Sphere

WEST OF TONGA

For a long time the horizon had been a monotonous flat blue line separating the Pacific Ocean from the sky. The Navy helicopter raced forward, flying low, near the waves. Despite the noise and the thumping vibration of the blades, Norman Johnson fell asleep. He was tired; he had been traveling on various military aircraft for more than fourteen hours. It was not the kind of thing a fifty-three-year-old professor of psychology was used to.

He had no idea how long he slept. When he awoke, he saw that the horizon was still flat; there were white semicircles of coral atolls ahead. He said over the intercom, “What’s this?”

“Islands of Ninihina and Tafahi,” the pilot said. “Technically part of Tonga, but they’re uninhabited. Good sleep?”

“Not bad.” Norman looked at the islands as they flashed by: a curve of white sand, a few palm trees, then gone. The flat ocean again.

“Where’d they bring you in from?” the pilot asked.

“San Diego,” Norman said. “I left yesterday.”

“So you came Honolulu-Guam-Pago-here?”

“That’s right.”

“Long trip,” the pilot said. “What kind of work you do, sir?”

“I’m a psychologist,” Norman said.

“A shrink, huh?” The pilot grinned. “Why not? They’ve called in just about everything else.”

“How do you mean?”

“We’ve been ferrying people out of Guam for the last two days. Physicists, biologists, mathematicians, you name it. Everybody being flown to the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean.”

“What’s going on?” Norman said.

The pilot glanced at him, eyes unreadable behind dark aviator sunglasses. “They’re not telling us anything, sir. What about you? What’d they tell you?”

“They told me,” Norman said, “that there was an airplane crash.”

“Uh-huh,” the pilot said. “You get called on crashes?”

“I have been, yes.”

For a decade, Norman Johnson had been on the list of FAA crash-site teams, experts called on short notice to investigate civilian air disasters. The first time had been at the United Airlines crash in San Diego in 1976; then he had been called to Chicago in ‘78, and Dallas in ‘82. Each time the pattern was the same-the hurried telephone call, frantic packing, the absence for a week or more. This time his wife, Ellen, had been annoyed because he was called away on July 1, which meant he would miss their July 4 beach barbecue. Then, too, Tim was coming back from his sophomore year at Chicago, on his way to a summer job in the Cascades. And Amy, now sixteen, was just back from Andover, and Amy and Ellen didn’t get along very well if Norman wasn’t there to mediate. The Volvo was making noises again. And it was possible Norman might miss his mother’s birthday the following week. “What crash is it?” Ellen had said. “I haven’t heard about any crash.” She turned on the radio while he packed. There was no news on the radio of an airline crash.

When the car pulled up in front of his house, Norman had been surprised to see it was a Navy pool sedan, with a uniformed Navy driver.

“They never sent a Navy car the other times,” Ellen said, following him down the stairs to the front door. “Is this a military crash?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“When will you be back?”

He kissed her. “I’ll call you,” he said. “Promise.”

But he hadn’t called. Everyone had been polite and pleasant, but they had kept him away from telephones. First at Hickam Field in Honolulu, then at the Naval Air Station in Guam, where he had arrived at two in the morning, and had spent half an hour in a room that smelled of aviation gasoline, staring dumbly at an issue of the American Journal of Psychology which he had brought with him, before flying on. He arrived at Pago Pago just as dawn was breaking. Norman was hurried onto the big Sea Knight helicopter, which immediately lifted off the cold tarmac and headed west, over palm trees and rusty corrugated rooftops, into the Pacific.

He had been on this helicopter for two hours, sleeping part of the time. Ellen, and Tim and Amy and his mother’s birthday, now seemed very far away.

“Where exactly are we?”

“Between Samoa and Fiji in the South Pacific,” the pilot said.

“Can you show me on the chart?”

“I’m not supposed to do that, sir. Anyway, it wouldn’t show much. Right now you’re two hundred miles from anywhere, sir.”

Norman stared at the flat horizon, still blue and featureless. I can believe it, he thought. He yawned. “Don’t you get bored looking at that?”

“To tell you the truth, no, sir,” the pilot said. “I’m real happy to see it flat like this. At least we’ve got good weather. And it won’t hold. There’s a cyclone forming up in the Admiralties, should swing down this way in a few days.”

“What happens then?”

“Everybody clears the hell out. Weather can be tough in this part of the world, sir. I’m from Florida and I saw some hurricanes when I was a kid, but you’ve never seen anything like a Pacific cyclone, sir.”

Norman nodded. “How much longer until we get there?”

“Any minute now, sir.”

After two hours of monotony, the cluster of ships appeared unusually interesting. There were more than a dozen vessels of various kinds, formed roughly into concentric circles. On the outer perimeter, he counted eight gray Navy destroyers. Closer to the center were large ships that had wide-spaced double hulls and looked like floating dry-docks; then nondescript boxy ships with flat helicopter decks; and in the center, amid all the gray, two white ships, each with a flat pad and a bull’s-eye.

The pilot listed them off: “You got your destroyers on the outside, for protection; RVS’s further in, that’s Remote Vehicle Support, for the robots; then MSS, Mission Support and Supply; and OSRV’s in the center.”

“OSRV’s?”

“Oceanographic Survey and Research Vessels.” The pilot pointed to the white ships. “John Hawes to port, and William Arthur to starboard. We’ll put down on the Hawes.” The pilot circled the formation of ships. Norman could see launches running back and forth between the ships, leaving small white wakes against the deep blue of the water.

“All this for an airplane crash?” Norman said.

“Hey,” the pilot grinned. “I never mentioned a crash. Check your seat belt if you would, sir. We’re about to land.”

BARNES

The red bull’s-eye grew larger, and slid beneath them as the helicopter touched down. Norman fumbled with his seat belt buckle as a uniformed Navy man ran up and opened the door.

“Dr. Johnson? Norman Johnson?”

“That’s right.”

“Have any baggage, sir?”

“Just this.” Norman reached back, pulled out his day case. The officer took it.

“Any scientific instruments, anything like that?”

“No. That’s it.”

“This way, sir. Keep your head down, follow me, and don’t go aft, sir.”

Norman stepped out, ducking beneath the blades. He followed the officer off the helipad and down a narrow stairs. The metal handrail was hot to the touch. Behind him, the helicopter lifted off, the pilot giving him a final wave. Once the helicopter had gone, the Pacific air felt still and brutally hot.

