Rama II

32 NEW YORK EXPLORER

The tiny bell on his wristwatch awak­ened Dr. Takagishi from a deep sleep. For a few moments he was disoriented, unable to remember where he was. He sat up on his cot and rubbed his eyes. At length he recalled that he was inside Rama and that the alarm had been set to wake him up after five hours of sleep.

He dressed in the dark. When he was finished he picked up a large bag and fumbled around inside for several seconds. Satisfied with its contents, he threw the strap over his shoulder and walked to the door of his hut. Dr. Takagishi peered out cautiously. He could not see lights in any of the other huts. He took a deep breath and tiptoed out the door.

The world’s leading authority on Rama walked out of the camp in the direction of the Cylindrical Sea. When he reached the shore, he climbed slowly down to the icy surface on the stairs cut into the fifty-meter cliff. Takagishi sat on the bottom rung, hidden against the base of the cliff. He removed some special cleats from his bag and attached them to the bottom of his shoes. Before walking out on the ice, the scientist calibrated his per­sonal navigator so that he would be able to keep a constant heading once he left the shoreline.

When he was about two hundred meters away from the shore, Dr. Takagi­shi reached in his pocket to pull out his portable weather monitor. It dropped on the ice, making a short clacking sound in the quiet night. Taka­gishi picked it up a few seconds later. The monitor told him that the temper­ature was minus two degrees Centigrade and that a soft wind was blowing across the ice at eight kilometers per hour.

Takagishi inhaled deeply and was astonished by a peculiar but familiar odor. Puzzled, he inhaled again, this time concentrating on the smell, There was no doubt about it — it was cigarette smoke! He hurriedly extinguished his flashlight and stood motionless on the ice. His mind raced into overdrive, searching for an explanation. Franceses Sabatini was the only cosmonaut who smoked. Had she somehow followed him when he left the camp? Had she seen his light when he checked his weather monitor?

He listened for noises but heard nothing in the Raman night. Still he waited. When the cigarette smell had been gone for several minutes, Dr. Takagishi continued his trek across the ice, stopping every four or five steps to ensure that he was not being followed. Eventually he convinced himself that Francesca was not behind him. However, the cautious Takagishi did not turn on his flashlight again until he had walked more than a kilometer and had become worried that he might have drifted off course.

Altogether it took him forty-five minutes to reach the opposite edge of the sea and the island city of New York. When he was a hundred meters from the shore, the Japanese scientist took a larger flashlight from his bag and switched on its powerful beam. The ghostly silhouettes of the skyscrapers sent an exhilarating chill down his spine. At last he was here! At last he could seek the answers to his lifetime of questions unencumbered by someone else’s arbitrary schedule.

Dr. Takagishi knew exactly where he wanted to go in New York. Each of the three circular sections of the Raman city was further subdivided into three angular portions, like a pie divided into slices. At the center of each of the three main sections was a central core, or plaza, around which the rest of the buildings and streets were arranged. As a boy in Kyoto, after reading everything he could find about the first Raman expedition, Takagishi had wondered what it would be like to stand in the center of one of those alien plazas and stare upward at buildings created by beings from another star.

Takagishi felt certain not only that the secrets of Rama could be understood by studying New York, but also that its three plazas were the most likely locations for clues to the mysterious purpose of the interstellar vehicle.

The map of New York drawn by the earlier Raman explorers was as firmly etched in Takagishi’s mind as the map of Kyoto, where he was born and raised. But that first Raman expedition had had only a limited time to survey New York. Of the nine functional units, only one had been mapped in detail; the prior cosmonauts had simply assumed, on the basis of limited observa­tions, that all the other units were identical.

As Takagishi’s brisk pace carried him deeper and deeper into the forebod­ing quiet of one part of the central section, some subtle differences between this particular segment of Rama and the one studied by Norton’s crew (they had surveyed an adjacent slice) began to emerge. The layout of the major streets in the two units was the same; however, as Dr. Takagishi drew closer to the plaza, the smaller streets broke into a slightly different pattern from the one that had been reported by the first explorers. The scientist in Takagi­shi forced him to stop often and note all the variations on his pocket com­puter.

