Rama II r-2 Read online

  A sudden draft of wind rolled the helicopter to the left and the arm with the biot banged against the wall. Tabori felt his grip loosening. “Straighten it up,” he cried, continuing to retract the arm. While Yamanaka was struggling to null the rolling motion of the helicopter, he inadvertently tipped the nose down just slightly. The three crew members heard the sickening sound of the metal rotor blades crashing against the wall.

  The Japanese pilot immediately pushed the emergency button and the craft returned to automatic control. In less than a second, a whining alarm sounded and the cockpit monitor flashed red. excessive damage. high probability of failure. eject crew. Yamanaka did not hesitate. Within moments he blasted out of the cockpit and had his parachute deployed. Tabori and Brown followed. As soon as the Hungarian engineer removed his hands from the special gloves, the claws at the end of the mechanical arm relaxed and the armadillo creature fell the hundred meters to the flat plain below, smashing into thousands of tiny pieces.

  The pilotless helicopter descended erratically toward the plain. Even with its onboard automatic landing algorithm active and in complete control, the damaged flying machine bounced hard on its struts when it hit the ground and tipped over on its side. Not far from the helicopter’s landing site, a portly man, wearing a brown military suit covered with ribbons, jumped down from an open elevator. He had just descended from the mission con­trol center and was clearly agitated as he walked briskly to a waiting rover. He was followed by a scrambling lithe blond woman in an ISA flight suit with camera equipment hanging over both her shoulders. The military man was General Valeriy Borzov, commander-in-chief of Project Newton. “Any­one hurt?” he asked the occupant of the rover, electrical engineer Richard Wakefield.

  “Janos apparently banged his shoulder pretty hard during the ejection. But Nicole just radioed that he had no broken bones or separations, only a lot of bruises.”

  General Borzov climbed into the front seat of the rover beside Wakefield, who was sitting behind the vehicle control panel. The blond woman, video journalist Francesca Sabatini, stopped recording the scene and started to open the back door of the rover. Borzov abruptly waved her away. “Go check on des Jardins and Tabori,” he said, pointing across the level plain. “Wil­son’s probably there already.”

  Borzov and Wakefield headed in the opposite direction in the rover. They traveled about four hundred meters before they pulled alongside a slight man, about fifty, in a new flight suit. David Brown was busy folding up his parachute and replacing it in a stuff bag. General Borzov stepped down from the rover and approached the American scientist.

  “Are you all right, Dr. Brown?” the general asked, obviously impatient to dispense with the preliminaries.

  Brown nodded but did not reply. “In that case,” General Borzov contin­ued in a measured tone, “perhaps you could tell me what you were thinking about when you ordered Yamanaka to go to manual. It might be better if we discussed it here, away from the rest of the crew.”

  “Did you even see the warning lights?” Borzov added after a lengthy silence. “Did you consider, even for a moment, that the safety of the other cosmonauts might be jeopardized by the maneuver?”

  Dr. David Brown eventually looked over at Borzov with a sullen, baleful stare. When he finally spoke in his own defense, his speech was clipped and strained, belying the emotion he was suppressing. “It seemed reasonable to move the helicopter just a little closer to the target. We had some clearance left and it was the only way that we could have captured the biot. Our mission, after all, is to bring home—”

  “You don’t need to tell me what our mission is,” Borzov interrupted with passion. “Remember, I helped write the policies myself. And I will remind you again that the number one priority, at all times, is the safety of the crew. Especially during these simulations… I must tell you that I am absolutely flabbergasted by this crazy stunt of yours. The helicopter is damaged, Tabori is injured, you’re lucky that nobody was killed.”

  David Brown was no longer paying attention to General Borzov. He had turned around to finish stuffing his parachute into its transparent package. From the set of his shoulders and the energy he was expending on this routine task, it was obvious that he was very angry.

