Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

Behind Takagishi, on the path that the led back to the main wooden building of the temple, three Buddhist monks walked briskly past. Despite the cold, they were dressed lightly in their usual charcoal gray smocks, their feet exposed to the cold in open sandals. The Japanese scientist was propos­ing to Nicole that they spend the rest of the day at the office of his personal physician, where they could study his complete and uncensored medical history dating back to his childhood. If she would be willing, he added, they would give her a data cube containing all the information to take back to France and study at her leisure.

Nicole, who had been listening intently to Takagishi for almost an hour, momentarily diverted her attention to the three monks now purposefully climbing the stairs in the distance. Their eyes are so serene, she thought. Their lives so free of contradiction. Onemindedness can be a virtue, ft makes all the answers easy. For just a moment she was envious of the monks and their ordered existence. She wondered how well they would handle the di­lemma that Dr. Takagishi was presenting her. He is not one of the space cadets, she was now thinking, so his role is not absolutely critical to mission success. And in a sense he is right The doctors on the project have been too strict. They never should have disqualified Alain. It would be a shame if . . . “Daijobu,” she said before he had finished talking. “1 will go with you to see your doctor and if I don’t find anything that bothers me, I will take the entire file home with me to study during the holidays.” Takagishi’s face lit up. “But let me warn you again,” she added, “if there is anything in your history that I find questionable, or if I have the slightest shred of evidence that you have withheld any information from me, then I will ask you to resign immediately.”

“Thank you, thank you so much,” Dr. Takagishi replied, standing and bowing to his female colleague. “Thank you so much,” he repeated.

10 THE COSMONAUT AND THE POPE

General O’Toole could not have slept more than two hours alto­gether. The combination of excitement and jet lag had kept his mind active all night long. He had studied the lovely bucolic mural on the wall opposite the bed in his hotel room and counted all the animals twice. Unfortunately, he had remained wide awake after he had finished both counts.

He took a deep breath, hoping that it would help him relax. So why all this nervousness? he thought. He is lust a man like all the rest on Earth. Well., not exactly. O’Toole sat up straight in his chair and smiled. It was ten o’clock in the morning and he was sitting in a small anteroom inside the Vatican. He was about to have a private audience with the Vicar of Christ himself, Pope John-Paul V.

During his childhood, Michael O’Toole had often dreamed of someday becoming the first North American pope. “Pope Michael,” he had called himself during the long Sunday afternoons when he had studied his cate­chism alone. As he had repeated the words of his lessons over and over and committed them to memory, he had imagined himself, maybe fifty years in the future, wearing the cassock and papal ring, celebrating mass for thou­sands in the great churches and stadia of the world. He would inspire the poor, the hopeless, the downtrodden. He would show them how God could lead them to a better life.

As a young man Michael O’Toole had loved all learning, but three sub­jects had especially intrigued him. He could not read enough about religion, history, and physics. Somehow his facile mind found it easy to jump between these different disciplines. It never bothered him that the epistemologies of religion and physics were one hundred and eighty degrees apart. Michael O’Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be an­swered by physics and which ones by religion.

All three of his favorite scholastic subjects merged in the study of creation. It was, after all, the beginning of everything, including religion, history, and physics. How had it happened? Was God present, as the referee perhaps, for the kickoff of the universe eighteen billion years ago? Wasn’t it He who had provided the impetus for the cataclysmic explosion known as the Big Bang that produced all matter out of energy? Hadn’t He foreseen that those original pristine hydrogen atoms would coalesce into giant clouds of gas and then collapse under gravitation to become the stars in which would be manu­factured the basic chemical building blocks of life?

And I have never lost my fascination for creation, O’Toole said to himself as he waited for his papal audience. How did it all happen? What is the significance of the particular sequence of events? He remembered his ques­tions of the priests when he was a teenager. I probably decided not to become a priest because it would have limited my free access to scientific truth. The church has never been as comfortable as lam with the apparent incompatibili­ties between God and Einstein.

An American priest from the Vatican state department had been waiting at his hotel in Rome the previous evening when O’Toole had returned from his day as a tourist. The priest had introduced himself and apologized pro­fusely for not having responded to the letter that General O’Toole had written from Boston in November. It would have “facilitated the process,” the priest had remarked in passing, if the general had pointed out in his letter that he was the General O’Toole, the Newton cosmonaut. Neverthe­less, the priest had continued, the papal schedule had been juggled and the Holy Father would be delighted to see O’Toole the next morning. As the door to the papal office swung open, the American general instinctively stood up. The priest from the night before walked into the room, looking very nervous, and quickly shook O’Toole’s hand. They both glanced toward the doorway, where the pope, wearing his normal white cassock, was concluding a conversation with a member of his staff. John-Paul V came forward into the anteroom, a pleasant smile on his face, and extended his hand toward O’Toole. The cosmonaut automatically dropped to one knee and kissed the papal ring.

“Holy Father,” he murmured, astonished at the excited pounding of his heart, “thank you for seeing me. This is indeed a great honor for me.”

“For me as well,” the pope replied in lightly accented English. “I have been following the activities of you and your colleagues with great interest.”

He gestured toward O’Toole and the American general followed the church leader into a grand office with high ceilings. A very large, dark wood desk stood on one side of the room under a life-size portrait of John-Paul IV, the man who had become pope during the darkest days of The Great Chaos and had provided both the world and the church with twenty years of ener­getic and inspirational leadership. The gifted Venezuelan, a poet and histori­cal scholar in his own right, had demonstrated to the world between 2139 and 2158 how positive a force the organized church could be at a time when virtually every other institution was collapsing and was, therefore, unable to give any succor to the bewildered masses.

The pope sat down on a couch and motioned for O’Toole to sit next to him. The American priest left the room. In front of O’Toole and the pope were great windows that opened onto a balcony overlooking the Vatican gardens some twenty feet below. In the distance O’Toole could see the Vatican museum where he had spent the previous afternoon.

“You wrote in your letter,” the Holy Father said, without referring to any notes, “that there were some theological issues that you would like to discuss with me. I assume these are in some way related to your mission.”

O’Toole looked at the seventy-year-old Spaniard who was the spiritual leader of a billion Catholics. The pope’s skin was olive, his features sharp, his thick black hair now mostly gray. His brown eyes were soft and clear. He certainly doesn’t waste any time, O’Toole thought, recalling an article in Catholic magazine in which one of the leading cardinals in the Vatican administration had praised John-Paul V for his management efficiency.

“Yes, Holy Father,” O’Toole said. “As you know, I am about to embark on a journey of the utmost significance for humankind. As a Catholic, I have some questions that I thought it might be helpful for me to discuss with you.” He paused for a moment. “I certainly don’t expect you to have all the answers. But maybe you can guide me a little with your accumulated wis­dom.”

The pope nodded and waited for O’Toole to continue. The cosmonaut took a deep breath, “The issue of redemption is one that’s bothering me, even though I guess it’s just a part of a bigger concern that I have in reconciling the Ramans with our faith.”