Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

Nicole started to protest her dismissal but decided against it. He wouldn’t follow my advice anyway, she said to herself as she walked toward Wilson’s hut. And his blood pressure was certainly not dangerously high. She thought about the strained final two minutes of their conversation, after she had astonished Dr. Brown by correctly identifying the type of sleeping pill. There’s something not quite right here. What is it that I am missing?

She could hear Reggie Wilson snoring before she arrived at the door of his tent. After a brief debate with herself, Nicole decided that she would scan him after his nap. She then returned to her own hut and quickly fell asleep.

“Nicole. Nicole des Jardins.” The voice intruded in her dream and awak­ened her. “It’s me. Francesca. I need to tell you something.”

Nicole sat up slowly on her cot. Francesca had already entered the hut. The Italian was wearing her friendliest smile, the one that Nicole had thought was always saved for the camera.

“I was talking to David just a few minutes ago,” Francesca said as she approached the cot, “and he told me about your conversation after lunch.” Francesca kept talking as Nicole yawned and swung her legs around to the floor. “I was, of course, very concerned to learn about his blood pressure— don’t worry, he and I have already agreed that I won’t use it—but what really bothered me was he reminded me that we never told you about the sleeping pill. I’m so embarrassed. We should have told you immediately.”

Francesca was talking too fast for Nicole. Just moments before she had been in a deep sleep, dreaming of Beauvois, and now all of a sudden she was expected to listen to a staccato confession from the Italian cosmonaut.

“Could you wait a minute until I wake up?” Nicole asked crossly. She leaned around Francesca to a makeshift table and took a cup of water. She drank slowly.

“Now am I to understand,” Nicole said, “that you have awakened me to tell me that you gave Dr. Brown a sleeping pill? Something I already know?”

“Yes,” Francesca said with a smile. “I mean, that’s part of it. But I real­ized that I had forgotten to tell you about Reggie also.”

Nicole shook her head. “I’m not following you, Francesca. Are you talking about Reggie Wilson now?”

Francesca hesitated for a second. “Yes,” she said. “Didn’t you check him with your scanner right after lunch?”

Nicole shook her head again. “No, he was already asleep.” She looked at her watch. “I had planned to scan him before the meeting started. Maybe an hour from now/’

Francesca was flustered. “Well,” she said, “when David told me that the medvil showed up in his biometry data, I thought . . .” She stopped herself in midsentence. She seemed to be collecting her thoughts. Nicole waited patiently.

“Reggie started complaining of headaches over a week ago,” Francesca eventually continued, “after the two Newton ships joined for the rendezvous with Rama. Since he and 1 have been close friends and he knew about my knowledge of drugs—you know, from all that work on my documentary series—he asked me if I would give him something for headaches. I refused at first, but finally, after he kept badgering me, I gave him some nubitrol.”

Nicole frowned. “That’s a very strong medicine for a simple headache. There are still doctors who believe it should never be prescribed unless everything else has failed—”

“I told him all that,” Francesca said. “He was adamant. You don’t know Reggie. Sometimes you can’t reason with him.”

“How much did you give him?”

“Eight pills altogether, a total of two hundred milligrams.”

“No wonder he’s been acting so strangely.” Nicole leaned over and picked up her pocket computer sitting on the end table. She accessed her medical data base and read the short entry about nubitrol. “Not much here,” she said. “I’ll have to ask O’Toole to transmit the full entry from the medical encyclopedia. But if I remember correctly, wasn’t there a controversy about nubitrol remaining in the system for weeks?”

“I don’t recall,” Francesca replied. She looked at the monitor in Nicole s hand and quickly read the text. Nicole was irritated. She started to lambast Francesca verbally but at the last moment changed her mind. So you gave drugs to both David and Reggie, she was thinking. Out of her memory came a vague recollection of Francesca handing Valeriy Borzov a glass of wine several hours before he died. A strange chill ran through Nicole’s body. Could her intuition be correct?

