Rama II

42 TWO EXPLORERS

Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that you’re alone? And we have no way to cross the Cylindrical Sea?”

Richard nodded. It was too much for Nicole. Five minutes earlier she had been exultant. Her ordeal had finally been over. She had imagined returning to the Earth and seeing her father and daughter again. Now he was telling her…

She walked away quickly and leaned her head against one of the buildings surrounding the plaza. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she gave vent to her disappointment. Richard followed her at a distance.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s not your fault!” Nicole replied after she had regained her composure. “It just never occurred to me that I might see one of the crew again and still not be rescued—” She stopped herself. It was not fair for her to make Richard suffer. She walked over to him and forced a smile.

“I’m not usually this emotional,” Nicole said. “And I interrupted your story right in the middle.” She paused a second to wipe her eyes. “You were telling me about the shark biots chasing the motorboat. You saw them first when you were about halfway across the sea?”

“More or less,” Richard replied. Her disappointment had subdued him. He tried a nervous laugh. “Do you remember, after one of the simulations, when the review board criticized us for not having sent a pilotless version of our motorboat into the water first, just to make sure that there wasn’t some­thing peculiar to the new design that would disturb the “ecological equilib­rium” in some way? Well, I thought their suggestion at the time was ridicu­lous. Now I’m not so certain. Those shark biots hardly bothered the Newton vessels, but they were definitely angry about my high-speed motorboat.”

Richard and Nicole had sat down together on one of the gray metal boxes that dotted the plaza area. “I managed to dodge them once,” Richard con­tinued, “but I was extremely lucky. When I had no other choice I simply jumped out and swam. Fortunately for me, they were mostly after the boat-1 didn’t see one again while I was swimming until I was only a hundred meters from shore.”

“How long have you been inside Rama altogether now?” Nicole asked.

“About seventeen hours. I left the Newton two hours after dawn. I spent too much damn time trying to repair the communications station at Beta. But it was impossible.”

Nicole felt his flight suit. “Except for your hair, I can’t even tell you’ve been wet.”

Richard laughed. “Ob, the miracles of fabric engineering. Would you believe that this suit was almost dry by the time I changed my thermals? By then I was having a hard time convincing even myself that I had spent that twenty minutes swimming in the cold water.” He looked at his companion. She was loosening up very slowly. “But I’m surprised at you, Cosmonaut des Jardins. You haven’t even asked me the most important question. How did I know where you were?”

Nicole had pulled out her scanner and was reading Richard’s biometry. Everything was within tolerances, despite his recent harrowing swim. She was a little slow to understand his question. “You knew where I was?” she said finally, knitting her brow. “I figured you were just wandering around—”

“Come on, lady. New York is small, but not that small. There’s twenty-five square kilometers of territory inside these walls. And radio around here is completely unreliable.” He grinned. “Let’s see, if I stood and called your name in each square meter, I would have to call you twenty-five million times. At one call every ten seconds — allowing myself time to listen for a response and move to the next square meter — that would be six calls a minute. So it would take four million minutes, which is slightly more than sixty thousand hours, or twenty-6ve hundred Earth days—”

“Okay. Okay,” Nicole interrupted. She was finally laughing. “Tell me how you knew where I was.”

Richard stood up. “May I?” he said dramatically, extending his fingers toward the breast pocket of Nicole’s flight suit.

“I suppose so,” she answered. “Although I can’t imagine what—” Richard reached into her pocket and pulled out Prince Hal. “He led me to you,” Wakefield said. “You’re a good man, my prince, but for a while I thought you’d failed me.”

Nicole had no idea what Richard was talking about. “Prince Hal and Falstaff have matching navigation beacons,” he explained. “They put out fifteen strong pulses a second. With Falstaff fixed in my hut at Beta and with an equivalent transceiver over at Alpha campsite, I could follow you by triangulation. So I knew exactly where you were — at least in terms of x-y coordinates. My simple tracking algorithm wasn’t designed for excursions inz.”

“That’s what an engineer would call my visit to the avian lair?” Nicole said with another smile. “An excursion in z?” “ That’s one way of describing it.”

Nicole shook her head. “I don’t know about you, Wakefield. If you really knew where I was all this time, why the hell did you wait so long—”

“Because we lost you, or thought we had, before we found you… after I came back to retrieve Falstaff.”

“Have I become a dullard in the last week, or is this roundabout explana­tion incredibly confusing?”

It was Richard’s turn to laugh. “Maybe I should try to make my presenta­tion more orderly.” He paused to arrange his mental notes. “I was really irritated,” he began, “back in June when the Engineering Steering Group decided not to use navigation beacons as backup personnel locators. I had argued, unsuccessfully, that there might be emergency situations, or unfore­seen circumstances, in which the signal-to-noise ratio on the regular voice link would be below threshold. So I equipped three of my own robots just in case…”

Nicole studied Richard Wakefield while he talked. She had forgotten that he was both amazing and amusing. She was certain that if she asked the right questions, he could talk on this subject alone for a full hour.

“…Then Falstaff lost the signal,” he was saying. “I wasn’t present myself at the time, for I was preparing to come with Hiro Yamanaka to pick you and Francesca up in the helicopter, But Falstaff has a small recorder and timetags all the data. After you didn’t show up, I replayed the data from the recorder and found that the signal had abruptly disappeared.