“Good trip, sir?”

“Fine.”

“Need to go, sir?”

“I’ve just arrived,” Norman said.

“No, I mean: do you need to use the head, sir.”

“No,” Norman said.

“Good. Don’t use the heads, they’re all backed up.”

“All right.”

“Plumbing’s been screwed up since last night. We’re working on the problem and hope to have it solved soon.” He peered at Norman. “We have a lot of women on board at the moment, sir.”

“I see,” Norman said.

“There’s a chemical john if you need it, sir.”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

“In that case, Captain Barnes wants to see you at once, sir.”

“I’d like to call my family.”

“You can mention that to Captain Barnes, sir.”

They ducked through a door, moving out of the hot sun into a fluorescent-lit hallway. It was much cooler. “Air conditioning hasn’t gone out lately,” the officer said. “At least that’s something.”

“Does the air conditioning go out often?”

“Only when it’s hot.”

Through another door, and into a large workroom: metal walls, racks of tools, acetylene torches spraying sparks as workmen hunched over metal pontoons and pieces of intricate machinery, cables snaking over the floor. “We do ROV repairs here,” the officer said, shouting over the din. “Most of the heavy work is done on the tenders. We just do some of the electronics here. We go this way, sir.”

Through another door, down another corridor, and into a wide, low-ceilinged room crammed with video monitors. A half-dozen technicians sat in shadowy half-darkness before the color screens. Norman paused to look.

“This is where we monitor the ROV’s,” the officer said. “We’ve got three or four robots down on the bottom at any given time. Plus the MSB’s and the FD’s, of course.”

Norman heard the crackle and hiss of radio communications, soft fragments of words he couldn’t make out. On one screen he saw a diver walking on the bottom. The diver was standing in harsh artificial light, wearing a kind of suit Norman had never seen, heavy blue cloth and a brightyellow helmet sculpted in an odd shape.

Norman pointed to the screen. “How deep is he?”

“I don’t know. Thousand, twelve hundred feet, something like that.”

“And what have they found?”

“So far, just the big titanium fin.” The officer glanced around. “It doesn’t read on any monitors now. Bill, can you show Dr. Johnson here the fin?”

“Sorry, sir,” the technician said. “Present MainComOps is working north of there, in quadrant seven.”

“Ah. Quad seven’s almost half a mile away from the fin,” the officer said to Norman. “Too bad: it’s a hell of a thing to see. But you’ll see it later, I’m sure. This way to Captain Barnes.”

They walked for a moment down the corridor; then the officer said, “Do you know the Captain, sir?”

“No, why?”

“Just wondered. He’s been very eager to see you. Calling up the com techs every hour, to find out when you’re arriving.”

“No,” Norman said, “I’ve never met him.”

“Very nice man.”

“I’ m sure.”

The officer glanced over his shoulder. “You know, they have a saying about the Captain,” he said.

“Oh? What’s that?”

“They say his bite is worse than his bark.”

Through another door, which was marked “Project Commander” and had beneath that a sliding plate that said “Capt. Harold C. Barnes, USN.” The officer stepped aside, and Norman entered a paneled stateroom. A burly man in shirtsleeves stood up from behind a stack of files.

Captain Barnes was one of those trim military men who made Norman feel fat and inadequate. In his middle forties, Hal Barnes had erect military bearing, an alert expression, short hair, a flat gut, and a politician’s firm handshake.

“Welcome aboard the Hawes, Dr. Johnson. How’re you feeling?”

“Tired,” Norman said.

“I’m sure, I’m sure. You came from San Diego?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s fifteen hours, give or take. Like to have a rest?”

“I’d like to know what’s going on,” Norman said.

“Perfectly understandable.” Barnes nodded. “What’d they tell you?”

“Who?”

“The men who picked you up in San Diego, the men who flew you out here, the men in Guam. Whatever.”

“They didn’t tell me anything.”

“And did you see any reporters, any press?”

“No, nothing like that.”

Barnes smiled. “Good. I’m glad to hear it.” He waved Norman to a seat. Norman sat gratefully. “How about some coffee?” Barnes said, moving to a coffee maker behind his desk, and then the lights went out. The room was dark except for the light that streamed in from a side porthole.

“God damn it!” Barnes said. “Not again. Emerson! Emerson!”

An ensign came in a side door. “Sir! Working on it, Captain.”

“What was it this time?”

“Blew out in ROV Bay 2, sir.”

“I thought we added extra lines to Bay 2.”

“Apparently they overloaded anyway, sir.”

“I want this fixed now, Emerson!”

“We hope to have it solved soon, sir.”

The door closed; Barnes sat back in his chair. Norman heard the voice in the darkness. “It’s not really their fault,” he said. “These ships weren’t built for the kind of power loads we put on them now, and-ah, there we are.” The lights came back on. Barnes smiled. “Did you say you wanted coffee, Dr. Johnson?”

“Black is fine,” Norman said.

Barnes poured him a mug. “Anyway, I’m relieved you didn’t talk to anybody. In my job, Dr. Johnson, security is the biggest worry. Especially on a thing like this. If word gets out about this site, we’ll have all kinds of problems. And so many people are involved now… Hell, CincComPac didn’t even want to give me destroyers until I started talking about Soviet submarine reconnaissance. The next thing, I get four, then eight destroyers.”

“Soviet submarine reconnaissance?” Norman asked. “That’s what I told them in Honolulu.” Barnes grinned. “Part of the game, to get what you need for an operation like this. You’ve got to know how to requisition equipment in the modern Navy. But of course the Soviets won’t come around.”

“They won’t?” Norman felt he had somehow missed the assumptions that lay behind the conversation, and was trying to catch up.

“It’s very unlikely. Oh, they know we’re here. They’ll have spotted us with their satellites at least two days ago, but we’re putting out a steady stream of decodable messages about our Search and Rescue exercises in the South Pacific. S and R drill represents a low priority for them, even though they undoubtedly figure a plane went down and we’re recovering for real. They may even suspect that we’re trying to recover nuclear warheads, like we did off of Spain in ‘68. But they’ll leave us alone-because politically they don’t want to be implicated in our nuclear problems. They know we have troubles with New Zealand these days.”

“Is that what all this is?” Norman said. “Nuclear warheads?”

