Rama II

9 DIASTOLIC IRREGULARITY

Through the window Nicole could barely discern the Siberian snow-fields in the oblique December light. They were more than fifty thousand feet below her. The supersonic plane was slowing now as it moved south toward Vladivostok and the island of Japan. Nicole yawned. After only three hours of sleep, it would be a fight all day to keep her body awake. It was almost ten in the morning in Japan but back home at Beauvois, in the Loire Valley not far from Tours, her daughter, Genevieve, still had four more hours of sleep until her alarm would awaken her at seven o’clock,

The video monitor in the back of the seat in front of Nicole automatically turned on and reminded her that in only fifteen minutes the plane would land at the Kansai Transportation Center. The lovely Japanese girl on the screen suggested that now would be an excellent time to make or confirm ground transportation and housing arrangements. Nicole activated the com­munication system in her seat and a thin rectangular tray with a keyboard and small display area slid in front of her. In less than a minute Nicole arranged both her train ride to Kyoto and her electric trolley passage from there to her hotel. She used her Universal Credit Card (UCC) to pay for all transactions, after first correctly identifying herself by indicating that her mother’s maiden name was Anawi Tiasso. When she was finished a small printed schedule listing her train and trolley identifiers, along with the times of arrival and transit (she would reach her hotel at 11:14 a.m. Japanese time), popped out of one end of the tray.

As the plane prepared for its landing, Nicole thought about the reason for her sudden trip one third of the way around the world. Just twenty-four hours ago she had been planning to spend this day around her home, alter­nating some office work in the morning with some language practice for Genevieve in the afternoon. It was the beginning of the holiday break for the cosmonauts and, except for that stupid party in Rome at the end of the year, Nicole was supposedly free until she had to report to LEO-3 on January 8. But while she had been sitting in her office at home the previous morning, routinely checking the biometry from the final set of simulations, Nicole had come across a curious phenomenon. She had been studying Richard Wakefield’s heart and blood pressure during a variable gravity test and had not understood a particularly rapid surge in his pulse rate. She had then decided to check Dr. Takagishi’s detailed heart biometry for comparison, since he had been engaged in a strenuous physical activity with Richard at the time of the pulse surge.

What she had found when she had examined a full dump of Takagishi’s heart information had been an even bigger surprise. The Japanese professor’s diastolic expansion was decidedly irregular, maybe even pathological. But no warnings had been issued by the probe and no data channels had been alarmed. What was going on? Had she detected a malfunction in the Haka-matsu system?

An hour’s worth of detective work had resulted in the identification of more peculiarities. During the full set of simulations, there had been four separate intervals during which Takagishi’s problem had occurred. The ab­normal behavior was sporadic and intermittent. Sometimes the extra long diastole, reminiscent of a valve problem during the filling of the heart with blood, would not appear for as long as thirty-eight hours. However, the fact that it did recur four different times suggested that there was definitely an abnormality of some kind.

What had mystified Nicole was not the raw data itself — it was the failure of the system to trigger the proper alarms in the presence of the wildly irregular observations. As part of her analysis she had traced laboriously through the Takagishi medical history, paying special attention to the cardi­ology report. She had found no hint of any kind of abnormality, so had convinced herself that she was seeing a sensor error and not a true medical problem.

So if the system was working correctly, she had reasoned, the onset of the long diastole should have immediately sent the heart monitor outside the expected range and triggered an alarm. But it didn “t Neither the first time nor any other time. Is it possible that we have a double failure here? If so, how did the unit continue to pass self-test?

At first Nicole had thought about phoning one of her assistants in the life science office at ISA to discuss the anomaly she had found, but she decided instead, since it was a holiday for ISA, to telephone Dr. Hakamatsu in Japan. That phone call to him had completely bewildered her. He had told her flatly that the phenomenon she had observed must have been in the patient, that no combination of component failures in his probe could have produced such strange results. “But then why were there no entries in the warning file?” she had asked the Japanese electronics designer.

“Because no expected range values were exceeded,” he answered confi­dently. “For some reason an extremely wide expected range must have been entered for this particular cosmonaut. Have you looked at his medical his­tory?”

Later on in the conversation, when Nicole told Dr. Hakamatsu that the unexplained data had actually come from the probes inside one of his coun­trymen, namely cosmonaut-scientist Takagishi, the usually restrained engi­neer had actually shouted into the phone. “Wonderful,” he had said, “then I’ll be able to clear up this mystery in a hurry. I’ll contact Takagishi-san over at Kyoto University and let you know what I find.”

Three hours later Nicole’s video monitor had revealed the somber face of Dr. Shigeru Takagishi. “Madame des Jardins,” he had said very politely, “I understand that you have been talking with my colleague Hakamatsu-san about my biometry output during the simulations. Would you be kind enough to explain to me what you have found?”

