23

NIGHTFALL

Considering the regular abuse that he received from his neurotic rather and the emotional scars that must remain from his youthful marriage to British actress Sarah Tydings, Cosmonaut Wakefield is remarkably well adjusted. He underwent two years of professional therapy after his celebrated divorce, concluding a year before he entered the Space Academy in 2192. His scholastic record at the academy is still unequaled to this day; his professors in electrical engineering and computer sciences all insist that by the time of his graduation, Wakefield knew more than any member of the faculty…

“…Except for a wariness where intimacy is concerned (particularly with women — he has apparently had no sustained emotional involvements since the breakup of his marriage), Wakefield exhibits none of the antisocial behavior usually found in abused children. Although his SC was low as a youth, he has grown less arrogant as he has matured and is now less likely to force his brilliance upon others. His honesty and character are unassailable. Knowledge, not power or money, seems to be his goal…”

Nicole finished reading the Psychological Assessment for Richard Wake-field and rubbed her eyes. It was very late. She had been studying the dossiers ever since the crew inside Rama had settled down to sleep. They would be awakening for their second day in that strange world in less than two hours. Her six-hour shift as communications officer would start in an­other thirty minutes. So out of this entire bunch, Nicole was thinking, there are only three that are beyond question. Those four with their illegal media contract have already compromised themselves. Yamanaka and Turgenyev are unknowns. Wilson is marginally stable and has his own agenda anyway. That leaves O’Toole, Takagishi, and Wakefield.

Nicole washed her face and hands and sat down again at the terminal. She exited from the Wakefield dossier and returned to the main menu of the data cube. She scanned the comparative statistics available and keyed a pair of displays to appear side by side on the screen. On the left-hand side was the ordered set of IE scores for each member of the crew; opposite, for comparison, Nicole had displayed the SC indices for the Newton dozen.

IE

SC

Wakefield

+ 5.58

O’Toole

86

Sabatini

+4.22

Borzov

84

Brown

+4.17

Takagishi

82

Takagishi

+4.02

Wilson

78

Tabori

+3.37

des Jardins

71

Borzov

+ 3.28

Heilmann

68

Des Jardins

+ 3.04

Tabori

64

O’Toole

+2.92

Yamanaka

62

Turgenyev

+ 2.87

Turgenyev

60

Yamanaka

+ 2.66

Wakefield

58

Wilson

+2.48

Sabatini

56

Heilmann

+2.24

Brown

49

Although Nicole had very quickly glanced through most of the informa­tion in the dossiers earlier, she had not read all the charts on all the crew members. Some of the indices she now saw for the first time. She was particularly surprised by the very high intelligence rating for Francesca Sabatini. What a waste, Nicole thought immediately. All that potential being used for such ordinary pursuits.

The overall intelligence level of the crew was quite impressive. Every cosmonaut was in the top one percent of the population. Nicole was “one in a thousand” and she was only in the middle of the dozen. Wakefield’s intelli­gence rating was truly exceptional and placed him in the supergenius cate­gory; Nicole had never before personally known someone with such high scores on the standardized tests.

Although her training in psychiatry had taught her to distrust attempts to quantify personality traits, Nicole was intrigued by the SC indices as well. She herself would have intuitively placed O’Toole, Borzov, and Takagishi at the top of the list. All three men seemed confident, balanced, and sensitive to others. But she was astonished by Wilson’s high socialization coefficient. He must have been an altogether different person before he became involved with Francesca. Nicole wondered for a brief moment why her own SC index was no higher than a seventy-one; then she remembered that as a young woman she had been more withdrawn and self-centered.

5o what about Wakefield? she asked herself, realizing that he was the only viable candidate to help her understand what had happened inside the RoSur software during Borzov’s operation. Could she trust him? And could she enlist Richard’s help without revealing some of her farfetched suspi­cions? Again the thought of abandoning her investigation altogether seemed very appealing. Nicole, she said to herself, if this conspiracy idea of yours turns out to be a waste of time…

But Nicole was convinced that there were enough unanswered questions to warrant continuing her investigation. She resolved to talk to Wakefield. After determining that she could add her own files to the king’s data cube, she created a new file, a nineteenth file, simply called nicole. She called in her word processing subroutine and wrote a brief memorandum:

3-3-00 — Have determined for certain that RoSur malfunction during Borzov pro­cedure due to external manual command after initial load and verification. Enlist­ing Wakefield for support.

Nicole pulled a blank data cube from the supply drawer adjacent to her computer. She copied onto it both her memorandum and all the information stored on the cube that she had been given by King Henry. When she dressed for her work shift in her flight suit, she put the duplicate cube in her pocket.

General O’Toole was dozing in the CCC (Command and Control Com­plex) of the military spacecraft when Nicole arrived to give him a break. Although the visual displays in this smaller vehicle were not quite as breathtaking as those in the scientific ship, the layout of the military “C-Cubed” as a communications center was far superior, especially from a human engineer­ing point of view. All the controls could easily be handled by a single cosmonaut.

O’Toole apologized for not being awake. He pointed to the three monitors that showed three different views of the same scene — the rest of the crew fast asleep inside the crude campsite at the foot of Alpha stairway. “This last five hours has not been what you would call exciting,” he said.

Nicole smiled. “General, you don’t need to apologize to me. I know you’ve been on duty for almost twenty-four hours.”

General O’Toole stood up. “After you left,” he summarized, checking his electronic log on one of the six monitors in front of him, “they finished dinner and then they started the assembly of the first rover. The automatic navigation program failed its self-test, but Wakefield found the problem — a software bug in one of the subroutines that was changed in the last delivery — and fixed it. Tabori took the rover for a test drive before the crew prepared for sleep. At the end of the day Francesca did a stirring short piece for transmission to the Earth.” He paused for a moment. “Would you like to see it?”

Nicole nodded. O’Toole activated the far right television monitor and Francesca appeared in a close-up outside the enclosed campsite. The frame showed a portion of the bottom of the stairway and the equipment for the chairlift as well. “It is time to sleep in Rama,” she intoned. She looked up and around her. “The lights in this amazing world came on unexpectedly about nine hours ago, showing us in more detail the elaborate handiwork of our intelligent cousins from across the stars.” A montage of still photographs and short videos, some taken by the drones and some taken by Francesca herself on that day, punctuated her tour of the artificial “worldlet” that the crew was “about to explore.” At the end of the brief segment the camera was again fixed on Francesca.