“When will the bombs detonate?” Janos Tabori asked nervously after Admiral Heilmann was finished.
“They will be set to explode sixty hours after our scheduled departure. According to the analytical models, we should be out of the debris field in twelve hours, but for safety we have specified, in our procedure, that the weapons will not be exploded unless we are at least twenty-four hours away… If our departure is delayed because of some crisis, we can always overwrite the detonation time by electronic command.”
“That’s reassuring” Janos remarked.
“Any more questions?” Heilmann asked.
“Just one,” Janos said. “As long as we’re inside Rama putting these things in their proper locations, I assume that it’s all right if we look around for our lost friends. In case they may be wandering—”
“The timeline is very tight, Cosmonaut Tabori,” the admiral replied, “and the deployment itself, inside the structure, only takes a few hours. Unfortunately, due to our delays in starting the procedure, we will place the weapons in their designated positions during the time that Rama is dark.”
Great, O’Toole thought in his room, that’s something else that can be blamed on me. All in all, though, he felt that Admiral Heilmann had handled the meeting very well, ft –was nice of Otto not to say anything about the code, O’Toole told himself. He probably figures I’ll come around. And he’s probably right.
When O’Toole woke up from a short nap it was past lunchtime and he had a ravenous appetite. There was nobody in the dining room except Francesca Sabatini; she was finishing her coffee and studying some kind of engineering data on a nearby computer monitor.
“Feeling better, Michael?” she said when she saw him.
He nodded. “What are you reading?” O’Toole asked.
“I’m looking at the executive software manual,” Francesca replied. “David is very concerned that without Wakefield we won’t even know if the Newton software is working properly or not. I’m learning how to read the self-test diagnostic output.”
“Whew,” O’Toole whistled. “That’s pretty heavy for a journalist.”
“It’s really not that complicated!” Francesca said with a laugh. “And it’s extremely logical. Maybe in my next career I’ll be an engineer.”
O’Toole made himself a sandwich, picked up a package of milk, and joined Francesca at the table. She put a hand on his forearm. “Speaking of next careers, Michael, have you given any thought to yours?”
He looked at her quizzically, “What are you talking about?”
“I’m trapped in the usual professional dilemma, my dear friend. My duties as a journalist are in direct conflict with my feelings.”
O’Toole stopped chewing. “Heilmann told you?”
She nodded. “I’m not stupid, Michael. I would have found out sooner or later. And this is a big, big story. Maybe one of the biggest of the mission. Can’t you see the trailer on the nightly news? “American general refuses to follow order to destroy Rama. Tune in at five.’”
The general became defensive. “I haven’t refused. The Trinity procedure does not call for me to input my code until after the weapons are out of the containers—”
“ — and ready for placement in the pods,” Francesca finished. “Which is about eighteen hours from now. Tomorrow morning, as near as I can figure… I plan to be on hand to record the historic event.” She rose from the table, “And Michael, in case you’re wondering, I haven’t mentioned your call to Norimoto in any of my reports. I may refer to your conversation with him in my memoirs, but I won’t publish them for at least five years ”
Francesca turned and looked directly in O’Toole’s eyes. “You’re about to crap in your mess kit, my friend. You will go from being an international hero to a bum overnight. I hope you’ve considered your decision very very carefully.”
55
THE VOICE OF MICHAEL
General O’Toole spent the afternoon in his room, watching on the video monitor as Tabori and Yamanaka checked out the nuclear weapons. He was excused, on the basis of his presumed stomach upset, from his assigned task of checking out the weapon subsystems. The procedure was surprisingly straightforward; no one would have suspected that the cosmonauts were initiating an activity designed to destroy the most impressive work of engineering ever seen by humans.
Before dinner O’Toole placed a call to his wife. The Newton was rapidly approaching the Earth now and the delay time between transmission and reception was under three minutes. Old-fashioned two-way conversations were even possible. His talk with Kathleen was cordial and mundane. General O’Toole thought briefly about sharing his moral dilemma with his wife, but he realized that the videophone was not secure and decided against it, They both expressed excitement about being reunited again in the very near future.
The general ate dinner with the crew. Janos was in one of his boisterous moods, entertaining the others with stories about his afternoon with “the bullets,” as he insisted on calling the nuclear bombs. “At one point,” Janos said to Francesca, who had been laughing nonstop since his narrative began, “we had all the bullets lightly anchored to the floor and lined up in a row, like dominoes. I scared the shit out of Yamanaka. I pushed the front one over and they all fell, clang, bang, in every direction. Hiro was certain they were going to explode.”
“Weren’t you worried that you might injure some critical components?” David Brown asked.
“Nope,” Janos replied. “The manuals that Otto gave me said that you couldn’t hurt those things if you dropped them from the top of the Trump Tower. Besides,” he added, “they aren’t even armed yet. Right, Herr Admiral?”
Heilmann nodded and Janos launched into another story. General O’Toole drifted away, into his own mind, struggling impossibly with the relationship between those metal objects in the military ship and the mushroom-shaped cloud in the Pacific…
Francesca interrupted his reverie. “You have an urgent call on your private line, Michael,” she said. “President Bothwell will be on in five minutes.”
The conversation at the table stopped. “Well,” said Janos with a grin, “you must be some special person. It’s not just everybody that receives a call from Slugger Bothwell.”
General O’Toole excused himself politely from the table and went to his room. He must know, he was thinking as he waited impatiently for the call to connect. But of course. He’s the president of the United States.
O’Toole had always been a baseball fan and his favorite team, naturally enough, was the Boston Red Sox. Baseball had gone into receivership at the height of The Great Chaos, in 2141, but a new group of owners had put the leagues back in business four years later. When Michael was six, in 2148, his father had taken him to Fenway Dome to watch a game between the Red Sox and the Havana Hurricanes. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair for O’Toole.
Sherman Bothwell had been a left-handed, power-hitting first baseman for the Red Sox between 2172 and 2187. He had been immensely popular. A Missouri boy by birth, his genuine modesty and old-fashioned dedication to hard work were as exceptional as the 527 home runs he had hit during his sixteen years in the major leagues. During the last year of his baseball career, Bothwell’s wife had died in a terrible boating accident. Sherman’s uncomplaining courage in facing the responsibility of raising his children as a single parent was applauded in every American home.
Three years later, when he married Linda Black, the darling daughter of the governor of Texas, it was obvious to many people that old Sherman had a political career in mind. He advanced through the ranks with great speed. First lieutenant governor, then governor and presidential hopeful. He was elected to the White House by a landslide in 2196; it was anticipated that he would soundly defeat the Christian Conservative candidate in the forthcoming general election of 2200.