“It came back on only briefly, while we were talking on the radio a few minutes later, but several seconds after our last conversation the signal was gone for good. The signature suggested a hardware failure to me. I thought Prince Hal had malfunctioned. When Francesca said that you had been with her up until the plaza, then I was virtually certain that Prince Hal—”

Nicole had only been listening with one ear but she bolted to attention when Richard mentioned Francesca. “Stop,” Nicole interrupted, holding up her hand. “What did you say she told you?”

“That you and she had left the bam together and that you had walked away from her several minutes later to look for Takagishi—”

“That’s complete bullshit,” Nicole said.

“What do you mean?” Richard asked.

“It’s a lie. An absolute and total untruth. I fell into that pit I told you about while Francesca was there, or at least no more than a minute after she left. She never saw me again.”

Richard thought for a moment. “That explains why Falstaff lost you. You were in the barn all that time and the signal was blocked.” Now it was his turn to be puzzled. “But why would Francesca make up such a story?”

That’s what I would like to know, Nicole thought to herself. She must have poisoned Borzov on purpose. Otherwise why would she deliberately…

“Was there something between the two of you?” Richard was saying. “I always thought I detected—”

“Probably some jealousy,” Nicole interrupted, “going both ways. Fran­cesca and I are light years apart.”

“You can say that again,” Richard said with a chuckle. “I’ve spent the better part of a year giving off signals that I find you intelligent and interest­ing and attractive. Yet I’ve never received anything but a restrained and courteous professional response. Francesca, on the other hand, notices if you happen to even glance at her.”

“There are other, more substantive differences,” Nicole replied, not alto­gether displeased that Richard had finally verbalized his interest in her as a woman.

There was a momentary pause in the conversation. Nicole glanced at her watch. “But I don’t want to spend any more time talking about Francesca Sabatini,” she said, “it’s going to be dark again in an hour and we have an escape from this island to plan. We also have certain, uh, logistical issues to address, such as food, water, and other unmentionable items that made confinement in a small pit reasonably disgusting.”

“I brought a portable hut — if we need one.”

“That’s great!” Nicole replied. “I’ll remember that when it rains.” She reached automatically into her backpack for some manna melon but did not pull it out. “By the way,” she said to Richard, “did you bring any human food?”

The hut came in handy when they were ready for sleep. They decided to pitch it just to the side of the central plaza. Nicole felt safer being close to the avians. In some sense they were her friends and they might help if an emergency arose. They were also the only known source of food. Between them, Richard and Nicole had barely enough food and water to last for another two Raman days.

Nicole had not objected to Richard’s suggestion that they share the hut. He had gallantly offered to sleep outside, “if that would make you more comfortable,” but the huts were plenty large enough for two sleeping mats as long as there were no other furnishings. Lying about half a meter apart made their conversation very easy. Nicole gave a detailed rendition of her hours alone, omitting only the part about the vial and the vision. That was too personal for her to share. Richard was fascinated by her entire story and absolutely intrigued by the avians.

“I mean, look,” he said, propping his head up on his elbow, “try to figure out how the hell they got here. From what you’ve said, except for that tank sentinel — and I completely agree with you that it’s an anomaly — they’re no more advanced than prehistoric man. What a boggle it would be to learn their secret.

“You can’t rule out completely that they’re biots,” he continued, barely able to contain his enthusiasm. “They might not be impressive as biology, but Jesus, as artificial intelligence they would be state of the art.” He sat up on his mat. “Just think about what it would mean either way. We must find out all these answers. You’re a linguist — maybe you could learn to talk to them.”

Nicole was amused. “Has it occurred to you, Richard,” she asked, “that all of this discussion will be academic if nobody ever rescues us?”

“A couple of times,” Richard said with a laugh. He was lying down again. “That damn Heilmann took me aside, right before I came back inside Rama, and told me that I was acting “in violation of all procedures” by returning here. He promised me that they would not come after me under any circum­stances.”

“So why did you come back?”

“I’m not completely certain,” he said slowly. “I know I wanted to pick up Falstaff and see if, by some wild happenstance, he had ever received any more signals from your beacon. But I think there were other reasons. The mission was becoming more politics than science. It was obvious to me that the bureaucrats on Earth were going to abort the mission, “for security rea­sons,” and the crew was not going to return to Rama. I knew the political discussions would continue for another day or two.” He paused a second. “And I wanted one last look at the most incredible sight of my life.”

Nicole was quiet for a moment. “You obviously weren’t afraid,” she said softly, “because you show no sign of fear even now. Doesn’t the thought of being left to die onboard Rama bother you at all?”

“A little,” Richard answered. “But dying in an exciting situation is much better than living in a boring one.” Again he propped himself up on his elbow. “I have been looking forward to this mission for three years. I thought from the beginning that I had a good chance of being selected. Except for my robots and Shakespeare, there is nothing in my life but my work. I have no family or friends to think of…”

His voice trailed off. “And I’m as much afraid of going back as I am of dying. At least Richard Wakefield, Newton cosmonaut, has a clearly defined purpose.” He started to say something else but stopped himself. Richard lay back down and closed his eyes.