Rama II Part 20

"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 s.p.a.ceship 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 s.p.a.cecraft 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 s.p.a.cecraft 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 s.p.a.cecraft 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 s.p.a.cecraft had not done so, it was considered hard evidence that Rama II was different. And the people partic.i.p.ating 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.

Both Richard and Nicole were astonished when they entered a room whose walls were painted a crisp white. In addition to the paint, the room was fascinating because one corner was cluttered with objects that turned out, on closer inspection, to be quite familiar. There was a comb and a brush, an empty lipstick container, several coins, a collection of keys, and even something that looked like an old walkie-talkie. In another pile there was a ring and a wrist.w.a.tch, a tube of toothpaste, a nail file, and a small keyboard with Latin letters. Richard and Nicole were stunned. "Okay, genius," she said with a wave of her hand.

"Explain all this, if you can."

He picked up the tube of toothpaste, opened the cap, and squeezed. A white material came out. Richard put his finger in it and then placed the finger in his mouth. "Yuck," he said, spitting out the paste. "Bring your ma.s.s spectrometer over here."

While Nicole was examining the toothpaste with her sophisticated medical instruments, Richard picked up each of the other objects. The watch in particular fascinated him. It was indeed keeping proper time, second by second, although its reference point was completely unknown. "Did you ever go to the s.p.a.ce museum in Florida?" he asked Nicole.

"No," she answered distractedly.

"They had a display of the common objects taken by the crew on the first Rama mission. This watch looks exactly like the one in the display-I remember it well because I bought a similar one in the museum shop/'

Nicole walked over with a puzzled look on her face. "This stuff isn't toothpaste, Richard. I don't know what it is. The spectra are astonishing, with an abundance of super-heavy molecules."

For several minutes the two cosmonauts rummaged in the odd collection of items, trying to make some sense out of their latest discovery. "One thing is certain," Richard said as he was trying unsuccessfully to open up the walkie-talkie, "these objects are definitely a.s.sociated with human beings. There's simply too many of them for some kind of strange interspecies coincidence."

"But how did they get here?" Nicole asked. She was trying to use the brush but its bristles were far too soft for her hair. She examined it in more detail. "This is not really a brush," she announced. "It looks like a brush, and feels like a brush, but it's useless in the hair."

She bent down and picked up the nail file. "And this can't be used to file any human's fingernails." Richard came over to see what she was talking about. He was still struggling with the walkie-talkie. He dropped it in disgust and took the nail file that Nicole had extended toward him.

"So these things look human, but aren't?" he said, pulling the file against the end of his longest fingernail. The nail was unchanged. Richard gave the file back to Nicole.

"What's going on here?" he shouted in a frustrated tone.

"I remember reading a science fiction novel while I was at the university," Nicole said a few seconds later, "in which an extraterrestrial species learned about human beings solely from our earliest television programs. When they finally met us, they offered cereal boxes and soaps and other objects the aliens had seen on our television commercials. The packages were all properly designed, but the contents were either nonexistent or absolutely wrong."

Richard had not been listening carefully to Nicole. He had been fiddling with the keys and surveying the collection of objects in the room. "Now what do all these things have in common?" he said, mostly to himself.

They both arrived at the same answer several seconds later.

"They were all carried by the Norton crew," Richard and Nicole said in unison.

"So the two Rama s.p.a.ce vehicles must have some kind of communication linkup/' Richard said.

"And these objects have been planted here on purpose, to show us that the visit to Rama I was observed and recorded."

"The spider biots that inspected the Norton campsites and the equipment must have contained imaging sensors."

"And all of these things were fabricated from pictures transmitted from Rama I to Rama II."

