Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

Nicole was astonished. “How did you do that?” she asked.

“I’ll explain later,” Richard said with a wave of his hand. “Do you have a favorite Shakespearean sonnet?” he now inquired. “If you do, recite a line, or give TB a number.”

“Full many a glorious morning . . .” recalled Nicole.

“. . . have I seen,” the robot added,

“Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green. Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy . . .”

The little robot recited the sonnet with fluid head and arm movements as well as a wide range of facial expressions. Again Nicole was impressed by Richard Wakefield’s creativity. She remembered the key four lines of the sonnet from her university days and mumbled them along with TB:

“Even so my sun one early morn did shine, With all-triumphant splendor on my brow; But, out alack, he was but one hour mine, The region cloud hath masked him from me now . . .”

After the robot finished the final couplet, Nicole, who was moved by the almost forgotten words, found herself applauding. “And he can do all the sonnets?” she asked.

Richard nodded. “Plus many, many of the more poetic dramatic speeches. But that’s not his most outstanding capability. Remembering passages from Shakespeare only requires plenty of storage. TB is also a very intelligent robot. He can carry on a conversation better than—”

Richard stopped himself in midsentence. “I’m sorry, Nicole. I’m monopo­lizing the time. You said you had some business to discuss.”

“But you’ve already used my two minutes,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Are you certain that you won’t die of starvation if I take five more minutes of your time?”

Nicole quickly summarized her investigation into the RoSur software mal­function, including her conclusion that the fault protection algorithms must have been disabled by manual commands. She indicated that she could go no further with her own analysis and that she would like some help from Richard. She did not discuss her suspicions.

“Should be a snap,” he said with a smile. “All I have to do is find the place in memory where the commands are buffered and stored. That could take a little time, given the size of the storage, but these memories are generally designed with logical architectures. However, I don’t understand why you’re doing all this detective work. Why don’t you simply ask Janos and the others if they input any commands?”

“That’s the problem,” Nicole replied. “Nobody recalls commanding RoSur at any time after the final load and verify. When Janos hit his head during the maneuver, I thought his fingers were on the control box. He doesn’t remember and I can’t be certain.”

Richard’s brow furrowed. “It would be very unlikely that Janos just hap­pened to toggle the fault protection enable switch with a random command. That would mean the overall design was stupid.” He thought for a moment. “Oh well,” he continued, “there’s no need to speculate. Now you’ve aroused my curiosity. I’ll look at the problem as soon as I have—”

“Break break. Break break.” Otto Hermann’s voice on the communicator interrupted their conversation. “Will everyone come immediately to the science control center for a meeting. We have a new development. The lights inside Rama just came on again.”

Richard opened the door and followed Nicole into the corridor. “Thanks for your help,” Nicole said. “I appreciate it very much.”

“Thank me after I do something,” Richard said with a grin. “I’m notori­ous for promises. Now, what do you think is the meaning of all these games with the lights?”

26 SECOND SORTIE

David Brown had placed a single large sheet of paper on the table in the middle of the control center. Franceses had divided it into partitions, representing hours, and was now busy writing down whatever he told her, “The damn mission planning software is too inflexible to be useful in a situation like this,” Dr. Brown was saying to Janos Tabori and Richard Wakefield. “It’s only good when the sequence of activities being planned is consistent with one of the preflight strategies.”

Janos walked over to one of the monitors. “Maybe you can use it better than I can,” Dr. Brown continued, “but I have found it much easier this morning to rely on pencil and paper.” Janos called up a software program for mission sequencing and began to key in some data.

“Wait a minute,” Richard Wakefield interjected. Janos stopped typing on the keyboard and turned to listen to his colleague. “We’re getting all worked up over nothing. We don’t need to plan the entire next sortie at this mo­ment. In any case, we know the first major activity segment must be the completion of the infrastructure. That will take another ten or twelve hours. The rest of the sortie design can be done in parallel.”

“Richard’s right,” Francesca added. “We’re trying to do everything too fast. Let’s send the space cadets into Rama to finish setting up. While they’re gone we can work out the details of the sortie.”

“That’s impractical,” Dr. Brown replied. “The academy graduates are the only ones who know how long each of the various engineering activities should take. We can’t make meaningful timelines without them.”

“Then one of us will stay here with you,” Janos Tabori said. He grinned. “And we can use Heilmann or O’Toole inside, as an extra worker. That shouldn’t slow us down too much.”

A consensus decision was reached in half an hour. Nicole would stay onboard the Newton again, at least until the infrastructure was completed, and represent the cadets in the mission planning process, Admiral Heilmann would go into Rama with the four other professional cosmonauts. They would finish the remaining three infrastructure tasks: the assembly of the rest of the vehicles, the deployment of another dozen portable monitoring stations in the Northern Hemicylinder, and the construction of the Beta campsite/communications complex on the north side of the Cylindrical Sea.

Richard Wakefield was in the process of reviewing all the detailed subtasks with his small team when Reggie Wilson, who had been virtually silent during the entire morning, suddenly jumped up from his chair. “This is all bullshit/’ he shouted. “I can’t believe all the nonsense I’m hearing.”

Richard stopped his review. Brown and Takagishi, who had already started discussing the sortie design, were suddenly silent- All eyes were focused on Reggie Wilson.

“A man died here four days ago,” he said. “Killed, most likely, by whoever or whatever is operating that gigantic spacecraft. But we went inside explor­ing anyway. Next the lights go on and off unexpectedly.” Wilson looked around the room at the rest of the crew. His eyes were wild. His forehead was sweating. “And what do we all do? Huh? How do we respond to this warning from alien creatures far superior to us? We sit down calmly and plan the rest of our exploration of their vehicle. Don’t any of you get it? They don’t want us in there. They want us to leave, to go home to Earth.”

Wilson’s outburst was greeted by an uncomfortable silence. At length General O’Toole walked over beside Reggie Wilson. “Reggie,” he said qui­etly, “we were all upset by General Borzov’s death. But none of the rest of us see any connection—”

“Then you’re blind, man, you’re blind. I was up in that goddamn helicop­ter when the lights went out. One minute it was bright as a summer day and the next, poof, it was pitch black. It was fucking weird, man. Somebody turned out all the lights. In this discussion never once have I heard anybody ask why the lights went out. What’s the matter with you people? Are you too smart to be afraid?”

Wilson ranted for several minutes. His recurring theme was always the same. The Ramans had planned Borzov’s death, they were sending a warn­ing with the lights going on and off, there would be more disasters if the crew insisted on continuing with the exploration.

General O’Toole stood beside Reggie during the entire episode. Dr, Brown, Francesca, and Nicole had a hurried discussion on the side and then Nicole approached Wilson. “Reggie,” she said informally, interrupting his diatribe, “why don’t you and General O’Toole come with me? We can continue this conversation without delaying the rest of the crew.”

He looked at her suspiciously. “You, Doctor? Why should I come with you? You weren’t even in there. You haven’t seen enough to know anything.” Wilson moved over in front of Wakefield. “You were there, Richard,” he said. “You saw that place, You know what kind of intelligence and power it would take to make a space vehicle that large and then launch it on a trip between the stars. Hey, man, we’re nothing to them. We’re less than ants. We haven’t got a chance.”

“I agree with you, Reggie,” Richard Wakefield said calmly after a mo­ment’s hesitation. “At least where our comparative capabilities are con­cerned. But we have no evidence they’re hostile. Or even care about whether or not we explore their craft. On the contrary, the very fact that we are alive—”