Nicole turned around and fixed Francesca with a cold stare. “Now that you have confessed to playing doctor and pharmacist for both David and Reggie, is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“What do you mean?” Francesca asked.

“Have you given drugs to any other member of the crew?”

Nicole felt her heart race as Francesca blanched, ever so slightly, and hesitated before replying.

“No. No, of course not,” was her answer.

29 THE HUNT

The helicopter very slowly dropped the rover to the ground. “How much farther?” Janos Tabori asked over the communicator.

“About ten meters,” Richard Wakefield replied from below. He was standing in a spot about a hundred meters south of the edge of the Cylindri­cal Sea. Above him the rover dangled at the end of two long cables. “Be careful to let it down gently. There are some delicate electronics in the chassis.”

Hiro Yamanaka commanded the helicopter into its tightest possible alti­tude control loop while Janos electronically extended the cables a few centi­meters at a time. “Contact,” shouted WakeBeld. “On the rear wheels. The front needs to come down another meter.”

Francesca Sabatini raced around to the side of the rover to record its historic touchdown in the Southern Hemicylinder of Rama. Fifty meters farther from the cliff, in the neighborhood of a hut that was serving as a temporary headquarters, the rest of the cosmonauts were preparing for the hunt to begin. Irina Turgenyev was checking the installation of the cable snare in the second helicopter. David Brown was by himself a few meters away from the hut, talking on the radio with Admiral Heilmann back at the Beta campsite. The two men were reviewing the details of the capture plan. Wilson, Takagishi, and des Jardins were watching the conclusion of the rover landing operation.

“Now we know who’s really the boss of this outfit,” Reggie Wilson was saying to his two companions. He pointed at Dr. Brown. “This damn hunt is more like a military operation than anything we’ve done, yet our senior scientist is in charge and our ranking officer is manning the phones.’* He spat on the ground. “Christ, do we have enough equipment here? Two helicop­ters, a rover, three different kinds of cages—not to mention several large boxes of electrical and mechanical shit. Those poor bastard crabs don’t have a chance.”

Dr. Takagishi put the laser binoculars to his eyes. He found the target quickly. Half a kilometer to the east the crab biots were nearing the edge of the cliff again. Nothing about their motion had changed. “We need all the equipment because of the uncertainty,” Takagishi said quietly. “Nobody really knows what is going to happen.”

“I hope the lights go out,” Wilson said with a laugh.

“We’re prepared for that,” David Brown interjected tersely as he walked up to join the other three cosmonauts. “The shells of the crabs have been sprayed with a light fluorescent material and we have plenty of flares. While you were complaining about the length of our last meeting, we were finish­ing the contingency plans.” He stared truculently at his countryman. “You know, Wilson, you could try—”

“Break break,” the voice of Otto Heilmann interrupted him. “News. Hot news. I just received word from O’Toole that INN will be carrying our feed live, beginning twenty minutes from now.”

“Good work,” replied Brown. “We should be ready by then. I see Wake-field heading this way in the rover.” He glanced at his watch. “And the crabs should be turning again in another few seconds. Incidentally, Otto, do you still disagree with my suggestion to snare the lead biot?”

“Yes, David, I do. I think it’s an unnecessary risk. What little we do know suggests that the lead crab has the most capability. Why take a chance? Any biot would be an incredible treasure to carry back to Earth, particularly if it’s still functional. We can worry about the leader after we already have one in the bag.”

“Then I guess I’m outvoted on this one. Dr, Takagishi and Tabori both agree with you. So does General O’Toole. We’ll proceed with Plan B. The target biot will be number four, the back right biot as we approach from the rear.”

The rover carrying Wakefield and Sabatini arrived at the hut area at al­most the same time as the helicopter. “Good job, men,” Dr. Brown said as Tabori and Yamanaka jumped down from the ‘copter. “Take a short breather, Janos. Then go over and make sure Turgenyev and the cable snare are both ready to go. I want you airborne in five minutes.