“No,” Barnes said. “Thank God. Anything nuclear, somebody in the White House always feels duty-bound to announce it. But we’ve kept this one away from the White House staff. In fact, we bypass the JCS on this. All briefings go straight from the Defense Secretary to the President, personally.” He rapped his knuckles on the desk. “So far, so good. And you’re the last to arrive. Now that you’re here, we’ll shut this thing down tight. Nothing in, nothing out.”

Norman still couldn’t put it together. “If nuclear warheads aren’t involved in the crash,” he said, “why the secrecy?”

“Well,” Barnes said. “We don’t have all the facts yet.”

“The crash occurred in the ocean?”

“Yes. More or less directly beneath us as we sit here.”

“Then there can’t be any survivors.”

“Survivors?” Barnes looked surprised. “No, I wouldn’t think so.”

“Then why was I called here?”

Barnes looked blank.

“Well,” Norman explained, “I’m usually called to crash sites when there are survivors. That’s why they put a psychologist on the team, to deal with the acute traumatic problems of surviving passengers, or sometimes the relatives of surviving passengers. Their feelings, and their fears, and their recurring nightmares. People who survive a crash often experience all sorts of guilt and anxiety, concerning why they survived and not others. A woman sitting with her husband and children, suddenly they’re all dead and she alone is alive. That kind of thing.” Norman sat back in his chair. “But in this case-an airplane that crashed in a thousand feet of water-there wouldn’t be any of those problems. So why am I here?”

Barnes was staring at him. He seemed uncomfortable. He shuffled the files around on his desk.

“Actually, this isn’t an airplane crash site, Dr. Johnson.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a spacecraft crash site.”

There was a short pause. Norman nodded. “I see.”

“That doesn’t surprise you?” Barnes said.

“No,” Norman said. “As a matter of fact, it explains a lot. If a military spacecraft crashed in the ocean, that explains why I haven’t heard anything about it on the radio, why it was kept secret, why I was brought here the way I was… When did it crash?”

Barnes hesitated just a fraction before answering. “As best we can estimate,” he said, “this spacecraft crashed three hundred years ago.”

ULF

There was a silence. Norman listened to the drone of the air conditioner. He heard faintly the radio communications in the next room. He looked at the mug of coffee in his hand, noticing a chip on the rim. He struggled to assimilate what he was being told, but his mind moved sluggishly, in circles.

Three hundred years ago, he thought. A spacecraft three hundred years old. But the space program wasn’t three hundred years old. It was barely thirty years old. So how could a spacecraft be three hundred years old? It couldn’t be. Barnes must be mistaken. But how could Barnes be mistaken? The Navy wouldn’t send all these ships, all these people, unless they were sure what was down there. A spacecraft three hundred years old.

But how could that be? It couldn’t be. It must be something else. He went over it again and again, getting nowhere, his mind dazed and shocked.

“-solutely no question about it,” Barnes was saying. “We can estimate the date from coral growth with great accuracy. Pacific coral grows two-and-a-half centimeters a year, and the object-whatever it is-is covered in about five meters of coral. That’s a lot of coral. Of course, coral doesn’t grow at a depth of a thousand feet, which means that the present shelf collapsed to a lower depth at some point in the past. The geologists are telling us that happened about a century ago, so we’re assuming a total age for the craft of about three hundred years. But we could be wrong about that. It could, in fact, be much older. It could be a thousand years old.”

Barnes shifted papers on his desk again, arranging them into neat stacks, lining up the edges.

“I don’t mind telling you, Dr. Johnson, this thing scares the hell out of me. That’s why you’re here.”

Norman shook his head. “I still don’t understand.”

“We brought you here,” Barnes said, “because of your association with the ULF project.”

“ULF?” Norman said. And he almost added, But ULF was a joke. Seeing how serious Barnes was, he was glad he had caught himself in time.

Yet ulf was a joke. Everything about it had been a joke, from the very beginning.

In 1979, in the waning days of the Carter Administration, Norman Johnson had been an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California at San Diego; his particular research interest was group dynamics and anxiety, and he occasionally served on FAA crash-site teams. In those days, his biggest problems had been finding a house for Ellen and the kids, keeping up his publications, and wondering whether UCSD would give him tenure. Norman’s research was considered brilliant, but psychology was notoriously prone to intellectual fashions, and interest in the study of anxiety was declining as many researchers came to regard anxiety as a purely biochemical disorder that could be treated with drug therapy alone; one scientist had even gone so far as to say, “Anxiety is no longer a problem in psychology. There is nothing left to study.” Similarly, group dynamics was perceived as old-fashioned, a field that had seen its heyday in the Gestalt encounter groups and corporate brainstorming procedures of the early 1970s but now was dated and passe.

Norman himself could not comprehend this. It seemed to him that American society was increasingly one in which people worked in groups, not alone; rugged individualism was now replaced by endless corporate meetings and group decisions. In this new society, group behavior seemed to him more important, not less. And he did not think that anxiety as a clinical problem was going to be solved with pills. It seemed to him that a society in which the most common prescription drug was Valium was, by definition, a society with unsolved problems.

Not until the preoccupation with Japanese managerial techniques in the 1980s did Norman’s field gain a new hold on academic attention. Around the same time, Valium dependence became recognized as a major concern, and the whole issue of drug therapy for anxiety was reconsidered. But in the meantime, Johnson spent several years feeling as if he were in a backwater. (He did not have a research grant approved for nearly three years.) Tenure, and finding a house, were very real problems.

It was during the worst of this time, in late 1979, that he was approached by a solemn young lawyer from the National Security Council in Washington who sat with his ankle across his knee and plucked nervously at his sock. The lawyer told Norman that he had come to ask his help.

Norman said he would help if he could.

Still plucking at the sock, the lawyer said he wanted to talk to Norman about a “grave matter of national security facing our country today.”

Norman asked what the problem was.

“Simply that this country has absolutely no preparedness in the event of an alien invasion. Absolutely no preparedness whatever.”

Because the lawyer was young, and because he stared down at his sock as he spoke, Norman at first thought he was embarrassed at having been sent on a fool’s errand. But when the young man looked up, Norman saw to his astonishment that he was utterly serious.

“We could really be caught with our pants down on this one,” the lawyer said. “An alien invasion.”

Norman had to bite his lip. “That’s probably true,” he said.

“People in the Administration are worried.”

“Are they?”

“There is the feeling at the highest levels that contingency plans should be drawn.”

“You mean contingency plans in the event of an alien invasion…” Norman somehow managed to keep a straight face.

