Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

She was nearing the Cylindrical Sea. Her personal navigator told her that she was only six hundred meters away. Dammit, Francesca answered herself after thinking very carefully about her situation, / don’t really have a com­pletely safe option. I mil have to choose one or the other. Either way there’s a significant risk.

Francesca stopped moving north and paced back and forth between two skyscrapers. As she was walking, the ground underneath her feet began to tremble. Everything was shaking. She dropped to her knees to steady herself. She heard Janos Tabori’s voice very faintly on the radio. “It’s all right, everybody, don’t be alarmed. It looks as if our vehicle is undergoing a maneu­ver. That must have been what the warnings were all about. … By the way, Nicole, where are you and Francesca? Hiro and Richard are about to take off in the helicopter.”

“I’m close to the sea, maybe two minutes away,” Francesca answered. “Nicole went back to check on something.”

“Roger,” Janos replied. “Are you there, Nicole? Do you copy, cosmonaut des Jardins?”

There was silence on the radio.

“As you know, Janos,” Francesca interjected, “communications are very spotty from here. Nicole knows where to meet the helicopter. She’ll be along quickly, I’m certain.” She paused a moment. “Say, where are the others? Is everyone all right?”

“Brown and Heilmann are on the radio with Earth. ISA management will be completely freaked out now. They were already demanding that we leave Rama before this maneuver began.”

“We’re just boarding the helicopter,” Richard Wakefield said. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

It’s done. I’ve made my choice, Francesca said to herself when Richard was finished. She was surprisingly elated. Immediately she began to rehearse her story. “We were near the large octahedron in the central plaza when Nicole spotted an alley off to our right that we had not noticed before. The street leading to the alley was extremely narrow and she remarked that it was probably a region where communications could not penetrate. I was already tired—we had been walking so fast. She told me to go ahead to the helicop­ter. . . .”

“And you never saw her again?” Richard Wakefield interrupted. Francesca shook her head. Richard was standing on the ice next to her. Beneath them the ice was vibrating as the long maneuver continued. The lights were now on. They had stopped their flashing when the maneuver began.

Pilot Yamanaka was sitting in the cockpit of his helicopter. Richard checked his watch. “It’s almost five minutes since we landed here. Some­thing must have happened to her.” He glanced around. “Maybe she’s com­ing out somewhere else.”

Richard and Francesca climbed into the helicopter and Yamanaka took off. They cruised up and down the island coast, twice circling over the solitary icemobile. “Edge into New York,” Wakefield commanded. “Maybe we’ll be able to spot her.”

From the helicopter it was virtually impossible to see the ground in the city. The ‘copter had to fly above the tallest buildings. The streets were very narrow and the shadows played games with the eyes. Once Richard thought he saw something moving between the buildings, but it turned out to be an optical illusion.

“All right, Nicole, all right. Where in the hell are you?”

“Wakefield,” Dr. David Brown’s sonorous voice sounded in the helicop­ter, “I want you three to come back to Beta immediately. We need to have a meeting.” Richard was surprised to hear that it was Dr. Brown. Janos had been the one monitoring their communication link since they had left Beta.

“What’s the hurry, boss?” Wakefield replied. “We still haven’t made our scheduled rendezvous with Nicole des Jardins. She should be coming out of New York any minute.”

“I’ll give you the details when you get here. We have some difficult deci­sions to make. I’m certain that des Jardins will radio when she reaches the shore.”

It did not take them long to cross the frozen sea. Near the Beta campsite, Yamanaka landed the helicopter on the shaking ground and the three cosmo­nauts descended. The remaining four members of the crew were waiting for them.

“This is one incredibly long maneuver,” Richard said with a smile as he approached the others. “I hope the Ramans know what they’re doing.”

“They probably do,” Dr. Brown said somberly. “At least the Earth thinks that they do.” He looked carefully at his watch. “According to the naviga­tion section in mission control, we should expect this maneuver to last an­other nineteen minutes, give or take a few seconds.”

