Because I was confused and frightened and the lights were flashing. And Richard had sounded so very concerned about our leaving. I thought it would be easier for us to all talk together at the helicopter. Was that believable? Barely. But it was easy to keep straight. So I still have the partial truth option, Francesca thought as she passed the octahedron near the central plaza. She realized she had walked too far to the east, checked her personal navigator, and then changed her direction. The lights of Rama continued to flash.
And what are my other choices:” Wakefield talked with us just outside the barn. He knows where we were. A search party would definitely find her.
Unless… Francesca thought again about the possibility that Nicole might eventually implicate her in the drugging of General Borzov. The resulting scandal would certainly result in a messy investigation and probably a criminal indictment. In any case, Francesca’s reputation would be sullied and her future career as a journalist would be seriously compromised.
With Nicole out of the picture, on the other hand, there was virtually zero probability that anyone would ever learn that Francesca had drugged Borzov. The only person who knew the facts was David Brown, and he had been a co-conspirator. Besides, he had even more to lose than she did.
So the issue, Francesca thought, is whether or not I can make up a believable story that both reduces the chance Nicole will be found and does not implicate me if she is. That’s a very difficult task.
She was nearing the Cylindrical Sea. Her personal navigator told her that she was only six hundred meters away. Dammit, Francesca answered herself after thinking very carefully about her situation, ! don’t really have a completely safe option. I mil have to choose one or the other. Either way there’s a significant risk.
Francesca stopped moving north and paced back and forth between two skyscrapers. As she was walking, the ground underneath her feet began to tremble. Everything was shaking. She dropped to her knees to steady herself. She heard Janos Tabori’s voice very faintly on the radio. “It’s all right, everybody, don’t be alarmed. It looks as if our vehicle is undergoing a maneuver. That must have been what the warnings were all about… By the way, Nicole, where are you and Francesca? Hiro and Richard are about to take off in the helicopter.”
“I’m close to the sea, maybe two minutes away,” Francesca answered. “Nicole went back to check on something.”
“Roger,” Janos replied. “Are you there, Nicole? Do you copy, cosmonaut des Jardins?”
There was silence on the radio.
“As you know, Janos,” Francesca interjected, “communications are very spotty from here. Nicole knows where to meet the helicopter. She’ll be along quickly, I’m certain.” She paused a moment. “Say, where are the others? Is everyone all right?”
“Brown and Heilmann are on the radio with Earth. ISA management will be completely freaked out now. They were already demanding that we leave Rama before this maneuver began.”
“We’re just boarding the helicopter,” Richard Wakefield said. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
It’s done. I’ve made my choice, Francesca said to herself when Richard was finished. She was surprisingly elated. Immediately she began to rehearse her story. “We were near the large octahedron in the central plaza when Nicole spotted an alley off to our right that we had not noticed before. The street leading to the alley was extremely narrow and she remarked that it was probably a region where communications could not penetrate. I was already tired — we had been walking so fast. She told me to go ahead to the helicopter…”
“And you never saw her again?” Richard Wakefield interrupted. Francesca shook her head. Richard was standing on the ice next to her. Beneath them the ice was vibrating as the long maneuver continued. The lights were now on. They had stopped their flashing when the maneuver began.
Pilot Yamanaka was sitting in the cockpit of his helicopter. Richard checked his watch. “It’s almost five minutes since we landed here. Something must have happened to her.” He glanced around. “Maybe she’s coming out somewhere else.”
Richard and Francesca climbed into the helicopter and Yamanaka took off. They cruised up and down the island coast, twice circling over the solitary icemobile. “Edge into New York,” Wakefield commanded. “Maybe we’ll be able to spot her.”
From the helicopter it was virtually impossible to see the ground in the city. The “copter had to fly above the tallest buildings. The streets were very narrow and the shadows played games with the eyes. Once Richard thought he saw something moving between the buildings, but it turned out to be an optical illusion.
“All right, Nicole, all right. Where in the hell are you?”
“Wakefield,” Dr. David Brown’s sonorous voice sounded in the helicopter, “I want you three to come back to Beta immediately. We need to have a meeting.” Richard was surprised to hear that it was Dr. Brown. Janos had been the one monitoring their communication link since they had left Beta.
“What’s the hurry, boss?” Wakefield replied. “We still haven’t made our scheduled rendezvous with Nicole des Jardins. She should be coming out of New York any minute.”
“I’ll give you the details when you get here. We have some difficult decisions to make. I’m certain that des Jardins will radio when she reaches the shore.”
It did not take them long to cross the frozen sea. Near the Beta campsite, Yamanaka landed the helicopter on the shaking ground and the three cosmonauts descended. The remaining four members of the crew were waiting for them.
“This is one incredibly long maneuver,” Richard said with a smile as he approached the others. “I hope the Ramans know what they’re doing.”
“They probably do,” Dr. Brown said somberly. “At least the Earth thinks that they do.” He looked carefully at his watch. “According to the navigation section in mission control, we should expect this maneuver to last another nineteen minutes, give or take a few seconds.”
