Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Nicole glanced back at the monitor. It was still blinking 92% LIKELY APPENDICITIS. "Do you have anything to add?" she said to Janos Tabori.

  "Only that I have seen an appendicitis before," the little Hungarian answered, "once, when I was a student, in Budapest. The symptoms were exactly like this."

  "All right," Nicole said. "Go prepare RoSur for the operation. Admiral Heilmann, will you and cosmonaut Yamanaka help General Borzov to the infirmary please?" She turned around to Francesca. "I recognize that this is big news. I will allow you in the operating room on three conditions. You will scrub like all the surgical staff. You will stand quietly over against the wall with your camera, And you will absolutely obey any order that I give you."

  "Good enough," Francesca nodded. "Thank you."

  Irina Turgenyev and General O'Toole were still waiting in the lobby after Borzov left with Heilmann and Yamanaka. "I'm certain that I speak for both of us," the American said in his usual sincere manner. "Can we help in any way?"

  "Janos will assist me while RoSur performs the operation. But I could use one more pair of hands, as an emergency backup."

  "I would like to do that," O'Toole said. "I have some hospital experience from my charity work."

  "Fine," replied Nicole. "Now come with me to clean up."

  RoSur, the portable robot surgeon that had been brought along on the Newton mission for just this kind of situation, was not in the same class, in terms of medical sophistication, as the fully autonomous operating rooms at the advanced hospitals on Earth. But RoSur was a technological marvel in its own right. It could be packed in a small suitcase and weighed only four kilograms. Its power requirements were low. And there were more than a hundred configurations in which it could be used.

  Janos Tabori unpacked RoSur. The electronic surgeon didn't look like much in its stowed configuration. All of its spindly joints and appendages were neatly arranged for easy storage. After Janos rechecked his RoSur User's Guide, he picked up the central control box of the robot surgeon and affixed it, as suggested, to the side of the infirmary bed where General Borzov was already lying. His pain had only subsided a little. The impatient commander was urging everyone to hurry.

  Janos entered the code word identifying the operation. RoSur automatically deployed all its limbs, including its extraordinary scalpel/hand with four fingers, in the configuration needed to remove an appendix. Nicole then entered the room, her hands in gloves and her body covered with the white gown of the surgeon.

  "Have you finished the software check?" she said.

  Janos nodded.

  "I'll complete all the preoperation tests while you scrub," she said to him. She motioned for Francesca and General O'Toole, both of whom were standing right outside the door, to enter the small room. "Any better?" she said to Borzov.

  "Not much," he grumbled.

  "That was a light sedative I administered. RoSur will give you the full anesthetic as the first step in the operation." Nicole had done all her memory refreshing in her room while she was dressing. She knew this operation inside out; it had been one of the surgical procedures they had performed during the test simulations. She entered Borzov's personal data file into RoSur, hooked up the electronic lines that would bring patient monitor information to RoSur during the appendectomy, and verified that all the software had passed self-test. As her last check, Nicole carefully tuned the pair of tiny stereo cameras that worked in concert with the surgical hand.

  Janos came back into the room. Nicole pressed a button on the robot surgeon's control box and two hard copies of the operations sequence were quickly printed. Nicole took one and handed the other to Janos. "Is everyone ready?" she asked, her eyes on General Borzov. The commanding officer of the Newton moved his head up and down. Nicole activated RoSur.

  One of the robot surgeon's four hands gunned an anesthetic into the patient and in one minute Borzov was unconscious. As Francesca's camera recorded every move of this historic operation (she was whispering occasional comments into her ultrasensitive microphone), the scalpel hand of RoSur., aided by its twin eyes, made the incisions necessary to isolate the suspect organ. No human surgeon had ever been so swift or deft. Armed with a battery of sensors checking hundreds of parameters every microsecond, RoSur had folded back all the requisite tissue and laid the appendix bare within two minutes. Programmed into the automatic sequence was a thirty-second inspection time before the robot surgeon would continue with the removal of the organ.

  Nicole bent over the patient to check the exposed appendix. It was neither swollen nor inflamed. "Look at this, quick, Janos," she said, her eye on the digital clock counting down the inspection period. "It looks perfectly healthy." Janos leaned over from the opposite side of the operating table. My God, Nicole thought, we're going to remove… The digital clock read 00:08. "Stop it," she shouted. "Stop the operation." Nicole and Janos both reached for the robot surgeon control box at the same time.

  At that instant the entire Newton spacecraft lurched sideways. Nicole was thrown backward, against the wall. Janos fell forward, smacking his head against the operating table. His outstretched fingers landed on the control box and then slowly released as he slumped to the floor. General O'Toole and Francesca were both thrown against the far wall. A beep, beep from one of the inserted Hakamatsu probes indicated that someone in the room was in serious trouble physically. Nicole checked briefly to see that O'Toole and Sabatini were all right and then struggled against the continuing torque to regain her position next to the operating table. With great effort she pulled herself across the room on the floor, using the anchored legs of the table. When she was beside the table she steadied herself, still holding on to the legs, and stood up.

