Rama II

55 THE VOICE OF MICHAEL

General O’Toole spent the after­noon in his room, watching on the video monitor as Tabori and Yamanaka checked out the nuclear weap­ons. He was excused, on the basis of his presumed stomach upset, from his assigned task of checking out the weapon subsystems. The procedure was surprisingly straightforward; no one would have suspected that the cosmo­nauts were initiating an activity designed to destroy the most impressive work of engineering ever seen by humans.

Before dinner O’Toole placed a call to his wife. The Newton was rapidly approaching the Earth now and the delay time between transmission and reception was under three minutes. Old-fashioned two-way conversations were even possible. His talk with Kathleen was cordial and mundane. Gen­eral O’Toole thought briefly about sharing his moral dilemma with his wife, but he realized that the videophone was not secure and decided against it, They both expressed excitement about being reunited again in the very near future.

The general ate dinner with the crew. Janos was in one of his boisterous moods, entertaining the others with stories about his afternoon with “the bullets,” as he insisted on calling the nuclear bombs. “At one point,” Janos said to Francesca, who had been laughing nonstop since his narrative began, “we had all the bullets lightly anchored to the floor and lined up in a row, like dominoes. I scared the shit out of Yamanaka. I pushed the front one over and they all fell, clang, bang, in every direction. Hiro was certain they were going to explode.”

“Weren’t you worried that you might injure some critical components?” David Brown asked.

“Nope,” Janos replied. “The manuals that Otto gave me said that you couldn’t hurt those things if you dropped them from the top of the Trump Tower. Besides,” he added, “they aren’t even armed yet. Right, Herr Admi­ral?”

Heilmann nodded and Janos launched into another story. General O’Toole drifted away, into his own mind, struggling impossibly with the relationship between those metal objects in the military ship and the mush­room-shaped cloud in the Pacific…

Francesca interrupted his reverie. “You have an urgent call on your private line, Michael,” she said. “President Bothwell will be on in five minutes.”

The conversation at the table stopped. “Well,” said Janos with a grin, “you must be some special person. It’s not just everybody that receives a call from Slugger Bothwell.”

General O’Toole excused himself politely from the table and went to his room. He must know, he was thinking as he waited impatiently for the call to connect. But of course. He’s the president of the United States.

O’Toole had always been a baseball fan and his favorite team, naturally enough, was the Boston Red Sox. Baseball had gone into receivership at the height of The Great Chaos, in 2141, but a new group of owners had put the leagues back in business four years later. When Michael was six, in 2148, his father had taken him to Fenway Dome to watch a game between the Red Sox and the Havana Hurricanes. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair for O’Toole.

Sherman Bothwell had been a left-handed, power-hitting first baseman for the Red Sox between 2172 and 2187. He had been immensely popular. A Missouri boy by birth, his genuine modesty and old-fashioned dedication to hard work were as exceptional as the 527 home runs he had hit during his sixteen years in the major leagues. During the last year of his baseball career, Bothwell’s wife had died in a terrible boating accident. Sherman’s uncom­plaining courage in facing the responsibility of raising his children as a single parent was applauded in every American home.

Three years later, when he married Linda Black, the darling daughter of the governor of Texas, it was obvious to many people that old Sherman had a political career in mind. He advanced through the ranks with great speed. First lieutenant governor, then governor and presidential hopeful. He was elected to the White House by a landslide in 2196; it was anticipated that he would soundly defeat the Christian Conservative candidate in the forthcom­ing general election of 2200.

“Hello, General O’Toole,” the man in the blue suit with the friendly smile said when the screen was no longer blank. “This is Sherman Bothwell, your president.”

The president was using no notes. He was leaning forward in a simple chair, his elbows resting on his thighs and his hands folded in front of him. He was talking as if he were sitting beside General O’Toole in someone’s cozy living room.

“I have been following your Newton mission with great interest — as has everybody in my family, including Linda and the four kids — ever since you launched. But I have been especially attentive these last several weeks, as the tragedies have rained down upon you and your courageous colleagues. My, my. Who would have ever thought that such a thing as that Rama ship could exist? It is truly staggering…

“Anyway, I understand from our COG representatives that the order has been given to destroy Rama. Now, I know that decisions like that are not made lightly, and that it places quite a large responsibility on folks like yourself. Nevertheless, I’m certain it’s the right action.

