Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

“But you don’t want to hear this,” Richard interrupted himself suddenly, “everyone has memories of childhood pain. We should talk about something else.”

“We should talk about whatever we’re feeling,” Nicole responded, surpris­ing even herself. “Which is something I hardly ever do,” she added softly.

Richard turned and looked in her direction, He extended his hand slowly. She gently wrapped her 6ngers around his. “My father worked for British Rail,” he said. “He was a very smart man, but socially clumsy, and he had difficulty finding a job that fit him after he finished the university at Sussex. Times were still tough. The economy had just started to recover from The Great Chaos. . . .

“When my mother told him that she was pregnant, he was overwhelmed by the responsibility of it all. He looked for a safe, secure position. He had always scored well on tests and the government had forced all the national transportation monopolies, including the rail system, to staff positions based on objective test results. So my father became the manager of operations at Stratford.

“He hated the job. It was boring and repetitive, no challenge at all for a man who had an honors degree. Mother told me that when I was very small he applied for other positions, but he always seemed to botch the interviews. Later on, when I was older, he never even tried. He sat at home and com­plained. And drank. And then made everyone around him miserable.”

There was a long silence. Richard was having a difficult time struggling with the demons of his childhood. Nicole squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“So was I,” Richard replied with a slight break in his voice. “I was just a small child with an incredible sense of wonder and love of life. I would come home enthusiastic about something new I had learned or something that had happened at school, and my Dad would just growl.

“Once, when I was only eight, I came home from school in the early afternoon and I got into an argument with him. It was his day off and he had been drinking, as usual. Mother was out at the store. I don’t remember what it was about now, but I do recall telling him that he was wrong about some trivial fact. When I continued to argue with him, he suddenly hit me in the nose with all his might. I fell against the wall with my broken nose gushing blood. From that time on, until I was fourteen and felt I could protect myself, I never walked in that house when he was there unless I was certain that my mother was home.”

Nicole tried to imagine an adult man slugging an eight-year-old child. What kind of human being could break his own son’s nose? she wondered.

“I had always been very shy,” Richard was saying, “and had convinced myself that I had inherited my father’s social clumsiness, so I didn’t have many friends my own age. But I still yearned for human interaction/’ He looked over at Nicole and paused, remembering, “I made Shakespeare’s characters my friends. I read his plays every afternoon in the park and immersed myself in his imaginative world. I even memorized entire scenes. Then I talked to Romeo or Ariel or Jaques while I was walking home.”

It was not difficult for Nicole to visualize the rest of Richard’s story. / can picture you as an adolescent, she thought. Solitary, awkward, emotionally repressed. Your obsession with Shakespeare gave you an escape from your pain. All the theaters were near your home. You saw your friends become alive on the stage.

On impulse Nicole leaned over and kissed Richard lightly on the cheek. “Thanks for telling me,” she said.

As soon as it was daylight they walked over to the lattice. Nicole was surprised to find that the incisions she had made when she had freed the avian had all been repaired. The lattice was like new. “Obviously a repair biot has already been here,” Richard commented, no longer extremely im­pressed after all the wonders he had already witnessed-

They cut off several long strands of the lattice and headed for the bam. On the way Richard tested the elasticity of the material. He found that it stretched about fifteen percent and always restored itself, albeit very slowly at times, to its original length. The restoration time varied significantly, depending on how long the piece had been fully stretched. Richard had already begun his examination of the inside structure of the cord when they arrived at the barn.

Nicole did not waste any time. She tied one end of the lattice material around a stumpy object just outside the barn and lowered herself down the wall. Richard’s function was to make certain that nothing untoward occurred and to be available if there was some kind of an emergency. Down in the bottom of the pit Nicole shuddered once as she remembered how helpless she had felt there just a few days earlier. But she quickly turned her attention to her task, inserting a makeshift handle made from her medical probes deep into the manna melon and then securing the other end of the handle to her backpack. Her ascent was vigorous and uneventful.

“Well.” She smiled at Richard as she handed him the melon to carry. “Should we now continue with Plan A?”

“Roger,” he replied. “Now we know where our next ten meals are coming from.”

“Nine,” Nicole corrected with a laugh. “I’ve made a slight adjustment in the estimate now that I’ve watched you eat a couple of times.”

Richard and Nicole marched quickly from the bam to the western plaza. They crisscrossed the open area and combed the narrow alleys nearby, but they did not find anything that would help them build a boat. Richard did have an encounter with a centipede biot, however, in the middle of their search one had entered the plaza and then moved diagonally across it. Rich­ard had done everything possible, including lying in front of it and beating it over the head with his backpack, to try to induce the biot to stop. He had not been successful. Nicole was laughing at him when Richard returned, a little frustrated, to her side.

“That centipede is absolutely useless,” he complained. “What the hell is it for? It’s not carrying anything. It has no sensors that I can see. It just travels merrily along.”

“The technology of an advanced extraterrestrial species,” she reminded Richard of one of his favorite quotes, “will be indistinguishable from magic.” “But that damn centipede’s not magic,” he replied, a little annoyed at Nicole’s laughter, “it’s goddamn stupid!”

“And what would you have done if it had stopped?” Nicole inquired. “Why, I would have examined it, of course. What did you think?” “I think we’d be better off concentrating our energy in other areas,” she replied. “I don’t imagine a centipede biot is going to help us get off this island.”

“Well,” Richard said a little brusquely, “it’s obvious to me already we’re going about this process all wrong. We’re not going to find anything on the surface. The biots probably clean it up regularly. We should be looking for another hole in the ground, like the avian’s lair. We can use the multispectral radar to identify any places where the ground is not solid.”

It took them a long time to find the second hole, even though it was not more than two hundred meters from the center of the western plaza. At first Richard and Nicole were much too restrictive in their search. After an hour, though, they finally convinced themselves that the ground underneath the plaza area was solid everywhere. They expanded their search to include the small streets and lanes nearby, off the concentric avenues. On a dead-end alley with tall buildings on three sides, they found another covering in the center of the road. It was not camouflaged in any way. This second cover was the same size as the one at the avian lair, a rectangle ten meters long and six meters wide.

45 NIKKI

“Do you think the avian cover opens in the same way?” Nicole asked, after Richard had very carefully searched the environs and found a flat plate on one of the buildings that looked decidedly out of place. Pressing hard against the plate had caused the cover to open.

“Probably,” he answered. “Well have to go back and check.” “Then these places are not very secure,” Nicole said. The two of them walked back onto the street and knelt down to look in the hole. A broad, steep ramp descended from beside them and disappeared into the darkness below. They could only see about ten meters into the hole.

“It looks like one of those ancient parking lots,” Richard remarked. “Back when everybody had automobiles.” He stepped on the ramp. “It even feels like concrete.”

Nicole watched as her companion moved slowly down the ramp. When Richard’s head was below the ground level, he turned and spoke to her. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked. He had switched on his flashlight beam and had illuminated a small landing another few meters below.