Nicole had then presented all the information to her fellow cosmonaut, concealing nothing and expressing her personal belief that the source of the erroneous data had indeed been a probe malfunction.

A long silence followed Nicole’s explanation. At length the worried Japa­nese scientist had spoken again. “Hakamatsu-san just visited me here at the university and checked out the probe set inside me. He will report that he I found no problems with his electronics.” Takagishi had then paused, seemingly deep in thought. “Madame des Jardins,” he had said a few seconds later, “I would like to ask you a favor. It is a matter of the utmost importance to me. Could you possibly come to see me in Japan in the very near future? I would like to talk with you personally and explain something that may be related to my irregular biometry data.”

There had been an earnestness in Takagishi’s face that Nicole could nei­ther overlook nor misinterpret. He was clearly imploring her to help him. Without asking any more questions, she had agreed to visit him immedi­ately. A few minutes later she had reserved a seat on the overnight super­sonic flight from Paris to Osaka.

“It was never bombed during the great war with America!” Takagishi said, waving his arms at the city of Kyoto spread out below them, “and it suffered almost no damage when the hoodlums took over for seven months in 2141.1 admit that I am prejudiced,” he said, smiling, “but to me Kyoto is the most beautiful city in the world.”

“Many of my countrymen feel that way about Paris,” Nicole answered. She pulled her coat rightly around her. The air was cold and damp. It felt as if it might snow at any moment. She was wondering when her associate was going to start talking about their business. She had not flown five thousand miles for a tour of the city, although she did admit that this Kyomizu Tem­ple set among the trees on a hillside overlooking the city was certainly a magnificent spot.

“Let’s have some tea,” Takagishi said. He led her to one of the several outside tearooms flanking the main part of the old Buddhist temple. Now, Nicole said to herself as she stifled a yawn, he’s going to tell me what this is all about. Takagishi had met her at the hotel when she had arrived. He had suggested that she have some lunch and a short nap before he returned. After he had picked her up at three o’clock, they had come directly to this temple.

He poured the thick Japanese tea into the two cups and waited for Nicole to take a sip. The hot liquid warmed her mouth even though she didn’t care for the bitter taste. “Madame,” Takagishi began, “you are doubtless wonder­ing why I have asked you to come all the way to Japan on such short notice. You see,” he spoke slowly but with great intensity, “all my life I have dreamed that perhaps another Rama spacecraft would return while I was still alive. During my studies at the university and during my many years of research I was preparing myself for one single event, the return of the Ramans. On that March morning in 2197 when Alastair Moore called me to say that the latest images from Excalibur indicated that we had another extraterrestrial visitor, I nearly wept with joy. I knew immediately that the ISA would mount a mission to visit the spaceship. I resolved to be part of that mission.”

The Japanese scientist took a drink from his tea and looked to his left, out across the manicured green trees and the slopes above the city. “When I was a boy,” he continued, his careful English barely audible, “I would climb these hills on a clear night and stare into the sky, searching for the home of the special intelligence that had created that incomparable giant machine. Once I came with my father and we huddled together in the cold night air, looking at the stars, while he told me what it had been like in his village during the days of the first Rama encounter twelve years before I was born. I believed on that night” — he turned to look at Nicole and she could again see the passion in his eyes — “and I still believe today, that there was some reason for that visit, some purpose for the appearance of that awesome spaceship. I have studied all the data from that 6rst encounter, hoping to find a clue that would explain why it came. Nothing has been conclusive. I have developed several theories on the subject, but I do not have enough evidence to support any of them.”

Again Takagishi stopped talking to drink some of his tea. Nicole had been both surprised and impressed by the depth of feeling he had exhibited. She sat patiently and said nothing while she waited for him to continue. “I knew that I had a good chance to be selected as a cosmonaut,” he said, “not only because of my publications, including the Atlas, but also because one of my closest associates, Hisanori Akita, was the Japanese representative on the selection board. When the number of scientists remaining in the competi­tion had been reduced to eight and I was one of them, Akita-san suggested to me that it looked as if the two leading contenders were myself and David Brown. You’ll recall that up until that time, no physical examinations of any kind had been conducted.”

That’s right, Nicole remembered. The potential crew was first reduced to forty-eight and then we were all taken to Heidelberg for the physicals. The German doctors in charge insisted that each of the candidates must pass every single medical criterion. The academy graduates were the first group tested and five out of twenty failed. Including Alain Blamont

“When your countryman Blamont, who had already flown half a dozen major missions for the ISA, was disqualified from consideration because of that trivial heart murmur — and the Cosmonaut Selection Board subse­quently upheld the doctors by denying his appeal — I completely panicked.” The proud Japanese physicist was now staring directly into Nicole’s eyes, entreating her to understand. “I was afraid that I was going to lose the most important opportunity of my career because of a minor physical problem that had never before affected any part of my life.” He paused to choose his words carefully. “I know that what I did was wrong and dishonorable, but I convinced myself at the time it was all right, that my chance to decipher the greatest puzzle in man’s history should not be blocked by a group of small-minded doctors defining acceptable health only in terms of numerical values.