He entered the region immediately surrounding the plaza, where the streets ran in concentric circles. He crossed three avenues and found himself standing opposite a huge octahedron, about a hundred meters tall, with a mirrored exterior. His powerful flashlight beam reflected off its surface and then bounced from building to building around him. Dr. Takagishi walked slowly around the octahedron, searching for an entrance, but he did not find one.

On the other side of the eight-sided structure, in the center of the plaza, was a broad circular space without tall buildings. Shigeru Takagishi moved deliberately around the entire perimeter of the circle, studying the surround­ing buildings as he walked. He gained no new insights about the purpose of the structures. When he turned inward at regular intervals to survey the plaza area itself, he saw nothing unusual or particularly noteworthy. Never­theless, he did enter into his computer the location of the many short, nondescript metallic boxes that divided the plaza into partitions.

When he was again in front of the octahedron, Dr. Takagishi reached into his bag and pulled out a thin hexagonal plate densely covered with electron­ics. He deployed the scientific apparatus in the plaza, three or four meters away from the octahedron, and then spent ten minutes verifying with his transceiver that all the scientific instruments were properly working. When the Japanese scientist had completed checking the payload, he quickly left the plaza area and headed for the Cylindrical Sea.

Takagishi was in the middle of the second concentric avenue when he heard a short but loud popping noise behind him in the plaza. He turned around but didn’t move. A few seconds later he heard a different sound. This one Takagishi recognized from his first sortie, both the dragging of the metal brushes and the embedded high-frequency singing. He shone his flashlight in the direction of the plaza. The sound stopped. He switched off his flashlight and stood quietly in the middle of the avenue.

Several minutes later the brush dragging began again. Takagishi moved stealthily across the two avenues and started around the octahedron in the direction of the noise. When he was almost to the plaza, a beep, beep from his bag broke his concentration. By the time he turned off the alarm, which was indicating that the scientific package he had just deployed in the plaza had already malfunctioned, there was total quiet in New York. Again Dr. Takagishi waited, but this time the sound did not recur.

He took a deep breath to calm himself and summoned all his courage. Somehow his curiosity won out over his fear and Dr. Takagishi “returned to the plaza opposite the octahedron to find out what had happened to the scientific payload. His first surprise was that the hexagonal package had vanished from the spot where he had left it. Where could it have gone? Who or what could have taken it?

Takagishi knew that he was on the verge of a scientific discovery of over­whelming importance. He was also terrified. Fighting a powerful desire to flee, he shone his large flashlight around the plaza, hoping to find an explana­tion for the disappearance of the science station. The beam reflected off a small piece of metal some thirty to forty meters closer to the center of the plaza. Takagishi realized immediately that the reflection was coming from the instrument package. He hurried over to it.

He bent down on his knees and examined the electronics. There was no damage that was obvious. He had just pulled out his transceiver to begin a methodical check of all the science instruments when he noticed a ropelike object about fifteen centimeters in diameter at the edge of the flashlight beam illuminating the science package. Dr. Takagishi picked up his light and walked over to the object. It was striped, black and gold, and stretched off into the distance for twelve meters or so, disappearing behind an odd metal shed about three meters tall. He felt the thick rope. It was soft and fuzzy on the top. When he tried to turn it over to feel the bottom, the object began to move. Takagishi dropped it immediately and watched it slither slowly away from him toward the shed. The motion was accompanied by the sound of brushes dragging against metal.

Dr. Takagishi could hear the sound of his own heartbeat. Again he fought the urge to run away. He remembered his dawn meditations as a college student in the garden of his Zen master. He would not be afraid. He ordered his feet to march in the direction of the shed.

The black and gold rope disappeared. There was silence in the plaza. Takagishi approached the shed with his light beam on the ground at the spot where the thick rope had last been visible. He came around the corner and thrust the beam into the shed. He could not believe what he saw. A mass of black and gold tentacles writhed underneath the light.

A high-frequency whine suddenly exploded in his ears. Dr. Takagishi looked over his left shoulder and was thunderstruck. His eyes bugged out of his head. His scream was lost as the noise intensified and three of the tenta­cles reached out to touch him. The walls of his heart gave way and he slumped, already dead, into the grasp of the amazing creature.