Rama II

35 INTO THE PIT

They had walked the bewildering maze of streets for only twenty minutes, but they would have already been hopelessly lost without their personal navigators. They had no thorough plan for the search. They simply wandered up and down streets in a quasi-random pattern. Every three or four minutes there would be another transmission from Admiral Heilmann to Dr. Brown and the search party would have to look for a location where the signal strength was satisfactory.

“At this rate,” Nicole remarked as once again they faintly heard Otto Heilmann’s voice on the communicator, “our search is going to take forever Dr. Brown, why don’t you just stay in one spot? Then Francesca and I—”

“Break break,” they heard Otto more clearly as David Brown moved into a space between two tall buildings. “Did you copy that last transmission?”

“Afraid not, Otto,” Dr. Brown replied. “Would you please repeat it.”

“Yamanaka, Wakefield, and Turgenyev have covered the bottom third of the Northern Hemicylinder. No sign of Takagishi. It’s unlikely that he could have gone farther north, unless he went to one of the cities. In that case we should have seen his footprints somewhere, So you’re probably on the right track.

“Meanwhile we have big news here, Our captured crab biot started to move about two minutes ago. It is trying to escape, but so far its tools have barely dented the cage. Tabori is working feverishly to build a larger, stronger cage that will go around the entire apparatus. I’m bringing Yamanaka’s “copter back to Beta so he can give Tabori a hand. He should be here in a minute — Wait… There’s an urgent coming through from WakeBeld… I’ll put him on.”

Richard Wakefield’s British accent was unmistakable, though he could barely be heard by the trio in New York. “Spiders,” he shouted in response to a question from Admiral Heilmann. “You remember the spider biot dis­sected by Laura Ernst? Well, we can see six of them just beyond the south­ern cliff. They’re all over that temporary hut we built. And something has apparently repaired those two dead crab biots, for our prisoner’s brothers are trundling toward the south pole—”

“Pictures!” Francesca Sabatini screamed into the radio. “Are you taking pictures?”

“What’s that? Sorry, I did not copy.”

“Francesca wants to know if you’re taking pictures,” Admiral Heilmann clarified.

“Of course, love,” Richard Wakefield said. “Both the automatic imaging system in the helicopter and the hand camera you gave me this morning have been running without interruption. The spider biots are amazing. I’ve never seen anything move so fast… By the way, any sign of our Japanese professor?”

“Not yet,” David Brown hollered from New York. “It’s slow going in this maze. I feel as if I’m looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Admiral Heilmann repeated the status of the missing person search for Wakefield and Turgenyev in the helicopter. Richard then said that they were coming back to Beta to refuel. “What about you, David?” Heilmann asked. “In view of everything, including the need to keep those bastards on Earth informed, don’t you think you should return to Beta yourself? Cosmonauts Sabatini and des Jardins can continue the search for Dr, Takagishi. If neces­sary we can send someone to replace you when the helicopter picks you up.”

“I don’t know, Otto, I haven’t—” Francesca turned off the transmit switch on David Brown’s radio in the middle of his reply. He shot her an angry glance that quickly softened.

“We need to talk about this,” she said firmly. “Tell him you’ll call him back in a couple of minutes.”

Nicole was flabbergasted by the conversation that ensued between Fran­ceses Sabatini and David Brown. Neither one of them seemed to be even slightly concerned about the fate of Dr. Takagishi. Francesca insisted that she had to return to Beta immediately to cover all the breaking stories. Dr. Brown was anxious because he was away from the “primary” action of the expedition.

Each argued that his reasons for returning were more important. What if they both left New York? No, that would leave cosmonaut des Jardins alone. Maybe she should come with them and they could reinitiate the search for Takagishi when things calmed down in several hours…

Nicole finally exploded. “Never,” she shouted suddenly at them, “never in my life have I seen such egotistical…” She could not think of a good noun. “One of our colleagues is missing and almost certainly needs our help. He may be injured or dying, yet all you two can do is argue about your own petty prerogatives. It’s really disgusting.”

She paused a second to catch her breath. “Let me tell you one thing,” Nicole continued, still fuming. “I am not going back to Beta right now. I don’t give a damn if you order me. I am staying here and finishing the search. At least I have my priorities straight. I know a man’s life is more important than image or status or even a stupid media project,”

David Brown blinked twice, as if he had been slapped in the face. Fran­cesca smiled. “Well, well,” she said, “so our reclusive life science officer knows more than we have given her credit for.” She looked over at David and then back at Nicole. “Will you excuse us for a moment, dear? We have a few matters to discuss in private.”

Francesca and Dr. Brown moved over beside the base of a skyscraper about twenty meters away and began an animated conversation. Nicole turned the other way. She was angry with herself for losing her temper. She was especially irritated that she had revealed her knowledge of their contract with Schmidt and Hagenest. They will assume Janos told me, she thought. After all, we have been close friends.

Francesca walked back to join Nicole while Dr. Brown radioed Admiral Heilmann. “David is calling for the helicopter to meet him next to the icemobile. He assures me that he can find his way out. I will stay here with you and search for Takagishi. At least that way I can photograph New York.”

There was no emotion in Francesca’s pronouncement. Nicole was unable to read her mood. “One other thing,” Francesca added. “I promised David we would conclude our search and be ready to return to camp in four hours or less.”

The two women hardly talked during the first hour of their search. Francesca was content to let Nicole choose the path. Every fifteen minutes they stopped to radio the Beta camp and obtain an updated fix on their position. “You’re now about two kilometers south and four kilometers east of the icemobile,” Richard Wakefield told them when they stopped for lunch. He had been delegated the job of keeping track of their progress. “You’re just east of the central plaza.”

They had gone to the central section first, for Nicole had thought that Takagishi would have headed there. They had found the open circular plaza with many low structures, but no sign of their colleague. Since then, Fran­cesca and Nicole had visited the two other plazas and carefully combed the length of two of the central pie portions. They had found nothing. Nicole admitted she was running out of ideas.

“This is quite an astonishing place!” Francesca responded as she began to eat her lunch. They were sitting on a square metal box about a meter high. “My photographs can barely begin to capture it. Everything is so quiet, so tall, so . . alien.”

“Some of these buildings could not be described without your pictures. The polyhedrons, for example. There’s at least one in each slice, with the biggest one always right around the plaza. I wonder what they signify, if anything? And why are they located where they are?”

The emotional tension just below the surface in the two women remained suppressed. They chatted a little about what they had seen in their trek across New York. Francesca had been especially fascinated by a large trellis arrangement that they had found connecting two tall skyscrapers in the central unit. “What do you suppose that lattice or net thing was all about?” she asked idly. “It must have had twenty thousand loops and must have been fifty meters tall.”

“I guess it’s ridiculous for us to try to understand any of this,” Nicole said with a wave of her hand. She finished her lunch and glanced at her compan­ion. “Ready to continue?”

“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.