“Perhaps,” said the lawyer, “perhaps invasion is too strong a word. Let’s soften that to say ‘contact’: alien contact.”

“I see.”

“You’re already involved in civilian crash-site teams, Dr. Johnson. You know how these emergency groups function. We want your input concerning the optimal composition of a crash-site team to confront an alien invader.”

“I see,” Norman said, wondering how he could tactfully get out of this. The idea was clearly ludicrous. He could see it only as displacement: the Administration, faced with immense problems it could not solve, had decided to think about something else.

And then the lawyer coughed, proposed a study, and named a substantial figure for a two-year research grant. Norman saw a chance to buy his house. He said yes. “I’m glad you agree the problem is a real one.”

“Oh yes,” Norman said, wondering how old this lawyer was. He guessed about twenty-five.

“We’ll just have to get your security clearance,” the lawyer said.

“I need security clearance?”

“Dr. Johnson,” the lawyer said, snapping his briefcase shut, “this project is top, top secret.”

“That’s fine with me,” Norman said, and he meant it. He could imagine his colleagues’ reactions if they ever found out about this.

What began as a joke soon became simply bizarre. Over the next year, Norman flew five times to Washington for meetings with high-level officials of the National Security Council over the pressing, imminent danger of alien invasion. His work was very secret. One early question was whether his project should be turned over to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency of the Pentagon. They decided not to. There were questions about whether it should be given to NASA, and again they decided not to. One Administration official said, “This isn’t a scientific matter, Dr. Johnson, this is a national security matter. We don’t want to open it out.” Norman was continually surprised at the level of the officials he was told to meet with. One Senior Undersecretary of State pushed aside the papers on his desk relating to the latest Middle East crisis to say, “What do you think about the possibility that these aliens will be able to read our minds?”

“I don’t know,” Norman said.

“Well, it occurs to me. How’re we going to be able to formulate a negotiating posture if they can read our minds?”

“That could be a problem,” Norman agreed, sneaking a glance at his watch.

“Hell, it’s bad enough our encrypted cables get intercepted by the Russians. We know the Japanese and the Israelis have cracked all our codes. We just pray the Russians can’t do it yet. But you see what I mean, the problem. About reading minds.”

“Oh yes.”

“Your report will have to take that into consideration.”

Norman promised it would.

A White House staffer said to him, “You realize the President will want to talk to these aliens personally. He’s that kind of man.”

“Uh-huh,” Norman said.

“And I mean, the publicity value here, the exposure, is incalculable. The President meets with the aliens at Camp David. What a media moment.”

“A real moment,” Norman agreed.

“So the aliens will need to be informed by an advance man of who the President is, and the protocol in talking to him. You can’t have the President of the United States talking to people from another galaxy or whatever on television without advance preparation. Do you think the aliens’ll speak English?”

“Doubtful,” Norman said.

“So someone may need to learn their language, is that it?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Perhaps the aliens would be more comfortable meeting with an advance man from one of our ethnic minorities,” the White House man said. “Anyway, it’s a possibility. Think about it.”

Norman promised he would think about it.

The Pentagon liaison, a Major General, took him to lunch and over coffee casually asked, “What sorts of armaments do you see these aliens having?”

“I’m not sure,” Norman said.

“Well, that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? And what about their vulnerabilities? I mean, the aliens might not even be human at all.”

“No, they might not.”

“They might be like giant insects. Your insects can withstand a lot of radiation.”

“Yes,” Norman said.

“We might not be able to touch these aliens,” the Pentagon man said gloomily. Then he brightened. “But I doubt they could withstand a direct hit with a multimeg nuclear device, do you?”

“No,” Norman said. “I don’t think they could.” “It’d vaporize ‘em.”

“Sure.”

“Laws of physics.”

“Right.”

“Your report must make that point clearly. About the nuclear vulnerability of these aliens.”

“Yes,” Norman said.

“We don’t want to start a panic,” the Pentagon man said. “No sense getting everyone upset, is there? I know the JCS will be reassured to hear the aliens are vulnerable to our nuclear weapons.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Norman said.

Eventually, the meetings ended, and he was left to write his report. And as he reviewed the published speculations on extraterrestrial life, he decided that the Major General from the Pentagon was not so wrong, after all. The real question about alien contact-if there was any real question at all-concerned panic. Psychological panic. The only important human experience with extraterrestrials had been Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” And the human response was unequivocal. People had been terrified.

Norman submitted his report, entitled “Contact with Possible Extraterrestrial Life.” It was returned to him by the NSC with the suggestion that the title be revised to “sound more technical” and that he remove “any suggestion that alien contact was only a possibility, as alien contact is considered virtually certain in some quarters of the Administration.”

Revised, Norman’s paper was duly classified Top Secret, under the title “Recommendations for the Human Contact Team to Interact with Unknown Life Forms (ULF).” As Norman envisioned it, the ULF Contact Team demanded particularly stable individuals. In his report he had said

“I wonder,” Barnes said, opening a folder, “if you recognize this quote:

Contact teams meeting an Unknown Life Form (ULF) must be prepared for severe psychological impact. Extreme anxiety responses will almost certainly occur. The personality traits of individuals who can withstand extreme anxiety must be determined, and such individuals selected to comprise the team.

Anxiety when confronted by unknown life has not been sufficiently appreciated. The fears unleashed by contact with a new life form are not understood and cannot be entirely predicted in advance. But the most likely consequence of contact is absolute terror.”

Barnes snapped the folder shut. “You remember who said that?”

“Yes,” Norman said. “I do.”

And he remembered why he had said it.

As part of the NSC grant, Norman had conducted studies of group dynamics in contexts of psychosocial anxiety. Following the procedures of Asch and Milgram, he constructed several environments in which subjects did not know they were being tested. In one case, a group of subjects were told to take an elevator to another floor to participate in a test. The elevator jammed between floors. Subjects were then observed by hidden video camera.

There were several variations to this. Sometimes the elevator was marked “Under Repair”; sometimes there was telephone communication with the “repairman,” sometimes not; sometimes the ceiling fell in, and the lights went out; and sometimes the floor of the elevator was constructed of clear lucite.

In another case, subjects were loaded into a van and driven out into the desert by an “experiment leader” who ran out of gas, and then suffered a “heart attack,” thus stranding the subjects.

