Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

“Have another module ready for me as soon as I reach the top,” Francesca said. “I’m almost out of film.”

“Such beauty. Such indescribable beauty/’ General O’Toole added. He and Nicole des Jardins were watching the monitor onboard the Newton. The real-time picture from Francesca’s camera was being transmitted to them through the relay station at the hub.

Richard Wakefield said nothing. He simply stared, entranced by the world below him. He could barely discern Janos Tabori, the chairlift apparatus, and the half-completed campsite down at the bottom of the stairway. Neverthe­less, the distance to them gave him some measure of this alien world. As he looked out across the hundreds of square kilometers of the Central Plain, he saw fascinating shapes in every direction. There were two features, however, that overwhelmed his imagination and vision: the Cylindrical Sea and the massive, pointed structures in the southern bowl opposite him, fifty kilome­ters away.

As his eyes grew more accustomed to the light, the gigantic central spire in the southern bowl seemed to grow larger and larger, It had been called Big Horn by the first explorers. Can it really be eight kilometers tall? Wakefield asked himself. The six smaller spires, surrounding the Big Horn in a hexago­nal pattern and connected both to it and the walls of Rama by enormous flying buttresses, were each larger than anything made by man on Earth. Yet they were dwarfed by this neighboring prominence originating from the very center of the bowl and growing straight along the spin axis of the cylinder. In the foreground, halfway between Wakefield’s position near the north pole and that mammoth construction in the south, a band of bluish white ringed the cylindrical world. The frozen sea seemed illogical and out of place. It could never melt, the mind wanted to say, or all the water would fall toward the central axis. But the Cylindrical Sea was held in its banks by the centrifugal force of Rama. None knew better than the Newton crew that on its shore a human being would have the same weight as he would standing beside a terrestrial ocean.

The island city in the middle of the Cylindrical Sea was Rama’s New York. To Richard its skyscrapers had not been too imposing in the views that had been offered by the light from the flares. But under the light of the Raman suns, it was clear that this city held center stage. The eyes were drawn to New York from any point inside Rama—the dense oval island of buildings was the only break in the orderly annulus that formed the Cylindri­cal Sea.

“Just look at New York!” Dr. Takagishi was gushing excitedly into his commpak. “There must be almost a thousand buildings over two hundred meters tall.” He paused only a second. “That’s where they live. I know it. New York must be our target.”

After the initial outbursts there was a protracted silence while each of the cosmonauts privately integrated the sunlit world of Rama into his own con­sciousness. Richard could now clearly see Francesca, four hundred meters above him, as his chair crossed the transition between the stairways and the ladders and closed in on the hub.

“Admiral Heilmann and I have just had a quick conversation,” David Brown said, breaking the silence, “with some advice from Dr. Takagishi. There seems to be no obvious reason to change our plans for this sortie, at least not the early part. Unless something else unexpected occurs, we will go forward with Wakefield’s suggestion. We will finish the two chairlifts, carry the rover down for assembly later this evening, and all sleep in the campsite at the foot of the stairway as planned.”

“Don’t forget me,” Janos hollered into his commpak. “I’m the only one who doesn’t have much of a view!”

Richard Wakefield unfastened his seat belt and stepped out onto the ledge. He looked down to where the stairway disappeared from view. “Roger, Cosmonaut Tabori. We have arrived back at Station Alpha. Whenever you give the signal, we will hoist you up to join us.”

23 NIGHTFALL

Considering the regular abuse that he received from his neurotic rather and the emotional scars that must remain from his youthful marriage to British actress Sarah Tydings, Cosmonaut Wakefield is remarkably well adjusted. He underwent two years of professional therapy after his celebrated divorce, concluding a year before he entered the Space Academy in 2192. His scholastic record at the academy is still unequaled to this day; his professors in electrical engineering and computer sciences all insist that by the time of his graduation, Wakefield knew more than any member of the faculty. . . .

