Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

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 every­where 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, // 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 acoel-erometer package should have informed the processor that tbe 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 6ve 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 tbe benchmark standard version of the software tested extensively dur­ing prelaunch. She also isolated the stereo imaging and accelerometer telem­etry from tbe 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 tbe 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 tbe 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?”