Rama II r-2 Read online

  The Japanese scientist took a drink from his tea and looked to his left, out across the manicured green trees and the slopes above the city. “When I was a boy,” he continued, his careful English barely audible, “I would climb these hills on a clear night and stare into the sky, searching for the home of the special intelligence that had created that incomparable giant machine. Once I came with my father and we huddled together in the cold night air, looking at the stars, while he told me what it had been like in his village during the days of the first Rama encounter twelve years before I was born. I believed on that night” — he turned to look at Nicole and she could again see the passion in his eyes — “and I still believe today, that there was some reason for that visit, some purpose for the appearance of that awesome spaceship. I have studied all the data from that 6rst encounter, hoping to find a clue that would explain why it came. Nothing has been conclusive. I have developed several theories on the subject, but I do not have enough evidence to support any of them.”

  Again Takagishi stopped talking to drink some of his tea. Nicole had been both surprised and impressed by the depth of feeling he had exhibited. She sat patiently and said nothing while she waited for him to continue. “I knew that I had a good chance to be selected as a cosmonaut,” he said, “not only because of my publications, including the Atlas, but also because one of my closest associates, Hisanori Akita, was the Japanese representative on the selection board. When the number of scientists remaining in the competi­tion had been reduced to eight and I was one of them, Akita-san suggested to me that it looked as if the two leading contenders were myself and David Brown. You’ll recall that up until that time, no physical examinations of any kind had been conducted.”

  That’s right, Nicole remembered. The potential crew was first reduced to forty-eight and then we were all taken to Heidelberg for the physicals. The German doctors in charge insisted that each of the candidates must pass every single medical criterion. The academy graduates were the first group tested and five out of twenty failed. Including Alain Blamont

  “When your countryman Blamont, who had already flown half a dozen major missions for the ISA, was disqualified from consideration because of that trivial heart murmur — and the Cosmonaut Selection Board subse­quently upheld the doctors by denying his appeal — I completely panicked.” The proud Japanese physicist was now staring directly into Nicole’s eyes, entreating her to understand. “I was afraid that I was going to lose the most important opportunity of my career because of a minor physical problem that had never before affected any part of my life.” He paused to choose his words carefully. “I know that what I did was wrong and dishonorable, but I convinced myself at the time it was all right, that my chance to decipher the greatest puzzle in man’s history should not be blocked by a group of small-minded doctors defining acceptable health only in terms of numerical values.

  Dr. Takagishi told the rest of his story without embellishment or obvious emotion. The passion he had fleetingly demonstrated during his discussion of the Ramans had vanished. His monotonic recital was crisp and clear. He explained how he had cajoled his family physician into falsifying his medical history and providing him with a new drug that would prevent the occur­rence of his diastolic irregularity during the two days of his physical at Heidelberg. Although there had been some risk of deleterious side effects from the new drug, everything went according to plan. Takagishi passed the rigorous physical and was ultimately selected as one of the two mission scientists, along with Dr. David Brown. He had never thought again about the medical issue until about three months ago, when Nicole had first ex­plained to the cosmonauts that she was planning to recommend the usage of the Hakamatsu probe system during the mission instead of the standard temporary probe scans once every week.

  “You see,” Takagishi explained, his brow now starting to furrow, “under the old mission technique I could have used that same drug once a week and neither you nor any other life science officer would ever have seen my irregu­larity, But a permanent monitoring system cannot be fooled — the drug is much too dangerous for constant use.”

  So you somehow worked out a deal with Hakamatsu, Nicole thought, jumping ahead of him in her own mind. Either with or without his explicit knowledge. And you input expected value ranges that would not trigger in the presence of your abnormality. You hoped that nobody analyzing the tests would call for a full biometry dump. Now she understood why he had sum­moned her urgently to Japan. And you want me to keep your secret.

  “Watakuski no doryo wa, wakarimas,” Nicole said kindly, changing into Japanese to show her sympathy for her colleague’s anguish. “I can tell how much distress this is causing you. You need not explain in detail how you tampered with the Hakamatsu probes.” She paused and watched his face relax. “But if I understand you correctly, what you want is for me to become an accomplice to your deception. You recognize of course that I cannot even consider preserving your secret unless I am absolutely convinced that your minor physical problem, as you call it, represents no possible threat to the mission. Otherwise I would be forced—”

  “Madame des Jardins,” Takagishi interrupted her, “I have the utmost respect for your integrity. I would never, never ask you to keep my heart irregularity out of the record unless you agreed that it was really an insignifi­cant problem.” He looked at her in silence for several seconds. “When Hakamatsu first phoned me last evening,” he continued quietly, “I thought originally that I would call a press conference and then resign from the project. But while I was thinking about what I would say in my resignation, I kept seeing this image of Professor Brown. He is a brilliant man, my Ameri­can counterpart, but he is also, in my opinion, too certain of his own infalli­bility. The most likely replacement for me would be Professor Wolfgang Heinrich from Bonn. He has published many fine papers about Rama but he, like Brown, believes that these celestial visits represent random events, totally without connection in any way to us and our planet.” The intensity and passion had returned to his eyes. “I cannot quit now. Unless I have no choice. Both Brown and Heinrich might miss the clue.”

