“All right, Nicole, all right. Where in the hell are you?”
“Wakefield,” Dr. David Brown’s sonorous voice sounded in the helicopter, “I want you three to come back to Beta immediately. We need to have a meeting.” Richard was surprised to hear that it was Dr. Brown. Janos had been the one monitoring their communication link since they had left Beta.
“What’s the hurry, boss?” Wakefield replied. “We still haven’t made our scheduled rendezvous with Nicole des Jardins. She should be coming out of New York any minute.”
“I’ll give you the details when you get here. We have some difficult decisions to make. I’m certain that des Jardins will radio when she reaches the shore.”
It did not take them long to cross the frozen sea. Near the Beta campsite, Yamanaka landed the helicopter on the shaking ground and the three cosmonauts descended. The remaining four members of the crew were waiting for them.
“This is one incredibly long maneuver,” Richard said with a smile as he approached the others. “I hope the Ramans know what they’re doing.”
“They probably do,” Dr. Brown said somberly. “At least the Earth thinks that they do.” He looked carefully at his watch. “According to the navigation section in mission control, we should expect this maneuver to last another nineteen minutes, give or take a few seconds.”
“How do they know?” inquired Wakefield. “Have the Ramans landed on Earth and handed out a flight plan while we’ve been up here exploring?”
Nobody laughed. “If the vehicle stays at this attitude and acceleration rate,” Janos said with uncharacteristic seriousness, “then in nineteen more minutes it will be on an impact course.”
“Impact with what?” Francesca asked.
Richard Wakefield did some quick mental computations. “With the Earth?” he guessed. Janos nodded.
“Jesus!” Francesca exclaimed.
“Exactly,” David Brown said. “This mission has become an Earth security concern. The COG Executive Council is meeting at this very moment to consider all contingencies. We have been told in the strongest possible language that we must leave Rama as soon as the maneuver is completed. We are to take nothing except the crab biot and our personal belongings. We are—”
“What about Takagishi? And des Jardins?” Wakefield asked.
“We will leave the icemobile where it is, along with a rover here at Beta. They are both easy to operate. We will still be in radio contact from the Newton.” Dr. Brown stared directly at Richard. “If this spacecraft is really on an Earth impact course,” he said dramatically, “our individual lives are no longer very important. The entire course of history is about to be changed.”
“But what if the navigation engineers are wrong? What if Rama has just happened to make a maneuver that momentarily intersects an Earth impact trajectory? It could be—”
“Extremely unlikely. You remember that group of short-burst maneuvers at the time of Borzov’s death? They changed the orientation of Rama’s orbit so that an Earth impact could be achieved with one long maneuver at exactly the right time. The engineers on Earth figured it out thirty-six hours ago. They radioed O’Toole before dawn this morning to expect the maneuver. I didn’t want to say anything while everyone was out looking for Takagishi.”
“That explains why everyone is so anxious for us to clear out of here!” Janos noted.
“Only partially,” Dr. Brown continued. “There is clearly a different feeling about Rama and the Ramans down on Earth. ISA management and the world leaders on the COG Executive Council are apparently convinced that Rama is implacably hostile.”
He stopped for several seconds, as if he were reassessing his own attitude.
“I think they are reacting emotionally myself, but I cannot persuade them differently. I personally see no evidence of hostility, only a disinterest in and disregard for a wildly inferior being. But the televised account of Wilson’s death has done its damage. The world’s populace cannot be herebeside us, cannot grasp the majesty of this place. they can only react viscerally to the horror—”
“If you don’t think the Ramans have hostile intentions,” Francesca interrupted, “then how do you explain this maneuver? It can’t be coincidence. They or it has decided for some reason to head for the Earth. No wonder the people down there are traumatized. Remember, the first Rama never acknowledged its visitors in any way. This is a dramatically different response. The Ramans are telling us they know—”
“Hold it. Hold it,” Richard said. “I think we’re jumping to conclusions a little too fast. We have twelve more minutes before we should start pushing the panic buttons.”
“All right, Cosmonaut Wakefield,” Francesca said, now remembering that she was a reporter and activating her video camera, “for the record, what do you think it will mean if this maneuver does culminate in a trajectory that impacts the Earth?”
When Richard finally spoke he was very serious. “People of the Earth,” he said dramatically, “if Rama has indeed changed its course to visit our planet, it is not necessarily a hostile act. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, that any of us have seen or heard that indicates the species that created this space vehicle wishes us any harm. Certainly Cosmonaut Wilson’s death was disturbing, but it was probably an isolated response from a specific set of robots rather than a part of a sinister plan.
“I see this magnificent spacecraft as a single machine, almost organic in its complexity. It is extraordinarily intelligent and programmed for long-term survival. It is neither hostile nor friendly. It could easily have been designed to track any incoming satellites and compute where the visiting spacecraft must have originated. Rama’s orbit change to fly in the vicinity of the Earth might therefore be nothing more than its standard response to an encounter initiated by another spacefaring species. It may simply be coming to find out more about us.”
“Very good,” Janos Tabori said with a grin. “That was borderline philosophical.”
Wakefield laughed nervously.
“Cosmonaut Turgenyev,” Francesca said as she changed the direction of the camera, “do you agree with your colleague? Right after General Borzov died, you openly expressed some concern that perhaps some “higher force,” meaning the Ramans, might have had a hand in his death. What are your feelings now?”
The normally taciturn Soviet pilot stared directly into the camera with her sad eyes. “Da,” she said, “I think Cosmonaut Wakefield is a very brilliant engineer. But he has not answered the difficult questions. Why did Rama maneuver during General Borzov’s operation? Why did the biots cut Wilson to pieces? Where is Professor Takagishi?”
Irina Turgenyev paused a moment to control her emotions. “We will not find Nicole des Jardins. Rama may be only a machine, but we cosmonauts have already seen how dangerous it can be. If it is heading for the Earth, I fear for my family, my friends, for all humanity. There is no way to predict what it might do. And we would be powerless to stop it.”
Several minutes later Francesca Sabatini carried her automatic video equipment out beside the frozen sea for one final sequence. She carefully checked the time before switching on the camera at precisely fifteen seconds before the maneuver was expected to end. “The picture you are seeing is jumping up and down,” she said in her best journalistic voice, “because the ground underneath us here on Rama has been shaking continuously since this maneuver started forty-seven minutes ago. According to the navigation engineers, the maneuver will stop in the next few seconds if Rama has changed course to impact the Earth. Their calculations are, of course, based on assumptions about Rama’s intentions—”
Francesca stopped in midsentence and took a deep breath. “The ground is no longer shaking. The maneuver is over. Rama is now on an Earth impact trajectory.”