“Well* as I live and breathe,” she heard a familiar voice behind her say, “I believe the lady in the white dress is none other than my fellow cosmonaut, the ice princess herself, Madame Nicole des Jardins.” Nicole turned and saw Richard Wakefield staggering toward her. He bounced off a table, reached out to stabilize himself on a chair, and nearly fell in her lap.
“Sorry,” he said, grinning and managing to seat himself beside her. “I’m afraid I’ve had too much gin and tonic.” He took a big gulp from the glass that had miraculously remained unspilled in his right hand. “And now,” he said with a wink, “if you don’t mind, I’m going to take a nap before the dolphin show.”
Nicole laughed as Richard’s head hit the wooden table with a splat and he feigned unconsciousness. After a moment she leaned over playfully and forced one of his eyelids open. “If you don’t mind, comrade, could you not pass out until after you explain to me the bit about the dolphin show.”
With great effort Richard sat up and began rolling his eyes. “You mean you don’t know? You, who always know all the schedules and all the procedures? That’s impossible.”
Nicole finished her wine. “Seriously, Wakefield. What are you talking about?”
Richard opened one of the small windows and stuck his arm through it, pointing at the pool of water that encircled the house. “The great Dr. Luigi Bardolini is here with his intelligent dolphins. Francesca is going to introduce him in about fifteen minutes.” He stared at Nicole with wild abandon. “Dr, Bardolini is going to prove, here and tonight,” he shouted, “that his dolphins can pass our university entrance exams.”
Nicole pulled back and looked carefully at her colleague. He really is drunk, she thought to herself. Maybe he feels as out of place as I do.
Richard was now gazing intently out the window. “This party is really some zoo, isn’t it?” Nicole said after a long silence. “Where did they find—”
“That’s it,” Wakefield interrupted her suddenly, giving the table a triumphant pounding. “That’s why this place has seemed familiar to me since the moment we walked in.” He glanced at Nicole, who was eyeing him as if he had lost his mind. “It’s a miniature Rama, don’t you see?” He jumped up, unable to contain his happiness at his discovery. “The water surrounding this house is the Cylindrical Sea, the porticoes represent the Central Pkin, and we, lovely lady, are sitting in the city of New York.”
Nicole was beginning to comprehend but could not keep up with the racing thoughts of Richard Wakefield. “And what does similarity of design prove?” he thought out loud. “What does it mean that human architects two thousand years ago constructed a theater with some of the same guiding principles of design as those used in the Raman ship? Similarity of nature? Similarity of culture? Absolutely not.”
He stopped, now aware that Nicole was staring fixedly at him. “Mathematics,” he said emphatically. A quizzical expression told him that she still didn’t understand completely. “Mathematics,” he said again, surprisingly lucid all of a sudden. “That’s the key. The Ramans almost certainly didn’t look like us and clearly evolved on a world far different from the Earth. But they must Have understood the same mathematics as the Romans.”
His face brightened. “Hah,” he shouted again, causing Nicole to jump. He was pleased with himself. “Ramans and Romans. That’s what tonight is all about. And at some level of development in between is modern-day homo sapiens.”
Nicole shook her head as Richard exulted in the joy of his wit. “You don’t understand, lovely lady?” he said, extending his hand to help her up from her seat. “Then perhaps you and I should go to watch a dolphin show and I will speak to you of Ramans there and Romans here, of cabbages and kings, of dum-de-dum and sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings.”
13
HAPPY NEW YEAR
After everyone had finished eating land all the plates had been cleared, Francesca Sabatini appeared in the center of the yard with a microphone and spent ten minutes thanking all the gala sponsors. Then she introduced Dr. Luigi Bardolini, suggesting that the techniques he had pioneered to communicate with the dolphins might prove extremely useful when humans try to talk to any extraterrestrials.
Richard Wakefield had disappeared just before Francesca had started speaking, ostensibly to find the rest room and obtain another drink. Nicole had caught sight of him briefly five minutes later, just after Francesca had finished with her introduction. He had been surrounded by a pair of buxom Italian actresses, both of whom were laughing heartily at his jokes. He had waved at Nicole and winked, pointing at the two women as if his actions were self-explanatory.
Good for you, Richard, Nicole had thought, smiling to herself. At least one of us social misfits is having a good time. She now watched Franceses walk gracefully across the bridge and start to move the crowd back from the water so that Bardolini and his dolphins would have plenty of room. Fran-cesca was wearing a tight black dress, bare on one shoulder, with a starburst of gold sequins in the front. A gold scarf was tied around her waist. Her long blond hair was braided and pinned against her head.
You really belong here, Nicole thought, truthfully admiring Francesca’s ease in large crowds. Dr. Bardolini began the first segment of his dolphin show and Nicole turned her attention to the circular pool of water. Luigi Bardolini was one of those controversial scientists whose work is brilliant but never quite as exceptional as he himself wants others to believe. It was true that he had developed a unique way of communicating with the dolphins and had isolated and identified the sounds of thirty to forty action verbs in their portfolio of squeaks. But it was not true, as he so often claimed, that two of his dolphins could pass a university entrance exam. Unfortunately, the way the twenty-second century international scientific community operated, if your most outrageous or advanced theories could not be substantiated, or were held up to ridicule, then your other discoveries, no matter how solid, were often disparaged as well. This behavior had induced an endemic conservatism in science that was not altogether healthy.
Unlike most scientists, Bardolini was a brilliant showman. In the final segment of his show he had his two most famous dolphins, Emilio and Emilia, take an intelligence test in a real-time competition against two of the villa guides, one male and one female, who had been selected at random that evening. The construct of the competitive test was enticingly simple. On two of the four large electronic screens (one pair of screens was in the water and another pair was in the yard), a three-by-three matrix was shown with a blank in the lower right-hand corner. The other eight elements were filled with different pictures and shapes. The dolphins and humans taking the test were supposed to discern the changing patterns moving from left to right and top to bottom in the matrix, and then correctly pick out, from a set of eight candidates displayed on the companion screen, the element that should be placed in the blank lower right comer. The competitors had one minute to make their choice on each problem. The dolphins in the water, like the humans on the land above them, had a control panel of eight buttons they could push (the dolphins used their snouts) to indicate their selection.
The first few problems were easy, both for the humans and for the dolphins. In the first matrix, a single white ball was in the upper left corner, two white balls in the second column of the first row, and three white balls in the matrix element corresponding to row one and column three. Since the first element of the second row was a single ball as well, half white and half black, and since the beginning element of the third row was another single ball, now fully black, it was easy to read the entire matrix quickly and determine that what belonged in the blank lower right corner was three black balls.