Rama II

47 PROGRESSIVE MATRICES

Never, never in my entire life,” Nicole said to Richard, “have I ever seen anything that terrified me like that.” The two cosmonauts were sitting with their backs against the bottom of one of the skyscrapers surrounding the western plaza. They were both still breathing heavily, exhausted from their frantic escape. Nicole took a long drink of water.

“I had just started to relax!” she continued. “I could hear you behind me — and nothing else. I decided I would stop in the museum and wait for you to catch up. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that we were in the “other” tunnel.

“It should have been obvious, of course, because the opening was on the wrong side. But I wasn’t thinking logically at the moment… Anyway, I stepped inside the room, the lights came on, and there he was, not more than three meters in front of me. I thought my heart had stopped alto­gether…”

Richard remembered Nicole running into his arms in the tunnel and sobbing for several seconds. “It’s Takagishi… stuffed like a deer or a tiger… in the opening to the right,” she had said in fits and starts. After Nicole had regained her composure, the two of them had walked back down the tunnel together. Inside the opening, standing upright just opposite the en­trance, Richard had been shocked to see Newton cosmonaut Shigeru Takagi­shi. He was dressed in his flight suit and looked exactly as he had the last time they had seen him at the Beta campsite. His face was fixed in a pleasant smile and his arms were at his sides.

“What the hell?” Richard had said, blinking twice, his curiosity only slightly stronger than his terror. Nicole had averted her eyes. Even though she had seen the sight before, the stuffed Takagishi was much too lifelike for her.

They had only stayed in the large room for a minute. Alien taxidermy had also performed wonders on an avian with a broken wing that was hanging from the ceiling next to Takagishi. Against the wall behind the Japanese scientist was Richard and Nicole’s hut that had disappeared the day before. The hexagonal electronics board from the Newton portable science station was on the floor next to Takagishi’s feet, not far from a full-scale model of a bulldozer biot. Other biot replicas were scattered around the room.

Richard had started to study the varied collection of biots in the room when they had faintly heard the familiar dragging noise coming from behind them in the tunnel. They had not wasted any more time. Their flight down the tunnel and up the ramps had been broken only by a brief stop at the cistern to replenish their supply of fresh water.

“Dr. Takagishi was a gentle, sensitive man,” Nicole was saying to Richard, “with passionate feelings about his work. Just before launch I visited him in Japan and he told me that his lifelong ambition had been to explore a second Rama spacecraft.”

“It’s a shame he had to die such an unpleasant death,” Richard grimly replied. “I guess that octospider, or one of its friends, must have dragged him down here for a visit to the taxidermist almost immediately. They cer­tainly wasted no time putting him on display.”

“You know, I don’t think they killed him,” Nicole said. “Maybe I’m hopelessly naive, but I didn’t see any evidence of foul play in his… his statue.”

“You think they just scared him to death?” Richard retorted sarcastically.

“Yes,” said Nicole firmly. “At least it’s possible.” She spent the next five minutes explaining Takagishi’s heart situation to Richard.

“I’m surprised at you, Nicole!” Richard replied after listening carefully to her disclosure. “I had you figured all wrong. I thought you were Miss Prim and Proper, play it by the rules all the way. I never gave you credit for having a mind of your own. Not to mention a strong streak of compassion.”

“In this instance it’s not clear that either was an asset. If I had faithfully enforced the rules, Takagishi would be alive and living with his family in Kyoto.”

“And he would have missed the singular experience of his life… which brings me to an interesting question, my dear doctor. Surely you are aware, as we sit here, that the odds do not favor our escape. We are both likely to die without ever seeing another human face. How do you feel about that? Where does your death — or any death, for that matter — fit into your overall scheme of things?”

Nicole looked at Richard. She was surprised by the tenor of his question. She tried without success to read the expression on his face. “I’m not afraid, if that’s what you mean,” she answered carefully. “As a doctor I’ve thought often about death. And of course since my mother died when I was very young, even as a child I was forced to have some perspective on the subject.”

She paused for a moment. “For myself, I know that I would like to stay alive until Genevieve is grown — so that I can be a grandmother to her children. But just being alive is not the most important thing. Life must have quality to be worthwhile. And to have quality we must be willing to take a few risks… I’m not being very focused, am I?”

Richard smiled– “No,” he said, “but I like your general drift. You have mentioned the key word. Quality… Have you ever considered suicide?” he asked suddenly.

“No!” Nicole replied, shaking her head. “Never. There’s always been too much to live for.” There must be some reason for his question, she was thinking. “What about you?” she said after a short silence, “did you think about suicide during any of that pain with your father?”

“No, strangely enough,” he answered. “My father’s beatings never made me lose my zest for life. There was too much to learn. And I knew that I would outgrow him and be on my own eventually.” There was a long pause before he continued. “But there was one period in my life when I did seriously consider suicide,” Richard said. “My pain and anger were so great that I did not think I could endure them.”

He became silent, locked in his thoughts. Nicole waited patiently. Eventu­ally she slipped her arm through his. “Well, my friend,” she said lightly, “you can tell me about it someday. Neither of us is accustomed to sharing our deepest secrets. Maybe in time we can learn. I’m going to start by telling you why I believe we are not going to die and why I think we should go over to search the area around the eastern plaza next.”