After Nicole's last comment both of them were silent, each following his own thought pattern. "But why do they want us to know all this? What is it we're supposed to do now?" Richard stood up and began to pace around the room. Suddenly he started laughing. "Wouldn't it be amazing," he said, "if David Brown was right after all, if the Ramans really were completely disinterested in anything they found, but programmed their s.p.a.ce vehicles to act interested in any visitors? They could flatter whatever species they encountered by making midcourse corrections and by fashioning simple objects. What an incredible irony. Since all immature species are probably hopelessly self-centered, the visitors to the Raman craft would be totally occupied trying to understand an a.s.sumed message-"

"I think you're getting carried away," Nicole interrupted. "All we know at this point is that this s.p.a.cecraft apparently received pictures from Rama I, and that reproductions of small, everyday objects that were carried by the Norton crew have been placed here in this room for us to find."

"I wonder if the keyboard is as useless as everything else/'

Richard said as he picked it up. He spelled the word "Rama" with the keys. Nothing happened. He tried "Nicole." Still nothing.

"Don't you remember how the old models worked?" Nicole said with a grin. She took the keyboard. "They all had a separate power key." She pressed the unmarked b.u.t.ton in the upper right-hand comer of the keyboard. A portion of the opposite wall slid away, revealing a large black square area about one meter on a side.

The small keyboard was based on the ones that had been attached to the portable computers on the first Rama mission. It had four rows of twelve characters, with an extra power b.u.t.ton in the upper right-hand corner. The twenty-six Latin letters, ten Arabic numerals, and four mathematical operands were marked on forty of the individual keys. The other eight keys contained either dots or geometrical figures on their surfaces and, in addition, could be set in either an "up" or "down" position. Richard and Nicole quickly learned that these special keys were the true controls of the Raman system. By trial and error they also discovered that the result from striking any individual action key was a function of the positioning of the other seven keys. Thus, pressing any specific command key could produce as many as 128 different results. Altogether, then, the system provided for 1,024 separate actions that could be initiated from the keyboard.

Making a command dictionary was a laborious process. Richard volunteered for the duty. Using their own computers to keep notes, he began the process of developing the rudiments of a language to translate the special keyboard commands. The initial goal was simple-to be able to use the Raman computer like one of their own. Once the translation was developed, any given input into the Newton portable computers would contain, as part of its output, what set of key impressions on the Raman board would produce a similar response on the square black screen.

Even with Richard's intelligence and computer expertise, the task was a formidable one. It was also not something that could easily be shared. At Richard's suggestion, Nicole climbed out of the lair twice during the first Raman day they were in the White Room. Both times she took long walks around New York, casting her eyes to the sky from time to time to look for a helicopter. On the second excursion Nicole went back to the barn where she had fallen in the pit. Already so much had happened that her frightening experience at the bottom seemed like ancient history. She thought often about Borzov, Wilson, and Takagishi. All the cosmonauts had known when they left the Earth that there were uncertainties in the mission. They had trained often to handle vehicle emergencies, problems with their own s.p.a.cecraft that might prove to be life threatening ... but none of them had actually believed that there would be any fatalities on the mission. // Richard and I perish here in New York, Nicole remarked to herself, then almost half the crew will have died. That will be the worst disaster since we started flying piloted missions again.

She was standing outside the bam, in almost the exact spot where she and Francesca had talked to Richard on the communicator the last time. So why did you lie, Francesca?

Nicole wondered. Did you think somehow my disappearance would silence all suspicion?

On the final morning at the Beta campsite, before she and the others had set out to look for Takagishi, Nicole had transmitted all the notes in her own portable computer in Rama through the networking system to the desktop in her room on the Newton. At the time Nicole had made the data transfer to give herself extra memory, if she should need it, in her traveling computer. But it's all there, she recalled, if some diligent detective ever looks for it The drugs, Jason's blood pressure, even a cryptic reference to the abortion. And of course Richard's solution to the RoSur malfunction. On her two walks Nicole saw several centipede biots, and even a bulldozer once, at the far limit of her vision. She didn't see any avians and neither heard nor saw an octospider. Maybe they only come out at night, she mused as she returned to have dinner with Richard.

49 INTERACTION.

We're almost out of food," Nicole said. They packed up what remained of the manna melon and stuffed it in Richard's backpack.

"I know," he replied. "I have a plan for you to obtain some more."

"Me?" asked Nicole. "Why is it my job?"

