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| ISBN-13: | 9780795325663 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 09/05/2019 |
| Series: | Rama , #2 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 510 |
| Sales rank: | 13,829 |
| Lexile: | 970L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
One of the most influential science fiction writers of the 20th and 21st century, Arthur C. Clarke is the author of over 100 novels, novellas, and short story collections that laid the groundwork for the science fiction genre. Combining scientific knowledge and visionary literary aptitude, Clarke's work explored the implications of major scientific discoveries in astonishingly inventive and mystical settings.
Clarke's short stories and novels have won numerous Hugo and Nebula Awards, have been translated into more than 30 languages, and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Several of his books, including 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey II, have been adapted into films that still stand as classic examples of the genre. Without a doubt, Arthur C. Clarke's is one of the most important voices in contemporary science fiction literature.
Gentry Lee is a science fiction author and chief engineer for the Planetary Flight Systems Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is known for collaborating with Arthur C. Clarke on several sequels to Rendezvous With Rama, as well as with Carl Sagan on the Cosmos series.
Date of Birth:
December 16, 1917Date of Death:
March 19, 2008Place of Birth:
Minehead, Somerset, EnglandPlace of Death:
Sri LankaEducation:
1948, King's College, London, first-class honors in Physics and Mathematics
CHAPTER 1
Rama Returns
The great radar pulse generator Excalibur, powered by nuclear explosions, had been out of service for almost half a century. It had been designed and developed in a frantic effort during the months following the transit of Rama through the solar system. When it was first declared operational in 2132, Excalibur's announced purpose was to give Earth ample warning of any future alien visitors: one as gigantic as Rama could be detected at interstellar distances — years, it was hoped, before it could have any effect on human affairs.
That original commitment to build Excalibur had been made even before Rama had passed perihelion. As the first extraterrestrial visitor rounded the sun and headed out toward the stars, armies of scientists studied the data from the only mission that had been able to rendezvous with the intruder. Rama, they announced, was an intelligent robot with absolutely no interest in our solar system or its inhabitants. The official report offered no explanations for the many mysteries encountered by the investigators; however, the experts did convince themselves that they understood one basic principle of Raman engineering. Since most of the major systems and subsystems encountered inside Rama by the human explorers had two functional backups, it appeared that the aliens engineered everything in threes. Therefore, since the entire giant vehicle was assumed to be a machine, it was considered highly likely that two more Rama spacecraft would be following the first visitor.
But no new spaceships entered the solar neighborhood from the empty reaches of interstellar space. As the years passed the people on Earth confronted more pressing problems. Concern about the Ramans, or whoever it was that had created that drab cylinder fifty kilometers long, abated as the lone alien incursion passed into history. The visit of Rama continued to intrigue many scholars, but most members of the human species were forced to pay attention to other issues. By the early 2140s the world was in the grip of a severe economic crisis. There was no money left to maintain Excalibur. Its few scientific discoveries could not justify the enormous expense of assuring the safety of its operation. The great nuclear pulse generator was abandoned.
Forty-five years later it took thirty-three months to return Excalibur to operational status. The primary justification for the refurbishment of Excalibur was scientific. During the intervening years radar science had flourished and produced new methods of data interpretation that had greatly enhanced the value of the Excalibur observations. As the generator again took images of the distant heavens, almost nobody on Earth was expecting the arrival of another Rama spacecraft.
The operations manager at Excalibur Station did not even inform his supervisor the first time the strange blip appeared on his data processing display. He thought it was an artifact, a bogey created by an anomalous processing algorithm. When the signature repeated several times, however, he paid closer attention. The manager called in the chief Excalibur scientist, who analyzed the data and decided the new object was a long period comet. It was another two months before a graduate student proved that the signature belonged to a smooth body at least forty kilometers in its longest dimension.
By 2197 the world knew that the object hurtling through the solar system toward the inner planets was a second extraterrestrial spacecraft. The International Space Agency (ISA) concentrated its resources to prepare a mission that would intercept the intruder just inside the orbit of Venus in late February of 2200. Again the eyes of humanity looked outward, toward the stars, and the deep philosophical questions raised by the first Rama were again debated by the populace on Earth. As the new visitor drew nearer and its physical characteristics were more carefully resolved by the host of sensors aimed in its direction, it was confirmed that this alien spacecraft, at least from the outside, was identical to its predecessor. Rama had returned. Mankind had a second appointment with destiny.
