Moments later she and Richard were kissing and hugging joyously. “O’Toole’s coming too,” he said, sitting down next to Nicole and immediately beginning to work on the sailboat. “At first, when I explained that I wasn’t leaving without you, that whatever life I could have on Earth wouldn’t mean anything if you weren’t with me, he told me that you and I were both crazy. But after we talked, and I explained to him that I thought we had a decent probability of warning the Ramans, he decided that he’d rather spend his last hours with us than take a chance on a lonely and painful death in the pod.”
“But I thought you said that it would be a safe trip for a solitary passenger.”
“It’s not completely clear, The software loaded in the pod is a nightmare.
You can tell from the programming that it was done hastily. And how could it have been properly checked? O’Toole by himself might have had a better chance than the two of us together… But remember, he would face serious problems upon his arrival on Earth. That court-martial comment was not idle chatter.”
“I don’t think that Michael was afraid of a court-martial. He might have wanted to spare his family, but—”
A shout from the distance interrupted their conversation. General O’Toole was waving at them from an approaching rover. “But I don’t understand,” Nicole said. “How did he get here so quickly? You didn’t walk, did you?”
Richard laughed. “Of course not. I left a beacon at the bottom of the chairlift After I arrived at Beta and saw that you had removed the sailboat and its parts, I sent the rover back on automatic.”
“That was brave of you,” Nicole said. “What if I had set sail during the extra time that it took you to find me on foot?”
Richard peered over the cliff at the boat’s hull down next to the water. “Actually you’ve done better than I expected,” he said with a tease in his voice. “You might have finished in another hour or two.”
He grabbed Nicole’s hands as she tried to hit him.
General O’Toole was the only practiced sailor among the three of them. Soon after they reached the midpoint of their sail, he relegated Richard to holding an oar as a possible weapon in case the pair of shark biots that were shadowing them decided to attack. “It’s not Marblehead or the Cape!1 O’Toole said as he stared across at New York, “but it’s definitely an interesting sail.”
During the voyage Richard tried, without success, to convince a nervous Nicole that the shark biots were unlikely to bother them. “After all,” he told her, “they didn’t bother the boats at all during the first Rama expedition. They must have capsized me because of something special in the design of our new motorboats.”
“How can you be so certain?” Nicole asked, staring uncomfortably at the gray shadows in the water beside them. “And if they are not going to attack us, why have they been following us for so long?”
“We’re a curiosity, that’s all,” Richard replied. Nevertheless, he braced himself when one of the shadows suddenly veered toward the boat. It disappeared underneath them and joined its companion on the other side. “See,” he said, releasing his grip on the oar, “I told you there was nothing to worry about.”
They moored the sailboat on the New York side before climbing up the nearby stairway. Since General O’Toole had never been to New York before and was naturally very curious about what he was seeing, Richard went ahead to start working on the computer while Nicole gave the briefest of tours to O’Toole along the way.
By the time Nicole and the general reached the White Room, Richard already had some progress to report. “My hypothesis was correct,” he said only seconds after the other two had joined him. “I’m fairly certain that I now have accessed the entire sensor list, They must have radar or its equivalent onboard. While I’m trying to locate it, why don’t you two develop a flow diagram for how we will communicate our warning. Remember, keep it simple. We probably don’t have more than twenty-four hours until the first missile arrives.”
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.”