"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. I 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.
57
THREE'S COMPANY
The three cosmonauts talked avidly for over an hour. There was so much to tell. When Nicole told of her fright upon encountering the dead Takagishi in the octospider lair, O'Toole was momentarily silent and then shook his head. "There are so many unanswered questions here," he said, staring up at the high ceiling. "Are you really malevolent after all?" he asked rhetorically.
Richard and Nicole both praised the general's courage in not entering his code to activate the weapons. They were also both horrified that the COG had ordered the destruction of Rama. "It is absolutely unforgivable for us to use nuclear weapons against this spaceship," Nicole said. "I am convinced that it is not fundamentally hostile. And I believe that Rama maneuvered to intercept the Earth because it has a specific message for us."
Richard lightly chided Nicole for developing her opinion more on the basis of emotions than facts. "Perhaps," she rejoined, "but there is a serious logical flaw as well in this decision to destroy. We now have hard evidence that this vehicle communicated with its predecessor. There is good reason to suspect that a Rama III is out there somewhere, probably coming in this direction. If the Rama fleet is potentially hostile, there is no way the Earth will be able to escape. We may succeed in destroying this second craft—but in so doing we will almost certainly alert their next ship. Since their technology is so much more advanced than ours, we would have no possibility of surviving their concerted attack."
G
eneral O'Toole looked at Nicole with admiration. "That's an excellent point," he said. "It's a shame you weren't available for the ISA discussions. We never considered—"
"Why don't we postpone the rest of this conversation until we're back on the Newton?" Richard said suddenly. "According to my watch, it will be dark again in another thirty minutes, before any of us have reached the top of the lift. I don't want to ride in the dark any longer than is necessary."
The three cosmonauts believed that they were leaving Rama for the last time. As the remaining minutes of light dwindled, each cosmonaut gazed intently at the magnificent alien landscape that stretched out into the distance. For Nicole, the dominant feeling was one of elation. Cautious by nature with her expectations, until this moment in the chairlift she had not allowed herself the intense pleasure of believing that she would ever again hold her beloved Genevieve in her arms. Her mind was now flooded by the bucolic beauty of Beauvois and she imagined in detail the joy of her reunion scene with her father and daughter. It could be as little as a week or ten days, Nicole said to herself expectantly. By the time she reached the top she was having difficulty containing her jubilation.
During his ride Michael O'Toole reviewed, one more time, his activation decision. When dark came to Rama, suddenly and at the predicted moment, he had finished developing his plan for communicating his decision to the Earth. They would phone ISA management immediately. Nicole and Richard would summarize their stories and Nicole would present her reasons for thinking that the destruction of Rama would be "unforgivable." O'Toole was convinced that his order to activate the weapons would then be rescinded.
The general switched on his flashlight just before his chair reached the top of the stairway. He stepped off in the weightless environment and stood beside Nicole. They waited for Richard Wakefield before proceeding together around the ramp to the ferry passageway, only a hundred meters away. After the trio had boarded the ferry and were ready to move through the Rama shell toward the Newton, Richard's flashlight beam fell on a large metal object on the side of the passage. "Is that one of the bombs?" he asked.
The nuclear weapon system did indeed resemble an oversized bullet. How curious, Nicole thought, recoiling as an instant shudder ran through her system. It could be any shape, of course. I wonder what subconscious aberration made the designers choose that particular form…
"But what's that weird contraption at the top?" Richard was asking O'Toole.
The general's brow furrowed as he stared at a bizarre object illuminated by the center of the beam of light. "I don't know," he confessed. "I've never seen it before." He disembarked from the ferry. Richard and Nicole followed him.
General O'Toole shuffled over to the weapon and studied the strange attachment fixed above the numerical keyboard. It was a fiat plate, slightly larger than the keyboard itself, that was anchored by angular joints to the sides of the weapon. On the underside of the plate, momentarily retracted, were ten tiny punches—at least that's what they looked like to O'Toole. His observation was confirmed seconds later when one of the punches extended and hit the number "5" on the keyboard several centimeters below. The "5" was followed in rapid succession by a "7," and then by eight more numbers before a green light flashed the successful completion of the first decade.
Within seconds the apparatus entered ten more digits and another green light flashed. O'Toole froze in terror. My God, he thought, that's my code! Somehow they've broken—His panic subsided an instant later when, after the third decade of digits, the red light announced that an error had been made.
"Apparently," General O'Toole said a short time later in response to an inquiry from Richard, "they have jerryrigged this scheme to try to enter the code in my absence, They only have the first two decades correct. For a moment I was afraid…" O'Toole paused, aware of strong emotions stirring within him.
"They must have assumed you weren't coming back," Nicole said in a matter-of-fact tone.
"If Heilmann and Yamanaka did it," O'Toole replied. "Of course we can't rule out completely the possibility that the contraption might have been placed there by the aliens … or even the biots."
"Extremely unlikely," Richard commented. "The engineering is much too crude."