  Blood spattered Nicole as her head crossed the plane of the operating table. She stared with disbelief at Borzov's body. The entire incision was full of blood and RoSur's scalpel/hand was buried inside, apparently still cutting away. It was Borzov's probe set that was going beep, beep, despite the fact that Nicole had inserted, by command, significantly wider emergency values just before the operation.

  A wave of fear and nausea swept through Nicole as she realized that the robot had not aborted its surgical activities. Holding on tight against the powerful force trying to push her against the wall again, she somehow managed to reach over to the control box and switch off the power. The scalpel withdrew from the pool of blood and restowed itself against a stanchion, Nicole then tried to stop the massive hemorrhaging.

  Thirty seconds later the unexplained force vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. General O'Toole clambered to his feet and came over beside the now desperate Nicole. The scalpel had done too much damage. The commander was bleeding to death before her eyes. "Oh, no. Oh, God," O'Toole said as he surveyed the wreckage of his friend's body. The insistent beep, beep continued. Now the life system alarms around the table sounded as well. Francesca recovered in time to record the final ten seconds of Valeriy Borzov's life.

  It was a very long night for the entire Newton crew. In the two hours immediately after the operation, Rama went through a sequence of three more maneuvers, each, like the first one, lasting one or two minutes. The Earth eventually confirmed that the combined maneuvers had changed the attitude, spin rate, and trajectory of the alien spaceship. Nobody could ascertain the exact purpose of the set of maneuvers; they were just "orientation changes," according to the Earth scientists, that had altered the inclination and line of apsides of the Rama orbit. However, the energy of the trajectory had not been changed significantly—Rama was still on a hyperbolic escape path with respect to the Sun.

  Everyone onboard the Newton and on Earth was stunned by the sudden death of General Borzov. He was eulogized by the press of all nations and his many accomplishments were lauded by his peers and associates. His death was reported as an accident, attributed to the untimely motion of the Rama spacecraft that had taken place during the middle of a routine appendectomy. But within eight hours after his death, knowledgeable people every
where were asking tough questions. Why had the Rama spacecraft moved at exactly that time? Why had RoSur's fault protection system failed to stop the operation? Why were the human medical officers presiding over the procedure not able to switch off the power before it was too late?

  Nicole des Jardins was asking herself the same questions. She had already completed the documents required when a death occurs in space and had sealed Borzov's body in the vacuum coffin at the back of the military ship's huge supply depot. She had quickly prepared and filed her report on the incident; O'Toole, Sabatini, and Tabori had all done the same. There was only one significant omission in the reports. Janos failed to mention that he had reached for the control box during the Raman maneuver. At the time Nicole did not think his omission was important.

  The required teleconferences with ISA officials were extremely painful. Nicole was the person who bore the brunt of all the inane and repetitious questioning. She had to reach deep inside herself for extra reserves to keep from losing her temper several times. Nicole had expected that Francesca might hint at incompetence on the part of the Newton medical staff in her teleconference, but the Italian journalist was evenhanded and fair in her reportage.

  After a short interview with Francesca, in which Nicole discussed how horrified she had been at the moment she had first seen Borzov's incision filled with blood, the life science officer retired to her room, ostensibly to rest and/or sleep. But Nicole did not allow herself the luxury of resting. Over and over she reviewed the critical seconds of the operation. Could she have done anything to change the outcome? What could possibly explain RoSur's failure to stop itself automatically?

  In Nicole's mind there was little or no probability that RoSur's fault protection algorithms had a design flaw; they wouldn't have passed all the rigorous prelaunch testing if they contained errors. So somewhere there must have been a human error, either negligence (had she and Janos, in their haste, forgotten to initialize some key fault protection parameter?) or an accident during those chaotic seconds following the unexpected torque. Her fruitless searching for an explanation and her almost total fatigue made her extremely depressed when she finally fell asleep. To her, one part of the equation was very clear. A man had died and she had been responsible.

  18

  POSTMORTEM

  As expected, the day after General Borzov's death was full of turmoil. The ISA investigation into the incident expanded and most of the cosmonauts were subjected to another long cross-examination. Nicole was interrogated about her sobriety at the time of the operation. Some of the questions were ugly and Nicole, who was trying to husband her energy for her own investigation of the events surrounding the tragedy, lost her patience twice with the interrogators.

  "Look," she exclaimed at one point, "I have now explained four times that I had two glasses of wine and one glass of vodka three hours before the operation. I have admitted that I would not have drunk any alcohol prior to surgery, if I had known that I was going to operate. I have even acknowledged, in retrospect, that perhaps one of the two life science officers should have remained completely sober, But that's all hindsight. I repeat what I said earlier. Neither my judgment nor my physical abilities was in any way impaired by alcohol at the time of the operation."

  Back in her room, Nicole focused her attention on the issue of why the robot surgeon proceeded with the operation when its own internal fault protection should have aborted all activities. Based on the RoSur User's Guide, it was evident that at least two separate sensor systems should have sent error messages to the central processor in the robot surgeon. The accelerometer package should have informed the processor that the environmental conditions were outside acceptable limits because of the untoward lateral force. And the stereo cameras should have transmitted a message indicating that the observed images were at variance with the predicted images. But for some reason neither sensor set was successful in interrupting the ongoing operation. What had happened?

