"I don't have to justify my actions," Borzov replied, for the moment enjoying his power over the arrogant American. He leaned forward. "But for the record, and because I antic.i.p.ated this childish outburst of yours, I will tell you why you're not going on the first sortie. There are two major purposes for our first visit: to establish the communications/transportation infrastructure and to complete a detailed survey of the interior, ensuring that this s.p.a.ceship is exactly like the first one-"

"That's already been confirmed by the drones," Brown interrupted. "Not according to Dr. Takagishi," Borzov reb.u.t.ted. "He says that-" "s.h.i.t, General, Takagishi won't be satisfied until every square centimeter of Rama has been shown to be exactly the same as the first ship. You saw the results of the drone survey. Do you have any doubt in your mind-"

David Brown stopped himself in midsentence. General Borzov was drumming on his desk with his fingers and regarding Dr. Brown with a cold stare. "Are you going to let me finish now?" Borzov said at length. He waited a few more seconds. "Whatever you may think," the commander continued, "Dr. Takagishi is considered to be the world expert on the interior of Rama. You cannot argue even for a minute that your knowledge of the details approaches his. I need all five of the s.p.a.ce cadets for the infrastructure work. The two journalists must go inside, not only because there are two separate tasks, but also because world attention is focused on us at this time. Finally, I believe it is important for my subsequent management of this mission that I myself go inside at least once, and I choose to do it now. Since the procedures clearly state that at least three members of the crew must remain outside Rama during the early sorties, it is not difficult to figure out-"

"You don't fool me for a minute," David Brown now interrupted nastily. "I know what this is all about. YouVe concocted an apparently logical excuse to hide the real reason for my exclusion from the first sortie team. You're jealous, Borzov. You can't stand the fact that I am regarded by most people as the real leader of this mission." The commander stared at the scientist for over fifteen seconds without saying anything. "You know, Brown," he said finally, "I feel sorry for you. You are remarkably talented, but your talent is exceeded by your own opinion of it. If you weren't such a-" This time it was Borzov's turn to stop himself in midsentence. He looked away. "Incidentally, since I know that you will go back to your room and immediately whine to the ISA, I should probably tell you that the life science officer's fitness report explicitly recommends against your sharing any mission duties with Wilson-because of the personal animosity that both of you have demonstrated."

Brown's eyes narrowed. "Are you telling me that Nicole des Jardins actually filed an official memorandum citing Wilson and me by name?"

Borzov nodded.

"The b.i.t.c.h," Brown muttered.

"It's always someone else who is at fault, isn't it Dr. Brown?" General Borzov said, smiling at his adversary. David Brown turned around and stalked out of the office. For the banquet, General Borzov ordered a few precious bottles of wine to be opened. The commanding officer was in an excellent mood. Francesca's suggestion had been a good one. There was a definite feeling of camaraderie among the cosmonauts as they brought the small tables together in the control center and anch.o.r.ed them to the floor.

Dr. David Brown did not come to the banquet. He remained in his room while the other eleven crew members feasted on game hens and wild rice. Francesca awkwardly reported that Brown was "feeling under the weather," but when Janos Tabori playfully volunteered to go check the American scientist's health, Francesca hurriedly added that Dr. Brown wanted to be left alone. Janos and Richard Wakefield, both of whom had several gla.s.ses of wine, bantered with Francesca at one end of the table while Reggie Wilson and General O'Toole engaged in an animated discussion about the coming baseball season at the opposite end. Nicole sat between General Borzov and Admiral Heilmann and listened to their reminiscences of peacekeeping activities in the early post-Chaos days. Cosmonauts Turgenyev and Yamanaka were their usual taciturn selves, contributing to the conversation only when asked a direct question.

When the meal was over, Francesca excused herself. She and Dr. Takagishi disappeared for several minutes. When they returned Francesca asked the cosmonauts to turn their chairs to face the large screen. Then, with the lights out, she and Takagishi projected a full exterior view of Rama on the monitor. Except that this was not the dull gray cylinder everyone had seen before. No, this Rama had been cleverly colored, using image processing subroutines, and was now a black cylinder with yellow-gold stripes. The end of the cylinder looked almost like a face. There was a momentary quiet in the room before Francesca began to recite.

"Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

Nicole des Jardins felt a cold chill run up her spine as she listened to Francesca begin the next verse.