“How do they know?” inquired Wakefield. “Have the Ramans landed on Earth and handed out a flight plan while we’ve been up here exploring?”
Nobody laughed. “If the vehicle stays at this attitude and acceleration rate,” Janos said with uncharacteristic seriousness, “then in nineteen more minutes it will be on an impact course.”
“Impact with what?” Francesca asked.
Richard Wakefield did some quick mental computations. “With the Earth?” he guessed. Janos nodded.
“Jesus!” Francesca exclaimed.
“Exactly,” David Brown said. “This mission has become an Earth security concern. The COG Executive Council is meeting at this very moment to consider all contingencies. We have been told in the strongest possible language that we must leave Rama as soon as the maneuver is completed. We are to take nothing except the crab biot and our personal belongings. We are—”
“What about Takagishi? And des Jardins?” Wakefield asked.
“We will leave the icemobile where it is, along with a rover here at Beta. They are both easy to operate. We will still be in radio contact from the Newton.” Dr. Brown stared directly at Richard. “If this spacecraft is really on an Earth impact course,” he said dramatically, “our individual lives are no longer very important. The entire course of history is about to be changed.”
“But what if the navigation engineers are wrong? What if Rama has just happened to make a maneuver that momentarily intersects an Earth impact trajectory? It could be—”
“Extremely unlikely. You remember that group of short-burst maneuvers at the time of Borzov’s death? They changed the orientation of Rama’s orbit so that an Earth impact could be achieved with one long maneuver at exactly the right time. The engineers on Earth figured it out thirty-six hours ago. They radioed O’Toole before dawn this morning to expect the maneuver. I didn’t want to say anything while everyone was out looking for Takagishi.”
“That explains why everyone is so anxious for us to clear out of here!” Janos noted.
“Only partially,” Dr. Brown continued. “There is clearly a different feeling about Rama and the Ramans down on Earth. ISA management and the world leaders on the COG Executive Council are apparently convinced that Rama is implacably hostile.”
He stopped for several seconds, as if he were reassessing his own attitude.
“I think they are reacting emotionally myself, but I cannot persuade them differently. I personally see no evidence of hostility, only a disinterest in and disregard for a wildly inferior being. But the televised account of Wilson’s death has done its damage. The world’s populace cannot be herebeside us, cannot grasp the majesty of this place. they can only react viscerally to the horror—”
“If you don’t think the Ramans have hostile intentions,” Francesca interrupted, “then how do you explain this maneuver? It can’t be coincidence. They or it has decided for some reason to head for the Earth. No wonder the people down there are traumatized. Remember, the first Rama never acknowledged its visitors in any way. This is a dramatically different response. The Ramans are telling us they know—”
“Hold it. Hold it,” Richard said. “I think we’re jumping to conclusions a little too fast. We have twelve more minutes before we should start pushing the panic buttons.”
“All right, Cosmonaut Wakefield,” Francesca said, now remembering that she was a reporter and activating her video camera, “for the record, what do you think it will mean if this maneuver does culminate in a trajectory that impacts the Earth?”
When Richard finally spoke he was very serious. “People of the Earth,” he said dramatically, “if Rama has indeed changed its course to visit our planet, it is not necessarily a hostile act. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, that any of us have seen or heard that indicates the species that created this space vehicle wishes us any harm. Certainly Cosmonaut Wilson’s death was disturbing, but it was probably an isolated response from a specific set of robots rather than a part of a sinister plan.
“I see this magnificent spacecraft as a single machine, almost organic in its complexity. It is extraordinarily intelligent and programmed for long-term survival. It is neither hostile nor friendly. It could easily have been designed to track any incoming satellites and compute where the visiting spacecraft must have originated. Rama’s orbit change to fly in the vicinity of the Earth might therefore be nothing more than its standard response to an encounter initiated by another spacefaring species. It may simply be coming to find out more about us.”
“Very good,” Janos Tabori said with a grin. “That was borderline philosophical.”
Wakefield laughed nervously.
“Cosmonaut Turgenyev,” Francesca said as she changed the direction of the camera, “do you agree with your colleague? Right after General Borzov died, you openly expressed some concern that perhaps some “higher force,” meaning the Ramans, might have had a hand in his death. What are your feelings now?”
The normally taciturn Soviet pilot stared directly into the camera with her sad eyes. “Da,” she said, “I think Cosmonaut Wakefield is a very brilliant engineer. But he has not answered the difficult questions. Why did Rama maneuver during General Borzov’s operation? Why did the biots cut Wilson to pieces? Where is Professor Takagishi?”
Irina Turgenyev paused a moment to control her emotions. “We will not find Nicole des Jardins. Rama may be only a machine, but we cosmonauts have already seen how dangerous it can be. If it is heading for the Earth, I fear for my family, my friends, for all humanity. There is no way to predict what it might do. And we would be powerless to stop it.”
