Rama II

56 AN ANSWERED PRAYER

General O’Toole stayed in his room the rest of the day. Admiral Heilmann dropped by about an hour after O’Toole’s failure to enter his code. After some meaningless small talk (Heilmann was terrible at that sort of thing), the admiral asked the all-important question.

“Are you ready to proceed with the activation?”

O’Toole shook his head. “I thought I was this morning, Otto, but…” There was no need for him to say anything more.

Heilmann rose from his chair. “I’ve given orders for Yamanaka to take the first two bullets to the passageway inside Rama. They’ll be there by dinner if you change your mind. The other three will be left in the bay for the time being.” He stared at his colleague for several seconds. “I hope you come to your senses before too much longer, Michael. We’re already in deep trouble at headquarters.”

When Francesca came in with her camera two hours later, it was clear from her choice of words that the attitude toward the general, at least among the remaining cosmonauts, was that O’Toole was suffering from acute ner­vous tension. He wasn’t being defiant. He wasn’t making a statement. None of the rest of the crew could have tolerated those alternatives, because they would all look bad by association. No, it was obvious that there was some­thing wrong with his nerves.

“I’ve told everyone not to bother you with calls,” Francesca said compas­sionately as she glanced around the room, her television mind already fram­ing the images of the coming interview. “The phones have been ringing like crazy, especially since I sent down the tape from this morning.” She walked over to his desk, checking the objects on its top. “Is this Michael of Siena?” Francesca asked, picking up the small statue.

O’Toole managed a wan smile. “Yes,” he said. “And I think you know the man on the cross in the picture.”

“Very well,” Francesca replied. “Very well indeed… Look, Michael, you know what’s coming. I would like for this interview to paint you in the best possible light. Not that I’m going to treat you with kid gloves, you understand, but I want to make certain that those wolves down there hear your side of the story—”

“They’re already screaming for my hide?” O’Toole interrupted.

“Oh, yes,” she answered. “And it will get much worse. The longer you delay activating the bombs, the more wrath will be aimed at you.”

“But why?” O’Toole protested. “I haven’t committed a crime. I’ve simply delayed activating a weapon whose destructive power exceeds—”

“That’s irrelevant,” Francesca retorted, “In their eyes you haven’t done your job, namely to protect the people on the planet Earth. They’re fright­ened. They don’t understand all this extraterrestrial crap. They’ve been told that Rama will be destroyed and now you’ve refused to remove their night­mares.”

“Nightmares,” mumbled O’Toole, “that’s what Bothwell—”

“What about President Bothwell?” inquired Francesca.

“Oh, nothing,” he said. He looked away from her probing eyes. “What else?” O’Toole asked impatiently.

“As I was saying, I want you to look as good as possible. Comb your hair again and put on a fresh uniform, not a flight suit. I’ll daub a little makeup on your face so you don’t look washed out.” She returned to the desk. “We’ll place your family photos in full view next to Jesus and Michael. Think carefully about what you’re going to say. Of course I’ll ask why you failed to activate the weapons this morning.”

Francesca walked over and put her hand on O’Toole’s shoulder. “In my introduction I will have suggested that you’ve been under a strain. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but admitting a little weakness will proba­bly play well. Particularly in your country.”

General O’Toole squirmed while Francesca finished the preparations for the interview. “Do I have to do this?” he asked, becoming more and more uncomfortable as the journalist essentially rearranged his room.

“Only if you want anybody to think you’re not Benedict Arnold,” was her curt reply.

Janos came in to visit just before dinner. “Your interview with Francesca was very good,” he lied. “At least you raised some moral issues that all of us should consider.”

“It was dumb of me to bring up all that philosophical crap,” O’Toole fretted. “I should have followed Francesca’s advice and blamed everything on my fatigue.”

“Well, Michael,” said Janos, “what’s done is done. I didn’t come in here to review the events of the day. I’m certain you’ve done that plenty of times already. I came in here to see if I could be any help.”

“I don’t think so, Janos,” he replied. “But I do appreciate the thought.”

There was a long hiatus in the conversation. At length Janos stood up and shuffled toward the door. “What do you do now?” he asked quietly.

“I wish I knew,” O’Toole answered. “I don’t seem to be able to come up with a plan.”

The combined Rama-Newton spacecraft continued to hurtle toward the Earth. With each passing day the Rama threat loomed greater, a huge cylin­der moving at hyperbolic speed toward what would be a calamitous impact if no new midcourse corrections were made. The estimated crash point was in the state of Tamil Nadu, in south India, not far from the city of Madurai. Physicists were on the network news every night, explaining what could be expected. “Shock waves” and “ejecta” became terms bandied about at din­ner parties.

