Even Borzov was impressed. As he often did, David Brown had used his eloquence to turn a defeat into a partial victory. The Soviet general decided to alter his tactics, “Still,” Borzov said in a subdued tone during the pause in Brown’s rhetoric, “we must never forget that human lives are at stake on this mission and that we must do nothing to jeopardize their safety.” He looked around the table at the rest of the crew. “I want to bring back biots and other samples from Rama as much as any of you,” he continued, “but I must confess that this blithe assumption that the second craft will be exactly like the first disturbs me a great deal. What evidence do we have from the first encounter that the Ramans, or whoever they are, are benevolent? None at all. It could be dangerous to seize a biot too soon.”
“But there’s no way of ever being certain, Commander, one way or the other.” Richard Wakefield spoke from the side of the table between Borzov and Brown. “Even if we verify that this spaceship is exactly like the first one almost seventy years ago, we still have no information about what will happen once we make a concerted effort to capture a biot. I mean, suppose for a moment that the two ships are just supersophisticated robots engineered millions of years ago by a now vanished race from the opposite side of the galaxy, as Dr. Brown has suggested in his articles. How can we predict what kinds of subroutines might be programmed into those biots to deal with hostile acts? What if the biots are integral parts, in some way that we have not been able to discern, of the fundamental operation of the ship? Then it would be natural, even though they are machines, that they would be programmed to defend themselves. And it is conceivable that what might look like an initial hostile act on our part could be the trigger that changes the way the entire ship functions. I remember reading about the robot lander that crashed into the ethane sea on Titan in 2012 — it had stored entirely different sequences depending on what it—”