Rama II

24 SOUNDS IN THE DARKNESS

At first Takagishi could see abso­lutely nothing. It was as if he had suddenly been struck blind. He blinked twice and stood motionless in the total darkness. The momentary silence on the commlinks erupted into hope­less noise as all the cosmonauts began to talk at the same time. Calmly, fighting against his growing fear, Takagishi tried to remember the scene that had been in front of his eyes at the moment the lights were extinguished. He had been standing on the wall overlooking New York, about a meter from the dangerous edge. In the final second he had been looking off to the left and had just glimpsed a staircase descending into the city about two hundred meters away. Then the scene had vanished… “Takagishi,” he heard Wakefield calling, “are you all right?” He turned around to acknowledge the question and noticed that his knees had become weak. In the complete darkness he had lost his orientation. How many degrees had he turned? Had he been facing the city directly? Again he recalled the last image. The elevated wall was twenty or thirty meters above the floor of the city. A fall would be fatal.

“I’m here,” he said tentatively, “But I’m too close to the edge.” He dropped down on all fours. The metal was cold against his hands.

“We’re coming,” Francesca said. “I’m trying to find the light on my video camera.”

Takagishi turned down the volume on his commpak and listened for the sound of his companions. A few seconds later he saw a light in the distance. He could barely make out the forms of his two associates.

“Where are you, Shigeru?” Francesca asked. The light from her camera illuminated only the area immediately around her.

“Up here. Up here.” He waved before he realized that they could not see him.

“I want complete quiet!” David Brown shouted over the communications system, “until everyone is accounted for.” The conversations ceased after a few seconds. “Now,” he continued, “Francesca, what’s going on down there?”

“We’re climbing the stairway up the wall, on the New York side, David, about a hundred meters from where we parked the icemobile. Dr. Takagishi was ahead of us, already at the top. We have the light from my camera. We’re going to meet him.”

“Janos,” Dr. Brown said next, “where are you in rover number two?”

“About three kilometers from camp. The headlights are working fine. We could return in ten minutes or so.”

“Go back there and man the navigation console. We’ll stay airborne until you verify that the homing system is operational from your side… Fran­cesca;, be careful, but come back to camp as fast as you can. And give us a report every two minutes or so.”

“Roger, David,” she said. Francesca switched off her commpak and called for Takagishi again. Despite the fact that he was only thirty meters away, it took Francesca and Richard over a minute to find him in the dark.

Takagishi was relieved to touch his colleagues. They sat down beside him on the wall and listened to the renewed chatter on the commpak. O’Toole and des Jardins verified that there had been no other observed changes inside Rama at the time the lights had gone out. The half dozen portable scientific stations that had already been deployed in the alien spaceship had exhibited no meaningful perturbations. Temperatures, wind velocities and directions, seismic readings, and near field spectroscopic measurements were all un­changed-

“So the lights went out,” Wakefield said. “I admit that it was scary, but it was no big deal. Probably—”

“Shh, ” said Takagishi abruptly. He reached down and turned off both his and Walcefield’s commpak. “Do you hear that noise?”

To Wakefield the sudden silence was nearly as unnerving as the total darkness had been a few minutes before. “No,” he said in a whisper, after listening for several seconds, “but my ears are not very—”

“S!z!z.” Now it was Francesca’s turn. “Are you talking about that distant, high-pitched scraping sound?” she whispered.

’Yes,” said Takagishi, quietly but excitedly. “Like something is brushing against a metallic surface. It suggests movement.”

Wakefield listened again. Maybe he could hear something. Maybe he was imagining it. “Come on,” he said to the others out loud, “let’s go back to the icemobile.”

“Wait,” said Takagishi as Richard stood up. “It seemed to stop just as you spoke.” He leaned over to Francesca. “Turn off the light,” he said softly. “Let’s sit here in the darkness and see if we can hear it again.”

Wakefield sat back down beside his companions. With the camera light off it was absolutely black around them. The only sound was their breathing. They waited a full minute. They heard nothing. Just as Wakefield was about to insist that they leave, he heard a sound from the direction of New York. It was like hard brushes dragging across metal, but there was also an embedded high-frequency noise, as if a tiny voice were singing very fast, that punc­tuated the nearly constant scraping. The sound was definitely louder. And eerie. Wakefield felt his spine tingle.

“Do you have a tape recorder?” Takagishi whispered to Francesca. The scraping stopped at the sound of Takagishi’s voice. The trio waited another fifteen seconds.

“Hey there, hey there,” they heard David Brown’s loud voice on the emergency interrupt channel. “Is everybody all right? You’re way overdue for a report.”

“Yes, David,” Francesca replied. “We’re still here. We heard an unusual sound coming from New York.’

“Now’s not the time for dilly-dallying. We have a major crisis on our hands. All our new plans have assumed that Rama would be constantly lit.

We need to regroup.”

“All right,” Wakefield responded. “We’re leaving the wall now. If all goes well we should be back to the campsite in less than an hour.”

Dr. Shigeru Takagishi was reluctant to leave New York with the mystery of the strange sound unresolved. But he understood completely that now was not the appropriate time for a scientific foray into the city. As the icemobile raced across the frozen Cylindrical Sea, the Japanese scientist smiled to himself. He was happy. He knew that he had heard a new sound, something decidedly different from any of the sounds catalogued by the first Rama team. This was a good beginning.

Cosmonauts Tabori and Wakefield were the last two to ride up the chair-lift beside the Alpha stairway. “Takagishi was really quite irritated with Dr. Brown, wasn’t he?” Richard was saying to Janos as he helped the little Hungarian disembark from the chair. They glided along the ramp toward the ferry.

“I’ve never seen him so angry,” Janos replied. “Shig is a consummate professional and he has great pride in his knowledge of Rama. For Brown to discount the noise you guys heard in such an offhand manner suggests an absence of respect for Takagishi. I don’t blame Shig for being irritated.”

They climbed onboard the ferry and activated the transportation module. The vast darkness of Rama retreated behind them as they eased through the lighted corridor toward the Newton.

“It was a very strange sound,” Richard said. “It really gave me the chills. I have no idea if it was a new sound, or if maybe Norton and his team heard the same thing seventy years ago. But I do know that I had a bad case of the willies while I was standing there on the wall.”

“Francesca was even pissed off at Brown at first. She wanted to do a feature interview with Shig for her nightly report. Brown talked her out of it, but I’m not certain he completely convinced her that strange noises are not news. Luckily she had enough of a story with just the lights going out.”

The two men descended from the ferry and approached the air lock. “Whew,” said Janos. “I’m bushed. It has been a couple of long and hectic days.”

“Yeah,” Richard agreed. “We thought we would be spending the next two nights at the campsite. Instead we’re back up here. I wonder what surprises are in store for us tomorrow.”

Janos smiled at his friend. “You know what’s funny about all this?” he said. He did not wait for Wakefield to answer. “Brown really believes he’s in charge of this mission. Did you see how he reacted when Takagishi sug­gested that we could explore New York in the dark? Brown probably thinks it was his decision for us to return to the Newton and abort the first sortie.”

Richard looked at Janos with a quizzical smile. “It wasn’t, of course,” Janos continued. “Rama made the decision for us to leave. And Rama will decide what we do next.”