Rama II

48 WELCOME EARTHLINGS

Richard was puzzled. In the first room off one of the top horizontal tunnels he had found an array of strange gadgets that he had decoded in less than an hour. He now knew how to regulate the lights and temperature throughout each particular portion of the underground lair. But if it was that easy, and all the lairs were similarly constructed, why did the avians not use the lights that had been provided? While they were eating breakfast Richard quizzed Nicole about the details of the avian lair.

“You’re overlooking more fundamental issues!” Nicole said, as she took a bite of manna melon. “The avians aren’t that important by themselves. The real question is, where are the Ramans? And why did they put these holes under New York in the first place?”

“Maybe they’re all Ramans,” Richard replied. “The biots, the avians, the octospiders — maybe they all came originally from the same planet. At the beginning they were all one happy family. But as the years and generations passed, different species evolved in separate ways. Individual lairs were con­structed and the—”

“There are too many problems with that scenario,” Nicole interrupted. “First, the biots are definitely machines. The avians may or may not be. The octospiders almost certainly aren’t, although a technological level that could create this spaceship in the first place might have progressed further in artificial intelligence than we can possibly imagine. My intuitive sense, how­ever, says that those things are organic.”

“We humans would never be able to distinguish between a living creature and a versatile machine created by a truly advanced species.”

“I agree with that. But we can’t possibly resolve this argument by our­selves. Besides, there is another question that f want to discuss with you.”

“What’s that?” Richard asked.

“Did the avians and the octospiders and these underground regions exist also on Rama I? If so, how did the Norton crew miss them altogether? If not, why are they on this spacecraft and not the first one?”

Richard was quiet for several seconds. “I see where you’re heading,” he said finally. “The fundamental premise has always been that the Rama spacecraft were created millions of years ago, by unknown beings from an­other region of the galaxy, and that they were totally uninvolved with and disinterested in whatever they encountered during their trek. If they were created that long ago, why would two vehicles that were presumably built at virtually the same time have such striking differences?”

“I’m starting to believe that our colleague from Kyoto was right,” Nicole answered. “Maybe there is a meaningful pattern to all this. I’m fairly confi­dent that the Norton crew was thorough and accurate in its survey and that all the distinctions between Rama I and Rama II are indeed real. As soon as we acknowledge that the two spacecraft are different, we face a more diffi­cult issue. Why are they different?”

Richard had finished eating and was now pacing in the dimly lit tunnel. “There was a discussion just like this before it was decided to abort the mission. At the teleconference the main question was, why did the Ramans change course to encounter the Earth? Since the first spacecraft had not done so, it was considered hard evidence that Rama II was different. And the people participating in that meeting knew nothing of the avians or octospiders!’

“General Borzov would have loved the avians,” Nicole commented after a short silence. “He thought that flying was the greatest pleasure in the world.” She laughed. “He once told me that his secret hope in life was that reincarnation was on the level and that he would come back as a bird.”

“He was a fine man,” Richard said, stopping his pacing momentarily. “I don’t think we ever properly appreciated all his talents.”

As Nicole replaced part of the manna melon in her backpack and prepared to continue the exploration, she smiled at her peripatetic friend. “One more question, Richard?”

He nodded.

“Do you think we’ve met any Ramans yet? By that I mean the creatures who made this vehicle. Or any of their descendants.”

Richard shook his head vigorously. “Absolutely not!” he said. “Maybe we’ve met some of their creations. Or even other species from the same planet. But we haven’t seen the main characters yet.”

They found the White Room off to the left of a horizontal tunnel at the second level below the surface. Until then the exploration had been almost boring. Richard and Nicole had walked down many tunnels and had peered into one empty room after another. Four times they had found a set of gadgets for regulating the lights and temperature. Until they reached the White Room, they had seen nothing else of interest.

Both Richard and Nicole were astonished when they entered a room whose walls were painted a crisp white. In addition to the paint, the room was fascinating because one corner was cluttered with objects that turned out, on closer inspection, to be quite familiar. There was a comb and a brush, an empty lipstick container, several coins, a collection of keys, and even something that looked like an old walkie-talkie. In another pile there was a ring and a wristwatch, a tube of toothpaste, a nail file, and a small keyboard with Latin letters. Richard and Nicole were stunned. “Okay, genius,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Explain all this, if you can.”

He picked up the tube of toothpaste, opened the cap, and squeezed. A white material came out. Richard put his finger in it and then placed the finger in his mouth. “Yuck,” he said, spitting out the paste. “Bring your mass spectrometer over here.”

While Nicole was examining the toothpaste with her sophisticated medi­cal instruments, Richard picked up each of the other objects. The watch in particular fascinated him. It was indeed keeping proper time, second by second, although its reference point was completely unknown. “Did you ever go to the space museum in Florida?” he asked Nicole.

“No,” she answered distractedly.

“They had a display of the common objects taken by the crew on the first Rama mission. This watch looks exactly like the one in the display — I re­member it well because I bought a similar one in the museum shop!’

Nicole walked over with a puzzled look on her face. “This stuff isn’t toothpaste, Richard. I don’t know what it is. The spectra are astonishing, with an abundance of super-heavy molecules.”

For several minutes the two cosmonauts rummaged in the odd collection of items, trying to make some sense out of their latest discovery. “One thing is certain,” Richard said as he was trying unsuccessfully to open up the walkie-talkie, “these objects are definitely associated with human beings. There’s simply too many of them for some kind of strange interspecies coincidence.”

“But how did they get here?” Nicole asked. She was trying to use the brush but its bristles were far too soft for her hair. She examined it in more detail. “This is not really a brush,” she announced. “It looks like a brush, and feels like a brush, but it’s useless in the hair.”