CHAPTER 2Test and Training
The bizarre metallic creature inched along the wall, crawling up toward the overhang. It resembled a skinny armadillo, its jointed snail body covered by a thin shell that curled over and around a compact grouping of electronic gadgetry astride the middle of its three sections. A helicopter hovered about two meters away from the wall. A long flexible arm with a pincer on the end extended from the nose of the helicopter and just missed closing its jaws around the odd creature.
"Dammit," muttered Janos Tabori, "this is almost impossible with the 'copter bouncing around. Even in perfect conditions it's hard to do precision work with these claws at full extension." He glanced over at the pilot. "And why can't this fantastic flying machine keep its altitude and attitude constant?"
"Move the helicopter closer to the wall," ordered Dr. David Brown.
Hiro Yamanaka looked at Brown without expression and entered a command into the control console. The screen in front of him flashed red and printed out the message, COMMAND UNACCEPTABLE. INSUFFICIENT TOLERANCES. Yamanaka said nothing. The helicopter continued to hover in the same spot.
"We have fifty centimeters, maybe seventy-five, between the blades and the wall," Brown thought out loud. "In another two or three minutes the biot will be safe under the overhang. Let's go to manual and grab it. Now. No mistakes this time, Tabori."
For an instant a dubious Hiro Yamanaka stared at the balding, bespectacled scientist sitting in the seat behind him. Then the pilot turned, entered another command into the console, and switched the large black lever to the left position. The monitor flashed, IN MANUAL MODE. NO AUTOMATIC PROTECTION. Yamanaka gingerly eased the helicopter closer to the wall.
Engineer Tabori was ready. He inserted his hands in the instrumented gloves and practiced opening and closing the jaws at the end of the flexible arm. Again the arm extended and the two mechanical mandibles deftly closed around the jointed snail and its shell. The feedback loops from the sensors on the claws told Tabori, through his gloves, that he had successfully captured his prey. "I've got it," he shouted exultantly. He began the slow process of bringing the quarry back into the helicopter.
A sudden draft of wind rolled the helicopter to the left and the arm with the biot banged against the wall. Tabori felt his grip loosening. "Straighten it up," he cried, continuing to retract the arm. While Yamanaka was struggling to null the rolling motion of the helicopter, he inadvertently tipped the nose down just slightly. The three crew members heard the sickening sound of the metal rotor blades crashing against the wall.
The Japanese pilot immediately pushed the emergency button and the craft returned to automatic control. In less than a second, a whining alarm sounded and the cockpit monitor flashed red. EXCESSIVE DAMAGE. HIGH PROBABILITY OF FAILURE. EJECT CREW. Yamanaka did not hesitate. Within moments he blasted out of the cockpit and had his parachute deployed. Tabori and Brown followed. As soon as the Hungarian engineer removed his hands from the special gloves, the claws at the end of the mechanical arm relaxed and the armadillo creature fell the hundred meters to the flat plain below, smashing into thousands of tiny pieces.
The pilotless helicopter descended erratically toward the plain. Even with its onboard automatic landing algorithm active and in complete control, the damaged flying machine bounced hard on its struts when it hit the ground and tipped over on its side. Not far from the helicopter's landing site, a portly man, wearing a brown military suit covered with ribbons, jumped down from an open elevator. He had just descended from the mission control center and was clearly agitated as he walked briskly to a waiting rover. He was followed by a scrambling lithe blond woman in an ISA flight suit with camera equipment hanging over both her shoulders. The military man was General Valeriy Borzov, commander-in-chief of Project Newton. "Anyone hurt?" he asked the occupant of the rover, electrical engineer Richard Wakefield.
"Janos apparently banged his shoulder pretty hard during the ejection. But Nicole just radioed that he had no broken bones or separations, only a lot of bruises."
General Borzov climbed into the front seat of the rover beside Wakefield, who was sitting behind the vehicle control panel. The blond woman, video journalist Francesca Sabatini, stopped recording the scene and started to open the back door of the rover. Borzov abruptly waved her away. "Go check on des Jardins and Tabori," he said, pointing across the level plain. "Wilson's probably there already."