"Well, first of all, it only requires one person. Working with graphics on the Raman computer gave me the idea. Second, I can't spare the time. I think I'm on the verge of breaking into the operating system. There are about two hundred commands that I can't explain unless they allow entry into another level, some kind of higher order s.p.a.ce in the hierarchy."

Richard had explained to Nicole during dinner that he had now figured out how to use the Raman computer like one on the Earth. He could store and retrieve data, perform mathematical computations, design graphics, even create new languages. "But I haven't begun to tap its potential," he had said. "Tonight and tomorrow I must discover more of its secrets. We're running out of time."

His plan for obtaining food was, indeed, deceptively simple. After the long Raman night (during which Richard could not have slept more than three hours), Nicole walked over to the central plaza to implement the plan. Based on his progressive matrix a.n.a.lysis, Richard gave her three possible locations for the panel to open the covering above the avian lair. He was so confident of his a.n.a.lysis that he wouldn't even discuss what she should do if she didn't find the plate. Richard was correct. Nicole found the panel easily. Then she opened the cover and shouted down the vertical corridor. There was no response.

She shone her flashlight into the darkness below her. The tank sentinel was on duty, going to and fro in front of the horizontal tunnel that led past the water room. Nicole shouted again. If she could avoid it, she did not want to descend even to the first ledge. Even though Richard had a.s.sured her he would come to her rescue if she was overdue, Nicole did not relish the prospect of being hemmed in with the avians again.

Was that a distant jabbering she heard? Nicole thought so. She took one of the coins that she had found in the White Room and dropped it into the vertical corridor. It sailed far down, hitting a ledge somewhere near the second main level. This time there was loud jabbering. One of the avians flew up into her flashlight beam and over the tank sentinel's head. Moments later the cover began to close and Nicole had to move away.

She had discussed this contingency with Richard. Nicole waited several minutes and then pushed the panel again. When she yelled into the depths of the avian lair the second time, there was an immediate response. This time her friend, the black velvet avian, flew up to within five meters of the surface and jabbered at her. It was clear to Nicole that she was being told to go away. Before the avian turned around, however, Nicole pulled out her computer monitor and activated a stored program. Two manna melons appeared on the screen in graphic depiction. As the avian watched, the melons became colored and then a neat incision displayed the texture and color inside one of them. The black velvet avian had flown up closer to the opening for a better look. Now it turned and screeched back into the dark below. Within seconds a second familiar bird, the likely mate for the black velvet one, flew up and landed on the first ledge below the ground-Nicole repeated the display. The two birds talked and then flew deeper into the lair. Minutes went by. Nicole could hear occasional jabbering from the depths of the corridor. At length her two friends returned, each carrying a small manna melon in its talons. They landed in the plaza near the opening. Nicole walked over toward the melons, but the avians continued to clutch them. What followed was (Nicole a.s.sumed) a long lecture. The two birds jabbered both individually and together, always looking at her and often tapping on the melons. Fifteen minutes later, apparently satisfied that they had communicated their message, the avians took flight, swooped around the plaza, and vanished into their lair. I think they were telling me that melons are in short supply, Nicole thought as she walked back toward the eastern plaza. The melons were heavy. She had one in each of the two backpacks that she had emptied that morning before she left the White Room. Or maybe that I should not disturb them in the future. Whatever it was, we will not be welcome anymore.

She thought that Richard would be ecstatic when she returned to the White Room. He was, but not because of Nicole and the manna melons. He had a grin on his face from one ear to the other and was holding one hand behind his back. "Wait until I show you what I have," he said as Nicole unloaded the backpacks. Richard brought his hand around in front of him and opened it. The hand contained a solitary black ball about ten centimeters in diameter.

"I'm nowhere near figuring out all the logic, or How much information can go in the request," Richard said. "But I have established a fundamental principle. We can ask for and receive 'things' using the computer."

"What do you mean?" Nicole asked, still not certain why Richard was so excited about a small black ball.

"They made this for me," he said, handing her the ball again. "Don't you understand? Somewhere here they have a factory and can make things for us."

