O’Toole managed a wan smile. “Yes,” he said. “And I think you know the man on the cross in the picture.”

“Very well,” Francesca replied. “Very well indeed… Look, Michael, you know what’s coming. I would like for this interview to paint you in the best possible light. Not that I’m going to treat you with kid gloves, you understand, but I want to make certain that those wolves down there hear your side of the story—”

“They’re already screaming for my hide?” O’Toole interrupted.

“Oh, yes,” she answered. “And it will get much worse. The longer you delay activating the bombs, the more wrath will be aimed at you.”

“But why?” O’Toole protested. “I haven’t committed a crime. I’ve simply delayed activating a weapon whose destructive power exceeds—”

“That’s irrelevant,” Francesca retorted, “In their eyes you haven’t done your job, namely to protect the people on the planet Earth. They’re fright­ened. They don’t understand all this extraterrestrial crap. They’ve been told that Rama will be destroyed and now you’ve refused to remove their night­mares.”

“Nightmares,” mumbled O’Toole, “that’s what Bothwell—”

“What about President Bothwell?” inquired Francesca.

“Oh, nothing,” he said. He looked away from her probing eyes. “What else?” O’Toole asked impatiently.

“As I was saying, I want you to look as good as possible. Comb your hair again and put on a fresh uniform, not a flight suit. I’ll daub a little makeup on your face so you don’t look washed out.” She returned to the desk. “We’ll place your family photos in full view next to Jesus and Michael. Think carefully about what you’re going to say. Of course I’ll ask why you failed to activate the weapons this morning.”

Francesca walked over and put her hand on O’Toole’s shoulder. “In my introduction I will have suggested that you’ve been under a strain. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but admitting a little weakness will proba­bly play well. Particularly in your country.”

General O’Toole squirmed while Francesca finished the preparations for the interview. “Do I have to do this?” he asked, becoming more and more uncomfortable as the journalist essentially rearranged his room.

“Only if you want anybody to think you’re not Benedict Arnold,” was her curt reply.

Janos came in to visit just before dinner. “Your interview with Francesca was very good,” he lied. “At least you raised some moral issues that all of us should consider.”

“It was dumb of me to bring up all that philosophical crap,” O’Toole fretted. “I should have followed Francesca’s advice and blamed everything on my fatigue.”

“Well, Michael,” said Janos, “what’s done is done. I didn’t come in here to review the events of the day. I’m certain you’ve done that plenty of times already. I came in here to see if I could be any help.”

“I don’t think so, Janos,” he replied. “But I do appreciate the thought.”

There was a long hiatus in the conversation. At length Janos stood up and shuffled toward the door. “What do you do now?” he asked quietly.

“I wish I knew,” O’Toole answered. “I don’t seem to be able to come up with a plan.”

The combined Rama-Newton spacecraft continued to hurtle toward the Earth. With each passing day the Rama threat loomed greater, a huge cylin­der moving at hyperbolic speed toward what would be a calamitous impact if no new midcourse corrections were made. The estimated crash point was in the state of Tamil Nadu, in south India, not far from the city of Madurai. Physicists were on the network news every night, explaining what could be expected. “Shock waves” and “ejecta” became terms bandied about at din­ner parties.

Michael O’Toole was vilified by the global press. Francesca had been right. The American general became the focus of a world’s fury. There were even suggestions that he should be court-martialed and executed, onboard the Newton, for his failure to follow orders. A lifetime of important accom­plishments and selfless contributions was forgotten. Kathleen O’Toole was forced to leave the family apartment in Boston and take refuge with a friend in Maine.

The general was tortured by his indecision. He knew that he was doing irreparable damage to his family and his career by his failure to activate the weapons. But each time he convinced himself he was ready to execute the order, that loud and resounding “No” echoed again in his ears.

O’Toole was only marginally coherent in his final interview with Francesca, the day before the scientific ship left to return to the Earth. She asked some very tough questions. When Francesca asked him why, if Rama were going to orbit the Earth, it had not yet made a deflection maneuver, the general perked up momentarily and reminded her that aerobraking — dis­sipating energy in the atmosphere as heat — was the most efficient method of achieving orbit around a planetary body with an atmosphere. But when she gave him a chance to amplify his statement, to discuss how Rama might reconfigure itself to have aerodynamic surfaces, O’Toole did not answer. He just stared at her distractedly.

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.