Borzov and Wakefield headed in the opposite direction in the rover. They traveled about four hundred meters before they pulled alongside a slight man, about fifty, in a new flight suit. David Brown was busy folding up his parachute and replacing it in a stuff bag. General Borzov stepped down from the rover and approached the American scientist.
"Are you all right, Dr. Brown?" the general asked, obviously impatient to dispense with the preliminaries.
Brown nodded but did not reply. "In that case," General Borzov continued in a measured tone, "perhaps you could tell me what you were thinking about when you ordered Yamanaka to go to manual. It might be better if we discussed it here, away from the rest of the crew."
"Did you even see the warning lights?" Borzov added after a lengthy silence. "Did you consider, even for a moment, that the safety of the other cosmonauts might be jeopardized by the maneuver?"
Dr. David Brown eventually looked over at Borzov with a sullen, baleful stare. When he finally spoke in his own defense, his speech was clipped and strained, belying the emotion he was suppressing. "It seemed reasonable to move the helicopter just a little closer to the target. We had some clearance left and it was the only way that we could have captured the biot. Our mission, after all, is to bring home —"
"You don't need to tell me what our mission is," Borzov interrupted with passion. "Remember, I helped write the policies myself. And I will remind you again that the number one priority, at all times, is the safety of the crew. Especially during these simulations. ... I must tell you that I am absolutely flabbergasted by this crazy stunt of yours. The helicopter is damaged, Tabori is injured, you're lucky that nobody was killed."
David Brown was no longer paying attention to General Borzov. He had turned around to finish stuffing his parachute into its transparent package. From the set of his shoulders and the energy he was expending on this routine task, it was obvious that he was very angry.
Borzov returned to the rover. After waiting for several seconds he offered Dr. Brown a ride back to the base. The American shook his head without saying anything, hoisted his pack onto his back, and walked off in the direction of the helicopter and the elevator.
CHAPTER 3Crew Conference
Outside the meeting room in the training facility, Janos Tabori was sitting on an auditorium chair underneath an array of small but powerful portable lights. "The distance to the simulated biot was at the limit of the reach of the mechanical arm," he explained to the tiny camera that Francesca Sabatini was holding. "Twice I tried to grab it and failed. Dr. Brown then decided to put the helicopter on manual and take it a little closer to the wall. We caught some wind ..."
The door from the conference room opened and a smiling, ruddy face appeared. "We're all here waiting for you," said General O'Toole pleasantly. "I think Borzov's becoming a little impatient."
Francesca switched off the lights and put her video camera back in the pocket of her flight suit. "All right, my Hungarian hero," she said with a laugh, "we'd better stop for now. You know how our leader dislikes waiting." She walked over and put her arms gently around the small man. She patted him on his bandaged shoulder. "But we're really glad you're all right."
A handsome black man in his early forties had been sitting just out of the camera frame during the interview, taking notes on a flat, rectangular keyboard about a foot square. He followed Francesca and Janos into the conference room. "I want to do a feature this week on the new design concepts in the teleoperation of the arm and the glove," Reggie Wilson whispered to Tabori as they sat down. "There are a bunch of my readers out there who find all this technical crap absolutely fascinating."
"I'm glad that the three of you could join us," Borzov's sarcastic voice boomed across the conference room. "I was starting to think that perhaps a crew meeting was an imposition on all of you, an activity that interrupted the far more important tasks of reporting our misadventures or writing erudite scientific and engineering papers." He pointed at Reggie Wilson, whose ubiquitous flat keyboard was on the table in front of him. "Wilson, believe it or not, you're supposed to be a member of this crew first and a journalist second. Just one time do you think you can put that damn thing away and listen? I have a few things to say and I want them to be off the record."
Wilson removed the keyboard and put it in his briefcase. Borzov stood up and walked around the room as he talked. The table in the crew conference room was a long oval about two meters across at its widest point. There were twelve places around the table (guests and observers, when they attended, sat in the extra chairs over against the walls), each one equipped with a computer keyboard and monitor slightly inset into the surface and covered, when not being used, by a polished grain top that matched the quality simulated wood on the rest of the table. As always, the other two military men on the expedition, European admiral Otto Heilmann (the hero of the Council of Governments intercession in the Caracas crisis) and American air force general Michael Ryan O'Toole, flanked Borzov at one end of the oval. The other nine Newton crew members did not always sit in the same seats, a fact that particularly frustrated the compulsively orderly Admiral Heilmann and, to a lesser extent, his commanding officer Borzov.