Michael O’Toole was vilified by the global press. Francesca had been right. The American general became the focus of a world’s fury. There were even suggestions that he should be court-martialed and executed, onboard the Newton, for his failure to follow orders. A lifetime of important accom­plishments and selfless contributions was forgotten. Kathleen O’Toole was forced to leave the family apartment in Boston and take refuge with a friend in Maine.

The general was tortured by his indecision. He knew that he was doing irreparable damage to his family and his career by his failure to activate the weapons. But each time he convinced himself he was ready to execute the order, that loud and resounding “No” echoed again in his ears.

O’Toole was only marginally coherent in his final interview with Francesca, the day before the scientific ship left to return to the Earth. She asked some very tough questions. When Francesca asked him why, if Rama were going to orbit the Earth, it had not yet made a deflection maneuver, the general perked up momentarily and reminded her that aerobraking — dis­sipating energy in the atmosphere as heat — was the most efficient method of achieving orbit around a planetary body with an atmosphere. But when she gave him a chance to amplify his statement, to discuss how Rama might reconfigure itself to have aerodynamic surfaces, O’Toole did not answer. He just stared at her distractedly.

O’Toole came out of his room for the final dinner the night before Brown, Sabatini, Tabori, and Turgenyev departed for home. His presence spoiled the last supper. Irina was extremely nasty to him, upbraiding the general venomously, and refusing to sit at the same table. David Brown ignored him altogether, choosing instead to discuss in excruciating detail the laboratory being designed in Texas to accommodate the captured crab biot. Only Fran­cesca and Janos were friendly, so General O’Toole returned to his room right after dinner without formally saying good-bye to anyone.

The next morning, less than an hour after the scientific ship had left, O’Toole buzzed Admiral Heilmann and asked for a meeting. “So you have finally changed your mind?” the German said excitedly when the general entered his office. “Good. It’s not too late yet It’s only 1-12 days. If we hurry we can still detonate the bombs at 1-9.”

“I’m getting closer, Otto,” O’Toole replied, “but I’m not there yet. I’ve been thinking about all this very carefully. There are two things I would still like to do. I’d like to talk to Pope John-Paul and I want to go inside to see Rama for myself.”

O’Toole’s response left Heilmann deflated. “Shit,” he said. “Here we go again. We’ll probably—”

“You don’t understand, Otto,” the American said. He stared fixedly at his colleague. “This is good news. Unless something totally unexpected occurs, either during my call to the pope or while I’m exploring Rama, I’ll be ready to enter my code the minute I come out.”

“Are you certain?” Heilmann asked.

“I give you my word,” O’Toole replied.

General O’Toole held nothing back in his long, emotional transmission to the pope. He was aware that his call was being monitored, but it no longer mattered. A single thing was uppermost in his mind: making the decision to activate the nuclear weapons with a clear conscience.

He waited impatiently for the reply. When Pope John-Paul V finally appeared on the screen, he was sitting in the same room in the Vatican where O’Toole had had his audience just after Christmas. The pope was holding a small electronic pad in his right hand and occasionally glanced down as he spoke.

“I have prayed with you, my son,” the pontiff began in his precise En­glish, “particularly during this last week of your personal turmoil. I cannot tell you what to do. I do not have the answers any more than you do. We can only hope together that God, in His wisdom, will provide unambiguous answers to your prayers.

“In response to some of your religious inquiries, however, I can make a few comments. I offer them to you in the hope that they will be helpful… I cannot say whether or not the voice you heard was that of St. Mi­chael, or if you had what is known as a religious experience. I can affirm that there is a category of human experience, usually called religious for lack of a better term, that exists and cannot be explained in purely rational or scien­tific terms. Saul of Tarsus was definitely blinded by a light from the heavens as part of his conversion to Christianity, before he became the apostle Paul, Your voice may have been St. Michael. Only you can decide.

“As we discussed three months ago, God certainly created the Ramans, whoever they were. But he also created the viruses and bacteria that cause human death and suffering. We cannot glorify God, either individually or as a species, if we do not survive. It seems unlikely to me that God would expect us to take no action if our very survival were threatened.

“The possible role of Rama as a herald for the second coming of Christ is a difficult issue. There are some priests inside the church who agree with St. Michael, although they are a distinct minority. Most of us feel that the Rama craft are too spiritually sterile to be heralds. They are incredible engi­neering marvels, to be sure, but there is nothing about them that suggests any warmth or compassion or any other redeeming characteristic that is associated with Christ. It therefore seems very unlikely that Rama has any strictly religious significance.

