General O’Toole looked at Nicole with admiration. “That’s an excellent point,” he said. “It’s a shame you weren’t available for the ISA discussions. We never considered—”

“Why don’t we postpone the rest of this conversation until we’re back on the Newton?” Richard said suddenly. “According to my watch, it will be dark again in another thirty minutes, before any of us have reached the top of the lift. I don’t want to ride in the dark any longer than is necessary.”

The three cosmonauts believed that they were leaving Rama for the last time. As the remaining minutes of light dwindled, each cosmonaut gazed intently at the magnificent alien landscape that stretched out into the dis­tance. For Nicole, the dominant feeling was one of elation. Cautious by nature with her expectations, until this moment in the chairlift she had not allowed herself the intense pleasure of believing that she would ever again hold her beloved Genevieve in her arms. Her mind was now flooded by the bucolic beauty of Beauvois and she imagined in detail the joy of her reunion scene with her father and daughter. It could be as little as a week or ten days, Nicole said to herself expectantly. By the time she reached the top she was having difficulty containing her jubilation.

During his ride Michael O’Toole reviewed, one more time, his activation decision– When dark came to Rama, suddenly and at the predicted moment, he had finished developing his plan for communicating his decision to the Earth. They would phone ISA management immediately. Nicole and Rich­ard would summarize their stories and Nicole would present her reasons for thinking that the destruction of Rama would be “unforgivable.” O’Toole was convinced that his order to activate the weapons would then be re­scinded.

The general switched on his flashlight just before his chair reached the top of the stairway. He stepped off in the weightless environment and stood beside Nicole. They waited for Richard Wakefield before proceeding to­gether around the ramp to the ferry passageway, only a hundred meters away. After the trio had boarded the ferry and were ready to move through the Rama shell toward the Newton, Richard’s flashlight beam fell on a large metal object on the side of the passage. “Is that one of the bombs?” he asked.

The nuclear weapon system did indeed resemble an oversized bullet. How curious, Nicole thought, recoiling as an instant shudder ran through her system. It could be any shape, of course. I wonder what subconscious aberra­tion made the designers choose that particular form…

“But what’s that weird contraption at the top?” Richard was asking O’Toole.

The general’s brow furrowed as he stared at a bizarre object illuminated by the center of the beam of light. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’ve never seen it before.” He disembarked from the ferry. Richard and Nicole followed him.

General O’Toole shuffled over to the weapon and studied the strange attachment fixed above the numerical keyboard. It was a fiat plate, slightly larger than the keyboard itself, that was anchored by angular joints to the sides of the weapon. On the underside of the plate, momentarily retracted, were ten tiny punches — at least that’s what they looked like to O’Toole. His observation was confirmed seconds later when one of the punches extended and hit the number “5” on the keyboard several centimeters below. The “5” was followed in rapid succession by a “7,” and then by eight more numbers before a green light flashed the successful completion of the first decade.

Within seconds the apparatus entered ten more digits and another green light flashed. O’Toole froze in terror. My God, he thought, that’s my code! Somehow they’ve broken — His panic subsided an instant later when, after the third decade of digits, the red light announced that an error had been made.

“Apparently,” General O’Toole said a short time later in response to an inquiry from Richard, “they have jerryrigged this scheme to try to enter the code in my absence, They only have the first two decades correct. For a moment I was afraid…” O’Toole paused, aware of strong emotions stir­ring within him.

“They must have assumed you weren’t coming back,” Nicole said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“If Heilmann and Yamanaka did it,” O’Toole replied. “Of course we can’t rule out completely the possibility that the contraption might have been placed there by the aliens… or even the biots.”

“Extremely unlikely,” Richard commented. “The engineering is much too crude.”

“At any rate,” O’Toole said, opening his backpack for some tools to dis­connect the apparatus, “I’m not taking any chances.”

At the Newton end of the passageway, O’Toole, Wakefield, and des Jardins found the second bomb fitted with the same apparatus. The trio watched it punch out one code attempt — with the same result, a failure somewhere in the third decade — and then they disabled it as well. Afterward they opened up the seal and exited from Rama.

Nobody greeted them when they stepped inside the Newton military ship. General O’Toole assumed that both Admiral Heilmann and Yamanaka were asleep and went immediately to the bedrooms. He wanted to talk to Heilmann in private anyway. But the two men were not in their rooms. It did not take long to confirm, in fact, that the other two cosmonauts were nowhere in the comparatively small living and working area of the military ship.

A search of the supply area in the back of the ship was also futile. How­ever, the threesome did discover that one of the extravehicular activity (EVA) pods was missing. This discovery raised another perplexing set of questions. Where could Heilmann and Yamanaka have gone in the pod? And why had they violated the top-priority project policy that at least one crew member should always stay onboard the Newton?

The three cosmonauts were puzzled as they returned to the control center to discuss their possible courses of action. O’Toole was the first to raise the specter of foul play. “Do you think those octospiders, or even some of the biots, might have come onboard? After all, it’s not difficult to enter the Newton unless it’s in Self-Protection Mode.”

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—”