“This creature,” Richard said in a loud voice after the prisoners had been searched and the curious troops were milling around them, “is what we call an octospider. All octospiders are very intelligent-in some ways more intelligent than we are-and about fifteen thousand of them live in the Southern Hemicylinder, which extends from here to the base of the south polar bowl. My family and I have been living in their realm for over a year-of our own choice, I might add-and we have found the octospiders to be moral and peace-loving. My daughter Ellie and I have come forward with this octospider representative, whom we call Archie, to try to find some way of stopping a military confrontation between our two species.”
“Aren’t you Dr. Robert Turner’s wife?” said one of the troops to Ellie. “The one who was kidnapped by the octospiders?”
“Yes, I am,” Ellie said in a clear voice. “Except that I wasn’t kidnapped in the truest sense of the word. The octospiders wanted to establish communications with us and had been unable to do so. I was taken because they believed that I had the capacity to learn their language.”
“That thing talks!” another soldier said with disbelief.
Until that moment Archie, as planned, had been silent. The troops all stared dumbfounded as colors began pouring out of the right side of his slit and circumnavigating his head. “Archie says greetings,” Ellie translated. “He asks each of you to understand that neither he nor any member of his species wishes you any harm. Archie also wants me to inform you that he can read lips and will be happy to answer any questions you might have.”
“Is this for real?” a soldier said.
Meanwhile, a frustrated Captain Pioggi was standing off to the side, providing an eyewitness account by radio to the colonel in New York. “Yes, sir,” he was saying, “colors on its head… all different colors, sir, red, blue, yellow… like rectangles, moving rectangles, they go around its head, and then more of them follow… What’s that, sir?… The woman, the doctor’s wife, sir… She apparently knows what the colors mean… No, sir, there aren’t any colored letters, just the colored strips…
“Right now, sir, the alien is talking to the soldiery… No, sir, they are not using colors… According to the woman, sir, the octospider can read lips… like a hearing impaired person, sir… same technique I guess… Anyway, it then answers in color and the doctor’s wife translates…
“No weapons of any kind, sir… Plenty of toys, clothes, weird-looking objects prisoner Wakefield says are electronic components… Toys, sir, I said toys… the little girl had a lot of toys in her backpack… No, we don’t have a scanner up here… Right, sir… Do you have any idea how long we might be waiting, sir?”
By the time Captain Pioggi finally received orders to send the prisoners to New York in one of the helicopters, Archie had thoroughly impressed all the soldiers at the camp. The octospider had begun the demonstration of his prodigious mental abilities by multiplying five- and six-place numbers in his head.
“Now, how do we know that the octospider thing is really coming up with the right answer?” one of the younger soldiers had asked. “All it does is show a string of colors.”
“My man,” Richard had replied with a laugh, “didn’t you just verify on the lieutenant’s calculator that the number my daughter gave was correct? Do you think she computed the product in her head?”
“Oh, yeah,” the youth said. “I see what you mean.”
What really overwhelmed the soldiers was Archie’s phenomenal memory. At Richard’s urging, one of the troops listed a sequence of several hundred numbers on a sheet of paper and then read the sequence to Archie, a single number at a time. The octospider repeated them back through Ellie, without any errors. Some of the soldiers thought that there had been a trick involved, that maybe Richard was flashing coded signals to Archie. However, when Archie duplicated his feat under carefully controlled conditions, all the doubters were convinced.
The atmosphere in the camp was relaxed and amiable by the time the orders were received to transport the prisoners to New York. The first part of their plan had succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. Nevertheless, Richard was nervous as they climbed on board the helicopter to cross a portion of the Cylindrical Sea.
They only stayed in New York for about an hour. Armed guards met the prisoners at the helicopter pad in the western plaza, confiscated their backpacks over Richard’s and Nikki’s loud protests, and marched them to the Port. Richard carried Nikki in his arms. He barely had time to admire his favorite skyscrapers looming overhead in the dark.
The yacht that carried them across the northern half of the Cylindrical Sea was similar to the pleasure boats that Nakamura and his cronies used on Lake Shakespeare. At no time during the crossing did any of the guards speak to them. “Boobah,” Nikki whispered to Richard after several of her questions had gone unheeded, “don’t these men know how to talk?” She giggled.
A rover was waiting for them on a dock that had been recently constructed to support the new activities in New York and the Southern Hemicylinder. At considerable effort and expense, the humans had cut an opening through the southern barrier wall in-an area adjacent to the avian/sessile habitat and had built a large docking facility.
Richard wondered at first why he and his companions had not been flown directly back to New Eden in the helicopter. After a few quick mental calculations, however, he correctly concluded that because of the enormous height of the barrier wall, which extended well up into the region where the artificial gravity caused by the spinning Rama spacecraft began to drop substantially, as well as the probable lack of skilled pilots, there was an upper limit placed on the altitude at which the hastily built helicopters were allowed to fly. That means, Richard was thinking as he boarded the rover, that the humans must move all their equipment and personnel either through this dock or by means of the moat and tunnel underneath the second habitat.
Their rover was driven by a Garcia biot. In front and behind them were two other rovers, both with armed humans. They sped across the darkness to the Central Plain.
Richard sat in the front seat beside the driver, with Archie, Ellie, and Nikki in the back. Richard had turned around in his seat and was reminding Archie of the five kinds of biots in New Eden when the Garcia interrupted him. “The prisoner Wakefield is to face forward and remain silent,” the biot said.
“Isn’t that just a little bit ridiculous?” Richard said lightly.
The Garcia pulled its right arm off the steering wheel and struck Richard hard in the face with the back of its hand. “Face forward and remain silent,” the biot repeated, as Richard recoiled from the force of the slap.
Nikki started crying after the sudden display of violence. Ellie tried both to quiet and to comfort her. “I don’t like the driver, Mommy,” the little girl said. “I really don’t.”
It was night inside New Eden after they were ushered through the checkpoint at the entrance to the habitat. Archie and the three humans were placed into an open electric car driven by another Garcia biot. Richard noticed immediately that it was almost as cold in New Eden as it had been in Rama. The car bounced down the road, which was in an acute state of disrepair, and turned north at what had once been the train station for the village of Positano. Fifteen or twenty people were huddled around campfires on the concrete areas surrounding the old station, and another three or four were stretched out and sleeping underneath cardboard boxes and old clothing.
“What are those people doing, Mommy?” Nikki asked. Ellie did not answer because the Garcia turned around quickly with a hostile stare.
The neon lights of Vegas could already be seen in front of them when the car took a sharp left turn onto a residential lane in a wooded section that had once been part of Sherwood Forest. The car came to an abrupt halt in front of a large, rambling ranch house. Two Oriental men, armed with both pistols and daggers, approached the car. They gestured for the passengers to climb out of the car and then dismissed the biot. “Come with us,” said one of the men.
Archie and his human companions entered the house and were taken down a long flight of stairs into a basement with no windows. “There is food and water on the table,” the second man said. He turned and started to climb the stairs.
“Wait a minute,” Richard said. “Our backpacks… we need to have our backpacks.”
“They will be returned,” the man said impatiently, “as soon as all the contents have been carefully checked.”
“And when do we see Nakamura?” Richard inquired.
The man shrugged. His face was expressionless. He walked quickly up the stairs.