She bent down and picked up the nail file. “And this can’t be used to file any human’s fingernails.” Richard came over to see what she was talking about. He was still struggling with the walkie-talkie. He dropped it in disgust and took the nail file that Nicole had extended toward him.

“So these things look human, but aren’t?” he said, pulling the file against the end of his longest fingernail. The nail was unchanged. Richard gave the file back to Nicole. “What’s going on here?” he shouted in a frustrated tone.

“I remember reading a science fiction novel while I was at the university,” Nicole said a few seconds later, “in which an extraterrestrial species learned about human beings solely from our earliest television programs. When they finally met us, they offered cereal boxes and soaps and other objects the aliens had seen on our television commercials. The packages were all prop­erly designed, but the contents were either nonexistent or absolutely wrong.”

Richard had not been listening carefully to Nicole. He had been fiddling with the keys and surveying the collection of objects in the room. “Now what do all these things have in common?” he said, mostly to himself.

They both arrived at the same answer several seconds later. “They were all carried by the Norton crew,” Richard and Nicole said in unison.

“So the two Rama space vehicles must have some kind of communication linkup!” Richard said.

“And these objects have been planted here on purpose, to show us that the visit to Rama I was observed and recorded.”

“The spider biots that inspected the Norton campsites and the equipment must have contained imaging sensors.”

“And all of these things were fabricated from pictures transmitted from Rama I to Rama II.”

After Nicole’s last comment both of them were silent, each following his own thought pattern. “But why do they want us to know all this? What is it we’re supposed to do now?” Richard stood up and began to pace around the room. Suddenly he started laughing. “Wouldn’t it be amazing,” he said, “if David Brown was right after all, if the Ramans really were completely disin­terested in anything they found, but programmed their space vehicles to act interested in any visitors? They could flatter whatever species they encoun­tered by making midcourse corrections and by fashioning simple objects. What an incredible irony. Since all immature species are probably hopelessly self-centered, the visitors to the Raman craft would be totally occupied try­ing to understand an assumed message—”

“I think you’re getting carried away,” Nicole interrupted. “All we know at this point is that this spacecraft apparently received pictures from Rama I, and that reproductions of small, everyday objects that were carried by the Norton crew have been placed here in this room for us to find.”

“I wonder if the keyboard is as useless as everything else!” Richard said as he picked it up. He spelled the word “Rama” with the keys. Nothing hap­pened. He tried “Nicole.” Still nothing.

“Don’t you remember how the old models worked?” Nicole said with a grin. She took the keyboard. “They all had a separate power key.” She pressed the unmarked button in the upper right-hand comer of the key­board. A portion of the opposite wall slid away, revealing a large black square area about one meter on a side.

The small keyboard was based on the ones that had been attached to the portable computers on the first Rama mission. It had four rows of twelve characters, with an extra power button in the upper right-hand corner. The twenty-six Latin letters, ten Arabic numerals, and four mathematical oper­ands were marked on forty of the individual keys. The other eight keys contained either dots or geometrical figures on their surfaces and, in addi­tion, could be set in either an “up” or “down” position. Richard and Nicole quickly learned that these special keys were the true controls of the Raman system. By trial and error they also discovered that the result from striking any individual action key was a function of the positioning of the other seven keys. Thus, pressing any specific command key could produce as many as 128 different results. Altogether, then, the system provided for 1,024 separate actions that could be initiated from the keyboard.

Making a command dictionary was a laborious process. Richard volun­teered for the duty. Using their own computers to keep notes, he began the process of developing the rudiments of a language to translate the special keyboard commands. The initial goal was simple — to be able to use the Raman computer like one of their own. Once the translation was developed, any given input into the Newton portable computers would contain, as part of its output, what set of key impressions on the Raman board would pro­duce a similar response on the square black screen.

Even with Richard’s intelligence and computer expertise, the task was a formidable one. It was also not something that could easily be shared. At Richard’s suggestion, Nicole climbed out of the lair twice during the first Raman day they were in the White Room. Both times she took long walks around New York, casting her eyes to the sky from time to time to look for a helicopter. On the second excursion Nicole went back to the barn where she had fallen in the pit. Already so much had happened that her frightening experience at the bottom seemed like ancient history.

She thought often about Borzov, Wilson, and Takagishi. All the cosmo­nauts had known when they left the Earth that there were uncertainties in the mission. They had trained often to handle vehicle emergencies, problems with their own spacecraft that might prove to be life threatening… but none of them had actually believed that there would be any fatalities on the mission. !! Richard and I perish here in New York, Nicole remarked to her­self, then almost half the crew will have died. That will be the worst disaster since we started flying piloted missions again.

She was standing outside the bam, in almost the exact spot where she and Francesca had talked to Richard on the communicator the last time. So why did you lie, Francesca? Nicole wondered. Did you think somehow my disap­pearance would silence all suspicion?

On the final morning at the Beta campsite, before she and the others had set out to look for Takagishi, Nicole had transmitted all the notes in her own portable computer in Rama through the networking system to the desktop in her room on the Newton. At the time Nicole had made the data transfer to give herself extra memory, if she should need it, in her traveling computer. But it’s all there, she recalled, if some diligent detective ever looks for it The drugs, Jason’s blood pressure, even a cryptic reference to the abortion. And of course Richard’s solution to the RoSur malfunction.

On her two walks Nicole saw several centipede biots, and even a bulldozer once, at the far limit of her vision. She didn’t see any avians and neither heard nor saw an octospider. Maybe they only come out at night, she mused as she returned to have dinner with Richard.