Richard nodded and pushed open the small door. Nicole bent down and entered the building. Surrounding them was a large room, well lit, perhaps a thousand cubic meters altogether, with a ceiling five meters above the floor. Their walkway was elevated above the floor by two or three meters, so Richard and Nicole could watch most of the activities taking place below them. Biot robot workers they had never seen before, each designed for a specialized task, were unloading the two barges in the room and separating the cargo according to some predefined plan. Many of the individual pieces from the stacks were loaded onto truck biots, which disappeared through one of the back doors once they were full.
After a few minutes of observation, Richard and Nicole continued along the walkway to where it intersected another path just above the center of the room. Richard stopped and made some notes in his computer. “I presume this layout is as simple as it looks,” he said to Nicole. “We can go either left or right-each way we go into another wing of the pentagon.”
Nicole chose the right walkway because the truck biots that she had thought were carrying parts for the centipede biot had gone in that direction. Her observations had been accurate. Soon after Richard and Nicole entered the second room, which was exactly the same size as the first, they realized that both a centipede and a crab biot were being manufactured on the floor below them. Richard and Nicole stopped to watch the process for several minutes.
“Absolutely fascinating,” Richard said, finishing his computer diagram of the biot factory. “Are you ready to go?”
As Richard turned to face Nicole, she saw his eyes widen. “Don’t look now,” he said quietly a second later, “but we have company.”
Nicole wheeled around and looked behind her. Across the room, forty meters behind them on the walkway, a pair of octospiders was slowly approaching them. Richard and Nicole had not heard their distinguishing sound, similar to dragging metallic brushes, because of the noise from the biot factory.
The octospiders stopped when they realized that the humans had noticed them. Nicole’s heart was pumping furiously. She remembered clearly her last encounter with an octospider, when she had rescued Katie from the octo lair in Rama II. Then, as now, her overwhelming impulse had been to run.
She grabbed Richard’s hand as they both stared at the aliens. “Let’s go,” Nicole said under her breath.
“I’m as scared as you are,” he replied, “but let’s not leave just yet. They aren’t moving. I want to see what they are going to do.”
Richard concentrated on the lead octospider and drew a careful picture in his mind. Its nearly spherical main body was charcoal gray, with a diameter of about a meter, and was featureless except for a vertical slit twenty or twenty-five centimeters wide that ran from the top to the bottom, where the body broke into the eight black and gold tentacles, each two meters long, that spread out across the floor. Inside the vertical slit were many unknown knobs and wrinkles-Almost certainly sensors, Richard thought-the largest of which was a big rectangular lens structure containing some kind of fluid.
As the two pairs of beings gazed at each other across the room, a broad band of bright purple coloring swept around the “head” of the lead octospider. This band originated on one of the parallel edges of the vertical slit. It moved around the head, disappearing into the opposite edge of the slit almost three hundred and sixty degrees later. It was followed in a few seconds by a complicated sequence containing some red bands, some green, and some that were apparently blank. This sequence made an identical journey around the head of the octospider.
“That’s exactly what happened when that octospider confronted Katie and me,” Nicole said nervously to Richard. “She said it was talking to us.”
“But we have no way of knowing what it’s saying,” Richard replied. “Just because it can talk does not mean that it won’t hurt us.” As the lead octospider continued to talk in color, Richard suddenly remembered an episode from years earlier, during his odyssey in Rama II. At the time he had been lying on a table, surrounded by five or six octos, all with colored patterns on their heads. Richard recalled clearly the powerful terror that he had felt as he had watched some very small creatures, apparently under the control of the octospiders, crawl into his nose.
Richard’s head began to throb with pain. “They weren’t all that nice to me before,” he said to Nicole. “When they—”
At that moment the far door to the room opened and four more octospiders entered. “That’s enough,” said Richard, feeling Nicole tense beside him. “I think it’s time for us to make an exit.”
Richard and Nicole walked quickly to the center of the room, where the walkway, as in the previous room, joined with the path leading to the outside of the building. They turned toward the outside but stopped after taking a few steps. Four more octospiders were coming through this door as well.
They didn’t need to confer. Richard and Nicole spun around, returned to the main interior walkway, and bolted in the direction of the third wing of the pentagon. This time they raced on, without turning to the outside, until they were inside the fourth wing. It was completely dark in this section. They slowed as Richard pulled out his flashlight to examine their surroundings. There was sophisticated-looking equipment on the floor below them, but no activity of any kind.
“Should we try the outside again?” Richard asked as he was putting his flashlight back in his shirt pocket. Seeing her nod, Richard took Nicole’s hand and they ran together toward the intersection, where they turned right and headed out of the pentagon altogether.
A few minutes later they were jogging down a dark corridor in completely unknown territory. Both of them were fatigued. Nicole was having difficulty breathing. “Richard,” she said, “I need to rest. I can’t keep running like this.”
Richard and Nicole walked down the empty corridor for another fifty meters. They saw a door on their left. Richard cautiously opened the door, peered in, and scanned the room with his flashlight. “It must be a storage room of some kind,” he said. “But it’s currently empty.”
Richard walked into the room, glanced through its back door into another empty chamber, and then returned for Nicole. They sat down with their backs against the wall. “When we return to our lair, darling,” Nicole said a few seconds later, “I want you to help me check my heart. I have been having some strange pains lately.”
“Are you all right now?” Richard asked, concern reflected in his voice.
“Yes,” Nicole replied. She smiled in the dark and kissed her husband. “As well as can be expected after narrowly escaping from a gaggle of octospiders.”
7
Nicole slept fitfully with her I back against the wall and her head resting on Richard’s shoulder. She had one nightmare after another, always waking with a start before dozing off again. In the last nightmare Nicole was on an island by the ocean with all her children. A huge tidal wave headed toward them on her dream screen. Nicole was frantic because her children were scattered all over the island. How could she possibly save all of them? She awakened with a shudder.
She nudged her husband in the dark. “Richard,” Nicole said, “wake up. Something’s not right.”
At first Richard did not move. When Nicole touched him a second time, he slowly opened his eyes. “What’s the matter?” he said at length.
“I have the feeling we’re not safe here,” she said. “I think we should go.”
Richard switched on his flashlight and moved the beam slowly around the room. “There’s nobody here,” he said softly. “And I don’t hear anything either. Don’t you think we should rest some more?”
Nicole’s fears increased as they sat HI silence. “I’m still feeling a sense of danger, Richard,” she said finally. “I know that you don’t believe in anything you can’t analyze, but I have learned to trust my premonitions.”
“All right,” Richard said unenthusiastically. He stood up and walked across the room, opening the back door, which led to a similar, adjacent area. He glanced inside. “Nothing here either,” he said after several seconds. Richard next came back across the room and opened the door to the corridor they had used to escape from the pentagon. The moment the door was open, Nicole and he both heard the unmistakable sound of dragging
