Even after dark he did not rest. Nicole slept the first part of the fifteen-hour night. When she awoke after five hours, Richard was still working feverishly on his project. He didn’t even hear Nicole clear her throat. She arose quietly and put her hands on his shoulders. “You must get some sleep, Richard,” she said quietly,

“I’m almost there,” he said. She saw the bags under his eyes when he turned around. “No more than another hour.”

Nicole returned to her mat. When Richard awakened her later, he was full of enthusiasm. “Wouldn’t you know it?” he said with a grin. “There are three possible solutions, each of which is consistent with all the patterns.” He paced for almost a minute. “Could we go look now?” he then said pleadingly. “I don’t think I can sleep until I find out.”

None of Richard’s three solutions for the location of the third lair was close to the plaza. The nearest one was over a kilometer away, at the edge of New York opposite the Northern Hemicylinder. He and Nicole found noth­ing there. They then marched another fifteen minutes in the dark to the second possible location, a spot very near the southeast comer of the city. Richard and Nicole walked down the indicated street and found the cover­ing in the exact spot that Richard had predicted. “Hallelujah,” he shouted, spreading out his sleeping mat beside the cover. “Hooray for mathematics.”

Hooray for Omeh, Nicole thought. She was no longer sleepy but she wasn’t anxious to explore any new territory in the dark. What comes first, she asked herself after they had returned to camp and she was lying awake on her mat, intuition or mathematics? Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it?

They were both up at daylight. “The days are still growing slightly shorter,” Richard mentioned to Nicole. “But the sum of daytime and nighttime is remaining constant at forty-six hours, four minutes, and fourteen seconds.”

“How long before we reach the Earth?” Nicole inquired as she was stuff­ing her sleeping mat into its protective package.

’Twenty Earth days and three hours,” he replied after consulting his computer. “Are you ready for another adventure?”

She nodded. “I presume you also know where to find the panel that opens this cover?”

“No, but I bet it’s not hard to find,” he said confidently. “And after we find this one, the avian lair opening will be duck soup because we’ll have the whole pattern.”

Ten minutes later Richard pushed on a metal plate and the third covering swung open. The descent into this third hole was down a wide staircase broken by occasional landings. Richard took Nicole’s hand as they walked down the stairs. They used their flashlights to find their way, as no lights illuminated their descent.

The water room was in the same place as in the other underground lairs. There were no sounds in the horizontal tunnels that led off from the central stairway at either of the two main levels. “I don’t think anyone lives here,” Richard said.

“At least not yet,” Nicole answered.

48

WELCOME EARTHLINGS

Richard was puzzled. In the first room off one of the top horizontal tunnels he had found an array of strange gadgets that he had decoded in less than an hour. He now knew how to regulate the lights and temperature throughout each particular portion of the underground lair. But if it was that easy, and all the lairs were similarly constructed, why did the avians not use the lights that had been provided? While they were eating breakfast Richard quizzed Nicole about the details of the avian lair.

“You’re overlooking more fundamental issues!” Nicole said, as she took a bite of manna melon. “The avians aren’t that important by themselves. The real question is, where are the Ramans? And why did they put these holes under New York in the first place?”

“Maybe they’re all Ramans,” Richard replied. “The biots, the avians, the octospiders — maybe they all came originally from the same planet. At the beginning they were all one happy family. But as the years and generations passed, different species evolved in separate ways. Individual lairs were con­structed and the—”

“There are too many problems with that scenario,” Nicole interrupted. “First, the biots are definitely machines. The avians may or may not be. The octospiders almost certainly aren’t, although a technological level that could create this spaceship in the first place might have progressed further in artificial intelligence than we can possibly imagine. My intuitive sense, how­ever, says that those things are organic.”

“We humans would never be able to distinguish between a living creature and a versatile machine created by a truly advanced species.”

“I agree with that. But we can’t possibly resolve this argument by our­selves. Besides, there is another question that f want to discuss with you.”

“What’s that?” Richard asked.

“Did the avians and the octospiders and these underground regions exist also on Rama I? If so, how did the Norton crew miss them altogether? If not, why are they on this spacecraft and not the first one?”

Richard was quiet for several seconds. “I see where you’re heading,” he said finally. “The fundamental premise has always been that the Rama spacecraft were created millions of years ago, by unknown beings from an­other region of the galaxy, and that they were totally uninvolved with and disinterested in whatever they encountered during their trek. If they were created that long ago, why would two vehicles that were presumably built at virtually the same time have such striking differences?”

“I’m starting to believe that our colleague from Kyoto was right,” Nicole answered. “Maybe there is a meaningful pattern to all this. I’m fairly confi­dent that the Norton crew was thorough and accurate in its survey and that all the distinctions between Rama I and Rama II are indeed real. As soon as we acknowledge that the two spacecraft are different, we face a more diffi­cult issue. Why are they different?”

Richard had finished eating and was now pacing in the dimly lit tunnel. “There was a discussion just like this before it was decided to abort the mission. At the teleconference the main question was, why did the Ramans change course to encounter the Earth? Since the first spacecraft had not done so, it was considered hard evidence that Rama II was different. And the people participating in that meeting knew nothing of the avians or octospiders!’

“General Borzov would have loved the avians,” Nicole commented after a short silence. “He thought that flying was the greatest pleasure in the world.” She laughed. “He once told me that his secret hope in life was that reincarnation was on the level and that he would come back as a bird.”

“He was a fine man,” Richard said, stopping his pacing momentarily. “I don’t think we ever properly appreciated all his talents.”

As Nicole replaced part of the manna melon in her backpack and prepared to continue the exploration, she smiled at her peripatetic friend. “One more question, Richard?”

He nodded.

“Do you think we’ve met any Ramans yet? By that I mean the creatures who made this vehicle. Or any of their descendants.”

Richard shook his head vigorously. “Absolutely not!” he said. “Maybe we’ve met some of their creations. Or even other species from the same planet. But we haven’t seen the main characters yet.”

They found the White Room off to the left of a horizontal tunnel at the second level below the surface. Until then the exploration had been almost boring. Richard and Nicole had walked down many tunnels and had peered into one empty room after another. Four times they had found a set of gadgets for regulating the lights and temperature. Until they reached the White Room, they had seen nothing else of interest.