“How do they know?” inquired Wakefield. “Have the Ramans landed on Earth and handed out a flight plan while we’ve been up here exploring?”

Nobody laughed. “If the vehicle stays at this attitude and acceleration rate,” Janos said with uncharacteristic seriousness, “then in nineteen more minutes it will be on an impact course.”

“Impact with what?” Francesca asked.

Richard Wakefield did some quick mental computations. “With the Earth?” he guessed. Janos nodded.

“Jesus!” Francesca exclaimed.

“Exactly,” David Brown said. “This mission has become an Earth security concern. The COG Executive Council is meeting at this very moment to consider all contingencies. We have been told in the strongest possible lan­guage that we must leave Rama as soon as the maneuver is completed. We are to take nothing except the crab biot and our personal belongings. We are—”

“What about Takagishi? And des Jardins?” Wakefield asked.

“We will leave the icemobile where it is, along with a rover here at Beta. They are both easy to operate. We will still be in radio contact from the Newton.” Dr. Brown stared directly at Richard. “If this spacecraft is really on an Earth impact course,” he said dramatically, “our individual lives are no longer very important. The entire course of history is about to be changed.”

“But what if the navigation engineers are wrong? What if Rama has just happened to make a maneuver that momentarily intersects an Earth impact trajectory? It could be—”

“Extremely unlikely. You remember that group of short-burst maneuvers at the time of Borzov’s death? They changed the orientation of Rama’s orbit so that an Earth impact could be achieved with one long maneuver at exactly the right time. The engineers on Earth figured it out thirty-six hours ago. They radioed O’Toole before dawn this morning to expect the maneuver. I didn’t want to say anything while everyone was out looking for Takagishi.”

“That explains why everyone is so anxious for us to clear out of here/’ Janos noted.

“Only partially,” Dr. Brown continued. “There is clearly a different feel­ing about Rama and the Ramans down on Earth. ISA management and the world leaders on the COG Executive Council are apparently convinced that Rama is implacably hostile.”

He stopped for several seconds, as if he were reassessing his own attitude.

“I think they are reacting emotionally myself, but I cannot persuade them differently. I personally see no evidence of hostility, only a disinterest in and disregard for a wildly inferior being. But the televised account of Wilson’s death has done its damage. The world’s populace cannot be here beside us, cannot grasp the majesty of this place. They can only react viscerally to the horror—”

“If you don’t think the Ramans have hostile intentions,” Francesca inter­rupted, “then how do you explain this maneuver? It can’t be coincidence. They or it has decided for some reason to head for the Earth. No wonder the people down there are traumatized. Remember, the first Rama never ac­knowledged its visitors in any way. This is a dramatically different response. The Ramans are telling us they know—”

“Hold it. Hold it,” Richard said. “I think we’re jumping to conclusions a little too fast. We have twelve more minutes before we should start pushing the panic buttons.”

“All right, Cosmonaut Wakefield,” Francesca said, now remembering that she was a reporter and activating her video camera, “for the record, what do you think it will mean if this maneuver does culminate in a trajectory that impacts the Earth?”

When Richard finally spoke he was very serious. “People of the Earth,” he said dramatically, “if Rama has indeed changed its course to visit our planet, it is not necessarily a hostile act. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, that any of us have seen or heard that indicates the species that created this space vehicle wishes us any harm. Certainly Cosmonaut Wilson’s death was dis­turbing, but it was probably an isolated response from a specific set of robots rather than a part of a sinister plan.

“1 see this magnificent spacecraft as a single machine, almost organic in its complexity. It is extraordinarily intelligent and programmed for long-term survival. It is neither hostile nor friendly. It could easily have been designed to track any incoming satellites and compute where the visiting spacecraft must have originated. Rama’s orbit change to fly in the vicinity of the Earth might therefore be nothing more than its standard response to an encounter initiated by another spacefaring species. It may simply be coming to find out more about us.”