Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

Richard stopped himself and began to cry noiselessly. Nicole put her arms around his heaving chest and wept with him. “Darling, darling,” she said.

“I was an animal,” he cried. “I was worse than my father ever was. I would have killed them both if the people in the next flat hadn’t restrained me.”

Neither of them said anything for several minutes. When Richard spoke again his voice was subdued, almost remote. “The next day, after the police station and the tabloid reporters and all the recriminations with Sarah, I wanted to kill myself. I would have done it, too, if I had owned a gun. I was considering the gruesome alternatives—pills, slitting my wrists with a razor blade, jumping off a bridge—when another student called to ask me a de­tailed question on relativity. There was no way, after fifteen minutes of thinking about Mr. Einstein, that suicide was still a viable option. Divorce, certainly. Celibacy, highly likely. But death was out of the question. I could never have prematurely terminated my love affair with physics.” His voice trailed off.

Nicole wiped her eyes and placed her hands in his. She leaned her naked body across Richard’s and kissed him. “I love you,” she said.

Nicole’s sounding alarm indicated that it was daylight again in Rama. Ten more days, she noted after a quick mental calculation. We ‘d better have a serious talk now,

The alarm had awakened Richard as well. He turned and smiled at his sleeping partner. “Darling,” Nicole said, “the time has come—”

“The walrus said, to speak of many things.”

“Come on now, be serious. We have to decide what we’re going to do. It’s fairly obvious that we’re not going to be rescued.”

“I agree,” said Richard. He sat up and reached across Nicole’s mat for his shirt. “I have been dreading this moment for days. But I guess we have finally reached the point where we should consider swimming across.”

“You don’t think there’s any chance of making a boat out of our black stuff?”

“No,” he answered. “One material is too light and the other too heavy. We could probably build a hybrid that would be seaworthy, if we had some nails, but without any sails we would still have to row across. . . . Our best bet is to swim.”

Richard stood up and walked over to the black square on the wall. “My fancy plans didn’t pan out, did they?” He thumped lightly on the square. “And I was going to produce steak and potatoes as well as a boat.”

“The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.”

“What a weird poet old Scottish Robbie was. I never could understand what people saw in him.”

Nicole finished dressing and started doing some stretching exercises. “Whew,” she said, “I’m out of shape. I haven’t had any heavy physical activity in days.” She smiled at Richard, who was looking at her coyly. “That doesn’t count,” she added, shaking her head.

“It’s almost the only exercise I’ve ever liked,” Richard replied with a grin. “I used to hate it at the academy when we had those special physical training weekends.”

Richard had laid out small portions of manna melon on the black table, “Three more meals after this one,” he said without emotion. “I guess we swim before it’s dark again.”

“You don’t want to go this morning?” Nicole asked.

“No,” he replied. “Why don’t you go survey the coast and pick a spot. I found something last night on the computer that has me baffled. It won’t give us food or sailboats, but it looks as if I may have finally broken through into another kind of structure.”

After breakfast, Nicole kissed Richard good-bye and wandered up to the surface. It did not take her long to reconnoiter the coast. There really were no reasons to pick one embarkation point over another. The grim reality of the coming swim oppressed Nicole. The odds are good, she told herself, that neither Richard nor I will be alive when it is dark again in Rama.

She tried to imagine what it would be like to be eaten by a shark biot. Would it be a quick death? Or would you drown aware that your legs had just been amputated? Nicole shuddered at the idea. Maybe we should try to obtain another melon. . . . She knew that was useless. Sooner or later, they had to swim.

Nicole turned her back on the sea. At least these last few days have been good, she said to herself, not wanting to think anymore about their predica­ment. He has been an excellent companion. In every way. She allowed herself the momentary luxury of recalling their shared pleasure. Then Nicole smiled and started walking back toward the lair.

“But what am I looking at?” Nicole asked as another image flashed up on the black square.

“I’m not completely certain,” Richard replied. “All I know is that I have tapped into a long list of some kind. You remember that one particular command configuration that produces the lines of symbols that look like Sanskrit? Well, I was scrolling through the gibberish and eventually I noticed a pattern. I stopped at the beginning of the pattern, changed the position of the last three keys, and then hit the double dot again. Suddenly an image was on the screen. And every time I hit an alphanumeric, the picture changed.”

“But how do you know you’re looking at sensor output?”

Richard entered a command and there was a change in the image. “Occa­sionally I see something I recognize,” he said. “Look at that one, for exam­ple. Couldn’t that be the Beta stairway viewed from a camera in the middle of the Central Plain?”

Nicole studied the picture. “Possibly,” she said, “but I don’t see how you could ever tell for certain.”

Richard commanded the screen to change again. The next three pictures were unintelligible. The fourth one showed a feature tapering to a point at the top of the frame. “And that one,” he said. “Couldn’t it be one of the little horns, as seen from a sensor near the top of the Big Horn?”

No matter how hard she tried, Nicole could not visualize what the view would be like from the top of the giant spire in the center of the southern bowl. Richard continued to flip through the pictures. Only about one in five was even partially clear. “Somewhere in this system there must be some enhancement algorithms,” he said to himself. “Then I can sharpen up all the images.”

Nicole could tell that Richard was about to begin another long work session. She walked over to him and put her arms around his neck. “Could I talk you into a little distraction first?” she said, reaching up and kissing him on the mouth.

“I guess so,” he replied, dropping the keyboard on the Boor. “It will probably be good for me to clear my mind.”

Nicole was in the middle of a beautiful dream. She was home again at her villa in Beauvois. Richard was sitting beside her on the couch in the living room and was holding her hand. Her father and daughter were opposite them in the soft chairs.

Her dream was broken by Richard’s insistent voice. When Nicole opened her eyes her lover was standing over her, his voice crackling with excitement. “Wait until you see this, darling/’ he said, extending a hand to pull her up. “It’s fantastic! Somebody is still here.”

Nicole shook the dream from her mind and looked over at the black square where Richard was pointing. “Can you believe it?” he said, jumping up and down. “There’s no doubt about it The military ship is still docked,”

Only then did Nicole realize that she was looking at a picture of the outside of Rama. She blinked her eyes and listened to Richard’s rambling explanation. “Once I figured out the code for the enhancement parameters, almost every frame became clear. That set of pictures I showed you earlier must be the real-time output from hundreds of Rama’s imaging sensors. And I think I have figured out how to access the other sensor data bases as well.”

Richard was exultant. He threw his arms around Nicole and lifted her off the ground. He hugged and kissed her and bounced around the room like a lunatic.

When he finally calmed down a little, Nicole spent almost a full minute studying the image that was projected on the black square. It was definitely the Newton military ship; she could read the markings. “So the science spacecraft has gone home,” she commented to Richard.

“Yes,” he answered, “as I expected. I was afraid they would both be gone and that after we swam across the sea, we would find ourselves still trapped, this time in a larger prison.”

The same concern had bothered Nicole. She smiled at Richard. “It’s relatively straightforward, then, isn’t it? We swim across the Cylindrical Sea and walk over to the chairlift. Someone will be waiting for us at the top.”