“Michael and I will work on those items while you develop the graphics for the first segment. He says he remembers his nuclear physics reasonably well.”
“Remember not to make too many assumptions,” Richard reminded Nicole. “We must make certain that each part of the message is self-contained.”
General O’Toole was not with Richard and Nicole at the moment. After two hours of intense work he had walked away, out into the tunnel, about five minutes earlier. His two colleagues suddenly worried about his absence. “He’s probably going to the bathroom,” Richard said.
“He might be lost,” Nicole replied.
Richard moved over to the entrance to the White Room and hollered into the corridor. “Hullo, Michael O’Toole,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” came the answer from the direction of the central stairway. “Can you and Nicole come around here for a minute?”
“What’s up?” Richard inquired a few moments later when he and Nicole joined the general at the foot of the stairway.
“Who built this lair?” O’Toole asked, his eyes focused on the ceiling high above him. “And why do you think it was created in the first place?”
“We don’t know,” Richard answered impatiently, “and I don’t think we’ll resolve the issue in the next few minutes, or even hours. Meanwhile, we have work—”
“Indulge me for a little while,” O’Toole interrupted firmly. “I need to have this discussion before I can proceed.” Richard and Nicole waited for him to continue. “We are rushing pell-mell toward sending a warning to whatever intelligence is in control of this vehicle. Presumably, we are doing this so that Rama will be able to take measures to protect itself. How do we know that’s the right action for us? How do we know that we’re not being traitors to our species?”
General O’Toole waved his arms at the large cavern around him. “There must be some reason, some grand plan for all this. Why were all those fake human objects left in the White Room? Why did the Ramans invite us to communicate with them? Who and what are the avians and the octospiders?” He shook his head, frustrated by all the unanswered questions. “I was uncertain about destroying Rama; but I’m equally uncertain about sending the warning. What if Rama escapes the nuclear attack because of us and then destroys the Earth anyway?”
“That’s extremely unlikely, Michael. The first Rama sailed through the solar system—”
“Just a minute, Nicole, if you don’t mind,” Richard interrupted softly. “Let me try to answer the general.”
He walked over and put his arm on General O’Toole’s shoulder. “Michael,” Richard said, “what has impressed me the most about you since the first time we met has been your ability to understand the difference between the answers we can know, as a result of deduction or the scientific method, and those questions for which there is not even a valid logical approach. There is no way whatsoever that we can understand what Rama is all about at this juncture. We don’t yet have enough data. It’s like trying to solve a system of simultaneous linear equations when there are many more variables than constraints. Multiple hypersurfaces of correct solutions exist.”
O’Toole smiled and nodded his head. “What we do know!” Richard continued, “is that a fleet of missiles is now approaching Rama. They are probably armed with nuclear warheads. We have a choice, to warn or not to warn, and we must make it based on the information available to us at this moment.”
Richard pulled out his small computer and walked over beside O’Toole. “You can represent this entire problem as a three-by-two matrix,” he said. “Assume there are three possible descriptions of the Raman threat; never hostile, always hostile, and hostile only if attacked. Let these three situations represent the rows of the matrix. Now consider the decision facing us. We can either warn them, or choose not to. Note that it is only a successful warning that matters. So there are two columns to the matrix, Rama warned and Rama not warned.”
O’Toole and Nicole both looked over Richard’s shoulder as he constructed the matrix and displayed it on his small monitor. “If we now look at the outcomes of the six events represented by the individual elements in this matrix, and try to assign some probabilities wherever we can, we will have all the information we need to make our decision. Do you agree?”
General O’Toole nodded, impressed by how quickly and concisely Richard had structured their dilemma. “The outcome of the second row is always the same,” Nicole now offered, “independent of whether or not we warn them. If Rama is truly hostile, with their more advanced technology it makes no difference whether we warn them or not. Sooner or later, with this vehicle or one that comes in the future, they will either subjugate or destroy the human race.”
Richard paused a moment to ensure that O’Toole was following the conversation, “Similarly,” he then said slowly, “if Rama is never hostile, it cannot be wrong to warn them. In neither case, warned or unwarned, is the Earth in danger. And if we are successful in telling them about the nuclear missiles, then something extraordinary will have been saved.”
The general smiled. “So the only possible problem, O’Toole’s Anxiety, if you want to call it that, comes if Rama was not originally intending to be hostile, but will change its mind and attack the Earth once it learns that nuclear missiles have been launched against it.”
“Precisely,” said Richard. “And I would argue that our warning itself would probably be a mitigating factor in that potentially hostile case. After all—”
“All right. AD right,” O’Toole replied. “I see where you’re headed. Unless a very high probability is assigned to the case I’m worried about, the overall analysis suggests a better result from warning the Ramans.” He suddenly laughed. “It’s a good thing you don’t work for COG military headquarters, Richard. You might have convinced me with logic to activate the code—”
“I doubt it,” Nicole said. “Nobody could have made a solid case for that kind of paranoia.”
“Thank you.” The general smiled. “I’m satisfied. You were very persuasive. Let’s go back to work.”
Driven by the relentless approach of the missiles, the threesome worked tirelessly for hours. Nicole and Michael O’Toole designed the warning message in two discrete segments. The first segment, much of which was background to establish the basic communication technique, presented all the trajectory mechanics, including the Rama orbit as the vehicle entered the solar system, the two Newton craft leaving the Earth and joining just before rendezvous with the alien ship, the two Raman maneuvers changing its trajectory, and finally the sixteen missiles blasting off from the Earth toward a Rama intercept. Richard, his long hours of work at the keyboard and black screen now paying off, transformed all these orbital events into graphic line drawings while the other two cosmonauts struggled with the complexity of the remainder of the message.
The second segment was exceedingly difficult to design. In it the humans wanted to explain that the incoming missiles carried nuclear warheads, that the explosive power of the bombs was generated by a chain reaction, and that the heat, shock, and radiation resulting from the explosion were all enormously powerful. Presenting the fundamental picture was not the challenge; quantifying the destructive power in any terms that could be understood by an extraterrestrial intelligence was a formidable obstacle.
“It’s impossible,” an exasperated Richard exclaimed when both O’Toole and Nicole insisted that the warning was not complete without some indication of the explosion temperature and the magnitude of the shock and radiation fields. “Why don’t we just indicate the quantity of fissionable material in the process? They must be great at physics. They can compute the yield and other parameters.”