“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.

What a sad commentary on our species, Nicole mused, as she was walking among the nuclear bombs. A visitor comes to see us. It cannot speak our language, but it does discover where we live. When it turns the corner onto out street, while its purpose is still utterly unknown, we blast it into oblivion.

She shuffled across the bay toward the living quarters, aware of a profound feeling of sadness deep within her. Your problem, Nicole said to herself, is that you always expect too much. From yourself. From those you love. Even from the human race. We are yet too immature a species.

A momentary wave of nausea forced Nicole to stop for a moment. What’s this? she thought. Are these bombs making me ill? In the back of her mind Nicole recalled a similar feeling of nausea fifteen years before, two hours into her flight from Los Angeles to Paris. It can’t be, she told herself. But III check just to be certain…

“That’s the second reason why the three of us cannot all fit in a single pod. Don’t feel bad, Nicole. Even if the physical space could accommodate our bodies and the needed supplies, the velocity change capability of the pod with all that mass is barely enough to close the orbit around the Sun. Our chances of being rescued would be virtually nil.”

“Well,” Nicole replied to Richard, trying to be cheerful, “at least we still have the other option. We can go home in this big vehicle. According to my estimates, we can dump in excess of ten thousand kilograms—”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t matter,” General O’Toole interrupted.