“Not quite,” Francesca said purposefully. She cleaned up the remains of her lunch and put them in the garbage pouch of her flight suit. “You and I still have some unfinished business.”
Nicole looked at her quizzically. “I think it’s time we took off the masks and raced each other honestly,” Francesca said in what was a deceptively friendly manner. “If you suspect that I gave Valeriy Borzov some medication on the day that he died, why don’t you ask me directly?”
Nicole stared at her adversary for several seconds. “Did you?” she asked at length.
“Do you think I did?” Franceses replied coyly. “And if so, why did I do it?”
“You’re just playing the same game at another level,” Nicole said after a pause. “You’re not willing to admit anything. You just want to find out how much I know. But I don’t need a confession from you. Science and technology are supporting me. Eventually the truth will be obvious.”
“I doubt it,” Francesca said casually. She jumped down from the box. “The truth always eludes those who search for it.” She smiled. “Now let’s go find the professor.”
On the western side of the central plaza the two women encountered another unique structure. From a distance it resembled a huge barn. The peak of its black roof was easily forty meters above the ground and it was more than a hundred meters long. There were two especially fascinating features about the bam. First, the two ends of the building were open. Second, although one could not see into it from the outside, all the walls and the roof were transparent from the inside. Francesca and Nicole took turns proving that it was not an optical illusion, Someone inside the barn could indeed see in all directions except down. In fact, the adjacent reflective skyscrapers had been precisely aligned so that all the nearby streets were visible from inside the barn.
“Fantastic,” said Francesca as she photographed Nicole standing on the other side of the wall.
“Dr. Takagishi told me,” Nicole said as she came around the comer, “that it was impossible to believe that New York was purposeless. The rest of Rama? Maybe. But nobody could have spent this much time and effort without some reason.”
“You almost sound religious,” Francesca said.
Nicole stared quietly at her Italian colleague. She’s needling me now, Nicole said to herself. She doesn’t really care what I think. Maybe what anybody thinks.
“Hey. Look at this,” Francesca said after a short silence. She had walked a short way into the interior of the bam and was pointing at the ground. Nicole came up beside her. In front of Francesca a narrow rectangular pit was cut in the floor. The pit was about five meters long, a meter and a half wide, and quite deep, maybe as much as eight meters. Most of the bottom was in shadow. The walls of the pit were straight up and down, without any sign of indentation.
“There’s another one over here. And another there…” Altogether there were nine pits, each constructed in exactly the same manner, that were scattered over the south half of the bam. In the north half, nine small spheres rested on the surface in a carefully measured array. Nicole found herself wishing for a legend of some kind, an instructional guide that would explain the meaning or purpose of all these objects. She was starting to feel bewildered.
They had crossed almost the entire length of the barn when they heard a faint emergency signal on their communicators. “They must have found Dr. Takagishi,” Nicole said out loud as she rushed out one of the open ends of the bam. As soon as she was no longer underneath the roof, the volume of the emergency signal nearly shattered her eardrums. “Okay. Okay,” she radioed. “We can hear you. What’s up?”
“We’ve been trying to call you for over two minutes,"” she heard Richard Wakefield say. “Where in the hell have you been? I only used the emergency signal because of its higher gain.”
“We were inside this amazing barn,” Francesca replied from behind Nicole. “It’s like a surrealistic world, with one-way mirrors and weird reflections—”
“That’s great,” Richard interrupted, “but we don’t have time to chat. You ladies are to march forthwith to the closest spot on the Cylindrical Sea. A helicopter will pick you up in ten minutes. We’d come into New York itself if there was a place for us to land.”
“Why?” Nicole asked. “What’s the hurry all of a sudden?”
“Can you see the South Pole from where you are?”
“No. We have too many tall buildings in the way.”
“Something weird is happening around the little horns. Huge arcs of lightning are bouncing from spire to spire. It’s an impressive display. We all feel something unusual is about to happen.” Richard hesitated a second. “You should leave New York immediately.”
“Okay,” Nicole answered. “We’re on our way.”
She switched off the transmitter and turned to Francesca. “Did you hear how loud the emergency signal was the moment we came out of the barn?” Nicole thought for several seconds. “The material in the walls and roof of that building must block radio signals.” Her face now brightened. “That explains what happened to Takagishi — he must be inside a barn, or something similar.”
Francesca was not following Nicole’s line of thought. “So what?” she said, taking one last panoramic image of the barn with her video camera. “It’s really not important now. We must hurry out to meet the helicopter.”
“Maybe he’s even in one of those very pits,” Nicole continued excitedly.
“Sure. It could have happened. He was exploring in the dark. He could have fallen… Wait here,” she said to Francesca. “I’ll only be a minute.”
Nicole dashed back inside the barn and bent down beside one of the holes. Holding the side of the pit with her hand, she shone the beam from her flashlight down into the bottom. Something was there! She waited a few seconds for her eyes to focus. It was a pile of material of some kind. She moved quickly to the next pit. “Doctor Takagishi,” she yelled. “Are you here, Shig?” she shouted in Japanese.
“Come on!” Francesca hollered at Nicole from the end of the barn. “Let’s go. Richard sounded very serious.”
At the fourth pit the shadows made it very difficult for Nicole to see the bottom even with the beam from her flashlight. She could make out some objects, but what were they? She laid down on her stomach and eased slightly into the pit at an angle to try to confirm that the shapeless mass below her was not the body of her friend.
The lights in Rama began flashing on and off. Inside the bam, the optical effect was startling. And disorienting. Nicole glanced up to see what was happening and lost her balance. Most of her body slid into the pit. “Francesca,” she yelled, pressing her hands against the opposite wall of the pit for support. “Francesca, I need some help,” Nicole shouted again.
Nicole waited almost a minute before she concluded that Cosmonaut Sabatini must have already left the barn area. Her arms were tiring rapidly. Only her feet and the very bottoms of her legs were safely resting on the barn floor. Her head was next to one of the pit walls about eighty centimeters below floor level. The remainder of her body was suspended in midair, prevented from falling only by her intense arm pressure against the wall.
The lights continued to flash off and on at short intervals. Nicole lifted her head to see if she could possibly reach the top of the pit with one of her arms, while holding her position secure with the other, It was hopeless. Her head was too deep in the hole. She waited several more seconds, her desperation growing as the fatigue in her arms increased. Finally Nicole made an attempt both to throw her body upward and to grab onto the lip of the pit in one connected motion. She was almost successful. Her arms could not stop her downward momentum when she fell. Her feet followed her body into the hole and she smacked her head against the wall. She tumbled unconscious to the bottom of the pit.