In the most severe version, subjects were taken up in a private plane, and the pilot suffered a “heart attack” in mid-air. Despite the traditional complaints about such tests-that they were sadistic, that they were artificial, that subjects somehow sensed the situations were contrived-Johnson gained considerable information about groups under anxiety stress.

He found that fear responses were minimized when the group was small (five or less); when group members knew each other well; when group members could see each other and were not isolated; when they shared defined group goals and fixed time limits; when groups were mixed age and mixed gender; and when group members had high phobic-tolerant personalities as measured by LAS tests for anxiety, which in turn correlated with athletic fitness.

Study results were formulated in dense statistical tables, although, in essence, Norman knew he had merely verified common sense: if you were trapped in an elevator, it was better to be with a few relaxed, athletic people you knew, to keep the lights on, and to know someone was working to get you free.

Yet Norman knew that some of his results were counterintuitive, such as the importance of group composition. Groups composed entirely of men or entirely of women were much poorer at handling stress than mixed groups; groups composed of individuals roughly the same age were much poorer than groups of mixed age. And pre-existing groups formed for another purpose did worst of all; at one point he had stressed a championship basketball team, and it cracked almost immediately.

Although his research was good, Norman remained uneasy about the underlying purposes for his paper-alien invasion-which he personally considered speculative to the point of absurdity. He was embarrassed to submit his paper, particularly after he had rewritten it to make it seem more significant than he knew it was.

He was relieved when the Carter Administration did not like his report. None of Norman’s recommendations were approved. The Administration did not agree with Dr. Norman Johnson that fear was a problem; they thought the predominant human emotion would be wonder and awe. Furthermore, the Administration preferred a large contact team of thirty people, including three theologians, a lawyer, a physician, a representative from the State Department, a representative from the Joint Chiefs, a select group from the legislative branch, an aerospace engineer, an exobiologist, a nuclear physicist, a cultural anthropologist, and a television anchor personality.

In any case, President Carter was not re-elected in 1980, and Norman heard nothing further about his ULF proposal. He had heard nothing for six years.

Until now.

Barnes said, “You remember the ULF team you proposed?”

“Of course,” Norman said.

Norman had recommended a ULF team of four-an astrophysicist, a zoologist, a mathematician, a linguist-and a fifth member, a psychologist, whose job would be to monitor the behavior and attitude of the working team members.

“Give me your opinion of this,” Barnes said. He handed Norman a sheet of paper:

ANOMALY INVESTIGATION TEAM

USN STAFF/SUPPORT MEMBERS

1. Harold C. Barnes, USN Project Commander Captain

2. Jane Edmunds, USN Data Processing Tech P.O. 1C

3. Tina Chan, USN Electronics Tech P.O. 1C

4. Alice Fletcher, USN Deepsat Habitat Support Chief P.O.

5. Rose C. Levy, USN Deepsat Habitat Support 2C

CIVILIAN STAFF MEMBERS

1. Theodore Fielding, astrophysicist/planetary geologist

2. Elizabeth Halpern, zoologist/biochemist

3. Harold J. Adams, mathematician/logician

4. Arthur Levine, marine biologist/biochemist

5. Norman Johnson, psychologist

Norman looked at the list. “Except for Levine, this is the civilian ULF Team I originally proposed. I even interviewed them, and tested them, back then.”

“Correct.”

“But you said yourself: there are probably no survivors. There’s probably no life inside that spacecraft.”

“Yes,” Barnes said. “But what if I’m wrong?”

He glanced at his watch. “I’m going to brief the team members at eleven hundred hours. I want you to come along, and see what you think about the team members,” Barnes said. “After all, we followed your ULF report recommendations.”

You followed my recommendations, Norman thought with a sinking feeling. Jesus Christ, I was just paying for a house.

“I knew you’d jump at the opportunity to see your ideas put into practice,” Barnes said. “That’s why I’ve included you on the team as the psychologist, although a younger man would be more appropriate.”

“I appreciate that,” Norman said.

“I knew you would,” Barnes said, smiling cheerfully. He extended a beefy hand. “Welcome to the ULF Team, Dr. Johnson.”

BETH

An ensign showed norman to his room, tiny and gray, more like a prison cell than anything else. Norman’s day bag lay on his bunk. In the corner was a computer console and a keyboard. Next to it was a thick manual with a blue cover.

He sat on the bed, which was hard, unwelcoming. He leaned back against a pipe on the wall.

“Hi, Norman,” a soft voice said. “I’m glad to see they dragged you into this. This is all your fault, isn’t it?” A woman stood in the doorway.

Beth Halpern, the team zoologist, was a study in contrasts. She was a tall, angular woman of thirty-six who could be called pretty despite her sharp features and the almost masculine quality of her body. In the years since Norman had last seen her, she seemed to have emphasized her masculine side even more. Beth was a serious weight-lifter and runner; the veins and muscles bulged at her neck and on her forearms, and her legs, beneath her shorts, were powerful. Her hair was cut short, hardly longer than a man’s.

At the same time, she wore jewelry and makeup, and she moved in a seductive way. Her voice was soft, and her eyes were large and liquid, especially when she talked about the living things that she studied. At those times she became almost maternal. One of her colleagues at the University of Chicago had referred to her as “Mother Nature with muscles.”

Norman got up, and she gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “My room’s next to yours, I heard you arrive. When did you get in?”

“An hour ago. I think I’m still in shock,” Norman said. “Do you believe all this? Do you think it’s real?”

“I think that’s real.” She pointed to the blue manual next to his computer.

Norman picked it up: Regulations Governing Personnel Conduct During Classified Military Operations. He thumbed through pages of dense legal text.

“It basically says,” Beth said, “that you keep your mouth shut or you spend a long time in military prison. And there’s no calls in or out. Yes, Norman, I think it must be real.”

“There’s a spacecraft down there?”

“There’s something down there. It’s pretty exciting.” She began to speak more rapidly. “Why, for biology alone, the possibilities are staggering-everything we know about life comes from studying life on our own planet. But, in a sense, all life on our planet is the same. Every living creature, from algae to human beings, is basically built on the same plan, from the same DNA. Now we may have a chance to contact life that is entirely different, different in every way. It’s exciting, all right.”

Norman nodded. He was thinking of something else. “What did you say about no calls in or out? I promised to call Ellen.”

“Well, I tried to call my daughter and they told me the mainland com links are out. If you can believe that. The Navy’s got more satellites than admirals, but they swear there’s no available line to call out. Barnes said he’d approve a cable. That’s it.”