"Then maybe 'they,' whoever they are, can start making us some food," said Nicole. She was a little annoyed that Richard had neither congratulated her nor thanked her for the melons. "The avians are not likely to give us any more."

"It will be no problem," Richard said. "Eventually, once we learn the full range of the request process, we may be able to order fish and chips, steak and potatoes, anything, as long as we can state what we want in unambiguous scientific terms."

Nicole stared at her friend. With his unkempt hair, his unshaven face, the bags under his eyes, and his wild grin, he looked at the moment like a fugitive from an insane asylum. "Richard," she asked, "will you slow down a little? If you've found the Holy Grail, can you at least spend a second explaining it to me?"

"Look at the screen," he said, Using the keyboard he drew a circle, then scratched it out and made a square. In less than a minute Richard had carefully drawn a cube in three dimensions. When he was finished with the graphics, he put the eight action keys into a predetermined configuration and then pressed the key with the small rectangle designator. A set of strange symbols appeared on the black monitor.

"Don't worry," Richard said, "we don't need to understand the details. They are just asking for the dimensional specifications on the cube."

Richard next made a string of entries from the normal alphanumeric keys. "Now," he said, turning back to face Nicole, "if I have done it correctly, we will have a cube, made from the same material as that ball, in about ten minutes."

They ate some of the new melon while they waited. It tasted the same as the others. Steak and potatoes would be unbelievably good, Nicole was thinking, when suddenly the end wall lifted up half a meter above the floor and a black cube appeared in the gap.

"Wait a minute, don't touch it yet," Richard said as Nicole went over to investigate. "Look here!" He shone his flashlight into the darkness behind the cube. "There are vast tunnels beyond these walls," he said, "and they must lead to factories so advanced we couldn't even recognize them. Imagine! They can even make objects on request." Nicole was beginning to understand why Richard was so ecstatic. "We now have the capability to control our own destiny in some small way," he continued, "If I can break the code fast enough, we should be able to request food, maybe even what we need to build a boat."

"Without loud motors, I hope," quipped Nicole.

"No motors," agreed Richard. He finished his melon and turned back to the keyboard.

Nicole was becoming worried. Richard had succeeded in making only one new breakthrough in a full Raman day. All he had to show for thirty-eight hours of work (he had only slept eight hours during the entire period) was one new material. He could make "light" black objects like the first ball, whose specific gravity was close to balsa wood, or he could make "heavy" black objects of density similar to oak or pine. He was wearing himself out with his work. And he could not, or would not, share any of the load with Nicole. What if his first discovery was just blind luck? Nicole said to herself as she climbed the stairs for her dawn walk. Or what if the system cannot make anything but two kinds of black objects? She could not help worrying about wasted time. It was only sixteen more days until Rama would encounter the Earth. There was no sign of a rescue team. At the back of her mind was the thought that perhaps she and Richard had been abandoned altogether.

She had tried to talk to Richard about their plans the previous evening, but he had been exhausted. Richard hadn't responded in any way when Nicole had mentioned to him that she was very concerned. Later, after she had carefully outlined all their options and asked his opinion about what they should do, she noticed that he had fallen asleep. When Nicole awakened after a brief nap herself, Richard was already working again at the keyboard and refused to be distracted by either breakfast or conversation. Nicole had stumbled over the growing array of black objects on the floor as she had exited the White Room for her early morning exercise.

Nicole was feeling very lonely. The last fifty hours, which she had spent mostly by herself, had pa.s.sed very slowly. Her only escape had been the pleasure of reading. She had the text of five books stored in her computer. One was her medical encyclopedia, but the other four were all for recreation. / bet all of Richard's discretionary memory is filled with Shakespeare, she thought as she sat on the wall surrounding New York. She stared out at the Cylindrical Sea. In the far distance, barely visible in her binoculars through the mist and clouds, she could see the northern bowl where they had entered Rama the first time.

