“Wow!” said Richard first. “Did you see that?”
He jumped up and approached the screen. “It happened so fast,” Nicole commented, coming up beside him.
General O’Toole mumbled a very short prayer of thanks and joined his colleagues in front of the screen. “How do you think it did that?” he asked Richard.
“I have no idea,” Richard replied. “But somehow that cocoon contained the explosion. It must be a fantastic material.” He flipped back to the radar image. “Let’s watch this next one more closely. It should be here in a few—”
There was a brilliant flash of light and the screen went blank. Less than a second later a sharp lateral force hit them hard, knocking them to the floor. The lights went out in the White Room and the ground stopped shaking. “Is everyone all right?” Richard asked, groping for Nicole’s hand in the dark.
“I think so,” O’Toole replied. “I hit the wall, but only with my back and elbow.”
“I’m fine, darling,” Nicole answered. “What happened?”
“Obviously that one exploded early, before it reached the net. We were hit by the shock wave.”
“I don’t understand,” O’Toole said. “The bomb exploded in a vacuum. How could there be a shock wave?”
“It wasn’t technically just a shock wave,” Richard replied, standing up as the lights came back on and the ground began to shake again. “Hey, how about that!” he interrupted himself. “The famous Raman redundancy scores again. You okay?” he said to Nicole, who looked unsteady as she was standing up.
“I bruised my knee,” she answered, “but it’s not serious.”
“The bomb destroyed the rest of its own missile,” Richard said, now answering O’Toole’s question as he searched through the sensor list for the redundant imaging and radar outputs, “vaporizing most of the casing and reducing the rest to fragments. The gas and debris moved outward at enormous speeds, creating the wave that hit us. The mesh attenuated the size of the shock.”
Nicole moved over against the wall and sat down. “I want to be ready for the next one,” she said.
“I wonder how many bumps like that Rama can survive,” Richard said.
General O’Toole came over and sat down beside Nicole. “Two down and fourteen to go,” he said. They all smiled. At least they weren’t dead yet.
Richard located the redundant sensors a few minutes later. “Uh-oh,” he said as he surveyed the remaining blips on the screen. “Unless I’m mistaken, the last bomb that exploded was many kilometers away. We were lucky. We’d better hope one doesn’t detonate just outside the mesh.”
The trio watched while two more missiles were trapped and wrapped in the material surrounding Rama. Richard stood up. “We have a brief respite now!” he said. “It will be three minutes or so before our next impact — then we’ll have four more missiles in a hurry.”
Nicole rose to her feet also. She saw that General O’Toole was holding his back. “Are you sure you’re all right, Michael?” she asked. He nodded, still watching the screen. Richard came over beside Nicole and took her hand. A minute later they sat down together against the wall to wait for the next impacts.
They didn’t wait long. A second lateral force, much stronger than the 6rst one, hit them within twenty seconds. Again the lights went out and the floor stopped shaking. Nicole could hear O’Toole’s labored breathing in the dark. “Michael,” she said, “are you hurt?”
When there was no immediate reply, Nicole started crawling in his direction. That was a mistake. She was not braced against anything when the powerful third blast hit. Nicole was thrown savagely into the wall, hitting it with the side of her head.
General O’Toole stayed beside Nicole while Richard went up into New York to survey the city. The men spoke quietly when Richard returned. He reported only minor damage. Thirty minutes after the final missile had been trapped, the lights came back on and the ground started shaking again. “You see,” Richard said with a grin, “I told you we’d be all right. They always do everything important in threes.”
Nicole remained unconscious for almost another hour. During the last few minutes she was vaguely aware of both the vibration of the floor and the conversation on the opposite side of the room. Nicole opened her eyes very slowly,
“The net effect,” she heard Richard say, “is to increase our velocity along the hyperbola. So we will cross the Earth’s orbit much earlier than previously, long before the planet itself has arrived.”
“How close will we come to the Earth?”
“Not too close. It depends on when this maneuver ends. If it stopped now we would miss by a million kilometers or so, more than twice the distance to the Moon.”
Nicole sat up and smiled. “Good morning,” she said cheerfully.
The two men came over beside her. “Are you all right, darling?” Richard asked.
“I think so,” Nicole said, feeling the bump on the side of her head. “I may have occasional headaches for a while.” She looked at the two men. “What about you, Michael? I seem to remember being worried about you right before the big blast.”
“The second one knocked the wind out of me,” O’Toole replied. “Luckily I was better prepared for the third bomb. And my back seems fine now.”
Richard started to explain what he had learned from the output of Rama’s celestial sensors. “I heard the last part of it,” Nicole said. “I gather we’re now going to miss the Earth altogether.” Richard helped her to stand up. “But where are we headed?”
Richard shrugged his shoulders. “No planetary or asteroidal targets are anywhere close to our present trajectory. Our hyperbolic energy is increasing. If nothing changes we will escape from the solar system altogether.”
“And become interstellar travelers!” Nicole said quietly.
“If we live that long!” added the general.
“For my part,” Richard said with a playful smile, “I am not going to worry about what happens next. At least not yet. I plan to celebrate our escape from the nuclear phalanx. I vote we go upstairs and introduce Michael to some new friends. Should it be the avians or the octospiders?”
Nicole shook her head and smiled. “You’re hopeless, Wakefield. Let me not in any way inhibit—”
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments…”
TB suddenly interrupted. All three of the cosmonauts were startled. They stared down at the tiny robot and then erupted with laughter.
“…love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark…”
Richard picked up TB and switched him off. Nicole and Michael were still laughing. Richard embraced each of them individually. “I can’t think of three better traveling companions,” he said, holding the little robot over his head, “wherever it is we’re going.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many different people contributed to this novel during numerous conversations over a two-year period. Those whose comments or insights were especially valuable include Bebe Barden, Paul Chodas, Clayton Frohman, Michael Classman, Bruce Jakosky, Roland Joffe, Gerry Snyder, and Ian Stewart.
Lou Aronica, Malcolm Edwards, and Russ Galen each made significant contributions to the book. Their editing insights were essential in shaping the final structure of the novel.
Special thanks are extended to Father Martin Slaught, whose religious acumen was indispensable in creating General O’Toole, and Peter Guber, who enabled the authors to meet for the first time over three years ago.
Finally, no acknowledgment would be complete without bouquets for Mr. Lee’s family. His wife, Stacey, and five young sons, Cooper, Austin, Robert, Patrick, and Michael, generously allowed him to make the necessary trips halfway around the world to Sri Lanka and granted him the private time that was required for the integration of this novel.