  Behind Takagishi, on the path that the led back to the main wooden building of the temple, three Buddhist monks walked briskly past. Despite the cold, they were dressed lightly in their usual charcoal gray smocks, their feet exposed to the cold in open sandals. The Japanese scientist was propos­ing to Nicole that they spend the rest of the day at the office of his personal physician, where they could study his complete and uncensored medical history dating back to his childhood. If she would be willing, he added, they would give her a data cube containing all the information to take back to France and study at her leisure.

  Nicole, who had been listening intently to Takagishi for almost an hour, momentarily diverted her attention to the three monks now purposefully climbing the stairs in the distance. Their eyes are so serene, she thought. Their lives so free of contradiction. Onemindedness can be a virtue, ft makes all the answers easy. For just a moment she was envious of the monks and their ordered existence. She wondered how well they would handle the di­lemma that Dr. Takagishi was presenting her. He is not one of the space cadets, she was now thinking, so his role is not absolutely critical to mission success. And in a sense he is right The doctors on the project have been too strict. They never should have disqualified Alain. It would be a shame if… “Daijobu,” she said before he had finished talking. “I will go with you to see your doctor and if I don’t find anything that bothers me, I will take the entire file home with me to study during the holidays.” Takagishi’s face lit up. “But let me warn you again,” she added, “if there is anything in your history that I find questionable, or if I have the slightest shred of evidence that you have withheld any information from me, then I will ask you to resign immediately.”

  “Thank you, thank you so much,” Dr. Takagishi replied, standing and bowing to his female colleague. “Thank you so much,” he repeated.

  10

  THE COSMONAUT
AND THE POPE

  General O’Toole could not have slept more than two hours alto­gether. The combination of excitement and jet lag had kept his mind active all night long. He had studied the lovely bucolic mural on the wall opposite the bed in his hotel room and counted all the animals twice. Unfortunately, he had remained wide awake after he had finished both counts.

  He took a deep breath, hoping that it would help him relax. So why all this nervousness? he thought. He is lust a man like all the rest on Earth. Well., not exactly. O’Toole sat up straight in his chair and smiled. It was ten o’clock in the morning and he was sitting in a small anteroom inside the Vatican. He was about to have a private audience with the Vicar of Christ himself, Pope John-Paul V.

  During his childhood, Michael O’Toole had often dreamed of someday becoming the first North American pope. “Pope Michael,” he had called himself during the long Sunday afternoons when he had studied his cate­chism alone. As he had repeated the words of his lessons over and over and committed them to memory, he had imagined himself, maybe fifty years in the future, wearing the cassock and papal ring, celebrating mass for thou­sands in the great churches and stadia of the world. He would inspire the poor, the hopeless, the downtrodden. He would show them how God could lead them to a better life.

  As a young man Michael O’Toole had loved all learning, but three sub­jects had especially intrigued him. He could not read enough about religion, history, and physics. Somehow his facile mind found it easy to jump between these different disciplines. It never bothered him that the epistemologies of religion and physics were one hundred and eighty degrees apart. Michael O’Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be an­swered by physics and which ones by religion.

  All three of his favorite scholastic subjects merged in the study of creation. It was, after all, the beginning of everything, including religion, history, and physics. How had it happened? Was God present, as the referee perhaps, for the kickoff of the universe eighteen billion years ago? Wasn’t it He who had provided the impetus for the cataclysmic explosion known as the Big Bang that produced all matter out of energy? Hadn’t He foreseen that those original pristine hydrogen atoms would coalesce into giant clouds of gas and then collapse under gravitation to become the stars in which would be manu­factured the basic chemical building blocks of life?

  And I have never lost my fascination for creation, O’Toole said to himself as he waited for his papal audience. How did it all happen? What is the significance of the particular sequence of events? He remembered his ques­tions of the priests when he was a teenager. I probably decided not to become a priest because it would have limited my free access to scientific truth. The church has never been as comfortable as lam with the apparent incompatibili­ties between God and Einstein.

  An American priest from the Vatican state department had been waiting at his hotel in Rome the previous evening when O’Toole had returned from his day as a tourist. The priest had introduced himself and apologized pro­fusely for not having responded to the letter that General O’Toole had written from Boston in November. It would have “facilitated the process,” the priest had remarked in passing, if the general had pointed out in his letter that he was the General O’Toole, the Newton cosmonaut. Neverthe­less, the priest had continued, the papal schedule had been juggled and the Holy Father would be delighted to see O’Toole the next morning. As the door to the papal office swung open, the American general instinctively stood up. The priest from the night before walked into the room, looking very nervous, and quickly shook O’Toole’s hand. They both glanced toward the doorway, where the pope, wearing his normal white cassock, was concluding a conversation with a member of his staff. John-Paul V came forward into the anteroom, a pleasant smile on his face, and extended his hand toward O’Toole. The cosmonaut automatically dropped to one knee and kissed the papal ring.