  Borzov returned to the rover. After waiting for several seconds he offered Dr. Brown a ride back to the base. The American shook his head without saying anything, hoisted his pack onto his back, and walked off in the direc­tion of the helicopter and the elevator.

  3

  CREW CONFERENCE

  Outside the meeting room in the training facility, Janos Tabori was sitting on an auditorium chair underneath an array of small but powerful portable lights. “The distance to the simulated biot was at the limit of the reach of the mechanical arm,” he explained to the tiny camera that Francesca Sabatini was holding. “Twice I tried to grab it and failed. Dr. Brown then decided to put the helicopter on manual and take it a little closer to the wall. We caught some wind…

  The door from the conference room opened and a smiling, ruddy face appeared. “We’re all here waiting for you!” said General O’Toole pleasantly. “I think Borzov’s becoming a little impatient.”

  Francesca switched off the lights and put her video camera back in the pocket of her flight suit. “All right, my Hungarian hero,” she said with a laugh, “we’d better stop for now. You know how our leader dislikes waiting.” She walked over and put her arms gently around the small man. She patted him on his bandaged shoulder. “But we’re really glad you’re all right.”

  A handsome black man in his early forties had been sitting just out of the camera frame during the interview, taking notes on a flat, rectangular key­board about a foot square. He followed Francesca and Janos into the confer­ence room. “I want to do a feature this week on the new design concepts in the teleoperation of the arm and the glove,” Reggie Wilson whispered to Tabori as they sat down. “There are a bunch of my readers out there who find all this technical crap absolutely fascinating.”

  “I’m glad that the three of you could join us,” Borzov’s sarcastic voice boomed across the conference room. “I was starting to think that perhaps a crew meeting was an imposition on all of you, an activity that interrupted the far more important tasks of reporting our misadventures or writing eru­dite scientific and engineering papers.” He pointed at Reggie Wilson, whose ubiquitous flat keyboard was on the table in front of him. “Wilson, believe it or not, you’re supposed to be a member of this crew first and a journalist second. Just one time do you think you can put that damn thing away and listen? I have a few things to say and I want them to be off the record.”

  Wilson removed the keyboard and put it in his briefcase. Borzov stood up and walked around the room as he talked. The table in the crew conference room was a long oval about two meters across at its widest point. There were twelve places around the table (guests and observers, when they attended, sat in the extra chairs over against the walls), each one equipped with a com­puter keyboard and monitor slightly inset into the surface and covered, when not being used, by a polished grain top that matched the quality simulated wood on the rest of the table. As always, the other two military men on the expedition, European admiral Otto Heilmann (the hero of the Council of Governments intercession in the Caracas crisis) and American air force gen­eral Michael Ryan O’Toole, flanked Borzov at one end of the oval. The other nine Newton crew members did not always sit in the same seats, a fact that particularly frustrated the compulsively orderly Admiral Heilmann and, to a lesser extent, his commanding officer Borzov.

  Sometimes the four “nonprofessionals” in the crew would cluster together around the other end of the table, leaving the “space cadets,” as the five cosmonaut graduates of the Space Academy were known, to create a buffer zone in the middle. After almost a year of constant media attention, the public had relegated each member of the Newton dozen to one of three subgroups — the nonpros, consisting of the two scientists and two journalists; the military
troika; and the five cosmonauts who did most of the skilled work during the mission.

  On this particular day, however, the two nonmilitary groups were thor­oughly mixed. The famed Japanese interdisciplinary scientist Shigeru Takagishi, widely regarded as the foremost expert in the world on the first Raman expedition seventy years earlier (and also the author of the Atlas of Rama that was required reading for all of the crew), was sitting in the middle of the oval between Soviet pilot Irina Turgenyev and the brilliant but often zany British cosmonaut!electrical engineer Richard Wakefield. Opposite them were life science officer Nicole des Jardins, a statuesque copper brown woman with a fascinating French and African lineage, the quiet, almost mechanical Japanese pilot Yamanaka, and the stunning Signora Sabatini. The final three positions at the “south” end of the oval, facing the large maps and diagrams of Rama on the opposite wall, were occupied by Ameri­can journalist Wilson, the inimitable and garrulous Tabori (a Soviet cosmo­naut from Budapest), and Dr. David Brown. Brown looked very businesslike and serious; he had a set of papers spread out in front of him as the meeting began.