"In what distant deeps or skies, Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

That is the real question after all, Nicole was thinking. Who made this gargantuan s.p.a.cecraft? That's much more important for our ultimate destiny than why.

"What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? . . ."

Across the table General O'Toole was also mesmerized by Francesca's recitation. His mind was again struggling with the same fundamental questions that had been bothering him since he originally applied for the mission. Dear G.o.d, he was wondering, how do these Ramans fit into your universe? Did You create them first, before us? Are they our cousins in some sense? Why have You sent them here at this time?

"When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears, Did He smile His work to see, Did He who made the Lamb make thee?"

When Francesca finished the short poem there was a brief silence and then spontaneous applause. She graciously mentioned that Dr. Takagishi had provided all the image processing intelligence and the likable j.a.panese cosmonaut took an embarra.s.sed bow. Then Janos Tabori stood at his chair. "I think I speak for all of us, Shig and Francesca, in congratulating you on that original and thought-provoking performance," he said with a grin. "It almost, but not quite, made me feel serious about what we are doing tomorrow."

"Speaking of which," General Borzov said, rising at the head of the table with his recently opened bottle of Ukrainian vodka, from which he had already taken two strong belts, "it is now time for an ancient Russian tradition-the toasts. I brought along only two bottles of this national treasure and I propose to share them both with you, my comrades and colleagues, on this very special evening."

He placed both bottles in General O'Toole's hands and the American adroitly used the liquid dispenser to channel the vodka into small covered cups that were pa.s.sed around the table. "As Irina Turgenyev knows/' the commander continued, "there is always a small worm in the bottom of a bottle of Ukrainian vodka. Legend has it that he who eats the worm will be endowed with special powers for twentyfour hours. Admiral Heilmann has marked two of the cup bottoms with an infrared cross. The two people who drink from the marked cups will each be allowed to eat one of the vodka-saturated worms."

"Yuch," said Janos a moment later, as he pa.s.sed the infrared scanner to Nicole. He had first verified that he had no cross on the bottom of his cup. "This is one contest I am glad to lose."

Nicole's cup did have a marking on the bottom. She was one of the two lucky cosmonauts who would be able to eat a Ukrainian worm for dessert. She found herself wondering, Must I do this? and then answering her own question affirmatively as she saw the earnest look on her commanding officer's face. Oh well, she thought, it probably won't kill me. Any parasites have probably been rendered harmless by the alcohol.

General Borzov himself had the second cup with a cross on the bottom. The general smiled, placed one of the two tiny worms in his own cup (and the other in Nicole's), and raised his vodka toward the ceiling of the s.p.a.cecraft.

"Let us all drink to a successful mission," he said. "For each of us, these next few days and weeks will be the greatest adventure of our lives. In a real sense, we dozen are human amba.s.sadors to an alien culture. Let us each resolve to do our best to properly represent our species."

He took the cover off his cup, being careful not to jiggle it, and then drank it all in one gulp. He swallowed the worm whole. Nicole also swallowed the worm quickly, commenting to herself that the only thing she had ever eaten that tasted worse than the worm was that awful tuber during her Poro ceremony in the Ivory Coast.

After several more short toasts the lights in the room began to dim. "And now," General Borzov announced with a grand gesture, "direct from Stratford, the Newton proudly presents Richard Wakefield and his talented robots." The room became dark except for a square meter to the left of the table that was spotlit from above. In the middle of the light was a cutaway of an old castle. A female robot, twenty centimeters high and dressed in a robe, was walking around in one of the rooms. She was reading a letter at the beginning of the scene. After a few steps, however, she dropped her hands to her sides and began to speak.

"Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature: It is too full o'th'milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great .

"I know that woman," Janos said with a grin to Nicole. "1 have met her somewhere before."

"Shh," replied Nicole. She was fascinated by the precision in the movements of Lady Macbeth. That Wakefield really is a genius, she was thinking. How is he able to design such extraordinary detail into those little things? Nicole was astonished by the range of expressions on the robot's face. As she concentrated, the tiny stage began to swim in Nicole's mind. She momentarily forgot she was watching robots in a miniature performance. A messenger came in and told Lady Macbeth both that her husband was drawing near and that King Duncan would be spending the night in their castle. Nicole watched Lady Macbeth's face explode with ambitious antic.i.p.ation as soon as the messenger had departed.