She had two of her father's novels stored in the computer. Nicole's personal favorite was Queen for All Ages, the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine's younger years, beginning with her adolescence at the ducal court in Poitiers, The story line followed Eleanor through her marriage to Louis Capet of France, their crusade to the Holy Land, and her extraordinary personal appeal for an annulment from Pope Eugenius. The novel culminated with Eleanor's divorce from Louis and betrothal to the young and exciting Henry Plantagenet.

The other Pierre des Jardins novel in her computer's memory was his universally acclaimed chef d'oeuvre, I Richard Coeur de Lion, a mixture of first-person diary and interior monologue, set during two winter weeks at the end of the twelfth century. In the novel Richard and his soldiers, embarked on another crusade, are quartered near Messina under the protection of the Norman king of Sicily, While there the famous warrior-king and h.o.m.os.e.xual son of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry Plantagenet, in a burst of self-examination, relives the major personal and historical events of his life.

Nicole remembered a long discussion with Genevieve after her daughter had read / Richard the previous summer. The young teenager had been fascinated by the story, and had surprised her mother by asking extremely intelligent questions. Thoughts of Genevieve made Nicole wonder what her daughter might be doing at Beauvois at the very moment. They have told you that I have disappeared, Nicole surmised. What does the military call it? Missing in action?

In her mind's eye Nicole could see her daughter riding home from school each day on her bicycle. "Any news?" Genevieve would probably say to her grandfather as she crossed the portal of the villa. Pierre would just shake his head sorrowfully.

It has been two weeks now since anyone has officially seen me. Do you still have hope, my darling daughter? The bereft Nicole was struck by an overwhelming desire to talk to Genevieve. For a moment, suspending reality, Nicole could not accept the fact that she was separated from her daughter by millions of kilometers and had no way to communicate with her. She rose to return to the White Room, thinking in her temporary confusion that she could phone Genevieve from there.

When her sanity returned several seconds later, Nicole was astonished at how easily her mind had tricked itself. She shook her head and sat down on the wall overlooking the Cylindrical Sea. She remained on the wall for almost two hours, her thoughts roaming freely over a variety of subjects. Toward the end of the time, when she was preparing to return to the White Room, her mind focused on Richard Wakefield. / have tried, my British friend, Nicole said to herself. / have been more open with you than with anyone since Henry. But it would be just my luck to be here with someone even less trusting than myself.

Nicole was feeling an undefined sadness as she trekked down the stairs to the second level and turned right at the horizontal tunnel. Her sadness changed to surprise when she entered the White Room. Richard jumped up from his small black chair and greeted her with a hug. He had shaved and brushed his hair. He had even cleaned his fingernails. Laid out on the black table in the middle of the room was a neatly sectioned manna melon. One piece sat on each of the two black plates in front of the chairs.

Richard pulled out her chair and indicated for Nicole to sit down. He went around the table and sat in his own seat. He reached across the table and took both of Nicole's hands. "I want to apologize," he said with great intensity, "for being such a boor. I have behaved very badly these last few days.

"I have thought of thousands of things to tell you during these hours I've been waiting," he continued hesitantly, a strained smile playing across his lips, "but I can't remember most of them. ... I know I wanted to explain to you how very important Prince Hal and Falstaff were to me. They were my closest friends. ... It has not been easy for me to deal with their deaths. My grief is still very intense. . . ." Richard took a drink of water and swallowed. "But most of all," he said, "I'm sorry that I have not told you what a spectacular person you are. You are intelligent, attractive, witty, sensitive-everything I ever dreamed of finding in a woman. Despite our situation, I've been afraid to tell you how I felt. I guess my fear of rejection runs very deep." Tears welled out of the comer of Richard's eyes and ran down his cheeks. He was trembling slightly. Nicole could tell what an incredible effort it had been for him. She brought his hands up against her cheeks. "I think you're very special too," she said.

50 HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL.

Richard continued to work with the Rama computer, but he limited himself to short sessions and involved Nicole whenever he could. They took walks together and chatted like old friends. Richard entertained Nicole by acting out entire scenes from Shakespeare. The man had a prodigious memory. He tried to play both sides in the love scenes from Romeo and Juliet, but every time he broke into his falsetto, Nicole would erupt with laughter.

