Nobody wanted to say what all three of them were thinking. If someone or something had captured or killed their two colleagues on the ship, then it might still be around and they might be in danger themselves…
“Why don’t we call the Earth and announce that we’re alive?” Richard said, breaking the silence.
“Great idea.” General O’Toole smiled. He moved over to the control center console and activated the panel. A standard system status display appeared on the large screen. “That’s strange,” the general commented. “According to this, we have no video link with the Earth presently. Only low-rate telemetry. Now, why would the data system configuration have been changed?”
He keyed in a simple set of commands to establish the normal multichannel high-rate link with the Earth. A swarm of error messages appeared on the monitor. “What the hell?” Richard exclaimed. “It looks as if the video system has died.” He turned to O’Toole. “This is your speciality, General, what do you make of all this?”
General O’Toole was very serious. “I don’t like it, Richard. I’ve only seen this many error messages one time before — during one of our early simulations when some nincompoop forgot to load the communications software. We must have a major software problem. The probability of that many hardware failures in such a short time span is essentially zero.”
Richard suggested that O’Toole subject the video communications software to its standard self-test. During the test, the diagnostic printout reported that the error buffers in the self-test algorithm had overflowed when the procedure was less than one percent complete. “So the vidcomm software is definitely the culprit,” Richard said, analyzing the data in the diagnostic. He entered some commands. “It’s going to take a while to straighten it out—”
“Just a minute,” Nicole interrupted. “Shouldn’t we spend our time trying to make some sense out of all this new information before we start on any specific tasks?” The two men stopped their activity and waited for her to continue. “Heilmann, Yamanaka, and one pod are missing from this ship,” Nicole said, walking slowly around the control center, “and someone was trying to automatically activate the two nuclear bombs in the passageway. Meanwhile the vidcomm software, after functioning properly for hundreds of days — counting all the preflight simulations — has suddenly gone haywire. Do either of you have a coherent explanation for all this?”
There was a long silence. “General O’Toole’s suggestion of a hostile invasion of the Newton might work!” Richard offered. “Heilmann and Yamanaka might have fled to save themselves and the aliens could have purposely screwed up the software.”
Nicole was not convinced. “Nothing I have seen suggests that any aliens — or even any biots, for that matter — have been inside the Newton. Unless we see some evidence—”
“Maybe Heilmann and Yamanaka were trying to break the general’s code,” Wakefield invented, “and they were afraid—”
“Stop. Stop,” Nicole shouted suddenly. “Something’s happening to the screen.” The two men turned around just in time to see Admiral Otto Heilmann’s face materialize on the monitor.
“Hello, General O’Toole,” Heilmann said with a smile from the huge screen. “This videotape was triggered by your entering the Newton airlock. Cosmonaut Yamanaka and I prepared it just before we departed in one of the pods three hours before 1-9 days. We were ordered to evacuate less than an hour after you went inside to explore Rama. We delayed as long as we could but eventually had to follow our instructions.
“Your personal orders are simple and straightforward. You are to enter your activation code into the two weapons in the ferry passageway and the three remaining in the bay. You should depart in the final pod no more than eight hours thereafter. Don’t be concerned about the electronic devices in operation on the two bombs in the Raman shell. COG military headquarters ordered them put in place to test some new top secret decryption techniques. You will discover they can easily be disabled with pliers and!or wirecutters.
“An extra, emergency propulsion system has been added to the pod and its software has been programmed to guide you to a safe location, where you will rendezvous with an ISA tug. All you need to do is code in the exact time of your departure. However, I must stress that the new pod navigation algorithms are valid only if you leave the Newton before 1-6 days. After that time, I am told the guidance parameters become increasingly invalid and it will be almost impossible to rescue you.”
There was a short pause in Heilmann’s delivery and his voice took on an increased sense of urgency. “Don’t waste any more time, Michael. Activate the weapons and go directly to the pod. We have already supplied it with the food and other essentials that you will need… Good luck on your voyage home. We’ll see you back on Earth.”
58
HOBSON’S CHOICE
I’m certain that Heilmann and Yamanaka were being extremely cautious,” Richard Wakefield explained. “They probably left early so they could take extra supplies. And with these lightweight pods, each extra kilogram can be critical.”
“How critical?” asked Nicole.
“Well — it could make all the difference between getting into a safe orbit around Earth — or shooting past it so quickly that we couldn’t be rescued.”
“Does that mean,” O’Toole inquired somberly, “that only one of us might be able to use the pod?”
Richard paused before answering. “I’m afraid that’s possible; it’s a function of the time of departure. We’ll have to do some quick calculations to determine exactly. But personally I see no reason why we shouldn’t consider flying this entire spacecraft. I was trained as a backup pilot, after all. . We have only limited control authority, since the ship is so large, but if we jettison everything we don’t absolutely need, we may be able to do it Again, we’ll need to do the computations.”
Nicole’s assignments from General O’Toole and Richard were to check the supplies that had been placed in the pod, determine their adequacy, and then approximate both the mass and packaging volume required to support either two or three travelers. In addition Richard, still favoring flying back to Earth in the military ship, asked Nicole to go through the Newton supply manifest and estimate how much mass could be thrown overboard.
While O’Toole and Wakefield used the computers in the control center, Nicole worked alone in the huge bay. First she examined the remaining pod very carefully. Although the pods were normally used by a single person for local extravehicular activity (EVA), they had also been designed as emergency escape vehicles. Two people could sit behind the tough, transparent front window with a week’s supplies on the shelves at the rear of the small cabin. But three people? Nicole wondered. Impossible. Someone would have to squeeze into the shelf space. And then there would not be adequate room for the supplies. Nicole thought momentarily about being confined to the tiny shelves for seven or eight days. It would be even worse than the pit in New York.
She looked through the supplies that had been hastily thrown into the pod by Heilmann and Yamanaka. The food allocation was more or less correct, both in quantity and variety, for a one-week voyage; the medical kit, however, was woefully inadequate. Nicole made a few notes, constructed what she considered to be a proper supply list for either a two or three person crew, and estimated the mass and packaging requirements. She then started to cross the bay.
Her eyes were drawn to the bullet-shaped nuclear weapons lying placidly on their sides right beside the pod airlock. Nicole walked over and touched the bombs, her hands idly running across the polished metal surface. So these are the first great weapons of destruction, she thought, the outcome of the brilliant physics of the twentieth century.