". . . Come you Spirits That tend on mortal thoughts. Uns.e.x me here And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood . . ."

My G.o.d, Nicole thought, blinking her eyes to make certain they were not playing tricks on her, she's changing! Indeed she was. As the words "Uns.e.x me here" came from the robot, her (or its) shape began to change. The impression of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the metal gown, the roundness of the hips, even the softness of the face all disappeared. An androgynous robot played on as Lady Macbeth.

Nicole was spellbound and floating in a fantasy induced both by her wild imagination and the sudden intake of alcohol. The new face on the robot was vaguely reminiscent of someone she knew. She heard a disturbance to her right and turned to see Reggie Wilson talking avidly with Franceses. Nicole glanced back and forth quickly from Francesca to Lady Macbeth. That's it, she said to herself. This new Lady Macbeth resembles Francesca.

A burst of fear, a premonition of tragedy, suddenly overwhelmed Nicole and plunged her into terror. Something terrible is going to happen, her mind was saying. She took several deep breaths and tried to calm herself but the eerie feeling would not go away. On the little stage King Duncan had just been greeted by his gracious hostess for the evening. To her left Nicole saw Francesca offer General Borzov the last sips of the wine. Nicole could not quell her panic.

"Nicole, what's the matter?" Janos asked. He could tell she was distressed.

"Nothing," she said. She gathered all her strength and rose to her feet. "Something I ate must have disagreed with me. I think I'll go to my room."

"But you'll miss the movie after dinner," Janos said humorously. Nicole forced a pained smile. He helped her stand up. Nicole heard Lady Macbeth berating her husband for his lack of courage and one more wave of premonitory fear surged through her. She waited until the adrenaline burst had subsided and then excused herself quietly from the group. She walked slowly back to her room.

17 DEATH OF A SOLDIER.

In her dream Nicole was ten years old again and playing in the woods behind her home in the Paris suburb of ChillyMazarin. She had a sudden feeling that her mother was dying. The little girl panicked. She ran toward the house to tell her father. A small snarling cat blocked her path. Nicole stopped, She heard a scream. She left the path and went through the trees. The branches sc.r.a.ped her skin. The cat followed her. Nicole heard another scream. When she awakened a frightened Janos Tabori was standing over her.

"It's General Borzov," Janos said. "He's in excruciating pain."

Nicole jumped swiftly out of bed, threw her robe around her, grabbed her portable medical kit, and followed Janos into the corridor, "It looks like an appendicitis," he mentioned as they hurried into the lobby, "But I'm not certain." Irina Turgenyev was kneeling beside the commander and holding his hand. The general himself was stretched out on a couch. His face was white and there was sweat on his brow. "Ah, Dr. des Jardins has arrived." He managed a smile. Borzov then tried to sit up, winced from the pain, and let himself lie back down. "Nicole," he said quietly, "I am in agony. I've never felt anything like this in my life, not even when I was wounded in the army."

"How long ago did it start?" she asked. Nicole had pulled out her scanner and biometry monitor to check all his vital statistics. Meanwhile Francesca and her video camera had moved over right behind Nicole's shoulder to film the doctor performing the diagnosis. Nicole impatiently motioned for her to back away.

"Maybe two or three minutes ago," General Borzov said with effort. "I was sitting here in a chair watching the movie, laughing heartily as I recall, when there was an intense, sharp pain, here on my lower right side. It felt as if something were burning me from the inside."

Nicole programmed the scanner to search through the last three minutes of detailed data recorded by the Hakamatsu probes inside Borzov. She located the onset of the pain, easily identifiable in terms of both heart rate and endocrine secretions. She next requested a full dump over the time period of interest from all channels. "Janos," she then said to her colleague, "go over to the supply room and bring me the portable diagnostician." She handed Tabori the code card for the door.

"You have a slight fever, suggesting your body is fighting some infection," Nicole told General Borzov. "All the internal data confirms that you are feeling severe pain." Cosmonaut Tabori returned with a small electronic array shaped like a box. Nicole extracted a small data cube from the scanner and inserted it into the diagnostician. In about thirty seconds the little monitor blinked and the words 94% LIKELY APPENDICITIS appeared. Nicole pressed a key and the screen displayed the other possible diagnoses, including hernia, internal muscle tear, and drug reaction. None were, according to the diagnostician, more than 2 percent probable.

