Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

He waited impatiently for the reply. When Pope John-Paul V finally appeared on the screen, he was sitting in the same room in the Vatican where O’Toole had had his audience just after Christmas. The pope was holding a small electronic pad in his right hand and occasionally glanced down as he spoke.

“I have prayed with you, my son,” the pontiff began in his precise En­glish, “particularly during this last week of your personal turmoil. I cannot tell you what to do. I do not have the answers any more than you do. We can only hope together that God, in His wisdom, will provide unambiguous answers to your prayers.

“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. / 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.”