“. , . Except for a wariness where intimacy is concerned (particularly with women—he has apparently had no sustained emotional involvements since the breakup of his marriage), Wakefield exhibits none of the antisocial behavior usually found in abused children. Although his SC was low as a youth, he has grown less arrogant as he has matured and is now less likely to force his brilliance upon others. His honesty and character are unassailable. Knowledge, not power or money, seems to be his goal. . . .”

Nicole finished reading the Psychological Assessment for Richard Wake-field and rubbed her eyes. It was very late. She had been studying the dossiers ever since the crew inside Rama had settled down to sleep. They would be awakening for their second day in that strange world in less than two hours. Her six-hour shift as communications officer would start in an­other thirty minutes. So out of this entire bunch, Nicole was thinking, there are only three that are beyond question. Those four with their illegal media contract have already compromised themselves. Yamanaka and Turgenyev are unknowns. Wilson is marginally stable and has his own agenda anyway. That leaves O’Toole, Takagishi, and Wakefield.

Nicole washed her face and hands and sat down again at the terminal. She exited from the Wakefield dossier and returned to the main menu of the data cube. She scanned the comparative statistics available and keyed a pair of displays to appear side by side on the screen. On the left-hand side was the ordered set of IE scores for each member of the crew; opposite, for comparison, Nicole had displayed the SC indices for the Newton dozen.

IE

SC

Wakefield

+ 5.58

O’Toole

86

Sabatini

+4.22

Borzov

84

Brown

+4.17

Takagishi

82

Takagishi

+4.02

Wilson

78

Tabori

+3.37

des Jardins

71

Borzov

+ 3.28

Heilmann

68

Des Jardins

+ 3.04

Tabori

64

O’Toole

+2.92

Yamanaka

62

Turgenyev

+ 2.87

Turgenyev

60

Yamanaka

+ 2.66

Wakefield

58

Wilson

+2.48

Sabatini

56

Heilmann

+2.24

Brown

49

Although Nicole had very quickly glanced through most of the informa­tion in the dossiers earlier, she had not read all the charts on all the crew members. Some of the indices she now saw for the first time. She was particularly surprised by the very high intelligence rating for Francesca Sabatini. What a waste, Nicole thought immediately. All that potential being used for such ordinary pursuits.

The overall intelligence level of the crew was quite impressive. Every cosmonaut was in the top one percent of the population. Nicole was “one in a thousand” and she was only in the middle of the dozen. Wakefield’s intelli­gence rating was truly exceptional and placed him in the supergenius cate­gory; Nicole had never before personally known someone with such high scores on the standardized tests.

Although her training in psychiatry had taught her to distrust attempts to quantify personality traits, Nicole was intrigued by the SC indices as well. She herself would have intuitively placed O’Toole, Borzov, and Takagishi at the top of the list. All three men seemed confident, balanced, and sensitive to others. But she was astonished by Wilson’s high socialization coefficient. He must have been an altogether different person before he became involved with Francesca. Nicole wondered for a brief moment why her own SC index was no higher than a seventy-one; then she remembered that as a young woman she had been more withdrawn and self-centered.

5o what about Wakefield? she asked herself, realizing that he was the only viable candidate to help her understand what had happened inside the RoSur software during Borzov’s operation. Could she trust him? And could she enlist Richard’s help without revealing some of her farfetched suspi­cions? Again the thought of abandoning her investigation altogether seemed very appealing. Nicole, she said to herself, if this conspiracy idea of yours turns out to be a waste of time . . .

But Nicole was convinced that there were enough unanswered questions to warrant continuing her investigation. She resolved to talk to Wakefield. After determining that she could add her own files to the king’s data cube, she created a new file, a nineteenth file, simply called nicole. She called in her word processing subroutine and wrote a brief memorandum:

3-3-00—Have determined for certain that RoSur malfunction during Borzov pro­cedure due to external manual command after initial load and verification. Enlist­ing Wakefield for support.