I have two choices at this juncture, Nicole was thinking rapidly as General Borzov winced again from the pain. I can send all the data down to Earth for a complete diagnostic, per the procedure . . . She glanced at her watch and quickly computed twice the round-trip light time plus the minimum duration of a physician's conference after the electronic diagnosis was completely which time it might be too late.

"What does it say, Doctor?" the general was asking. His eyes were entreating her to end the pain as quickly as possible.

"Most likely diagnosis is appendicitis," Nicole answered.

"Dammit," General Borzov responded. He looked around at all the others. Everyone was there except Wilson and Takagishi, both of whom had skipped the movie. "But I won't make the project wait. We'll go ahead with the first and second sorties while I'm recuperating." Another sharp pain jolted him and his face contorted, "Whoa," said Nicole. "It's not certain yet. We need a little more data first." She repeated the earlier data dump, now using the extra two minutes of information that had been recorded since she arrived in the lobby. This time the diagnosis read 92% LIKELY APPENDICITIS. Nicole was about to routinely check the alternative diagnoses when she felt the commander's strong hand on her arm.

"If we do this quickly, before too much poison builds up in my system, then this is a straightforward operation for the robot surgeon, isn't it?"

Nicole nodded.

"And if we spend the time to obtain a diagnostic concurrence from the Earth-ouch-then my body may be in deeper trauma?"

He is reading my mind, Nicole thought at first. Then she realized that the general was only displaying his thorough knowledge of the Newton procedures.

"Is the patient trying to give the doctor a suggestion?" Nicole asked, smiling despite Borzov's obvious pain.

"I wouldn't be that presumptuous," the commander answered with just a trace of a twinkle in his eye. Nicole glanced back at the monitor. It was still blinking 92% LIKELY APPENDICITIS. "Do you have anything to add?" she said to Janos Tabori.

"Only that I have seen an appendicitis before," the little Hungarian answered, "once, when I was a student, in Budapest. The symptoms were exactly like this."

"All right," Nicole said. "Go prepare RoSur for the operation. Admiral Heilmann, will you and cosmonaut Yamanaka help General Borzov to the infirmary please?" She turned around to Francesca. "I recognize that this is big news. I will allow you in the operating room on three conditions. You will scrub like all the surgical staff. You will stand quietly over against the wall with your camera, And you will absolutely obey any order that I give you."

"Good enough," Francesca nodded. "Thank you." Irina Turgenyev and General O'Toole were still waiting in the lobby after Borzov left with Heilmann and Yamanaka. "I'm certain that I speak for both of us," the American said in his usual sincere manner. "Can we help in any way?"

"Janos will a.s.sist me while RoSur performs the operation. But 1 could use one more pair of hands, as an emergency backup."

"I would like to do that," O'Toole said. "I have some hospital experience from my charity work."

"Fine," replied Nicole. "Now come with me to clean up." RoSur, the portable robot surgeon that had been brought along on the Newton mission for just this kind of situation, was not in the same cla.s.s, in terms of medical sophistication, as the fully autonomous operating rooms at the advanced hospitals on Earth. But RoSur was a technological marvel in its own right. It could be packed in a small suitcase and weighed only four kilograms. Its power requirements were low. And there were more than a hundred configurations in which it could be used.

Janos Tabori unpacked RoSur. The electronic surgeon didn't look like much in its stowed configuration. All of its spindly joints and appendages were neatly arranged for easy storage. After Janos rechecked his RoSur User's Guide, he picked up the central control box of the robot surgeon and affixed it, as suggested, to the side of the infirmary bed where General Borzov was already lying. His pain had only subsided a little. The impatient commander was urging everyone to hurry.

Janos entered the code word identifying the operation. RoSur automatically deployed all its limbs, including its extraordinary scalpel/hand with four fingers, in the configuration needed to remove an appendix. Nicole then entered the room, her hands in gloves and her body covered with the white gown of the surgeon.

"Have you finished the software check?" she said. Janos nodded his head.

"I'll complete all the preoperation tests while you scrub," she said to him. She motioned for Francesca and General O'Toole, both of whom were standing right outside the door, to enter the small room. "Any better?" she said to Borzov.

"Not much," he grumbled.

