“I’m here, Richard. Below you,” she shouted. “Underneath the plaza.”
Nicole reached the top ledge and started pushing on the covering. It wouldn’t budge. “Shit,” she shouted as the puzzled Richard paced around in the vicinity. “Richard, come over here. Where you hear my voice. Beat on the ground.”
Richard began to knock hard on the covering. They were shouting at each other. The noise was deafening. From far below Nicole heard the flapping of wings. As the avians rose in the corridor, they began to shriek and jabber.
“Help me,” Nicole hollered at them as they drew close. She pointed up at the cover. “My friend is out there.”
Richard continued to pound. Only the two avians who had originally found Nicole in the pit came up to where she was. They hovered around her, flapping their wings and jabbering back at the five others who were one level below. The creatures were apparently having an argument, for the black velvet avian twice extended its neck down toward its associates and uttered a fearsome screech.
The covering suddenly opened. Richard had to scramble to keep from falling in. When he looked down into the hole he saw Nicole and two gigantic bird creatures, one of which flew right by him as Nicole crawled out of the opening. “Holy shit’” he exclaimed, his eyes following the flight of the avian.
Nicole was overcome with joy. She ran into Wakefield’s arms. “Richard, oh Richard,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you.”
He grinned at her and returned the hug. “If I had known you felt like this,” he said, “I would have come earlier.”
42
TWO EXPLORERS
Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that you’re alone? And we have no way to cross the Cylindrical Sea?”
Richard nodded. It was too much for Nicole. Five minutes earlier she had been exultant. Her ordeal had finally been over. She had imagined returning to the Earth and seeing her father and daughter again. Now he was telling her…
She walked away quickly and leaned her head against one of the buildings surrounding the plaza. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she gave vent to her disappointment. Richard followed her at a distance.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault!” Nicole replied after she had regained her composure. “It just never occurred to me that I might see one of the crew again and still not be rescued—” She stopped herself. It was not fair for her to make Richard suffer. She walked over to him and forced a smile.
“I’m not usually this emotional,” Nicole said. “And I interrupted your story right in the middle.” She paused a second to wipe her eyes. “You were telling me about the shark biots chasing the motorboat. You saw them first when you were about halfway across the sea?”
“More or less,” Richard replied. Her disappointment had subdued him. He tried a nervous laugh. “Do you remember, after one of the simulations, when the review board criticized us for not having sent a pilotless version of our motorboat into the water first, just to make sure that there wasn’t something peculiar to the new design that would disturb the “ecological equilibrium” in some way? Well, I thought their suggestion at the time was ridiculous. Now I’m not so certain. Those shark biots hardly bothered the Newton vessels, but they were definitely angry about my high-speed motorboat.”
Richard and Nicole had sat down together on one of the gray metal boxes that dotted the plaza area. “I managed to dodge them once,” Richard continued, “but I was extremely lucky. When I had no other choice I simply jumped out and swam. Fortunately for me, they were mostly after the boat-1 didn’t see one again while I was swimming until I was only a hundred meters from shore.”
“How long have you been inside Rama altogether now?” Nicole asked.
“About seventeen hours. I left the Newton two hours after dawn. I spent too much damn time trying to repair the communications station at Beta. But it was impossible.”
Nicole felt his flight suit. “Except for your hair, I can’t even tell you’ve been wet.”
Richard laughed. “Ob, the miracles of fabric engineering. Would you believe that this suit was almost dry by the time I changed my thermals? By then I was having a hard time convincing even myself that I had spent that twenty minutes swimming in the cold water.” He looked at his companion. She was loosening up very slowly. “But I’m surprised at you, Cosmonaut des Jardins. You haven’t even asked me the most important question. How did I know where you were?”
Nicole had pulled out her scanner and was reading Richard’s biometry. Everything was within tolerances, despite his recent harrowing swim. She was a little slow to understand his question. “You knew where I was?” she said finally, knitting her brow. “I figured you were just wandering around—”
“Come on, lady. New York is small, but not that small. There’s twenty-five square kilometers of territory inside these walls. And radio around here is completely unreliable.” He grinned. “Let’s see, if I stood and called your name in each square meter, I would have to call you twenty-five million times. At one call every ten seconds — allowing myself time to listen for a response and move to the next square meter — that would be six calls a minute. So it would take four million minutes, which is slightly more than sixty thousand hours, or twenty-6ve hundred Earth days—”
“Okay. Okay,” Nicole interrupted. She was finally laughing. “Tell me how you knew where I was.”
Richard stood up. “May I?” he said dramatically, extending his fingers toward the breast pocket of Nicole’s flight suit.
“I suppose so,” she answered. “Although I can’t imagine what—” Richard reached into her pocket and pulled out Prince Hal. “He led me to you,” Wakefield said. “You’re a good man, my prince, but for a while I thought you’d failed me.”
Nicole had no idea what Richard was talking about. “Prince Hal and Falstaff have matching navigation beacons,” he explained. “They put out fifteen strong pulses a second. With Falstaff fixed in my hut at Beta and with an equivalent transceiver over at Alpha campsite, I could follow you by triangulation. So I knew exactly where you were — at least in terms of x-y coordinates. My simple tracking algorithm wasn’t designed for excursions inz.”
“That’s what an engineer would call my visit to the avian lair?” Nicole said with another smile. “An excursion in z?” “ That’s one way of describing it.”
Nicole shook her head. “I don’t know about you, Wakefield. If you really knew where I was all this time, why the hell did you wait so long—”
“Because we lost you, or thought we had, before we found you… after I came back to retrieve Falstaff.”
“Have I become a dullard in the last week, or is this roundabout explanation incredibly confusing?”
It was Richard’s turn to laugh. “Maybe I should try to make my presentation more orderly.” He paused to arrange his mental notes. “I was really irritated,” he began, “back in June when the Engineering Steering Group decided not to use navigation beacons as backup personnel locators. I had argued, unsuccessfully, that there might be emergency situations, or unforeseen circumstances, in which the signal-to-noise ratio on the regular voice link would be below threshold. So I equipped three of my own robots just in case…”
Nicole studied Richard Wakefield while he talked. She had forgotten that he was both amazing and amusing. She was certain that if she asked the right questions, he could talk on this subject alone for a full hour.
“…Then Falstaff lost the signal,” he was saying. “I wasn’t present myself at the time, for I was preparing to come with Hiro Yamanaka to pick you and Francesca up in the helicopter, But Falstaff has a small recorder and timetags all the data. After you didn’t show up, I replayed the data from the recorder and found that the signal had abruptly disappeared.