“How old is Jennifer now?” Norman asked, pleased to pull the name from his memory. And what was her husband’s name? He was a physicist, Norman remembered, something like that. Sandy blond man. Had a beard. Wore bow ties.

“Nine. She’s pitching for the Evanston Little League now. Not much of a student, but a hell of a pitcher.” She sounded proud. “How’s your family? Ellen?”

“She’s fine. The kids are fine. Tim’s a sophomore at Chicago. Amy’s at Andover. How is…”

“George? We divorced three years ago,” Beth said. “George had a year at CERN in Geneva, looking for exotic particles, and I guess he found whatever he was looking for. She’s French. He says she’s a great cook.” She shrugged. “Anyway, my work is going well. For the past year I have been working with cephalopods-squid and octopi.”

“How’s that?”

“Interesting. It gives you quite a strange feeling to realize the gentle intelligence of these creatures, particularly octopi. You know an octopus is smarter than a dog, and would probably make a much better pet. It’s a wonderful, clever, very emotional creature, an octopus. Only we never think of them that way.”

Norman said, “Do you still eat them?”

“Oh, Norman.” She smiled. “Do you still relate everything to food?”

“Whenever possible,” Norman said, patting his stomach. “Well, you won’t like the food in this place. It’s terrible. But the answer is no,” she said, cracking her knuckles. “I could never eat an octopus now, knowing what I do about them. Which reminds me: What do you know about Hal Barnes?”

“Nothing, why?”

“I’ve been asking around. Turns out Barnes is not Navy at all. He’s ex-Navy.”

“You mean he’s retired?”

“Retired in ‘81. He was originally trained as an aeronautical engineer at Cal Tech, and after he retired he worked for Grumman for a while. Then a member of the Navy Science Board of the National Academy; then Assistant Undersecretary of Defense, and a member of DSARC, the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council; a member of the Defense Science Board, which advises the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense.”

“Advises them on what?”

“Weapons acquisition,” Beth said. “He’s a Pentagon man who advises the government on weapons acquisition. So how’d he get to be running this project?”

“Beats me,” Norman said. Sitting on the bunk, he kicked off his shoes. He felt suddenly tired. Beth leaned against the doorway.

“You seem to be in very good shape,” Norman said. Even her hands looked strong, he thought.

“A good thing, too, as it turns out,” Beth said. “I have a lot of confidence for what’s coming. What about you? Think you’ll manage okay?”

“Me? Why shouldn’t I?” He glanced down at his own familiar paunch. Ellen was always after him to do something about it, and from time to time he got inspired and went to the gym for a few days, but he could never seem to get rid of it. And the truth was, it didn’t matter that much to him. He was fifty-three years old and he was a university professor. What the hell.

Then he had a thought: “What do you mean, you have confidence for what’s coming? What’s coming?”

“Well. It’s only rumors so far. But your arrival seems to confirm them.”

“What rumors?”

“They’re sending us down there,” Beth said.

“Down where?”

“To the bottom. To the spaceship.”

“But it’s a thousand feet down. They’re investigating it with robot submersibles.”

“These days, a thousand feet isn’t that deep,” Beth said. “The technology can handle it. There are Navy divers down there now. And the word is, the divers have put up a habitat so our team can go down and live on the bottom for a week or so and open the spacecraft up.”

Norman felt a sudden chill. In his work with the FAA, he had been exposed to every sort of horror. Once, in Chicago, at a crash site that extended over a whole farm field, he had stepped on something squishy. He thought it was a frog, but it was a child’s severed hand, palm up. Another time he had seen a man’s charred body, still strapped into the seat, except the seat had been flung into the back yard of a suburban house, where it sat upright next to a portable plastic kiddie swimming pool. And in Dallas he had watched the investigators on the rooftops of the suburban houses, collecting the body parts, putting them in bags…

Working on a crash-site team demanded the most extraordinary psychological vigilance, to avoid being overwhelmed by what you saw. But there was never any personal danger, any physical risk. The risk was the risk of nightmares.

But now, the prospect of going down a thousand feet under the ocean to investigate a wreck…

“You okay?” Beth said. “You look pale.”

“I didn’t know anybody was talking about going down there.”

“Just rumors,” Beth said. “Get some rest, Norman. I think you need it.”

THE BRIEFING

The ulf team met in the briefing room, just before eleven. Norman was interested to see the group he had picked six years before, now assembled together for the first time.

Ted Fielding was compact, handsome, and still boyish at forty, at ease in shorts and a Polo sport shirt. An astrophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, he had done important work on the planetary stratigraphy of Mercury and the moon, although he was best known for his studies of the Mangala Vallis and Valles Marineris channels on Mars. Located at the Martian equator, these great canyons were as much as twenty-five hundred miles long and two and a half miles deep-ten times the length and twice the depth of the Grand Canyon. And Fielding had been among the first to conclude that the planet most like the Earth in composition was not Mars at all, as previously suspected, but tiny Mercury, with its Earth-like magnetic field.

Fielding’s manner was open, cheerful, and pompous. At JPL, he had appeared on television whenever there was a spacecraft flyby, and thus enjoyed a certain celebrity; he had recently been remarried, to a television weather reporter in Los Angeles; they had a young son.

Ted was a longstanding advocate for life on other worlds, and a supporter of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which other scientists considered a waste of time and money. He grinned happily at Norman now.

“I always knew this would happen-sooner or later, we’d get our proof of intelligent life on other worlds. Now at last we have it, Norman. This is a great moment. And I am especially pleased about the shape.”

“The shape?”

“Of the object down there.”

“What about it?” Norman hadn’t heard anything about the shape.

“I’ve been in the monitor room watching the video feed from the robots. They’re beginning to define the shape beneath the coral. And it’s not round. It is not a flying saucer,” Ted said. “Thank God. Perhaps this will silence the lunatic fringe.” He smiled. “ ‘All things come to him who waits,’ eh?”

“I guess so,” Norman said. He wasn’t sure what Fielding meant, but Ted tended to literary quotations. Ted saw himself as a Renaissance man, and random quotations from Rousseau and Lao-tsu were one way to remind you of it. Yet there was nothing mean-spirited about him; someone once said that Ted was “a brand-name guy,” and that carried over to his speech as well. There was an innocence, almost a naivete to Ted Fielding that was endearing and genuine. Norman liked him.

