O’Toole came out of his room for the final dinner the night before Brown, Sabatini, Tabori, and Turgenyev departed for home. His presence spoiled the last supper. Irina was extremely nasty to him, upbraiding the general venomously, and refusing to sit at the same table. David Brown ignored him altogether, choosing instead to discuss in excruciating detail the laboratory being designed in Texas to accommodate the captured crab biot. Only Francesca and Janos were friendly, so General O’Toole returned to his room right after dinner without formally saying good-bye to anyone.
The next morning, less than an hour after the scientific ship had left, O’Toole buzzed Admiral Heilmann and asked for a meeting. “So you have finally changed your mind?” the German said excitedly when the general entered his office. “Good. It’s not too late yet It’s only 1-12 days. If we hurry we can still detonate the bombs at 1-9.”
“I’m getting closer, Otto,” O’Toole replied, “but I’m not there yet. I’ve been thinking about all this very carefully. There are two things I would still like to do. I’d like to talk to Pope John-Paul and I want to go inside to see Rama for myself.”
O’Toole’s response left Heilmann deflated. “Shit,” he said. “Here we go again. We’ll probably—”
“You don’t understand, Otto,” the American said. He stared fixedly at his colleague. “This is good news. Unless something totally unexpected occurs, either during my call to the pope or while I’m exploring Rama, I’ll be ready to enter my code the minute I come out.”
“Are you certain?” Heilmann asked.
“I give you my word,” O’Toole replied.
General O’Toole held nothing back in his long, emotional transmission to the pope. He was aware that his call was being monitored, but it no longer mattered. A single thing was uppermost in his mind: making the decision to activate the nuclear weapons with a clear conscience.
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.