  “It is inconceivable to me,” Borzov was saying while he strode purpose­fully around the room, “that any of you could ever forget, even for a mo­ment, that you have been selected to go on what could be the most impor­tant human mission of all time. But on the basis of this last set of simulations, I must admit that I am beginning to have my doubts about some of you.

  “There are those who believe that this Rama craft will be a copy of its predecessor,” Borzov continued, “and that it will be equally disinterested and uninvolved with whatever trifling creatures come to survey it. I admit it certainly appears to be at least the same size and same configuration, based on the radar data that we have been processing for the past three years. But even if it does turn out to be another dead ship built by aliens that vanished thousands of years ago, this mission is still the most important one of our lifetime. And I would think that it demands the very best effort from each of you.”

  The Soviet general paused to collect his thoughts. Janos Tabori started to ask a question but Borzov interrupted him and launched again into his monologue. “Our performance as a crew on this last set of training exercises has been absolutely abominable. Some of you have been outstanding — you know who you are — but just as many of you have acted as if you had no idea what this mission was about. I am convinced that two or three of you do not even read the relevant procedures or the protocol listings before the exercises begin. I grant you that they are dull and sometimes tedious, but all of you agreed, when you accepted your appointments ten months ago, to learn the procedures and to follow the protocols and project policies. Even those of you with no prior flight experience.”

  Borzov had stopped in front of one of the large maps on the wall, this one an inset view of one corner of the city of “New York” inside the first Raman spaceship. The area of tall thin buildings resembling Manhattan skyscrapers, all huddled together on an island in the middle of the Cylindrical Sea, had been partially mapped during the previous human encounter. “In six weeks we will rendezvous with an unknown space vehicle, perhaps one containing a city like this, and all of mankind will depend on us to represent them. We have no way of knowing what we will find. Whatever preparation we will have completed before then may well be not enough. Our knowledge of our preplanned procedures must be perfect and automatic, so that our brains are free to deal with any new conditions we may encounter.”

  The commander sat down at the head of the table. “Today’s exercise was nearly a complete disaster. We could easily have lost three valuable members of our team as well as one of the most expensive helicopters ever built. I want to remind you all, one more time, of the priorities of this mission as agreed to by the International Space Agency and the Council of Govern­ments. The top priority is the safety of the crew. Second priority is the analysis and!or determination of any threat, if it exists, to the human popu­lation of the planet Earth.” Borzov was now looking directly down the table at Brown, who returned the commander’s challenging look with a stony stare of his own. “Only after those two priorities are satisfied and the Raman craft is adjudged harmless does the capturing of one or more of the biots have any significance.”

  “I would like to remind General Borzov,” David Brown said almost imme­diately in his sonorous voice, “that some of us do not believe the priorities should be blindly applied in a serial fashion. The importance of the biots to the scientific community cannot be overstated. As I have said repeatedly, both in cosmonaut meetings and on my many television news appearances, if this second Rama craft is just like the first — which means that it will ignore our existence completely — and we proceed so slowly that we fail even to capture a single biot before we must abandon the alien ship and return to Earth, then an absolutely unique opportunity for science will have been sacrificed to assuage the collective anxiety of the world’s politicians.”

