Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

“They must have understood our warning,” he said to Nicole. Richard jubilantly picked her up off the ground, gave her a kiss, and held her in the air. “It worked, darling,” he shouted. “Thank you, oh thank you.”

Nicole too was excited. But she was not yet convinced that Rama’s action would prevent the destruction of the vehicle. After General O’Toole came in and Richard explained to him what they were seeing on the screen, there were only nine minutes left. Nicole had butterflies the size of basketballs in her stomach. The ground continued to shake as Rama extended its maneu­ver.

The nuclear missiles obviously had terminal guidance, for despite the fact that Rama was definitely changing its trajectory, the missiles continued to approach along a straight line. The close-up radar picture showed that the sixteen attackers were quite spread out. Their estimated impact times ranged over a period slightly less than an hour.

Richard’s frenetic activity increased. He paced wildly around the room. At one point he pulled TB out of his pocket, put him down on the floor, and began talking rapidly to the little robot as if TB were his closest friend. What Richard said was barely coherent. One moment Richard was telling TB to prepare for the coming explosion; a second later he was explaining to him how Rama was going to miraculously evade the oncoming missiles.

General O’Toole was trying to remain calm, but it was impossible with Richard flying around the room like a Tasmanian devil. He started to say something to Richard, but decided instead to step outside into the tunnel for some quiet.

During one of the rare moments that Richard was not moving, Nicole walked over to him and grabbed his hands. “Darling,” she said, “relax. There’s nothing we can do.”

Richard looked down for a second at his friend and lover and then threw his arms around her. He kissed her wildly and then sat down on the shaking floor, pulling her down beside him. “I’m scared, Nicole,” he said, his body trembling. “I’m really scared. I hate not being able to do anything.”

“I’m frightened too,” she replied gently, taking his hands again. “And so is Michael.”

“But neither of you act scared,” Richard said. “I feel like an idiot, bounc­ing around here like Tigger in Winnie the Pooh,”

“Every person confronts death in a different way,” Nicole said. “All of us feel fear. We just deal with it in our own individual fashion,”

Richard was calming down. He glanced over at the big monitor and then at his watch. “Three more minutes until the first impact,” he said.

Nicole put her hands on his cheeks and kissed him softly on the lips. “I love you, Richard Wakefield,” she said.

“And I love you,” he answered.

Richard and Nicole were sitting quietly on the floor, holding hands and watching the black screen, when the first missile reached the edge of the dense mesh that surrounded Rama. General O’Toole was standing behind them in the doorway—he had returned to the room about thirty seconds earlier. At the moment the missile made contact, the impacted part of the mesh yielded, cushioning the blow but allowing the missile to penetrate deeper into the netting. Simultaneously, other pieces of the mesh wrapped themselves rapidly about the missile, spinning a thick cocoon with amazing speed. It was all over in a fraction of a second. The missile was about two hundred meters from the outer shell of Rama, already enclosed in a thick wrapping, when its nuclear warhead detonated. The mesh on the screen flew around a little, but there was only a barely perceptible nudge inside the White Room.

“Wow!” said Richard first. “Did you see that?”

He jumped up and approached the screen. “It happened so fast,” Nicole commented, coming up beside him.

General O’Toole mumbled a very short prayer of thanks and joined his colleagues in front of the screen. “How do you think it did that?” he asked Richard.

“I have no idea,” Richard replied. “But somehow that cocoon contained the explosion. It must be a fantastic material.” He flipped back to the radar image. “Let’s watch this next one more closely. It should be here in a few—”

There was a brilliant flash of light and the screen went blank. Less than a second later a sharp lateral force hit them hard, knocking them to the floor. The lights went out in the White Room and the ground stopped shaking. “Is everyone all right?” Richard asked, groping for Nicole’s hand in the dark.

“I think so,” O’Toole replied. “I hit the wall, but only with my back and elbow.”

“I’m fine, darling,” Nicole answered. “What happened?”

“Obviously that one exploded early, before it reached the net. We were hit by the shock wave.”

“I don’t understand,” O’Toole said. “The bomb exploded in a vacuum. How could there be a shock wave?”

“It wasn’t technically just a shock wave,” Richard replied, standing up as the lights came back on and the ground began to shake again. “Hey, how about that!” he interrupted himself. “The famous Raman redundancy scores again. You okay?” he said to Nicole, who looked unsteady as she was standing up.

“I bruised my knee,” she answered, “but it’s not serious.”

“The bomb destroyed the rest of its own missile,” Richard said, now answering O’Toole’s question as he searched through the sensor list for the redundant imaging and radar outputs, “vaporizing most of the casing and reducing the rest to fragments. The gas and debris moved outward at enor­mous speeds, creating the wave that hit us. The mesh attenuated the size of the shock.”

Nicole moved over against the wall and sat down. “I want to be ready for the next one,” she said.

“I wonder how many bumps like that Rama can survive,” Richard said.

General O’Toole came over and sat down beside Nicole. “Two down and fourteen to go,” he said. They all smiled. At least they weren’t dead yet.

Richard located the redundant sensors a few minutes later. “Uh-oh,” he said as he surveyed the remaining blips on the screen. “Unless I’m mistaken, the last bomb that exploded was many kilometers away. We were lucky. We’d better hope one doesn’t detonate just outside the mesh.”

The trio watched while two more missiles were trapped and wrapped in the material surrounding Rama. Richard stood up. “We have a brief respite now/’ he said. “It will be three minutes or so before our next impact—then we’ll have four more missiles in a hurry.”

Nicole rose to her feet also. She saw that General O’Toole was holding his back. “Are you sure you’re all right, Michael?” she asked. He nodded, still watching the screen. Richard came over beside Nicole and took her hand. A minute later they sat down together against the wall to wait for the next impacts.

They didn’t wait long. A second lateral force, much stronger than the 6rst one, hit them within twenty seconds. Again the lights went out and the floor stopped shaking. Nicole could hear O’Toole’s labored breathing in the dark. “Michael,” she said, “are you hurt?”

When there was no immediate reply, Nicole started crawling in his direc­tion. That was a mistake. She was not braced against anything when the powerful third blast hit. Nicole was thrown savagely into the wall, hitting it with the side of her head.

General O’Toole stayed beside Nicole while Richard went up into New York to survey the city. The men spoke quietly when Richard returned. He reported only minor damage. Thirty minutes after the final missile had been trapped, the lights came back on and the ground started shaking again. “You see,” Richard said with a grin, “I told you we’d be all right. They always do everything important in threes.”

Nicole remained unconscious for almost another hour. During the last few minutes she was vaguely aware of both the vibration of the floor and the conversation on the opposite side of the room. Nicole opened her eyes very slowly,

“The net effect,” she heard Richard say, “is to increase our velocity along the hyperbola. So we will cross the Earth’s orbit much earlier than previ­ously, long before the planet itself has arrived.”

“How close will we come to the Earth?”

“Not too close. It depends on when this maneuver ends. If it stopped now we would miss by a million kilometers or so, more than twice the distance to the Moon.”

Nicole sat up and smiled. “Good morning,” she said cheerfully.

The two men came over beside her. “Are you all right, darling?” Richard asked.

“I think so,” Nicole said, feeling the bump on the side of her head. “I may have occasional headaches for a while.” She looked at the two men. “What about you, Michael? I seem to remember being worried about you right before the big blast.”

“The second one knocked the wind out of me,” O’Toole replied. “Luckily I was better prepared for the third bomb. And my back seems fine now.”