry data, I would guess that you took a single medvil."

  "You can tell that from my biometry data."

  "Not exactly," Nicole said with a smile. "The interpretation is not unique. What was it you said at lunch? Sometimes it's necessary to extrapolate … and speculate,"

  Their eyes met for a moment. Could that be fear? Nicole wondered as she tried to interpret what she was seeing in his gaze. Dr. Brown looked away. "Thank you, Dr. des Jardins," he said stiffly, "for your report on my blood pressure. I will try to relax and get plenty of sleep. And I apologize for not informing you about the sleeping pill." He dismissed her with a wave of his hand.

  Nicole started to protest her dismissal but decided against it. He wouldn't follow my advice anyway, she said to herself as she walked toward Wilson's hut. And his blood pressure was certainly not dangerously high. She thought about the strained final two minutes of their conversation, after she had astonished Dr. Brown by correctly identifying the type of sleeping pill. There's something not quite right here. What is it that I am missing?

  She could hear Reggie Wilson snoring before she arrived at the door of his tent. After a brief debate with herself, Nicole decided that she would scan him after his nap. She then returned to her own hut and quickly fell asleep.

  "Nicole. Nicole des Jardins." The voice intruded in her dream and awakened her. "It's me. Francesca. I need to tell you something."

  Nicole sat up slowly on her cot. Francesca had already entered the hut. The Italian was wearing her friendliest smile, the one that Nicole had thought was always saved for the camera.

  "I was talking to David just a few minutes ago," Francesca said as she approached the cot, "and he told me about your conversation after lunch." Francesca kept talking as Nicole yawned and swung her legs around to the floor. "I was, of course, very concerned to learn about his blood pressure—don't worry, he and I have already agreed that I won't use it—but what really bothered me was he reminded me that we never told you about the sleeping pill. I'm so embarrassed. We should have told you immediately."

  Francesca was talking too fast for Nicole. Just moments before she had been in a deep sleep, dreaming of Beauvois, and now all of a sudden she was expected to listen to a staccato confession from the Italian cosmonaut.

  "Could you wait a minute until I wake up?" Nicole asked crossly. She leaned around Francesca to a makeshift table and took a cup of water. She drank slowly.

  "Now am I to understand," Nicole said, "that you have awakened me to tell me that you gave Dr. Brown a sleeping pill? Something I already know?"

  "Yes," Francesca said with a smile. "I mean, that's part of it. But I realized that I had forgotten to tell you about Reggie also."

  Nicole shook her head. "I'm not following you, Francesca. Are you talking about Reggie Wilson now?"

  Francesca hesitated for a second. "Yes," she said. "Didn't you check him with your scanner right after lunch?"

  Nicole shook her head again. "No, he was already asleep." She looked at her watch. "I had planned to scan him before the meeting started. Maybe an hour from now."

  Francesca was flustered. "Well," she said, "when David told me that the medvil showed up in his biometry data, I thought…" She stopped herself in midsentence. She seemed to be collecting her thoughts. Nicole waited patiently.

  "Reggie started complaining of headaches over a week ago," Francesca eventually continued, "after the two Newton ships joined for the rendezvous with Rama. Since he and I have been close friends and he knew about my knowledge of drugs—you know, from all that work on my documentary series—he asked me if I would give him something for headaches. I refused at first, but finally, after he kept badgering me, I gave him some nubitrol."

  Nicole frowned. "That's a very strong medicine for a simple headache. There are still doctors who believe it should never be prescribed unless everything else has failed—"

  "I told him all that," Francesca said. "He was adamant. You don't know Reggie. Sometimes you can't reason with him."

  "How much did you give him?"

  "Eight pills altogether, a total of two hundred milligrams."

  "No wonder he's been acting so strangely." Nicole leaned over and picked up her pocket computer sitting on the end table. She accessed her medical data base and read the short entry about nubitrol. "Not much here," she said. "I'll have to ask O'Toole to transmit the full entry from the medical encyclopedia. But if I remember correctly, wasn't there a controversy about nubitrol remaining in the system for weeks?"

