Richard Wakefield was coming out of his room as Nicole headed down the hall after leaving Takagishi. She made a spontaneous decision to talk to him about the RoSur software.
“Good morning, princess,” he said as he approached. “What are you doing awake at this hour? Something exciting, I hope.”
“As a matter of fact,” Nicole replied in the same playful tone, “I was coming to talk to you.” He stopped to listen. “Do you have a minute?”
“For you, Madame Doctor,” he answered with an exaggerated smile, “I have two minutes. But no more. Mind you, I’m hungry. And if I am not fed quickly when I’m hungry, I turn into an awful ogre.” Nicole laughed. “What’s on your mind?” he added lightly.
“Could we go into your room?” she asked.
“I knew it. I knew it,” he said, spinning around and sliding quickly toward his door. “It’s finally happened, just like in my dreams. An intelligent, beautiful woman is going to declare her undying affection—”
Nicole could not suppress a chortle. “Wakefield,” she interrupted, still grinning, “you are hopeless. Are you never serious? I have some business to discuss with you.”
“Oh, darn,” Richard said dramatically. “Business. In that case I’m going to limit you to the two minutes I allocated you earlier. Business also makes me hungry… and grumpy.”
Richard Wakefield opened the door to his room and waited for Nicole to enter. He offered her the chair in front of his computer monitor and sat down behind her on the bed. She turned around to face him. On the shelf above his bed were a dozen tiny figurines similar to the ones she had seen before in Tabori’s room and at the Borzov banquet.
“Allow me to introduce you to some of my menagerie,” Richard said, noticing her curiosity. “You’ve met Lord and Lady Macbeth, Puck, and Bottom. This matched pair is Tybalt and Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet Next to them are Iago and Othello, followed by Prince Hal, Falstaff, and the wonderful Mistress Quickly. The last one on the right is my closest friend, The Bard, or TB for short.”
As Nicole watched, Richard activated a switch near the head of his bed and TB climbed down a ladder from the shelf to the bed. The twenty-centimeter-nigh robot carefully navigated the folds in the bed coverings and came over to greet Nicole.
“And what be your name, fair lady?” TB said.
“I am Nicole des Jardins,” she replied.
“Sounds French,” the robot said immediately. “But you don’t look French. At least not Valois.” The robot appeared to be staring at her. “You look more like a child of Othello and Desdemona.”
Nicole was astonished. “How did you do that?” she asked.
“I’ll explain later,” Richard said with a wave of his hand. “Do you have a favorite Shakespearean sonnet?” he now inquired. “If you do, recite a line, or give TB a number.”
“Full many a glorious morning…” recalled Nicole.
“…have I seen,” the robot added,
“Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green. Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy…”
The little robot recited the sonnet with fluid head and arm movements as well as a wide range of facial expressions. Again Nicole was impressed by Richard Wakefield’s creativity. She remembered the key four lines of the sonnet from her university days and mumbled them along with TB:
“Even so my sun one early morn did shine, With all-triumphant splendor on my brow; But, out alack, he was but one hour mine, The region cloud hath masked him from me now…”
After the robot finished the final couplet, Nicole, who was moved by the almost forgotten words, found herself applauding. “And he can do all the sonnets?” she asked.
Richard nodded. “Plus many, many of the more poetic dramatic speeches. But that’s not his most outstanding capability. Remembering passages from Shakespeare only requires plenty of storage. TB is also a very intelligent robot. He can carry on a conversation better than—”
Richard stopped himself in midsentence. “I’m sorry, Nicole. I’m monopolizing the time. You said you had some business to discuss.”
“But you’ve already used my two minutes,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Are you certain that you won’t die of starvation if I take five more minutes of your time?”
Nicole quickly summarized her investigation into the RoSur software malfunction, including her conclusion that the fault protection algorithms must have been disabled by manual commands. She indicated that she could go no further with her own analysis and that she would like some help from Richard. She did not discuss her suspicions.
“Should be a snap,” he said with a smile. “All I have to do is find the place in memory where the commands are buffered and stored. That could take a little time, given the size of the storage, but these memories are generally designed with logical architectures. However, I don’t understand why you’re doing all this detective work. Why don’t you simply ask Janos and the others if they input any commands?”
“That’s the problem,” Nicole replied. “Nobody recalls commanding RoSur at any time after the final load and verify. When Janos hit his head during the maneuver, I thought his fingers were on the control box. He doesn’t remember and I can’t be certain.”
Richard’s brow furrowed. “It would be very unlikely that Janos just happened to toggle the fault protection enable switch with a random command. That would mean the overall design was stupid.” He thought for a moment. “Oh well,” he continued, “there’s no need to speculate. Now you’ve aroused my curiosity. I’ll look at the problem as soon as I have—”
“Break break. Break break.” Otto Hermann’s voice on the communicator interrupted their conversation. “Will everyone come immediately to the science control center for a meeting. We have a new development. The lights inside Rama just came on again.”
Richard opened the door and followed Nicole into the corridor. “Thanks for your help,” Nicole said. “I appreciate it very much.”
“Thank me after I do something,” Richard said with a grin. “I’m notorious for promises. Now, what do you think is the meaning of all these games with the lights?”
26
SECOND SORTIE
David Brown had placed a single large sheet of paper on the table in the middle of the control center. Franceses had divided it into partitions, representing hours, and was now busy writing down whatever he told her, “The damn mission planning software is too inflexible to be useful in a situation like this,” Dr. Brown was saying to Janos Tabori and Richard Wakefield. “It’s only good when the sequence of activities being planned is consistent with one of the preflight strategies.”
Janos walked over to one of the monitors. “Maybe you can use it better than I can,” Dr. Brown continued, “but I have found it much easier this morning to rely on pencil and paper.” Janos called up a software program for mission sequencing and began to key in some data.
“Wait a minute,” Richard Wakefield interjected. Janos stopped typing on the keyboard and turned to listen to his colleague. “We’re getting all worked up over nothing. We don’t need to plan the entire next sortie at this moment. In any case, we know the first major activity segment must be the completion of the infrastructure. That will take another ten or twelve hours. The rest of the sortie design can be done in parallel.”
“Richard’s right,” Francesca added. “We’re trying to do everything too fast. Let’s send the space cadets into Rama to finish setting up. While they’re gone we can work out the details of the sortie.”
“That’s impractical,” Dr. Brown replied. “The academy graduates are the only ones who know how long each of the various engineering activities should take. We can’t make meaningful timelines without them.”