He wasn’t so sure about Harry Adams, the reserved Princeton mathematician Norman hadn’t seen for six years. Harry was now a tall, very thin black man with wire-frame glasses and a perpetual frown. He wore a T-shirt that said “Mathematicians Do It Correctly”; it was the kind of thing a student would wear, and indeed, Adams appeared even younger than his thirty years; he was clearly the youngest member of the group-and arguably the most important.

Many theorists argued that communication with extraterrestrials would prove impossible, because human beings would have nothing in common with them. These thinkers pointed out that just as human bodies represented the outcome of many evolutionary events, so did human thought. Like our bodies, our ways of thinking could easily have turned out differently; there was nothing inevitable about how we looked at the universe.

Men already had trouble communicating with intelligent Earthly creatures such as dolphins, simply because dolphins lived in such a different environment and had such different sensory apparatus.

Yet men and dolphins might appear virtually identical when compared with the vast differences that separated us from an extraterrestrial creature-a creature who was the product of billions of years of divergent evolution in some other planetary environment. Such an extraterrestrial would be unlikely to see the world as we did. In fact, it might not see the world at all. It might be blind, and it might learn about the world through a highly developed sense of smell, or temperature, or pressure. There might be no way to communicate with such a creature, no common ground at all. As one man put it, how would you explain Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils to a blind watersnake?

But the field of knowledge we were most likely to share with extraterrestrials was mathematics. So the team mathematician was going to play a crucial role. Norman had selected Adams because, despite his youth, Harry had already made important contributions to several different fields.

“What do you think about all this, Harry?” Norman said, dropping into a chair next to him.

“I think it’s perfectly clear,” Harry said, “that it is a waste of time.”

“This fin they’ve found underwater?”

“I don’t know what it is, but I know what it isn’t. It isn’t a spacecraft from another civilization.”

Ted, standing nearby, turned away in annoyance. Harry and Ted had evidently had this same conversation already. “How do you know?” Norman asked.

“A simple calculation,” Harry said, with a dismissing wave of his hand. “Trivial, really. You know the Drake equation?”

Norman did. It was one of the famous proposals in the literature on extraterrestrial life. But he said, “Refresh me.”

Harry sighed irritably, pulled out a sheet of paper. “It’s a probability equation.” He wrote:

p = f_pn_hf_lf_if_c

“What it means,” Harry Adams said, “is that the probability, p, that intelligent life will evolve in any star system is a function of the probability that the star will have planets, the number of habitable planets, the probability that simple life will evolve on a habitable planet, the probability that intelligent life will evolve from simple life, and the probability that intelligent life will attempt interstellar communication within five billion years. That’s all the equation says.”

“Uh-huh,” Norman said.

“But the point is that we have no facts,” Harry said. “We must guess at every single one of these probabilities. And it’s quite easy to guess one way, as Ted does, and conclude there are probably thousands of intelligent civilizations. It’s equally easy to guess, as I do, that there is probably only one civilization. Ours.” He pushed the paper away. “And in that case, whatever is down there is not from an alien civilization. So we’re all wasting our time here.”

“Then what is down there?” Norman said again.

“It is an absurd expression of romantic hope,” Adams said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. There was a vehemence about him that troubled Norman. Six years earlier, Harry Adams had still been a street kid whose obscure talent had carried him in a single step from a broken home in the slums of Philadelphia to the manicured green lawns of Princeton. In those days Adams had been playful, amused at his turn of fortune. Why was he so harsh now?

Adams was an extraordinarily gifted theoretician, his reputation secured in probability-density functions of quantum mechanics which were beyond Norman’s comprehension, although Adams had worked them out when he was seventeen. But Norman could certainly understand the man himself, and Harry Adams seemed tense and critical now, ill at ease in this group.

Or perhaps it had to do with his presence as part of a group. Norman had worried about how he would fit in, because Harry had been a child prodigy.

There were really only two kinds of child prodigies-mathematical and musical. Some psychologists argued there was only one kind, since music was so closely related to mathematics. While there were precocious children with other talents, such as writing, painting, and athletics, the only areas in which a child might truly perform at the level of an adult were in mathematics or music. Psychologically, such children were complex: often loners, isolated from their peers and even from their families by their gifts, for which they were both admired and resented. Socialization skills were often retarded, making group interactions uncomfortable. As a slum kid, Harry’s problems would have been, if anything, magnified. He had once told Norman that when he first learned about Fourier transforms, the other kids were learning to slam-dunk. So maybe Harry was feeling uncomfortable in the group now.

But there seemed to be something else… Harry appeared almost angry.

“You wait,” Adams said. “A week from now, this is going to be recognized as one big fat false alarm. Nothing more.”

You hope, Norman thought. And again wondered why.

“Well, I think it’s exciting,” Beth Halpern said, smiling brightly. “Even a slim chance of finding new life is exciting, as far as I am concerned.”

“That’s right,” Ted said. “After all, Harry, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”

Norman looked over at the final member of the team, Arthur Levine, the marine biologist. Levine was the only person he didn’t know. A pudgy man, Levine looked pale and uneasy, wrapped in his own thoughts. He was about to ask Levine what he thought when Captain Barnes strode in, a stack of files under his arm.

“Welcome to the middle of nowhere,” Barnes said, “and you can’t even go to the bathroom.” They all laughed nervously. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “But we don’t have a lot of time, so let’s get right down to it. If you’ll kill the lights, we can begin.”

The first slide showed a large ship with an elaborate superstructure on the stern.

“The Rose Sealady,” Barnes said. “A cable-laying vessel chartered by Transpac Communications to lay a submarine telephone line from Honolulu to Sydney, Australia. The Rose left Hawaii on May 29 of this year, and by June 16 it had gotten as far as Western Samoa in the mid-Pacific. It was laying a new fiber-optics cable, which has a carrying capacity of twenty thousand simultaneous telephonic transmissions. The cable is covered with a dense metal-and-plastics web matrix, unusually tough and resistant to breaks. The ship had already laid more than forty-six hundred nautical miles of cable across the Pacific with no mishaps of any sort. Next.”

A map of the Pacific, with a large red spot.

“At ten p.m. on the night of June 17, the vessel was located here, midway between Pago Pago in American Samoa and Viti Levu in Fiji, when the ship experienced a wrenching shudder. Alarms sounded, and the crew realized the cable had snagged and torn. They immediately consulted their charts, looking for an underwater obstruction, but could see none. They hauled up the loose cable, which took several hours, since at the time of the accident they had more than a mile of cable paid out behind the ship. When they examined the cut end, they saw that it had been cleanly sheared-as one crewman said, ‘like it was cut with a huge pair of scissors.’ Next.”