"That was a light sedative I administered. RoSur will give you the full anesthetic as the first step in the operation." Nicole had done all her memory refreshing in her room while she was dressing. She knew this operation inside out; it had been one of the surgical procedures they had performed during the test simulations. She entered Borzov's personal data file into RoSur, hooked up the electronic lines that would bring patient monitor information to RoSur during the appendectomy, and verified that all the software had pa.s.sed self-test. As her last check, Nicole carefully tuned the pair of tiny stereo cameras that worked in concert with the surgical hand.

Janos came back into the room. Nicole pressed a b.u.t.ton on the robot surgeon's control box and two hard copies of the operations sequence were quickly printed. Nicole took one and handed the other to Janos. "Is everyone ready?" she asked, her eyes on General Borzov. The commanding officer of the Newton moved his head up and down. Nicole activated RoSur.

One of the robot surgeon's four hands gunned an anesthetic into the patient and in one minute Borzov was unconscious. As Francesca's camera recorded every move of this historic operation (she was whispering occasional comments into her ultrasensitive microphone), the scalpel hand of RoSur., aided by its twin eyes, made the incisions necessary to isolate the suspect organ. No human surgeon had ever been so swift or deft. Armed with a battery of sensors checking hundreds of parameters every microsecond, RoSur had folded back all the requisite tissue and laid the appendix bare within two minutes. Programmed into the automatic sequence was a thirty-second inspection time before the robot surgeon would continue with the removal of the organ.

Nicole bent over the patient to check the exposed appendix. It was neither swollen nor inflamed. "Look at this, quick, Janos/' she said, her eye on the digital clock counting down the inspection period. "It looks perfectly healthy." Janos leaned over from the opposite side of the operating table. My G.o.d, Nicole thought, we're going to remove . . . The digital clock read 00:08. "Stop it," she shouted. "Stop the operation." Nicole and Janos both reached for the robot surgeon control box at the same time.

At that instant the entire Newton s.p.a.cecraft lurched sideways. Nicole was thrown backward, against the wall. Janos fell forward, smacking his head against the operating table. His outstretched fingers landed on the control box and then slowly released as he slumped to the floor. General O'Toole and Franceses were both thrown against the far wall. A beep, beep from one of the inserted Hakamatsu probes indicated that someone in the room was in serious trouble physically. Nicole checked briefly to see that O'Toole and Sabatini were all right and then struggled against the continuing torque to regain her position next to the operating table. With great effort she pulled herself across the room on the floor, using the anch.o.r.ed legs of the table. When she was beside the table she steadied herself, still holding on to the legs, and stood up.

Blood spattered Nicole as her head crossed the plane of the operating table. She stared with disbelief at Borzov's body. The entire incision was full of blood and RoSur's scalpel/hand was buried inside, apparently still cutting away. It was Borzov's probe set that was going beep, beep, despite the fact that Nicole had inserted, by command, significantly wider emergency values just before the operation.

A wave of fear and nausea swept through Nicole as she realized that the robot had not aborted its surgical activities. Holding on tight against the powerful force trying to push her against the wall again, she somehow managed to reach over to the control box and switch off the power. The scalpel withdrew from the pool of blood and restowed itself against a stanchion, Nicole then tried to stop the ma.s.sive hemorrhaging.

Thirty seconds later the unexplained force vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. General O'Toole clambered to his feet and came over beside the now desperate Nicole. The scalpel had done too much damage. The commander was bleeding to death before her eyes. "Oh, no. Oh, G.o.d/'

O'Toole said as he surveyed the wreckage of his friend's body. The insistent beep, beep continued. Now the life system alarms around the table sounded as well. Francesca recovered in time to record the final ten seconds of Valeriy Borzov's life.

It was a very long night for the entire Newton crew. In the two hours immediately after the operation, Rama went through a sequence of three more maneuvers, each, like the first one, lasting one or two minutes. The Earth eventually confirmed that the combined maneuvers had changed the att.i.tude, spin rate, and trajectory of the alien s.p.a.ceship. n.o.body could ascertain the exact purpose of the set of maneuvers; they were just "orientation changes," according to the Earth scientists, that had altered the inclination and line of apsides of the Rama orbit. However, the energy of the trajectory had not been changed significantly-Rama was still on a hyperbolic escape path with respect to the Sun. Everyone onboard the Newton and on Earth was stunned by the sudden death of General Borzov. He was eulogized by the press of all nations and his many accomplishments were lauded by his peers and a.s.sociates. His death was reported as an accident, attributed to the untimely motion of the Rama s.p.a.cecraft that had taken place during the middle of a routine appendectomy. But within eight hours after his death, knowledgeable people everywhere were asking tough questions. Why had the Rama s.p.a.cecraft moved at exactly that time? Why had RoSur's fault protection system failed to stop the operation? Why were the human medical officers presiding over the procedure not able to switch off the power before it was too late?