  “Holy Father,” he murmured, astonished at the excited pounding of his heart, “thank you for seeing me. This is indeed a great honor for me.”

  “For me as well,” the pope replied in lightly accented English. “I have been following the activities of you and your colleagues with great interest.”

  He gestured toward O’Toole and the American general followed the church leader into a grand office with high ceilings. A very large, dark wood desk stood on one side of the room under a life-size portrait of John-Paul IV, the man who had become pope during the darkest days of The Great Chaos and had provided both the world and the church with twenty years of ener­getic and inspirational leadership. The gifted Venezuelan, a poet and histori­cal scholar in his own right, had demonstrated to the world between 2139 and 2158 how positive a force the organized church could be at a time when virtually every other institution was collapsing and was, therefore, unable to give any succor to the bewildered masses.

  The pope sat down on a couch and motioned for O’Toole to sit next to him. The American priest left the room. In front of O’Toole and the pope were great windows that opened onto a balcony overlooking the Vatican gardens some twenty feet below. In the distance O’Toole could see the Vatican museum where he had spent the previous afternoon.

  “You wrote in your letter,” the Holy Father said, without referring to any notes, “that there were some theological issues that you would like to discuss with me. I assume these are in some way related to your mission.”

  O’Toole looked at the seventy-year-old Spaniard who was the spiritual leader of a billion Catholics. The pope’s skin was olive, his features sharp, his thick black hair now mostly gray. His brown eyes were soft and clear. He certainly doesn’t waste any time, O’Toole thought, recalling an article in Catholic magazine in which one of the leading cardinals in the Vatican administration had praised John-Paul V for his management efficiency.

  “Yes, Holy Father,” O’Toole said. “As you know, I am about to embark on a journey of the utmost significance for humankind. As a Catholic, I have some questions that I thought it might be helpful for me to discuss with you.” He paused for a moment. “I certainly don’t expect you to have all the answers. But maybe you can guide me a little with your accumulated wis­dom.”

  The pope nodded and waited for O’Toole to continue. The cosmonaut took a deep breath, “The issue of redemption is one that’s bothering me, even though I guess it’s just a part of a bigger concern that I have in reconciling the Ramans with our faith.”

  The pope’s brow furrowed and O’Toole could tell that he was not commu­nicating very well. “I have no trouble whatsoever,” the general added as an explanation, “with the concept of God creating the Ramans — that’s easy to comprehend. But did the Ramans follow a similar pattern of spiritual evolu­tion and therefore need to be redeemed, at some point in their history, like human beings on Earth? And if so, did God send Jesus, or perhaps his Raman equivalent, to save them from their sins? Do we humans thus repre­sent an evolutionary paradigm that has been repeated over and over through­out the universe?”

  The pope’s smile broadened almost into a grin. “Goodness, General!” he said with humor, “you have romped over a vast intellectual territory very quickly. You must know that I do not have fast answers to such profound questions. The church has had its scholars addressing the issues raised by Rama for almost seventy years and, as you would expect, our research has recently intensified because of the discovery of the second spacecraft.”

  “But what do you personally believe, Your Holiness?” O’Toole persisted. “Did the creatures who made these two incredible space vehicles commit some original sin and also need a savior sometime in their history? Is the story of Jesus unique for us here on Earth, or is it just one small chapter in a book of nearly infinite length that covers all sentient beings and a general requirement for redemption to achieve salvation?”

  “I’m not certain,” the Holy Father replied after several seconds. “Some­times it is nearly impossible for me to fathom the existence of other intelli­gence in any form out there in th
e rest of the universe. Then, as soon as I acknowledge that it certainly wouldn’t look like us, I struggle with images and pictures that sidetrack my thinking from the kinds of theological ques­tions that you have raised this morning.” He paused for a moment, reflect­ing. “But most of the time I imagine that the Ramans too had lessons to learn in the beginning, that God did not create them perfect either, and that at some time in their development He must have sent them Jesus—”

  The pope interrupted himself and looked intently at General O’Toole. “Yes,” he continued softly, “I said Jesus. You asked me what I believed personally. To me Jesus is both the true savior and the only son of God. It would be He who would be sent to the Ramans also, albeit in a different guise.”

  O’Toole’s face had brightened at the end of the pontiff’s remarks. “I agree with you, Holy Father,” he said excitedly. “And therefore all intelligence is united, everywhere throughout the universe, by a similar spiritual experience. In a very very real sense, assuming that the Ramans have also been saved, we are all brothers. After all, we are made from the same basic chemicals. That means that Heaven will not be limited just to humans but will encompass all beings everywhere who have understood His message.”

  “I can see where you might come to that conclusion,” John-Paul replied. “But it is certainly not one that is universally accepted. Even within the church there are those who have an altogether different view of the Ramans.”

  “You mean the homocentric group that uses quotations from St. Michael of Siena for support?”