  "I don't recall," Francesca replied. She looked at the monitor in Nicole s hand and quickly read the text. Nicole was irritated. She started to lambast Francesca verbally but at the last moment changed her mind. So you gave drugs to both David and Reggie, she was thinking. Out of her memory came a vague recollection of Francesca handing Valeriy Borzov a glass of wine several hours before he died. A strange chill ran through Nicole's body. Could her intuition be correct?

  Nicole turned around and fixed Francesca with a cold stare. "Now that you have confessed to playing doctor and pharmacist for both David and Reggie, is there anything else you want to tell me?"

  "What do you mean?" Francesca asked.

  "Have you given drugs to any other member of the crew?"

  Nicole felt her heart race as Francesca blanched, ever so slightly, and hesitated before replying.

  "No. No, of course not," was her answer.

  29

  THE HUNT

  The helicopter very slowly dropped the rover to the ground. "How much farther?" Janos Tabori asked over the communicator.

  "About ten meters," Richard Wakefield replied from below. He was standing in a spot about a hundred meters south of the edge of the Cylindrical Sea. Above him the rover dangled at the end of two long cables. "Be careful to let it down gently. There are some delicate electronics in the chassis."

  Hiro Yamanaka commanded the helicopter into its tightest possible altitude control loop while Janos electronically extended the cables a few centimeters at a time. "Contact," shouted Wakefield. "On the rear wheels. The front needs to come down another meter."

  Francesca Sabatini raced around to the side of the rover to record its historic touchdown in the Southern Hemicylinder of Rama. Fifty meters farther from the cliff, in the neighborhood of a hut that was serving as a temporary headquarters, the rest of the cosmonauts were preparing for the hunt to begin. Irina Turgenyev was checking the installation of the cable snare in the second helicopter. David Brown was by himself a few meters away from the hut, talking on the radio with Admiral Heilmann back at the Beta campsite. The two men were reviewing the details of the capture plan. Wilson, Takagishi, and des Jardins were watching the conclusion of the rover landing operation.

  "Now we know who's really the boss of this outfit," Reggie Wilson was saying to his two companions. He pointed at Dr. Brown. "This damn hunt is more like a military operation than anything we've done, yet our senior scientist is in charge and our ranking officer is manning the phones." He spat on the ground. "Christ, do we have enough equipment here? Two helicopters, a rover, three different kinds of cages—not to mention several large boxes of electrical and mechanical shit. Those poor bastard crabs don't have a chance."

  Dr. Takagishi put the l
aser binoculars to his eyes. He found the target quickly. Half a kilometer to the east the crab biots were nearing the edge of the cliff again. Nothing about their motion had changed. "We need all the equipment because of the uncertainty," Takagishi said quietly. "Nobody really knows what is going to happen."

  "I hope the lights go out," Wilson said with a laugh.

  "We're prepared for that," David Brown interjected tersely as he walked up to join the other three cosmonauts. "The shells of the crabs have been sprayed with a light fluorescent material and we have plenty of flares. While you were complaining about the length of our last meeting, we were finishing the contingency plans." He stared truculently at his countryman. "You know, Wilson, you could try—"

  "Break break," the voice of Otto Heilmann interrupted him. "News. Hot news. I just received word from O'Toole that INN will be carrying our feed live, beginning twenty minutes from now."

  "Good work," replied Brown. "We should be ready by then. I see Wakefield heading this way in the rover." He glanced at his watch. "And the crabs should be turning again in another few seconds. Incidentally, Otto, do you still disagree with my suggestion to snare the lead biot?"

  "Yes, David, I do. I think it's an unnecessary risk. What little we do know suggests that the lead crab has the most capability. Why take a chance? Any biot would be an incredible treasure to carry back to Earth, particularly if it's still functional. We can worry about the leader after we already have one in the bag."

  "Then I guess I'm outvoted on this one. Dr, Takagishi and Tabori both agree with you. So does General O'Toole. We'll proceed with Plan B. The target biot will be number four, the back right biot as we approach from the rear."

  The rover carrying Wakefield and Sabatini arrived at the hut area at almost the same time as the helicopter. "Good job, men," Dr. Brown said as Tabori and Yamanaka jumped down from the 'copter. "Take a short breather, Janos. Then go over and make sure Turgenyev and the cable snare are both ready to go. I want you airborne in five minutes.