Several minutes later Francesca Sabatini carried her automatic video equipment out beside the frozen sea for one final sequence. She carefully checked the time before switching on the camera at precisely fifteen seconds before the maneuver was expected to end. “The picture you are seeing is jumping up and down,” she said in her best journalistic voice, “because the ground underneath us here on Rama has been shaking continuously since this maneuver started forty-seven minutes ago. According to the navigation engineers, the maneuver will stop in the next few seconds if Rama has changed course to impact the Earth. Their calculations are, of course, based on assumptions about Rama’s intentions—”
Francesca stopped in midsentence and took a deep breath. “The ground is no longer shaking. The maneuver is over. Rama is now on an Earth impact trajectory.”
37
MAROONED
When Nicole awakened the first time she was groggy and had great difficulty holding any idea fixed in her mind. Her head hurt and she could feel sharp pains in her back and legs. She did not know what had happened to her. She was barely able to find her water flask and take a drink. I must have a concussion, she thought as she fell back asleep.
It was dark when Nicole woke up again. But her mind was no longer in a fog. She knew where she was. She remembered looking for Takagishi and sliding into the pit. Nicole also remembered calling for Francesca and the painful, terrible fall. She immediately took her communicator from the belt of her flight suit.
“Hello there, Newton team,” she said as she stood up slowly. “This is cosmonaut des Jardins checking in. I’ve been, well, indisposed might be a good word. I fell down into a hole and knocked myself out. Sabatini knows where I am…”
Nicole broke off her monologue and waited. There was no response from her receiver. She turned up the gain but only succeeded in picking up some strange static. It’s dark already, she thought, and it had only been light for two hours at most… Nicole knew that the periods of light inside Rama had been lasting about thirty hours. Had she been unconscious that long? Or had Rama thrown them another curveball? She looked at her wristwatch, which showed time elapsed since the start of the second sortie, and did a quick calculation. ! have been down here for thirty-two hours. Why has nobody come?
Nicole thought back to the last minutes before she fell. They had talked to Wakefield, and then she had dashed in to check the pits. Richard always did a navigation fix when they were in two-way lock and Francesca knew exactly…
Could something have happened to the entire crew? But if not, why had nobody discovered her? Nicole smiled to herself as she fought the onset of panic. Of course, she reasoned, they found me, but I was unconscious, so they decided… Another voice in her head told her that her thought pattern didn’t make sense. Under any circumstances, she would have been retrieved from the pit if they had found her.
She shuddered involuntarily as she feared, for a brief moment, that perhaps she would never be found. Nicole forced her mind to change subjects and began an assessment of the physical damage she had suffered during the fall. She ran her fingers carefully across all portions of her skull. There were several bumps, including a large one on the very back of her head. That must have been responsible for the concussion, she surmised. But there were no skull fractures and what little bleeding there had been had stopped hours ago.
She checked her arms and legs, then her back. There were bruises everywhere, but miraculously no bones were broken. The occasional sharp pain just below her neck suggested that she had either crushed part of a vertebra or pinched some nerves. Other than that, she would heal. The discovery that her body had survived more or less intact temporarily buoyed her spirits.
Nicole next surveyed her new domain. She had fallen in the middle of a deep but narrow rectangular pit. It was six paces from end to end and one and a half paces across. Using her flashlight and outstretched arm, she estimated the depth of the hole at eight and a half meters.
The pit was empty except for a jumbled collection of small metallic pieces, ranging in length from five to fifteen centimeters, that were stacked over at one end of the hole. Nicole examined them carefully under the beam from her flashlight. There were over a hundred altogether and maybe a dozen different individual types– Some were long and straight, others curved, a few jointed — they reminded Nicole of industrial trash from a modern steel mill.
The
walls of the pit were absolutely straight. The wall material felt like a metal!rock hybrid to Nicole. It was cold, very cold. There were no anomalies, no wrinkles that might have been used as footholds, nothing that would encourage her to believe she could climb out. She tried to chip or scrape the wall surface using her portable medical tools. She was unable to make any mark.
Discouraged by the perfect construction of the pit walls, Nicole walked back to the metal pile to see if there was any way she could put together a ladder or scaffold, some kind of support that would elevate her to the point where she could climb out using her own strength. It was not encouraging. The metal pieces were small and thin. A quick mental calculation told her there was not enough mass to support her weight.
Nicole became even more discouraged when she ate a small snack. She remembered that she had brought very little food and water with her because she had wanted to carry extra medical supplies for Takagishi. Even if she rationed it carefully, her water would only last a day and her food no more than thirty-six hours.
She shone her flashlight directly upward. The beam bounced off the roof of the bam. Thinking about the barn reminded her again of the events preceding her fall. Nicole remembered the increased amplitude of the emergency signal once she exited the building. Great, she thought despondently. The interior of this fantastic barn is probably a radio blackout zone. No wonder nobody heard me.
She slept because there was nothing else to do. Eight hours later Nicole woke up with a start from a frightening dream. She had been sitting with her father and daughter in a lovely provincial restaurant in France. It was a magnificent spring day; Nicole could see flowers in the garden adjoining the restaurant. When the waiter had come, he had placed a plate of escargots smothered in herbs and butter in front of Genevieve. Pierre received a mountainous serving of chicken cooked in a mushroom and wine sauce. The waiter had smiled and left. Slowly it had dawned on Nicole that there was nothing for her. , . ,
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