“Yessirree, I know it’s correct. Why, you know, my daughter Courtney — that’s the eight-year-old — she wakes up with nightmares almost every night. We were watching when you all were trying to capture that biot, the one that looked like a crab, and my, it was positively awful. Now, Courtney knows — it’s been all over the television — that Rama is heading directly for the Earth and she is really scared. Terrified. She thinks the whole country will be overrun by those crab things and that she and all her friends will be chopped up just like journalist Wilson.

“I’m telling you all this, General, because I know you’re facing a big decision. And I’ve heard on the grapevine that you may be hesitant to destroy that humongous spacecraft and all its wonders. But General, I’ve told Courtney about you. I’ve told her that you and your crew are going to blow Rama to smithereens long before it reaches the Earth, “That’s why I called. To tell you that I’m counting on you. And so is Courtney.”

General O’Toole had thought, before listening to the president, that he might take advantage of the call and lay his dilemma in front of the leader of the American people. He had imagined that he might even question Slugger Bothwell about the nature of a species that destroys to protect against an unlikely downside risk. But after the practically perfect short speech from the ex-6rst baseman, O’Toole had nothing to say. After all, how could he refuse to respond to such a plea? All the Courtney Bothwells on the entire planet were counting on him.

After sleeping for five hours O’Toole awakened at three o’clock. He was aware that the most important action of his life was facing him. It seemed to him that everything he had done — his career, his religious studies, even his family activities — had been preparing him for this moment. God had trusted him with a monumental decision. But what did God want him to do? His forehead broke out in a sweat as O’Toole knelt before the image of Jesus on the cross that was behind his desk.

Dear Lord, he said, clasping his hands earnestly, my hour approaches and I still do not see Thy will clearly. It would be so easy for me just to follow my orders and do what everyone wants. Is that Thy desire? How can I know for certain?

Michael O’Toole closed his eyes and prayed for guidance with a fervor surpassing any he had ever felt previously. As he prayed, he recalled another time, years before, when he had been a young pilot working as part of a temporary peacekeeping force in Guatemala. O’Toole and his men had awakened one morning to find their small air base in the jungle completely surrounded by the right-wing terrorists that were trying to bring the fledgling democratic government to its knees. The subversives wanted the planes. In exchange they would guarantee safe passage to O’Toole and his men.

Major O’Toole had taken fifteen minutes to deliberate and pray before deciding to fight it out. In the ensuing battle the planes were destroyed and almost half his men were killed, but his symbolic stand against terrorism emboldened the young government and many others throughout Central America at a time when the poor countries were struggling desperately to overcome the ravages of two decades of depression. O’Toole had been awarded the Order of Merit, the highest COG military accolade, for his exploits in Guatemala.

Onboard the Newton years later, General O’Toole’s decision process was much less straightforward. In Guatemala the young major had not had any questions about the morality of his actions His order to destroy Rama, however, was altogether different. In O’Toole’s opinion, the alien ship had not taken any overtly bellicose actions. In addition, he knew that the order was based primarily on two factors: fear of what Rama might do and the uproar of xenophobic public opinion. Historically, both fear and public opin­ion were notoriously unconcerned about morality. If somehow he could learn what Rama’s true purpose was, then he could…

Below the painting of Jesus on the desk in his room was a small statue of a young man with curly hair and wide eyes. This figure of St. Michael of Siena had accompanied O’Toole on every journey he had made since his marriage to Kathleen. Seeing the statue gave him an idea. General O’Toole reached into one of the desk drawers and pulled out an electronic template. He switched on the power, checked the template menu, and accessed a concor­dance indexing the sermons of St. Michael.

Under the word “Rama,” the general found a host of different references in the concordance. The one that he was looking for was the only one marked in a bold font. That specific reference was the saint’s famous “Rama sermon,” delivered in camp to a group of five thousand of Michael’s neo­phytes three weeks before the holocaust in Rome. O’Toole began to read.

“As the topic for my talk to you today, I am going to address an issue raised by Sister Judy in our council, namely what is the basis for my state­ment that the extraterrestrial spacecraft called Rama might well have been the first announcement of the second coming of Christ. Understand that at this point I have had no clear revelation one way or the other; God has, however, suggested to me that the heralds of Christ’s next coming will have to be extraordinary or the people on Earth will not notice. A simple angel or two blowing trumpets in the heavens won’t suffice. The heralds must do things that are truly spectacular to engage attention,

“There is a precedent, established in the old testament prophecies fore­telling the coming of Jesus, of prophetic announcements originating in the heavens. Elijah’s chariot was the Rama of its time. It was, technologically speaking, as much beyond the understanding of its observers as Rama is today. In that sense there is a certain conforming pattern, a symmetry that is not inconsistent with God’s order.