Nicole des Jardins was asking herself the same questions. She had already completed the doc.u.ments required when a death occurs in s.p.a.ce and had sealed Borzov's body in the vacuum coffin at the back of the military ship's huge supply depot. She had quickly prepared and filed her report on the incident; O'Toole, Sabatini, and Tabori had all done the same. There was only one significant omission in the reports. Janos failed to mention that he had reached for the control box during the Raman maneuver. At the time Nicole did not think his omission was important.

The required teleconferences with ISA officials were extremely painful. Nicole was the person who bore the brunt of all the inane and repet.i.tious questioning. She had to reach deep inside herself for extra reserves to keep from losing her temper several times. Nicole had expected that Francesca might hint at incompetence on the part of the Newton medical staff in her teleconference, but the Italian journalist was evenhanded and fair in her reportage. After a short interview with Francesca, in which Nicole discussed how horrified she had been at the moment she had first seen Borzov's incision filled with blood, the life science officer retired to her room, ostensibly to rest and/or sleep. But Nicole did not allow herself the luxury of resting. Over and over she reviewed the critical seconds of the operation. Could she have done anything to change the outcome? What could possibly explain RoSur's failure to stop itself automatically?

In Nicole's mind there was little or no probability that RoSur's fault protection algorithms had a design flaw; they wouldn't have pa.s.sed all the rigorous prelaunch testing if they contained errors. So somewhere there must have been a human error, either negligence (had she and Janos, in their haste, forgotten to initialize some key fault protection parameter?) or an accident during those chaotic seconds following the unexpected torque. Her fruitless searching for an explanation and her almost total fatigue made her extremely depressed when she finally fell asleep. To her, one part of the equation was very clear. A man had died and she had been responsible.

18 POSTMORTEM.

As expected, the day after General Borzov's death was full of turmoil. The ISA investigation into the incident expanded and most of the cosmonauts were subjected to another long cross-examination. Nicole was interrogated about her sobriety at the time of the operation. Some of the questions were ugly and Nicole, who was trying to husband her energy for her own investigation of the events surrounding the tragedy, lost her patience twice with the interrogators.

"Look," she exclaimed at one point, "I have now explained four times that I had two gla.s.ses of wine and one gla.s.s of vodka three hours before the operation. I have admitted that I would not have drunk any alcohol prior to surgery, // I had known that I was going to operate. I have even acknowledged, in retrospect, that perhaps one of the two life science officers should have remained completely sober, But that's all hindsight. I repeat what I said earlier. Neither my judgment nor my physical abilities was in any way impaired by alcohol at the time of the operation," Back in her room, Nicole focused her attention on the issue of why the robot surgeon proceeded with the operation when its own internal fault protection should have aborted all activities. Based on the RoSur User's Guide, it was evident that at least two separate sensor systems should have sent error messages to the central processor in the robot surgeon. The acoel-erometer package should have informed the processor that tbe environmental conditions were outside acceptable limits because of the untoward lateral force. And the stereo cameras should have transmitted a message indicating that the observed images were at variance with the predicted images. But for some reason neither sensor set was successful in interrupting the ongoing operation. What had happened?

It took Nicole almost 6ve hours to rule out the possibility of a major error, either software or hardware, in the RoSur system itself. She verified that the loaded software and data base had been correct by doing a code comparison with tbe benchmark standard version of the software tested extensively during prelaunch. She also isolated the stereo imaging and accelerometer telemetry from tbe few seconds right after the s.p.a.cecraft lurched. These data were properly transmitted to the central processor and should have resulted in an aborted sequence. But they didn't. Why not?

The only possible explanation was that the software had been changed by manual command between the time of loading and the performance of the appendectomy.