One night they talked for over an hour about Omen, the Senoufo tribe, and Nicole's visions. "You understand that it's difficult for me to accept the physical reality of some of these stories," Richard said, attempting to qualify his curiosity. "Nevertheless, I admit that I find them absolutely fascinating." Later he showed keen interest in a.n.a.lyzing all the symbolism in her visions.

It was obvious that he acknowledged Nicole's mystical attributes as just another component in her rich personality. They slept nuzzling together before they made love. When they did finally have intercourse, it was gentle and unhurried, surprising both of them with its ease and satisfaction. A few nights later, Nicole was lying with her head on Richard's chest, quietly drifting in and out of sleep. He was in deep thought. "Several days ago," he said, nudging her awake, "back before we became so intimate, I told you that I considered committing suicide once. At the time I was afraid to tell you the story. Would you like to hear it now?"

Nicole opened her eyes. She rolled over and put her chin on his stomach. "Uh-huh," she said. She reached up and kissed him on the eyes before he began his tale.

"I guess you know I was married to Sarah Tydings when both of us were very young," he began. "It was also before she was famous. She was in her first year with the Royal Shakespeare Company and they were performing Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Cymbeline in repertory at Stratford. Sarah was Rosalind and Juliet and fantastic at both.

"She was eighteen at the time, just out of school. I fell in love with her the first night I saw her as Juliet. I sent her roses in the dressing room every evening and used most of my savings to see all the performances. We had two long dinners together and then I proposed. She accepted more from astonishment than love.

"I went to graduate school at Cambridge after the summer was over. We lived in a modest flat and she commuted to the theater in London. I would go with her whenever I could, but after several months my studies demanded more of my time."

Richard stopped his narrative and glanced down at Nicole. She had not moved. She was lying partially across him, a smile of love on her face. "Go on," she said softly.

"Sarah was an adrenaline junkie. She craved excitement and variety. The mundane and tedious angered her. Grocery shopping, for example, was a colossal bore. It was just too much trouble for her to turn on the set and decide what to order. She also found any kind of schedule incredibly constraining.

"Lovemaking had to be performed in a different position or be accompanied by some different music every time; otherwise it was old hat. For a while I was creative enough to satisfy her. I also took care of all the routine tasks to free her from the drudgery of housework. But there were only so many hours in the day. Ultimately, despite my considerable abilities, my graduate studies began to suffer because I was spending all my energy making life interesting for her.

"After we had been married for a year, Sarah wanted to rent a flat in London, so that she didn't need to make the long commute every night after a performance. Actually she had already been spending a couple of nights a week in London, ostensibly with one of her actress friends. But her career was soaring and we had plenty of money, so why should I say no?

"It was not long before rumors about her behavior became quite widespread. I chose to ignore them, fearing, I guess, that she wouldn't deny them if I asked her. Then one night, late, while I was studying for an examination, I received a phone call from a woman. She was very polite, although obviously distraught. She told me that she was the wife of the actor Hugh Sinclair, and that Mr. Sinclair-who at that time was starring with Sarah in the American drama In Any Weather-was having an affair with my wife. 'In fact,' she told me, 'he is over at your wife's flat at this very moment.'

Mrs. Sinclair started crying and then hung up." Nicole reached up and softly caressed Richard's cheek with her hand. "I felt as if my chest had exploded," he said, remembering the pain. "I was angry, terrified, frantic. I went to the station and took the late train to London. When the taxi dropped me at Sarah's place, I ran to the door.

"I did not knock. I bolted up the stairs and found the two of them sleeping naked in the bed. I picked Sarah up and flung her against the wall-I can still remember the sound of her head smashing into the mirror. Then I fell on him in a rage, punching his face over and over, until it was nothing but a ma.s.s of blood. It was awful. . . ."

Richard stopped himself and began to cry noiselessly. Nicole put her arms around his heaving chest and wept with him.

"Darling, darling," she said.

"I was an animal," he cried. "I was worse than my father ever was. I would have killed them both if the people in the next flat hadn't restrained me."