Brown could tell from the body language of the rest of the crew that his presentation had had a successful beginning. He drew a breath and continued. “I assumed, after reading those background conditions, that this particular exercise might represent the last chance to capture a biot. During the test I kept thinking what it would mean if we could bring one or several of them back to the Earth — in all the history of humanity, the only absolutely certain contact with an extraterrestrial culture took place in 2130 when our cosmonauts boarded that first Rama spaceship.
“Yet the long-term scientific benefit from that encounter was less than it might have been. Granted, we have reams of remote sensing data from that first investigation, including the information from the detailed dissection of the spider biot done by Dr. Laura Ernst. But the cosmonauts brought home only one artifact, a tiny piece of some kind of biomechanical flower whose physical characteristics had already irreversibly changed before any of its mysteries could be understood, We have nothing else in the way of souvenirs from that first excursion. No ashtrays, no drinking glasses, not even a transistor from a piece of equipment that would teach us something about Raman engineering. Now we have a second chance.”
Brown looked up at the circular ceiling above him. His voice was full of power. “If we could somehow find and return two or three different biots to the Earth, and if we could then analyze these creatures to unlock their secrets, then this mission would without doubt be the most significant historical event of all time. For in understanding in depth the engineering minds of the Ramans, we would, in a real sense, achieve a first contact.”