"At any rate," O'Toole said, opening his backpack for some tools to disconnect the apparatus, "I'm not taking any chances."
At the Newton end of the passageway, O'Toole, Wakefield, and des Jardins found the second bomb fitted with the same apparatus. The trio watched it punch out one code attempt—with the same result, a failure somewhere in the third decade—and then they disabled it as well. Afterward they opened up the seal and exited from Rama.
Nobody greeted them when they stepped inside the Newton military ship. General O'Toole assumed that both Admiral Heilmann and Yamanaka were asleep and went immediately to the bedrooms. He wanted to talk to Heilmann in private anyway. But the two men were not in their rooms. It did not take long to confirm, in fact, that the other two cosmonauts were nowhere in the comparatively small living and working area of the military ship.
A search of the supply area in the back of the ship was also futile. However, the threesome did discover that one of the extravehicular activity (EVA) pods was missing. This discovery raised another perplexing set of questions. Where could Heilmann and Yamanaka have gone in the pod? And why had they violated the top-priority project policy that at least one crew member should always stay onboard the Newton?
The three cosmonauts were puzzled as they returned to the control center to discuss their possible courses of action. O'Toole was the first to raise the specter of foul play. "Do you think those octospiders, or even some of the biots, might have come onboard? After all, it's not difficult to enter the Newton unless it's in Self-Protection Mode."
Nobody wanted to say what all three of them were thinking. If someone or something had captured or killed their two colleagues on the ship, then it might still be around and they might be in danger themselves…
"Why don't we call the Earth and announce that we're alive?" Richard said, breaking the silence.
"Great idea." General O'Toole smiled. He moved over to the control center console and activated the panel. A standard system status display appeared on the large screen. "That's strange," the general commented. "According to this, we have no video link with the Earth presently. Only low-rate telemetry. Now, why would the data system configuration have been changed?"
He keyed in a simple set of commands to establish the normal multichannel high-rate link with the Earth. A swarm of error messages appeared on the monitor. "What the hell?" Richard exclaimed. "It looks as if the video system has died." He turned to O'Toole. "This is your speciality, General, what do you make of all this?"
General O'Toole was very serious. "I don't like it, Richard. I've only seen this many error messages one time before—during one of our early simulations when some nincompoop forgot to load the communications software. We must have a major software problem. The probability of that many hardware failures in such a short time span is essentially zero."
Richard suggested that O'Toole subject the video communications software to its standard self-test. During the test, the diagnostic printout reported that the error buffers in the self-test algorithm had overflowed when the procedure was less than one percent complete. "So the vidcomm software is definitely the culprit," Richard said, analyzing the data in the diagnostic. He entered some commands. "It's going to take a while to straighten it out—"
"Just a minute," Nicole interrupted. "Shouldn't we spend our time trying to make some sense out of all this new information before we start on any specific tasks?" The two men stopped their activity and waited for her to continue. "Heilmann, Yamanaka, and one pod are missing from this ship," Nicole said, walking slowly around the control center, "and someone was trying to automatically activate the two nuclear bombs in the passageway. Meanwhile the vidcomm software, after functioning properly for hundreds of days—counting all the preflight simulatio
ns—has suddenly gone haywire. Do either of you have a coherent explanation for all this?"
There was a long silence. "General O'Toole's suggestion of a hostile invasion of the Newton might work," Richard offered. "Heilmann and Yamanaka might have fled to save themselves and the aliens could have purposely screwed up the software."
Nicole was not convinced. "Nothing I have seen suggests that any aliens—or even any biots, for that matter—have been inside the Newton. Unless we see some evidence—"
"Maybe Heilmann and Yamanaka were trying to break the general's code," Wakefield invented, "and they were afraid—"
"Stop. Stop," Nicole shouted suddenly. "Something's happening to the screen." The two men turned around just in time to see Admiral Otto Heilmann's face materialize on the monitor.
"Hello, General O'Toole," Heilmann said with a smile from the huge screen. "This videotape was triggered by your entering the Newton airlock. Cosmonaut Yamanaka and I prepared it just before we departed in one of the pods three hours before I-9 days. We were ordered to evacuate less than an hour after you went inside to explore Rama. We delayed as long as we could but eventually had to follow our instructions.
"Your personal orders are simple and straightforward. You are to enter your activation code into the two weapons in the ferry passageway and the three remaining in the bay. You should depart in the final pod no more than eight hours thereafter. Don't be concerned about the electronic devices in operation on the two bombs in the Raman shell. COG military headquarters ordered them put in place to test some new top secret decryption techniques. You will discover they can easily be disabled with pliers and/or wirecutters.
"An extra, emergency propulsion system has been added to the pod and its software has been programmed to guide you to a safe location, where you will rendezvous with an ISA tug. All you need to do is code in the exact time of your departure. However, I must stress that the new pod navigation algorithms are valid only if you leave the Newton before I-6 days. After that time, I am told the guidance parameters become increasingly invalid and it will be almost impossible to rescue you."
Rama: The Omnibus Page 66