Dr. Takagishi told the rest of his story without embellishment or obvious emotion. The passion he had fleetingly demonstrated during his discussion of the Ramans had vanished. His monotonic recital was crisp and clear. He explained how he had cajoled his family physician into falsifying his medical history and providing him with a new drug that would prevent the occur­rence of his diastolic irregularity during the two days of his physical at Heidelberg. Although there had been some risk of deleterious side effects from the new drug, everything went according to plan. Takagishi passed the rigorous physical and was ultimately selected as one of the two mission scientists, along with Dr. David Brown. He had never thought again about the medical issue until about three months ago, when Nicole had first ex­plained to the cosmonauts that she was planning to recommend the usage of the Hakamatsu probe system during the mission instead of the standard temporary probe scans once every week.

“You see,” Takagishi explained, his brow now starting to furrow, “under the old mission technique I could have used that same drug once a week and neither you nor any other life science officer would ever have seen my irregu­larity, But a permanent monitoring system cannot be fooled — the drug is much too dangerous for constant use.”

So you somehow worked out a deal with Hakamatsu, Nicole thought, jumping ahead of him in her own mind. Either with or without his explicit knowledge. And you input expected value ranges that would not trigger in the presence of your abnormality. You hoped that nobody analyzing the tests would call for a full biometry dump. Now she understood why he had sum­moned her urgently to Japan. And you want me to keep your secret.

“Watakuski no doryo wa, wakarimas,” Nicole said kindly, changing into Japanese to show her sympathy for her colleague’s anguish. “I can tell how much distress this is causing you. You need not explain in detail how you tampered with the Hakamatsu probes.” She paused and watched his face relax. “But if I understand you correctly, what you want is for me to become an accomplice to your deception. You recognize of course that I cannot even consider preserving your secret unless I am absolutely convinced that your minor physical problem, as you call it, represents no possible threat to the mission. Otherwise I would be forced—”

“Madame des Jardins,” Takagishi interrupted her, “I have the utmost respect for your integrity. I would never, never ask you to keep my heart irregularity out of the record unless you agreed that it was really an insignifi­cant problem.” He looked at her in silence for several seconds. “When Hakamatsu first phoned me last evening,” he continued quietly, “I thought originally that I would call a press conference and then resign from the project. But while I was thinking about what I would say in my resignation, I kept seeing this image of Professor Brown. He is a brilliant man, my Ameri­can counterpart, but he is also, in my opinion, too certain of his own infalli­bility. The most likely replacement for me would be Professor Wolfgang Heinrich from Bonn. He has published many fine papers about Rama but he, like Brown, believes that these celestial visits represent random events, totally without connection in any way to us and our planet.” The intensity and passion had returned to his eyes. “I cannot quit now. Unless I have no choice. Both Brown and Heinrich might miss the clue.”

Behind Takagishi, on the path that the led back to the main wooden building of the temple, three Buddhist monks walked briskly past. Despite the cold, they were dressed lightly in their usual charcoal gray smocks, their feet exposed to the cold in open sandals. The Japanese scientist was propos­ing to Nicole that they spend the rest of the day at the office of his personal physician, where they could study his complete and uncensored medical history dating back to his childhood. If she would be willing, he added, they would give her a data cube containing all the information to take back to France and study at her leisure.

Nicole, who had been listening intently to Takagishi for almost an hour, momentarily diverted her attention to the three monks now purposefully climbing the stairs in the distance. Their eyes are so serene, she thought. Their lives so free of contradiction. Onemindedness can be a virtue, ft makes all the answers easy. For just a moment she was envious of the monks and their ordered existence. She wondered how well they would handle the di­lemma that Dr. Takagishi was presenting her. He is not one of the space cadets, she was now thinking, so his role is not absolutely critical to mission success. And in a sense he is right The doctors on the project have been too strict. They never should have disqualified Alain. It would be a shame if… “Daijobu,” she said before he had finished talking. “I will go with you to see your doctor and if I don’t find anything that bothers me, I will take the entire file home with me to study during the holidays.” Takagishi’s face lit up. “But let me warn you again,” she added, “if there is anything in your history that I find questionable, or if I have the slightest shred of evidence that you have withheld any information from me, then I will ask you to resign immediately.”

“Thank you, thank you so much,” Dr. Takagishi replied, standing and bowing to his female colleague. “Thank you so much,” he repeated.