Nicole approached Takagishi and clandestinely activated her biometry scanner. The warning file was empty. “Clean as a whistle,” she said with a smile.

Takagishi looked at her very seriously. “Our decision is a mistake,” he said somberly. “We should be going into New York.”

Be very careful,” Admiral Heilmann said to Francesca. “It makes me nervous to see you leaning out like that.”

Signora Sabatini had hooked her ankles underneath the seats of the heli­copter and was now stretching out beyond the plane of the door. She was holding a small video camera in her right hand. Three or four meters below her, apparently oblivious to the whirring machine overhead, the six crab biots plodded methodically along. They were still in their phalanx formation, arranged like the first three rows of a set of bowling pins.

“Move out over the sea!” Francesca shouted to Hiro Yamanaka. “They’re coming to the edge and will be turning again.”

The helicopter veered sharply to the left and flew over the side of the five-hundred-meter cliff that separated the southern half of Rama from the Cylindrical Sea. The bank here was ten times higher above the water than its northern counterpart. David Brown gasped as he looked down at the frozen sea half a kilometer below him,

“This is ridiculous, Francesca,” he said– “What do you hope to accom­plish? The automatic camera in the nose of the copter will take adequate pictures!’

“This camera was specifically designed for zoom action,” she said. “Be­sides, a little jitter gives the images more verisimilitude.” Yamanaka steered back toward the bank. The biots were now about thirty meters directly ahead. The lead biot came up to within half a body length of the edge, paused for a fraction of a second, and then turned abruptly to its right. Another quick ninety-degree right turn completed the maneuver and left the biot heading in the exact opposite direction. The other five crabs followed their leader, executing their turns row by row with military precision.

“I got it that time,” Francesca said happily, pulling herself back into the helicopter. “Head on and full frame. And I think I caught a glimmer of movement in the leader’s blue eye just before it turned.”

The biots were now ambling away from the cliff at their normal speed of ten kilometers per hour. Their movement caused a slight indentation in the loamy soil. Their heading was along a path parallel to their last previous sweep toward the sea. From above, the whole region looked like a suburban yard in which part of the grass had been mowed — on one side the ground was neat and packed, while in the territory not yet covered by the biots there was no orderly pattern in the soil markings.

“This could get boring,” Francesca said, playfully reaching up and putting her arms around David Brown’s neck. “We may have to amuse ourselves with something else.”

“We’ll only watch them one more strip. Their pattern is fairly simple.” He ignored Francesca’s light tickling on his neck. It seemed as if he were going through some kind of checklist in his mind. At length Brown spoke into the communicator. “What do you think, Dr. Takagishi? Is there anything else we should do at this time?”

Back in the scientific control center on the Newton, Dr. Takagishi was following the progression of the biots on the monitor. “It would be ex­tremely valuable,” he said, “if we could find out more about their sensory capabilities before we try to capture one of them. So far they have not responded to noises or to distant visual stimuli. In fact, they have apparently not even noticed our presence. As I’m sure you would agree, we don’t have enough data yet to come to any definitive conclusions. If we could expose them to an entire range of electromagnetic frequencies and calibrate their responses, then we might have a better idea—”

“But that would take days,” Dr. Brown interrupted. “And in the final analysis we would still have to take our chances. I can’t imagine what we might learn that would materially alter our plans.”

“If we found out more about them first,” Takagishi argued, “then we could design a better, safer capture procedure. It might even occur that we would learn something that would dissuade us altogether—”

“Unlikely,” was David Brown’s abrupt response. As far as he was con­cerned, this particular discussion was over. “Hey there, Tabori,” he now shouted. “How are you guys coming with the huts?”

“We’re almost finished,” the Hungarian answered. “Another thirty min­utes at the most. Then I’ll be ready for a nap.”

“Lunch comes first,” Francesca interjected. “You can’t go to sleep on an empty stomach.”

“What are you cooking, beautiful?” Tabori bantered.

“Osso buco a la Rama.”

“That’s enough,” Dr. Brown said. He paused for a couple of seconds. “O’Toole,” he then continued, “can you handle the Newton all by yourself? At least for the next twelve hours?”

“Affirmative,” was the response.

“Then send down the rest of the crew. By the time we all meet at the new campsite, it should be ready for occupancy. We’ll have some lunch and a brief nap. Then we’ll plan our biot hunt.”

Below the helicopter the six crablike creatures continued their relentless march across the barren soil. The four human beings watched them encoun­ter a distinct boundary, where the floor changed from dirt and small rocks into a fine wire mesh. As soon as they touched the narrow lane dividing the two sections, the biots executed a U-turn. They then headed back toward the sea along a parallel line adjacent to their last track. Yamanaka banked the helicopter, increased his altitude, and headed for the Beta campsite ten kilometers across the Cylindrical Sea,

They were all correct, Nicole was thinking. Seeing it on the monitor is nothing by comparison. She was descending on the chairlift into Rama. Now that she was beyond the halfway point, she had a breathtaking view in every direction. She remembered a similar feeling once, when she had been stand­ing on the Tonto Plateau in the Grand Canyon National Park. But that was made by nature and took over a billion years, she said to herself. Rama was actually built by somebody. Or something.

The chair momentarily slowed. Shigeru Takagishi climbed off a kilometer below her. Nicole couldn’t see him, but she could hear him talking to Rich­ard Wakefield on the communicator. “Hurry up,” she heard Reggie Wilson shout. “I don’t like sitting here in the middle of nowhere.” Nicole enjoyed being suspended on the chairlift. The amazing scene around her was tempo­rarily almost static and she could study at her leisure any feature that was particularly interesting.

After one more stop for Wilson to disembark, Nicole was at last approach­ing the bottom of the Alpha chairlift herself. She watched, fascinated, as the resolution of her eyes improved quickly during the last three hundred meters of her descent. What had been a jumble of indistinct images resolved itself into a rover, three people, some equipment, and a small surrounding camp. After a few more seconds she could identify each of the three men. She had a quick flashback to another chairlift ride, this one in Switzerland some two months before. An image of King Henry flitted momentarily through her mind. It was replaced by the smiling face of Richard Wakefield just below her. He was giving her instructions on how best to ease herself out of the chair.

“It will never come to a complete stop,” he was saying, “but it will slow down a lot. Unfasten your belt and then hit the ground walking, as if you were coming off a moving sidewalk.”

He grabbed her by the waist and lifted her off the platform. Takagishi and Wilson were already in the backseat of the rover. “Welcome to Rama,” Wakefield said.