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.

“Hello, General O’Toole,” the man in the blue suit with the friendly smile said when the screen was no longer blank. “This is Sherman Bothwell, your president.”

The president was using no notes. He was leaning forward in a simple chair, his elbows resting on his thighs and his hands folded in front of him. He was talking as if he were sitting beside General O’Toole in someone’s cozy living room.

“I have been following your Newton mission with great interest — as has everybody in my family, including Linda and the four kids — ever since you launched. But I have been especially attentive these last several weeks, as the tragedies have rained down upon you and your courageous colleagues. My, my. Who would have ever thought that such a thing as that Rama ship could exist? It is truly staggering…

“Anyway, I understand from our COG representatives that the order has been given to destroy Rama. Now, I know that decisions like that are not made lightly, and that it places quite a large responsibility on folks like yourself. Nevertheless, I’m certain it’s the right action.

“Yessirree, I know it’s correct. Why, you know, my daughter Courtney — that’s the eight-year-old — she wakes up with nightmares almost every night. We were watching when you all were trying to capture that biot, the one that looked like a crab, and my, it was positively awful. Now, Courtney knows — it’s been all over the television — that Rama is heading directly for the Earth and she is really scared. Terrified. She thinks the whole country will be overrun by those crab things and that she and all her friends will be chopped up just like journalist Wilson.

“I’m telling you all this, General, because I know you’re facing a big decision. And I’ve heard on the grapevine that you may be hesitant to destroy that humongous spacecraft and all its wonders. But General, I’ve told Courtney about you. I’ve told her that you and your crew are going to blow Rama to smithereens long before it reaches the Earth, “That’s why I called. To tell you that I’m counting on you. And so is Courtney.”

General O’Toole had thought, before listening to the president, that he might take advantage of the call and lay his dilemma in front of the leader of the American people. He had imagined that he might even question Slugger Bothwell about the nature of a species that destroys to protect against an unlikely downside risk. But after the practically perfect short speech from the ex-6rst baseman, O’Toole had nothing to say. After all, how could he refuse to respond to such a plea? All the Courtney Bothwells on the entire planet were counting on him.