Rama II

Twenty-four hours, Nicole said to herself. One more day. She glanced over at Richard, hard at work at the keyboard, and General O’Toole, who was looking at some of the black objects still scattered in one of the corners. Nicole’s momentary feelings of fondness for the two men were quickly trun­cated by a sharp burst of fear. The reality of their predicament overpowered her. Will we all die tomorrow? she wondered.

61

ENDANGERED SPACECRAFT

We really shouldn’t be surprised,” Richard said without emotion. The three of them were sitting in front of the large black screen. “AH of us expected it.”

“But we hoped otherwise,” O’Toole interjected. “Sometimes it’s depress­ing to be proven correct.”

“Are you positive, Richard,” Nicole asked, “that each of those blips repre­sents an object in space?”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt,” Richard replied. “We know for certain that we’re looking at sensor output. And look, I’ll show you how to change the fields.” Richard called to the screen a display that showed a cylinder, definitely Rama, at the center of a set of concentric circles. Next he keyed in another pair of commands, resulting in motion on the screen. The cylinder became smaller and smaller, ultimately collapsing to a point. The size of the concentric circles around the cylinder also diminished during the motion and new circles appeared at the edge of the screen. Eventually a group of dots, sixteen in all, appeared on the right side of the display.

“But how do you know they are missiles?” Nicole queried, indicating the small points of light.

“I don’t,” Richard said. “But I do know they are flying objects nearly on a straight line between Rama and the Earth. I suppose they might be peace envoys, but I doubt it seriously.”

“How long?” O’Toole asked.

“It’s hard to tell exactly,” Richard answered after a moment’s pause. “I’d estimate eighteen to twenty hours until the first one. They’re spread out more than I would have expected. If we track them for an hour or so, we’ll have a more precise estimate of the impact time.”

General O’Toole whistled and then reflected for several seconds before speaking. “Before we try to tell this spacecraft that it’s about to undergo a nuclear attack, will you answer one simple question for me?”

“If I can,” Richard replied,

“What makes you think that Rama can protect itself from these incoming missiles, even if we are able to communicate the warning?”

There was a protracted silence. “Do you remember one time, Michael, almost a year ago,” Richard said, “when we were flying together from Lon­don to Tokyo and we started talking about religion?”

“You mean when I was reading Eusebius?”

“I think so. You were telling me about the early history of Christianity… Anyway, right in the middle of the discussion I suddenly asked you why you believed in God. Do you remember your answer?”

“Of course,” O’Toole replied. “It’s the same response I gave my oldest son when he declared himself an atheist at the age of eighteen.”

“Your answer on the plane perfectly captures my attitude in this current situation. We know that Rama is extremely advanced technologically. Cer­tainly when it was designed there must have been some consideration of a possible hostile attack… Who knows, maybe it even has a powerful propulsion system that we haven’t yet discovered and will be able to maneu­ver out of the way. I bet—”

“Can I interrupt for a second?” Nicole said. “I wasn’t with you two on the flight to Tokyo. I’d like to know how Michael answered your question.”

The two men stared at each other for several seconds. Finally General O’Toole responded. “Faith informed by thought and observation,” he said.

“The first part of your plan is not too difficult, and I agree with the approach, but I have no mental picture of how we will communicate the yield, or how to tie the nuclear chain reaction to the incoming missiles unambiguously.”

“Michael and I will work on those items while you develop the graphics for the first segment. He says he remembers his nuclear physics reasonably well.”

“Remember not to make too many assumptions,” Richard reminded Ni­cole. “We must make certain that each part of the message is self-con­tained.”

General O’Toole was not with Richard and Nicole at the moment. After two hours of intense work he had walked away, out into the tu

“He might be lost,” Nicole replied.

Richard moved over to the entrance to the White Room and hollered into the corridor. “Hullo, Michael O’Toole,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” came the answer from the direction of the central stairway. “Can you and Nicole come around here for a minute?”

“What’s up?” Richard inquired a few moments later when he and Nicole joined the general at the foot of the stairway.

“Who built this lair?” O’Toole asked, his eyes focused on the ceiling high above him. “And why do you think it was created in the first place?”

“We don’t know,” Richard answered impatiently, “and I don’t think we’ll resolve the issue in the next few minutes, or even hours. Meanwhile, we have work—”

“Indulge me for a little while,” O’Toole interrupted firmly. “I need to have this discussion before I can proceed.” Richard and Nicole waited for him to continue. “We are rushing pell-mell toward sending a warning to whatever intelligence is in control of this vehicle. Presumably, we are doing this so that Rama will be able to take measures to protect itself. How do we know that’s the right action for us? How do we know that we’re not being traitors to our species?”

General O’Toole waved his arms at the large cavern around him. “There must be some reason, some grand plan for all this. Why were all those fake human objects left in the White Room? Why did the Ramans invite us to communicate with them? Who and what are the avians and the octospiders?” He shook his head, frustrated by all the unanswered questions. “I was uncertain about destroying Rama; but I’m equally uncertain about sending the warning. What if Rama escapes the nuclear attack because of us and then destroys the Earth anyway?”

“That’s extremely unlikely, Michael. The first Rama sailed through the solar system—”

“Just a minute, Nicole, if you don’t mind,” Richard interrupted softly. “Let me try to answer the general.”

He walked over and put his arm on General O’Toole’s shoulder. “Mi­chael,” Richard said, “what has impressed me the most about you since the first time we met has been your ability to understand the difference between the answers we can know, as a result of deduction or the scientific method, and those questions for which there is not even a valid logical approach. There is no way whatsoever that we can understand what Rama is all about at this juncture. We don’t yet have enough data. It’s like trying to solve a system of simultaneous linear equations when there are many more variables than constraints. Multiple hypersurfaces of correct solutions exist.”

O’Toole smiled and nodded his head. “What we do know!” Richard con­tinued, “is that a fleet of missiles is now approaching Rama. They are proba­bly armed with nuclear warheads. We have a choice, to warn or not to warn, and we must make it based on the information available to us at this mo­ment.”

Richard pulled out his small computer and walked over beside O’Toole. “You can represent this entire problem as a three-by-two matrix,” he said. “Assume there are three possible descriptions of the Raman threat; never hostile, always hostile, and hostile only if attacked. Let these three situations represent the rows of the matrix. Now consider the decision facing us. We can either warn them, or choose not to. Note that it is only a successful warning that matters. So there are two columns to the matrix, Rama warned and Rama not warned.”