Rama II

Francesca drank the liquid without hesitation. As her patient was dressing, Nicole thought back to the time when she had first suspected her own pregnancy. Never once did I consider… And not just because her father was a prince. No. It was a question of responsibility. And love.

“I can tell what you’re thinking,” Francesca said when she was ready to leave. She was standing by the infirmary door. “But don’t waste your time. You have enough problems of your own.”

Nicole did not reply. “So tomorrow the little bastard will be gone,” Fran­cesca said coldly, her eyes tired and angry. “It’s a damn good thing. The world doesn’t need another half-black baby.” Francesca didn’t wait for Nicole’s response.

16

RAMA RAMA BURNING BRIGHT

The touchdown near the entry port to Rama was smooth and without incident. Following the precedent of Commander Norton seventy years ear­lier, General Borzov instructed Yamanaka and Turgenyev to guide the New­ton to a contact point just outside the hundred-meter circular disc centered on the spin axis of the giant cylinder. A set of low, pillbox-shaped structures temporarily held the spacecraft from Earth in place against the slight centrifugal force created by the spi

The large disc was, as anticipated, the outer seal of the Raman air lock. Wakefield and Tabori departed from the Newton in their EVA gear and started searching for an embedded wheel. The wheel, which was the manual control for the air lock, was in exactly the predicted place. It turned as expected and exposed an opening in the outer shell of Rama. Since nothing about Rama II had yet varied from its predecessor in any way, the two cosmonauts continued with the entry procedure.

Four hours later, after considerable shuttling back and forth in the half kilometer of corridors and tu

After a short break for lunch, Yamanaka joined Wakefield and Tabori and the three of them constructed the pla

Brown and Takagishi took their positions in the control center once the operation of the Alpha relay station was verified. The countdown to interior drone deployment proceeded. Takagishi was obviously both nervous and excited as he finished his preflight tests with his drone. Brown seemed re­laxed, even casual, as he completed his final preparations. Francesca Sabatini was sitting in front of the multiple monitors, ready to select the best images for real-time transmission to the Earth.

General Borzov himself a

That the vista was familiar barely lessened the wonder of the image. In the end of the crater-shaped bowl, starting from the tu

The northern half of the Central Plain spread out to fill most of the picture on the screen. The huge expanse was broken into rectangular fields that had irregular dimensions except immediately around the “cities.” The three cities in the wide-angle image, clusters of tall slim objects, resembling manmade buildings, that were co

The strange sea, a body of water ru

The entire crew stared silently at the image for almost a minute. Then Dr. David Brown started hooting. “All right, Rama,” he said in a proud voice. “You see, all you disbelievers,” he shouted loud enough for everyone to hear, “it is exactly like the first one.” Francesca’s video camera turned to record Brown’s exultation. Most of the rest of the crew were still speechless, trans­fixed by the details on the monitor.

Meanwhile, Takagishi’s drone was transmitting narrow-angle photos of the area just under the tu

Two hours later the last of the drones returned to the relay station and an initial summary of the photographic survey was complete. There were no major structural differences between Rama II and the earlier space vehicle down to a scale of a hundred meters. The only significant region of miscom­pares at that resolution was the Cylindrical Sea itself, and ice reflectivity was a notoriously difficult phenomenon to handle with a straightforward digital comparison algorithm. It had been a long and exciting day. Borzov an­nounced that crew assignments for the first sortie would be posted in an hour and that a “special di