Nicole was now out of her league. Her software and system engineering knowledge had been stretched to the limit in satisfying herself that there had been no error in the loaded software. To determine whether and when commands might have changed the code or parameters after they were installed in RoSur required someone who could read machine language and carefully interrogate tbe billions of bits of data that had been stored during the entire procedure. Nicole's investigation was stalled until she could find someone to help her. Maybe I should give this up? a voice inside her said. How could you, another voice replied, until you know for certain the cause of General Borzov's death? At the root of Nicole's desire to know the answer was a desperate yearning to prove for certain that his death had not been her fault.

She turned away from her terminal and collapsed on her bed. As she was lying there, she remembered her surprise during the thirty-second inspection period when Borzov's appendix had been in plain view, He definitely wasn 't having an appendicitis, she thought. Without having any particular motive, Nicole returned to her terminal and accessed the second set of data that she had had evaluated by the electronic diagnostician, just prior to her decision to operate. She glanced only briefly at the 92% LIKELY APPENDICITIS on tbe first screen, moving instead to the backup diagnoses. This time DRUG REACTION was listed as the second most likely cause, with a 4 percent probability. Nicole now called for the data to be displayed in another way. She asked a statistical routine to compute the likely cause of the symptoms, given the fact that it could not be an appendicitis.

The results flashed up on the monitor in seconds. Nicole was astonished. According to the data, if the biometry information input from Borzov's probe set was a.n.a.lyzed under the a.s.sumption that the cause for the abnormalities could not be an appendicitis, then there was a 62 percent chance that it was due to a drug reaction. Before Nicole was able to complete any more a.n.a.lysis, there was a knock on her door.

"Come in," she said, continuing to work at her terminal. Nicole turned and saw Irina Turgenyev standing in the doorway. The Soviet pilot said nothing for a moment.

"They asked me to come for you," Irina said haltingly. She was very shy around everyone except her countrymen Tabori and Borzov. "We're having a meeting of the crew down in the lobby."

Nicole saved her temporary data files and joined Irina in the corridor. "What sort of meeting is it?" she asked.

"An organizational meeting," Irina answered. She said nothing more.

There was a heated exchange in process between Reggie Wilson and David Brown when the two women reached the lobby. "Am I to understand, then," Dr. Brown was saying sarcastically, "that you believe the Rama s.p.a.cecraft purposely decided to maneuver at precisely that moment?

Would you like to explain to all of us how this asteroid of dumb metal happened to know that General Borzov was having an appendectomy at that very minute? And while you're at it, will you explain why this supposedly malevolent s.p.a.ceship has allowed us to attach ourselves and has done nothing to dissuade us from continuing our mission?" Reggie Wilson glanced around the room for support. "You're logic-chopping again, Brown," he said, his frustration obvious. "What you say always sounds logical on the surface. But I'm not the only member of this crew that found the coincidence unnerving. Look, here's Irina Turgenyev. She's the one who suggested the connection to me in the first place."

Dr. Brown acknowledged the arrival of the two women. There was an authority in the way he was asking the questions that suggested he was in control of the gathering.

"Is that right, Irina?" David Brown asked. "Do you feel, like Wilson, that Rama was trying to send us some specific message by performing its maneuver during the general's operation?"

Irina and Hiro Yamanaka were the two cosmonauts who spoke the least during crew meetings. With all eyes turned toward her, Irina mumbled "No" very meekly.

"But when we were discussing it last night-" Wilson insisted to the Soviet pilot.

"That's enough on that subject," David Brown interrupted imperiously. "I think we have a consensus, shared by our mission control officers on Earth, that the Raman maneuver was coincidence and not conspiracy." He looked at the fuming Reggie Wilson. "Now we have other more important issues to discuss. I would like to ask Admiral Heilmann to tell us what he has learned about the leadership problem." Otto Heilmann stood up on cue and read from his notes.

"According to the Newton procedures, in the event of the death or the incapacity of the commanding officer, the crew is expected to complete all sequences then under way in accordance with previous directions. However, once those in-process activities are finished, the cosmonauts are supposed to wait for the Earth to name a new commanding officer."

David Brown jumped back into the conversation. "Admiral Heilmann and I started discussing our situation about an hour ago and we quickly realized that we had valid reasons for being concerned. The ISA is wrapped up in their investigation of General Borzov's death. They have not even begun to think about his replacement. Once they do start, it may take them weeks to decide. Remember, this is the same bureaucracy that was never able to select a deputy for Borzov, so they eventually decided that he didn't need one." He paused several seconds to allow the rest of the crew members to consider what he was saying.