  Borzov started to reply but Brown stood up and gestured emphatically with his hands. “No, no, hear me out. You have essentially accused me of incompetence in my conduct of today’s exercise and I have a right to re­spond.” He held up some computer printout and waved it at Borzov. “Here are the initial conditions for today’s simulation, as posted and defined by your engineers. Let me refresh your memory with a few of the more salient points, in case you’ve forgotten. Background condition number one: It is near the end of the mission and it has already been firmly established that Rama II is totally passive and represents no threat to the planet Earth. Background condition number two: During the expedition biots have only been seen sporadically, and never in groups.”

  Brown could tell from the body language of the rest of the crew that his presentation had had a successful beginning. He drew a breath and contin­ued. “I assumed, after reading those background conditions, that this partic­ular exercise might represent the last chance to capture a biot. During the test I kept thinking what it would mean if we could bring one or several of them back to the Earth — in all the history of humanity, the only absolutely certain contact with an extraterrestrial culture took place in 2130 when our cosmonauts boarded that first Rama spaceship.

  “Yet the long-term scientific benefit from that encounter was less than it might have been. Granted, we have reams of remote sensing data from that first investigation, including the information from the detailed dissection of the spider biot done by Dr. Laura Ernst. But the cosmonauts brought home only one artifact, a tiny piece of some kind of biomechanical flower whose physical characteristics had already irreversibly changed before any of its mysteries could be understood, We have nothing else in the way of souvenirs from that first excursion. No ashtrays, no drinking glasses, not even a transis­tor from a piece of equipment that would teach us something about Raman engineering. Now we have a second chance.”

  Brown looked up at the circular ceiling above him. His voice was full of power. “If we could somehow find and return two or three different biots to the Earth, and if we could then analyze these creatures to unlock their secrets, then this mission would without doubt be the most significant histor­ical event of all time. For in understanding in depth the engineering minds of the Ramans, we would, in a real sense, achieve a first contact.”

  Even Borzov was impressed. As he often did, David Brown had used his eloquence to turn a defeat into a partial victory. The Soviet general decided to alter his tactics, “Still,” Borzov said in a subdued tone during the pause in Brown’s rhetoric, “we must never forget that human lives are at stake on this mission and that we must do nothing to jeopardize their safety.” He looked around the table at the rest of the crew. “I want to bring back biots and other samples from Rama as much as any of you,” he continued, “but I must confess that this blithe assumption that the second craft will be exactly like the first disturbs me a great deal. What evidence do we have from the first encounter that the Ramans, or whoever they are, are benevolent? None at all. It could be
dangerous to seize a biot too soon.”

  “But there’s no way of ever being certain, Commander, one way or the other.” Richard Wakefield spoke from the side of the table between Borzov and Brown. “Even if we verify that this spaceship is exactly like the first one almost seventy years ago, we still have no information about what will hap­pen once we make a concerted effort to capture a biot. I mean, suppose for a moment that the two ships are just supersophisticated robots engineered millions of years ago by a now vanished race from the opposite side of the galaxy, as Dr. Brown has suggested in his articles. How can we predict what kinds of subroutines might be programmed into those biots to deal with hostile acts? What if the biots are integral parts, in some way that we have not been able to discern, of the fundamental operation of the ship? Then it would be natural, even though they are machines, that they would be pro­grammed to defend themselves. And it is conceivable that what might look like an initial hostile act on our part could be the trigger that changes the way the entire ship functions. I remember reading about the robot lander that crashed into the ethane sea on Titan in 2012 — it had stored entirely different sequences depending on what it—”

  “Halt,” Janos Tabori interrupted with a friendly smile. “The arcana of the early robotic exploration of the solar system is not on the agenda for today’s postmortem.” He looked down the table at Borzov. “Skipper, my shoulder is hurting, my stomach is empty, and the excitement of today’s exercise has left me exhausted. All this talk is wonderful, but if there’s no more specific business would it be out of line to suggest an early end to this meeting so that we will have adequate time, for once, to pack our bags?”

  Admiral Heilmann leaned forward on the table. “Cosmonaut Tabori, General Borzov is in charge of the crew meetings. It is up to him to determine —