Rama II

27 TO CATCH A BIOT

Be very careful,” Admiral Heilmann said to Francesca. “It makes me nervous to see you leaning out like that.”

Signora Sabatini had hooked her ankles underneath the seats of the heli­copter and was now stretching out beyond the plane of the door. She was holding a small video camera in her right hand. Three or four meters below her, apparently oblivious to the whirring machine overhead, the six crab biots plodded methodically along. They were still in their phalanx formation, arranged like the first three rows of a set of bowling pins.

“Move out over the sea!” Francesca shouted to Hiro Yamanaka. “They’re coming to the edge and will be turning again.”

The helicopter veered sharply to the left and flew over the side of the five-hundred-meter cliff that separated the southern half of Rama from the Cylindrical Sea. The bank here was ten times higher above the water than its northern counterpart. David Brown gasped as he looked down at the frozen sea half a kilometer below him,

“This is ridiculous, Francesca,” he said– “What do you hope to accom­plish? The automatic camera in the nose of the copter will take adequate pictures!’

“This camera was specifically designed for zoom action,” she said. “Be­sides, a little jitter gives the images more verisimilitude.” Yamanaka steered back toward the bank. The biots were now about thirty meters directly ahead. The lead biot came up to within half a body length of the edge, paused for a fraction of a second, and then turned abruptly to its right. Another quick ninety-degree right turn completed the maneuver and left the biot heading in the exact opposite direction. The other five crabs followed their leader, executing their turns row by row with military precision.

“I got it that time,” Francesca said happily, pulling herself back into the helicopter. “Head on and full frame. And I think I caught a glimmer of movement in the leader’s blue eye just before it turned.”

The biots were now ambling away from the cliff at their normal speed of ten kilometers per hour. Their movement caused a slight indentation in the loamy soil. Their heading was along a path parallel to their last previous sweep toward the sea. From above, the whole region looked like a suburban yard in which part of the grass had been mowed — on one side the ground was neat and packed, while in the territory not yet covered by the biots there was no orderly pattern in the soil markings.

“This could get boring,” Francesca said, playfully reaching up and putting her arms around David Brown’s neck. “We may have to amuse ourselves with something else.”

“We’ll only watch them one more strip. Their pattern is fairly simple.” He ignored Francesca’s light tickling on his neck. It seemed as if he were going through some kind of checklist in his mind. At length Brown spoke into the communicator. “What do you think, Dr. Takagishi? Is there anything else we should do at this time?”

Back in the scientific control center on the Newton, Dr. Takagishi was following the progression of the biots on the monitor. “It would be ex­tremely valuable,” he said, “if we could find out more about their sensory capabilities before we try to capture one of them. So far they have not responded to noises or to distant visual stimuli. In fact, they have apparently not even noticed our presence. As I’m sure you would agree, we don’t have enough data yet to come to any definitive conclusions. If we could expose them to an entire range of electromagnetic frequencies and calibrate their responses, then we might have a better idea—”

“But that would take days,” Dr. Brown interrupted. “And in the final analysis we would still have to take our chances. I can’t imagine what we might learn that would materially alter our plans.”

“If we found out more about them first,” Takagishi argued, “then we could design a better, safer capture procedure. It might even occur that we would learn something that would dissuade us altogether—”

“Unlikely,” was David Brown’s abrupt response. As far as he was con­cerned, this particular discussion was over. “Hey there, Tabori,” he now shouted. “How are you guys coming with the huts?”

“We’re almost finished,” the Hungarian answered. “Another thirty min­utes at the most. Then I’ll be ready for a nap.”

“Lunch comes first,” Francesca interjected. “You can’t go to sleep on an empty stomach.”

“What are you cooking, beautiful?” Tabori bantered.

“Osso buco a la Rama.”

“That’s enough,” Dr. Brown said. He paused for a couple of seconds. “O’Toole,” he then continued, “can you handle the Newton all by yourself? At least for the next twelve hours?”

“Affirmative,” was the response.

“Then send down the rest of the crew. By the time we all meet at the new campsite, it should be ready for occupancy. We’ll have some lunch and a brief nap. Then we’ll plan our biot hunt.”

Below the helicopter the six crablike creatures continued their relentless march across the barren soil. The four human beings watched them encoun­ter a distinct boundary, where the floor changed from dirt and small rocks into a fine wire mesh. As soon as they touched the narrow lane dividing the two sections, the biots executed a U-turn. They then headed back toward the sea along a parallel line adjacent to their last track. Yamanaka banked the helicopter, increased his altitude, and headed for the Beta campsite ten kilometers across the Cylindrical Sea,

They were all correct, Nicole was thinking. Seeing it on the monitor is nothing by comparison. She was descending on the chairlift into Rama. Now that she was beyond the halfway point, she had a breathtaking view in every direction. She remembered a similar feeling once, when she had been stand­ing on the Tonto Plateau in the Grand Canyon National Park. But that was made by nature and took over a billion years, she said to herself. Rama was actually built by somebody. Or something.

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!”