“In the end it is a decision you must make yourself. You must continue your prayers, as I’m certain you realize, but maybe expect a little less fanfare in God’s response. He does not speak to everyone in the same way; nor will each of His messages to you come in the same form. Please remember one more thing. As you explore Rama in search of God’s will, the prayers of many on Earth will go with you. You can be certain that God will give you an answer; your challenge is to identify and interpret it.”

John-Paul ended his transmission with a blessing and a recitation of the Lord’s prayer. General O’Toole knelt automatically and spoke the words along with his spiritual leader. When the screen was blank, he reviewed what the pontiff had said and felt reassured. ! must be on the right track, O’Toole said to himself. But I should not expect a heavenly proclamation with accom­panying trumpets.

O’Toole was not prepared for his powerful emotional response to Rama. Perhaps it was the sheer scale of the spacecraft, so much larger than any­thing ever built by human beings. Perhaps also his long confinement on the Newton and heightened emotional state contributed to the intensity of his feelings. Whatever the reasons, Michael O’Toole was totally overwhelmed by the spectacle as he made his solitary way into the giant spacecraft.

There was no specific feature that dominated the rest in O’Toole’s mind. His throat caught and his eyes brimmed with tears of wonder on several different occasions: riding down the chairlift on his initial descent and look­ing out across the Central Plain with its long illuminated strips that were Rama’s light; standing beside the rover on the shores of the Cylindrical Sea and staring through his binoculars at the mysterious skyscrapers of New York; and gawking many times, like all the cosmonauts before him, at the gigantic horns and buttresses that adorned the southern bowl. O’Toole’s dominant feelings were awe and reverence, much as he had felt the first time he had entered one of the old European cathedrals.

He spent the Raman night at Beta, using one of the extra huts left by the cosmonauts on the second sortie. He found Wakefield’s message dated two weeks earlier, and had a momentary desire to assemble the sailboat and cross over to New York. But O’Toole restrained himself and focused on the true purpose of his visit.

He admitted to himself that although Rama was a spectacular achieve­ment, its magnificence should not be a relevant factor in his evaluation process. Was there anything he had seen that would cause him to alter his tentative conclusion? No, he grudgingly answered. When the lights came on again inside the giant cylinder, O’Toole was confident that before the next Raman nightfall he would activate the weapons.

Still he procrastinated, He drove the entire length of the coastline, exam­ining New York and the other vistas from different vantage points and ob­serving the five-hundred-meter cliff on the opposite side of the sea. On one last pass through the Beta campsite, O’Toole decided to pick up some odds and ends, including a few personal mementos left behind by the other crew members in their hasty retreat from Rama. Not many items had escaped the hurricane, but he found some souvenirs that had been trapped in comers against the supply crates.

General O’Toole took a long nap before he guided the rover back to the bottom of the chairlift. Realizing what he was going to do when he reached the Newton, O’Toole knelt down and prayed one last time before ascending. Shortly into his ride, when he was still less than half a kilometer above the Central Plain, he turned in his chair and looked back across the Raman panorama. Soon this will all be gone, O’Toole thought, enveloped in a solar furnace unleashed by man. His eyes lifted from the plain and focused on New York. He thought he saw a moving black speck in the Raman sky.

With trembling hands he lifted his binoculars to his eyes. In a few seconds O’Toole located the enlarged speck. He quickly changed the binocular reso­lution and the speck split into three parts, each a bird soaring in formation far off in the distance. O’Toole blinked but the image did not change. There were indeed three birds flying in the Raman sky!

Joy filled General O’Toole. He yelled with delight as he followed the birds with his binoculars until he could no longer see them. The remaining thirty minutes of the ride to the top of the Alpha stairway seemed like a lifetime.

The American officer immediately climbed into another chair and de­scended again into Rama. He wanted desperately to see those birds one more time. If I could somehow photograph them, he thought, planning to drive back to the Cylindrical Sea if necessary, then I could prove to everyone that there are also living creatures in this amazing world.

Starting two kilometers above the floor O’Toole searched in vain for the birds as he descended. Only slightly disheartened by his failure to find them, he was subsequently dumbfounded by what he saw when he dropped his binoculars from his eyes and prepared to disembark from the chair. Richard Wakefield and Nicole des Jardins were standing side by side at the bottom of the lift.

General O’Toole embraced them each with a vigorous hug and then, with tears of happiness running down his cheeks, he knelt on the soil of Rama. “Dear God,” he said as he offered his silent prayer of thanks. “Dear God,” he repeated.