Sometimes the four "nonprofessionals" in the crew would cluster together around the other end of the table, leaving the "space cadets," as the five cosmonaut graduates of the Space Academy were known, to create a buffer zone in the middle. After almost a year of constant media attention, the public had relegated each member of the Newton dozen to one of three subgroups — the nonpros, consisting of the two scientists and two journalists; the military troika; and the five cosmonauts who did most of the skilled work during the mission.
On this particular day, however, the two nonmilitary groups were thoroughly mixed. The famed Japanese interdisciplinary scientist Shigeru Takagishi, widely regarded as the foremost expert in the world on the first Raman expedition seventy years earlier (and also the author of the Atlas of Rama that was required reading for all of the crew), was sitting in the middle of the oval between Soviet pilot Irina Turgenyev and the brilliant but often zany British cosmonaut/electrical engineer Richard Wakefield. Opposite them were life science officer Nicole des Jardins, a statuesque copper brown woman with a fascinating French and African lineage, the quiet, almost mechanical Japanese pilot Yamanaka, and the stunning Signora Sabatini. The final three positions at the "south" end of the oval, facing the large maps and diagrams of Rama on the opposite wall, were occupied by American journalist Wilson, the inimitable and garrulous Tabori (a Soviet cosmonaut from Budapest), and Dr. David Brown. Brown looked very businesslike and serious; he had a set of papers spread out in front of him as the meeting began.
"It is inconceivable to me," Borzov was saying while he strode purposefully around the room, "that any of you could ever forget, even for a moment, that you have been selected to go on what could be the most important human mission of all time. But on the basis of this last set of simulations, I must admit that I am beginning to have my doubts about some of you.
"There are those who believe that this Rama craft will be a copy of its predecessor," Borzov continued, "and that it will be equally disinterested and uninvolved with whatever trifling creatures come to survey it. I admit it certainly appears to be at least the same size and same configuration, based on the radar data that we have been processing for the past three years. But even if it does turn out to be another dead ship built by aliens that vanished thousands of years ago, this mission is still the most important one of our lifetime. And I would think that it demands the very best effort from each of you."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Rama II"
by .
Copyright © 2012 RosettaBooks, LLC..
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
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Author's Note,
Rama Returns,
Test and Training,
Crew Conference,
The Great Chaos,
After the Crash,
La Signora Sabatini,
Public Relations,
Biometry,
Diastolic Irregularity,
The Cosmonaut and the Pope,
St. Michael of Siena,
Ramans and Romans,
Happy New Year,
Good-Bye, Henry,
Encounter,
Rama Rama Burning Bright,
Death of a Soldier,
Postmortem,
Rite of Passage,
Blessed Slumber,
Pandora's Cube,
Dawn,
Nightfall,
Sounds in the Darkness,
A Friend in Need,
Second Sortie,
To Catch a Biot,
Extrapolation,
The Hunt,
Postmortem II,
Orvieto Prodigy,
New York Explorer,
Missing Person,
Strange Companions,
Into the Pit,
Impact Course,
Marooned,
Visitors,
Waters of Wisdom,
Alien Invitation,
A Friend Indeed,
Two Explorers,
Exobiological Psychology,
Another Lair,
Nikki,
The Better Part of Valor,
Progressive Matrices,
Welcome Earthlings,
Interaction,
Hope Springs Eternal,
Escape Harness,
Flight 302,
Trinity,
Once a Hero,
The Voice of Michael,
An Answered Prayer,
Three's Company,
Hobson's Choice,
Dream of Destiny,
Return to Rama,
Endangered Spacecraft,
The Final Hour,
Acknowledgments,
This past fall, astronomers from the Pan-STARRS program in Hawaii announced they had spotted a small asteroid, or perhaps a comet, that they believed originated from outside our solar system. (Since the Hawai’ian observatory made the discovery, it was named ‘Oumuamua, Hawai’ian for “first messenger”.) As more data came in, the scenario became even more […]