  It took Nicole almost five hours to rule out the possibility of a major error, either software or hardware, in the RoSur system itself. She verified that the loaded software and data base had been correct by doing a code comparison with the benchmark standard version of the software tested extensively during prelaunch. She also isolated the stereo imaging and accelerometer telemetry from the few seconds right after the spacecraft lurched. These data were properly transmitted to the central processor and should have resulted in an aborted sequence. But they didn't. Why not? The only possible explanation was that the software had been changed by manual command between the time of loading and the performance of the appendectomy.

  Nicole was now out of her league. Her software and system engineering knowledge had been stretched to the limit in satisfying herself that there had been no error in the loaded software. To determine whether and when commands might have changed the code or parameters after they were installed in RoSur required someone who could read machine language and carefully interrogate the billions of bits of data that had been stored during the entire procedure. Nicole's investigation was stalled until she could find someone to help her. Maybe I should give this up? a voice inside her said. How could you, another voice replied, until you know for certain the cause of General Borzov's death? At the root of Nicole's desire to know the answer was a desperate yearning to prove for certain that his death had not been her fault.

  She turned away from her terminal and collapsed on her bed. As she was lying there, she remembered her surprise during the thirty-second inspection period when Borzov's appendix had been in plain view, He definitely wasn't having an appendicitis, she thought. Without having any particular motive, Nicole returned to her terminal and accessed the second set of data that she had had evaluated by the electronic diagnostician, just prior to her decision to operate. She glanced only briefly at the 92% LIKELY APPENDICITIS on the first screen, moving instead to the backup diagnoses. This time DRUG REACTION was listed as the second most likely cause, with a 4 percent probability. Nicole now called for the data to be displayed in another way. She asked a statistical routine to compute the likely cause of the symptoms, given the fact that it could not be an appendicitis.

  The results flashed up on the monitor in seconds. Nicole was astonished. According to the data, if the biometry information input from Borzov's probe set was analyzed under the assumption that the cause for the abnormalities could not be an appendicitis, then there was a 62 percent chance that it was due to a drug reaction. Before Nicole was able to complete any more analysis, there was a knock on her door.

  "Come in," she said, continuing to work at her terminal. Nicole turned and saw Irina Turgenyev standing in the doorway. The Soviet pilot said nothing for a moment.

  "They asked me to come for you," Irina said haltingly. She was very shy around everyone except her countrymen Tabori and Borzov. "We're having a meeting of the crew down in the lobby."

  Nicole saved her temporary data files and joined Irina in the corridor. "What sort of meeting is it?" she asked.

  "An organizational meeting," Irina answered. She said nothing more.

  There was a heated exchange in process between Reggie Wilson and David Brown when the two women reached the lobby. "Am I to understand, then," Dr. Brown was saying sarcastically, "that you believe the Rama spacecraft purposely decided to maneuver at precisely that moment? Would you like to explain to all of us how this asteroid of dumb metal happened to know that General Borzov was having an appendectomy at that very minute? And while you're at it, will you explain why this supposedly malevolent spaceship has allowed us to attach ourselves and has done nothing to dissuade us from continuing our mission?"

  Reggie Wilson glanced around the room for support. "You're logic-chopping again, Brown," he said, his frustration obvious. "What you say always sounds logical on the surface. But I'm not the only member of this crew that found the coincidence unnerving. Look, here's Irina Turgenyev. She's the one who suggested the connection to me in the first place."

 
; Dr. Brown acknowledged the arrival of the two women. There was an authority in the way he was asking the questions that suggested he was in control of the gathering. "Is that right, Irina?" David Brown asked. "Do you feel, like Wilson, that Rama was trying to send us some specific message by performing its maneuver during the general's operation?"

  Irina and Hiro Yamanaka were the two cosmonauts who spoke the least during crew meetings. With all eyes turned toward her, Irina mumbled "No" very meekly.

  "But when we were discussing it last night—" Wilson insisted to the Soviet pilot.

  "That's enough on that subject," David Brown interrupted imperiously. "I think we have a consensus, shared by our mission control officers on Earth, that the Raman maneuver was coincidence and not conspiracy." He looked at the fuming Reggie Wilson. "Now we have other more important issues to discuss. I would like to ask Admiral Heilmann to tell us what he has learned about the leadership problem."

  Otto Heilmann stood up on cue and read from his notes. "According to the Newton procedures, in the event of the death or the incapacity of the commanding officer, the crew is expected to complete all sequences then under way in accordance with previous directions. However, once those in-process activities are finished, the cosmonauts are supposed to wait for the Earth to name a new commanding officer."

  David Brown jumped back into the conversation. "Admiral Heilmann and I started discussing our situation about an hour ago and we quickly realized that we had valid reasons for being concerned. The ISA is wrapped up in their investigation of General Borzov's death. They have not even begun to think about his replacement. Once they do start, it may take them weeks to decide. Remember, this is the same bureaucracy that was never able to select a deputy for Borzov, so they eventually decided that he didn't need one." He paused several seconds to allow the rest of the crew members to consider what he was saying.