Nicole had never told anyone, not even her father, about her “trip” during the Poro. Before she finished telling her story to Richard, not only had Nicole covered what had happened to her as a seven-year-old at the Poro, but also she had recounted the story of Omeh’s visit to Rome, the Senoufo prophecies about the “woman without companion” who scatters her progeny “among the stars,” and the details of her vision after drinking the vial at the bottom of the pit.

Richard was speechless. The entire set of stories was so foreign to his mathematical mind that he did not even know how to react. He stared at Nicole with awe and amazement. At length, embarrassed by his silence, he started to speak. “I don’t know what to say…”

Nicole put her fingers to his lips. “You don’t need to say anything!” she said. “I can read your reaction in your face. We can talk about it tomorrow, after you’ve had some time to think about what I told you.”

Nicole yawned and looked at her watch. She pulled her sleeping mat out of her backpack and unrolled it on the ground. “I’m exhausted,” she said to Richard. “Nothing like a little terror to produce instant fatigue. I’ll see you in four hours.”

“We’ve been searching now for an hour and a half,” Richard said impa­tiently. “Look at this map. There’s no place within five hundred meters of the plaza center that we haven’t covered at least twice.”

“Then we’re doing something wrong,” Nicole replied. “There were three heat sources in my vision.” Richard frowned. “Or be logical, if you prefer. Wliy would there be three plazas and only two underground lairs? You said yourself that the Ramans always followed a reasonable plan.”

They were standing in front of a dodecahedron that faced the eastern plaza. “And another thing,” Richard growled to himself, “what’s the pur­pose of all these damn polyhedrons? There’s one in every sector and the three biggest are in the plazas… Wait a minute,” he said, as his eyes went from one of the twelve faces of the dodecahedron to an opposite skyscraper. His head then turned quickly around the plaza. “Could it be?” he said. “No,” he answered, “that would be impossible.”

Richard saw that Nicole was staring at him. “I have an idea,” he said excitedly. “It may be completely farfetched… Do you remember Dr. Bardolini and his progressive matrices? With the dolphins?.. What if the Ramans also left a pattern here in New York of subtle differences that change from plaza to plaza and section to section?.. Look, it’s no crazier than your visions.”

Already Richard was on his knees on the ground, working with his maps of New York, “Can I use your computer too?” he said to Nicole a few minutes later. “That will speed up the process.”

For hours Richard Wakefield sat beside the two computers, mumbling to himself and trying to solve the puzzle of New York. He explained to Nicole, when he took a break for dinner at her insistence, that the location of the third underground hole could only be determined if he thoroughly under­stood the geometric relationships between the polyhedrons, the three plazas, and all the skyscrapers immediately opposite the principal faces of the polyhedrons in each of the nine sectors. Two hours before dark Richard dashed off hurriedly to an adjacent section to obtain extra data that had not yet been recorded on their computer maps.

Even after dark he did not rest. Nicole slept the first part of the fifteen-hour night. When she awoke after five hours, Richard was still working feverishly on his project. He didn’t even hear Nicole clear her throat. She arose quietly and put her hands on his shoulders. “You must get some sleep, Richard,” she said quietly,

“I’m almost there,” he said. She saw the bags under his eyes when he turned around. “No more than another hour.”

Nicole returned to her mat. When Richard awakened her later, he was full of enthusiasm. “Wouldn’t you know it?” he said with a grin. “There are three possible solutions, each of which is consistent with all the patterns.” He paced for almost a minute. “Could we go look now?” he then said pleadingly. “I don’t think I can sleep until I find out.”

None of Richard’s three solutions for the location of the third lair was close to the plaza. The nearest one was over a kilometer away, at the edge of New York opposite the Northern Hemicylinder. He and Nicole found noth­ing there. They then marched another fifteen minutes in the dark to the second possible location, a spot very near the southeast comer of the city. Richard and Nicole walked down the indicated street and found the cover­ing in the exact spot that Richard had predicted. “Hallelujah,” he shouted, spreading out his sleeping mat beside the cover. “Hooray for mathematics.”

Hooray for Omeh, Nicole thought. She was no longer sleepy but she wasn’t anxious to explore any new territory in the dark. What comes first, she asked herself after they had returned to camp and she was lying awake on her mat, intuition or mathematics? Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it?

They were both up at daylight. “The days are still growing slightly shorter,” Richard mentioned to Nicole. “But the sum of daytime and nighttime is remaining constant at forty-six hours, four minutes, and fourteen seconds.”

“How long before we reach the Earth?” Nicole inquired as she was stuff­ing her sleeping mat into its protective package.

’Twenty Earth days and three hours,” he replied after consulting his computer. “Are you ready for another adventure?”

She nodded. “I presume you also know where to find the panel that opens this cover?”

“No, but I bet it’s not hard to find,” he said confidently. “And after we find this one, the avian lair opening will be duck soup because we’ll have the whole pattern.”

Ten minutes later Richard pushed on a metal plate and the third covering swung open. The descent into this third hole was down a wide staircase broken by occasional landings. Richard took Nicole’s hand as they walked down the stairs. They used their flashlights to find their way, as no lights illuminated their descent.

The water room was in the same place as in the other underground lairs. There were no sounds in the horizontal tunnels that led off from the central stairway at either of the two main levels. “I don’t think anyone lives here,” Richard said.

“At least not yet,” Nicole answered.