“But what I think is most hopeful about the arrival of the first Rama spacecraft eight years ago — and I say first because I am certain there will be others — is that it forces humanity to think of itself in an extraterrestrial perspective. Too often we limit our concept of God and, by implication, our own spirituality. We belong to the universe. We are its children. It’s just pure chance that our atoms have risen to consciousness here on this particu­lar planet.

“Rama forces us to think of ourselves, and God, as beings of the universe. It is a tribute to His intelligence that He has sent such a herald at this moment. For as I have told you many times, we are overdue for our final evolution, our recognition that the entire human race is but a single organ­ism. The appearance of Rama is another signal that it is time for us to change our ways and begin that final evolution.”

General O’Toole put down the template and rubbed his eyes. He had read the sermon before — right before his meeting with the pope in Rome, in fact — but somehow it had not seemed as significant then as it did now. So which are you, Rama? he thought. A threat to Courtney Bothwell or a herald of Christ’s second coming?

During the hour before breakfast General O’Toole was still vacillating. He genuinely did not know what his decision would be. Weighing heavily upon him was the fact that he had been given an explicit order by his command­ing officer. O’Toole was well aware that he had sworn, when he had received his commission, not only to follow orders, but also to protect the Courtney Bothwells of the planet. Did he have any evidence that this particular order was so immoral that he should abrogate his oath?

As long as he thought of Rama as only a machine, it was not too difficult for General O’Toole to countenance its destruction. His action would not, after all, kill any Ramans. But what was it that Wakefield had said? That the Raman spaceship was probably more intelligent than any living creatures on Earth, including human beings? And shouldn’t superior machine intelli­gence have a special place among God’s creations, perhaps even above lower life forms?

Eventually General O’Toole succumbed to fatigue. He simply had no energy left to deal with the unending stream of questions without answers. He reluctantly decided to cease his internal debate and prepared to imple­ment his orders.

His first action was to rememorize his RQ code, the specific string of fifty integers between zero and nine that was known only by him and the proces­sors inside the nuclear weapons. O’Toole had personally entered his code and checked that it had been properly stored in each of the weapons before the Newton mission had been launched from Earth. The string of digits was long to minimize the probability of its being duplicated by a repetitive, electronic search routine. Each of the Newton military officers had been counseled to derive a sequence that met two criteria: The code should be almost impossible to forget and should not be something straightforward, like all the phone numbers in the family, that an outside party might figure out easily from the personnel files.

For sentimental reasons, O’Toole had wanted nine of the numbers in his code to be his birthdate, 3-29-42, and the birthdate of his wife, 2-7-46. He knew that any decryption specialist would immediately look for such obvious selections, so the general resolved to hide the birthdates in the fifty digits. But what about the other forty-one digits? That particular number, forty-one, had intrigued O’Toole ever since a beer and pizza party during his sophomore year at MIT. One of his associates then, a brilliant young num­ber theorist whose name he had long forgotten, had told O’Toole in the middle of a drunken discussion that forty-one was a “very special number, the initial integer in the longest continuous string of quadratic primes.”

O’Toole never fully comprehended what exactly was meant by the expres­sion “quadratic prime.” However, he did understand, and was fascinated by, the fact that the string 41, 43,47, 53, 61, 71, 83,97, where each successive number was computed by increasing the difference from the previous num­ber by two, resulted in exactly forty consecutive prime numbers. The se­quence of primes ended only when the forty-first number in the string turned out to be a nonprime, namely 41 X 41 = 1681. This little known piece of information O’Toole had shared only one time in his life, with his wife Kathleen on her forty-first birthday, and he had received such a lacklus­ter response that he had never told anybody about it again,

But it was perfect for his secret code, particularly if he disguised it prop­erly. To build his fifty-digit number, General O’Toole first constructed a sequence of forty-one digits, each coming from the sum of the first two digits in the corresponding term in the special quadratic prime sequence beginning with 41. Thus “5” was the initial digit, representing 41, followed by “7” for 43, “1” for 47 (4 + 7 = 11 and then truncate), “8” for 53, etc. O’Toole next scattered the numbers of the two birthdates using an inverse Fibonacci sequence (34, 21,13,8, 5, 3, 2,1,1) to define the locations of the nine new integers in the original forty-one-digit string.

