The chair momentarily slowed. Shigeru Takagishi climbed off a kilometer below her. Nicole couldn’t see him, but she could hear him talking to Richard Wakefield on the communicator. “Hurry up,” she heard Reggie Wilson shout. “I don’t like sitting here in the middle of nowhere.” Nicole enjoyed being suspended on the chairlift. The amazing scene around her was temporarily almost static and she could study at her leisure any feature that was particularly interesting.
After one more stop for Wilson to disembark, Nicole was at last approaching the bottom of the Alpha chairlift herself. She watched, fascinated, as the resolution of her eyes improved quickly during the last three hundred meters of her descent. What had been a jumble of indistinct images resolved itself into a rover, three people, some equipment, and a small surrounding camp. After a few more seconds she could identify each of the three men. She had a quick flashback to another chairlift ride, this one in Switzerland some two months before. An image of King Henry flitted momentarily through her mind. It was replaced by the smiling face of Richard Wakefield just below her. He was giving her instructions on how best to ease herself out of the chair.
“It will never come to a complete stop,” he was saying, “but it will slow down a lot. Unfasten your belt and then hit the ground walking, as if you were coming off a moving sidewalk.”
He grabbed her by the waist and lifted her off the platform. Takagishi and Wilson were already in the backseat of the rover. “Welcome to Rama,” Wakefield said.
“All right, Tabori,” he then spoke into the communicator. “We’re all here and ready to go. We’re switching now to the listen-only mode for our drive.”
“Hurry,” Janos urged him. “We’re having a hard time not eating your lunch… By the way, Richard, will you bring tool box C when you come? We’ve been talking about nets and cages and I may need a wider variety of gadgets.”
“Roger,” Wakefield replied. He jogged over to the campsite and entered the only large hut. He emerged with a long rectangular metal box that was obviously very heavy. “Shit, Tabori,” he said into the radio, “what in the world is in here?”
They all heard a laugh. “Everything you could possibly need to catch a crab biot. And then some.”
Wakefield switched off the transmitter and climbed in the rover. He started driving away from the stairway in the direction of the Cylindrical Sea. “This biot hunt is the stupidest goddamn idea I’ve ever heard,” Reggie Wilson groused. “Somebody is going to get hurt.”
There was quiet in the rover for almost a minute. To the right, at the limit of their vision, the cosmonauts could barely see the Raman city of London. “Well, how does it feel to be part of the second team?” Wilson asked nobody in particular.
After an awkward silence, Dr. Takagishi turned to address him. “Excuse me, Mr. Wilson,” he said politely, “are you talking to me?”
“Sure I am!” Wilson replied, nodding his head up and down. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you were the number two scientist on this mission? I guess not,” Wilson continued after a short pause. “But that’s not surprising. Down on Earth I never knew that I was the number two journalist.”
“Reggie, I don’t think—” Nicole said before she was interrupted.
“As for you, Doctor” — Wilson leaned forward in the rover — “you may be the only member of the third team. I overheard our glorious leaders Heilmann and Brown talking about you. They’d like to leave you on the Newton permanently. But since we may need your skills—”
“That’s enough,” Richard Wakefield broke in. There was a threatening edge in his voice. “You can stop being so unpleasant.” Several tense seconds passed before Wakefield spoke again. “By the way, Wilson,” he said in a friendlier tone, “if I remember correctly, you’re a racing fanatic. Would you like to drive this buggy?”
It was the perfect suggestion. A few minutes later Reggie Wilson was in the driver’s seat beside Wakefield, laughing wildly as he accelerated the rover around a tight circle. Cosmonauts des Jardins and Takagishi were bumping around in the backseat.
Nicole was observing Wilson very carefully. He’s erratic again, she was thinking. That’s at least three times in the last two days. Nicole tried to recall when she had last done a full scan on Wilson. Not since the day after Borzov died. I’ve checked the cadets twice in the interim… Dammit, she said to herself, ! let my preoccupation with the Borzov incident make me careless. She made a mental note to scan everyone as soon as possible after she arrived at the Beta campsite.
“Say, my good professor,” Richard Wakefield said once Wilson had finally straightened out and was heading for camp, “I have a question for you.” He turned around and faced the Japanese scientist. “Have you figured out our strange sound from the other day? Or has Dr. Brown convinced you that it was just a figment of our collective imagination?”
Dr. Takagishi shook his head. “I told you at the time that it was a new noise.” He stared off in the distance, across the unexplained mechanical fields of the Central Plain. “This is a different Rama. I know it. The checkerboard squares in the south are laid out in an entirely new pattern and no longer extend to the shore of the Cylindrical Sea. The lights now go on before the sea melts. And they go off abruptly, without dimming for several hours as the first Rama explorers reported, The crab biots now appear in herds instead of individually.” He paused, still looking out across the fields. “Dr. Brown says that all these differences are trivial, but I think they mean something. It’s just possible,” Takagishi said softly, “that Dr. Brown is wrong.”
“It’s also possible that he’s a complete son of a bitch,” said Wilson bitterly. He accelerated the rover to its maximum speed. “Beta campsite, here we come!”
28
EXTRAPOLATION
Nicole completed her lunch of pressed duck, reconstituted broccoli, and mashed potatoes. The rest of the cosmonauts were still eating and it was temporarily quiet at the long table. In the corner, by the entrance, a monitor tracked the location of the crab biots. Their pattern had not changed. The blip representing the crabs would move in one direction for slightly more than ten minutes and then reverse itself.
“What happens after they finish this parcel?” Richard Wakefield asked. He was looking at a computer map of the area that was posted on a temporary bulletin board.
“Last time they followed one of those lanes between the checkerboard partitions until they came to a hole,” Francesca responded from the other end of the table. “Then they dumped their garbage in it. They haven’t picked up anything in this new territory, so what they will do when they finish is anybody’s guess.”
“Everyone is convinced that our biots are in fact garbagemen?” Richard asked.
“The evidence is fairly strong!” David Brown said. “A similar solitary crab biot encountered by Jimmy Pak inside the first Rama was also believed to be a garbage collector.”
“Excuse me,” Janos Tabori interjected, “but just what garbage are these crabs collecting?”
“We flatter ourselves,” Shigeru Takagishi said softly after a long silence. He finished chewing his last bite and swallowed. “Dr. Brown himself was the one who first said that it was unlikely we human beings could comprehend what Rama was about. Our conversation reminds me of that old Hindu proverb about the blind men who felt the elephant. They all described it differently, for each of them touched only a small part of the animal. None of them was correct.”