It was not easy to commit the sequence to memory, but the general did not want to write it down and carry it with him to the activation process. If his code were written down, then anyone could use it, with or without his permission, and his option to change his mind again would be precluded. Once he had rememorized the sequence, O’Toole destroyed all his computa­tions and went to the dining room to have breakfast with the rest of the cosmonauts.

“Here’s a copy of my code for you, Franceses, and one for you, Irina, and the final one goes to Hiro Yamanaka. Sorry, Janos,” Admiral Heilmann said with a big smile, “but I’m all out of bullets. Maybe General O’Toole will let you enter his code into one of the bombs.”

“It’s all right, Herr Admiral,” Janos said wryly. “Some privileges in life I can do without.”

Heilmann was making a big production out of activating the nuclear weapons, He had had his fifty-digit number printed out multiple times and had enjoyed explaining to the other cosmonauts how clever he had been in the conception of his code. Now, with uncharacteristic flair, he was allowing the rest of the crew to participate in the process.

Franceses loved it. It was definitely good television. It occurred to O’Toole that Francesca had probably suggested such a staging to Heilmann, but the general didn’t spend much time thinking about it. O’Toole was too busy being astonished by how calm he himself had become. After his long and agonizing soul-searching, he was apparently going to perform his duty with­out qualms.

Admiral Heilmann became confused during the entering of his code (he admitted that he was nervous) and temporarily lost track of where he was in his sequence. The system designers had foreseen this possibility and had installed two lights, one green and one red, right above the numerical key­boards on the side of the bomb. After every tenth digit one of the two lights would illuminate, indicating whether or not the previous decade of code was a successful match. The safety committee had expressed concern that this “extra” feature compromised the system (it would be easier to decrypt five ten-digit strings than one fifty-digit string), but repeated human engineering tests prior to launch had shown that the lights were necessary.

At the end of his second decade of digits, Heilmann was greeted by the flashing red light. “I’ve done something wrong,” he said, his embarrassment obvious.

“Louder,” shouted Francesca from where she was filming. She had neatly framed the ceremony so that both the weapons and the pods appeared in the picture.

“I’ve made a mistake,” Admiral Heilmann proclaimed. “All this noise has distracted me. I must wait thirty seconds before I can start again.”

After Heilmann had successfully completed his code, Dr. Brown entered the activation code on the second weapon. He seemed almost bored; cer­tainly he didn’t push the keyboard with anything approaching enthusiasm. Irina Turgenyev activated the third bomb. She made a short but passionate comment underscoring her belief that the destruction of Rama was abso­lutely essential

Neither Hiro Yamanaka nor Francesca said anything at all. Francesca, however, did impress the rest of the crew by doing her first thirty digits from memory. Considering that she had supposedly never seen Hermann’s code until an hour earlier, and had not been alone for more than two minutes since then, her feat was quite remarkable.

Next it was General O’Toole’s turn. Smiling comfortably, he walked easily up to the first weapon. The other cosmonauts applauded, both showing their respect for the general and acknowledging his struggle. He asked everyone please to be quiet, explaining that he had committed his whole sequence to memory. Then O’Toole entered the first decade of digits.

He stopped for a second as the green light flashed. In that instant an image flashed into his mind of one of the frescoes on the second floor of the shrine of St. Michael in Rome. A young man in a blue robe, his eyes uplifted to the heavens, was standing on the steps of the Victor Emmanuel Monu­ment, preaching to an appreciative multitude. General O’Toole beard a voice, loudly and distinctly. The voice said “No.”

The general spun around quickly. “Did anybody say anything?” he said, staring at the other cosmonauts. They shook their heads. Befuddled, O’Toole turned back to the bomb. He tried to remember the second decade of digits. But it was no good. His heart was racing at breakneck speed. His mind kept saying, over and over again, What was that voice? His resolve to perform his duty had vanished.

Michael O’Toole took a deep breath, turned around again, and walked across the huge bay. When he passed his stunned colleagues he heard Admi­ral Heilmann yell, “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to my room!” O’Toole said without breaking stride.

“Aren’t you going to activate the bombs?” Dr. Brown said behind him.

“No,” replied General O’Toole. “At least not yet”