A section of Fiberglas cable held toward the camera in the rough hand of a sailor.

“The nature of the break, as you can see, suggests an artificial obstruction of some sort. The Rose steamed north back over the scene of the break. Next.”

A series of ragged black-and-white lines, with a region of small spikes.

“This is the original sonar scan from the ship. If you can’t read sonar scans this’ll be hard to interpret, but you see here the thin, knife-edge obstruction. Consistent with a sunken ship or aircraft, which cut the cable.

“The charter company, Transpac Communications, notified the Navy, requesting any information we had about the obstruction. This is routine: whenever there is a cable break, the Navy is notified, on the chance that the obstruction is known to us. If it’s a sunken vessel containing explosives, the cable company wants to know about it before they start repair. But in this case the obstruction was not in Navy files. And the Navy was interested.

“We immediately dispatched our nearest search ship, the Ocean Explorer, from Melbourne. The Ocean Explorer reached the site on June 21 of this year. The reason for the Navy interest was the possibility that the obstruction might represent a sunken Chinese Wuhan-class nuclear submarine fitted with SY-2 missiles. We knew the Chinese lost such a sub in this approximate area in May 1984. The Ocean Explorer scanned the bottom, using a most sophisticated sidelooking sonar, which produced this picture of the bottom.”

In color, the image was almost three-dimensional in its clarity.

“As you see, the bottom appears flat except for a single triangular fin which sticks up some two hundred and eighty feet above the ocean floor. You see it here,” he said, pointing. “Now, this wing dimension is larger than any known aircraft manufactured in either the United States or the Soviet Union. This was very puzzling at first. Next.”

A submersible robot, being lowered on a crane over the side of a ship. The robot looked like a series of horizontal tubes with cameras and lights nestled in the center.

“By June 24, the Navy had the ROV carrier Neptune IV on site, and the Remote Operated Vehicle Scorpion, which you see here, was sent down to photograph the wing. It returned an image that clearly showed a control surface of some sort. Here it is.”

There were murmurs from the group. In a harshly lit color image, a gray fin stuck up from a flat coral floor. The fin was sharp-edged and aeronautical-looking, tapered, definitely artificial.

“You’ll notice,” Barnes said, “that the sea bottom in this region consists of scrubby dead coral. The wing or fin disappears into the coral, suggesting the rest of the aircraft might be buried beneath. An ultra-high-resolution SLS bottom scan was carried out, to detect the shape underneath the coral. Next.”

Another color sonar image, composed of fine dots instead of lines.

“As you see, the fin seems to be attached to a cylindrical object buried under the coral. The object has a diameter of a hundred and ninety feet, and extends west for a distance of 2,754 feet before tapering to a point.”

More murmurings from the audience.

“That’s correct,” Barnes said. “The cylindrical object is half a mile long. The shape is consistent with a rocket or spacecraft-it certainly looks like that-but from the beginning we were careful to refer to this object as ‘the anomaly.’ ”

Norman glanced over at Ted, who was smiling up at the screen. But alongside Ted in the darkness, Harry Adams frowned and pushed his glasses up on his nose.

Then the projector light went out. The room was plunged into darkness. There were groans. Norman heard Barnes say, “God damn it, not again!” Someone scrambled for the door; there was a rectangle of light.

Beth leaned over to Norman and said, “They lose power here all the time. Reassuring, huh?”

Moments later, the electricity came back on; Barnes continued. “On June 25 a SCARAB remote vehicle cut a piece from the tail fin and brought it to the surface. The fin segment was analyzed and found to be a titanium alloy in an epoxy-resin honeycomb. The necessary bonding technology for such metal/plastic materials was currently unknown on Earth.

“Experts confirmed that the fin could not have originated on this planet-although in ten or twenty years we’d probably know how to make it.”

Harry Adams grunted, leaned forward, made a note on his pad.

Meanwhile, Barnes explained, other robot vessels were used to plant seismic charges on the bottom. Seismic analysis showed that the buried anomaly was of metal, that it was hollow, and that it had a complex internal structure.

“After two weeks of intensive study,” Barnes said, “we concluded the anomaly was some sort of spacecraft.”

The final verification came on June 27 from the geologists. Their core samples from the bottom indicated that the present seabed had formerly been much shallower, perhaps only eighty or ninety feet deep. This would explain the coral, which covered the craft to an average thickness of thirty feet. Therefore, the geologists said, the craft had been on the planet at least three hundred years, and perhaps much longer: five hundred, or even five thousand years.

“However reluctantly,” Barnes said, “the Navy concluded that we had, in fact, found a spacecraft from another civilization. The decision of the President, before a special meeting of the National Security Council, was to open the spacecraft. So, starting June 29, the ULF team members were called in.”

On July 1, the subsea habitat DH-7 was lowered into position near the spacecraft site. DH-7 housed nine Navy divers working in a saturated exotic-gas environment. They proceeded to do primary drilling work. “And I think that brings you up to date,” Barnes said. “Any questions?”

Ted said, “The internal structure of the spacecraft. Has it been clarified?”

“Not at this point. The spacecraft seems to be built in such a way that shock waves are transmitted around the outer shell, which is tremendously strong and well engineered. That prevents a clear picture of the interior from the seismics.”

“How about passive techniques to see what’s inside?”

“We’ve tried,” Barnes said. “Gravitometric analysis, negative. Thermography, negative. Resistivity mapping, negative. Proton precision magnetometers, negative.”

“Listening devices?”

“We’ve had hydrophones on the bottom from day one. There have been no sounds emanating from the craft. At least not so far.”

“What about other remote inspection procedures?”

“Most involve radiation, and we’re hesitant to irradiate the craft at this time.”

Harry said, “Captain Barnes, I notice the fin appears undamaged, and the hull appears a perfect cylinder. Do you think that this object crashed in the ocean?”

“Yes,” Barnes said, looking uneasy.

“So this object has survived a high-speed impact with the water, without a scratch or a dent?”

“Well, it’s tremendously strong.”

Harry nodded. “It would have to be…”

Beth said, “The divers who are down there now-what exactly are they doing?”

“Looking for the front door.” Barnes smiled. “For the time being, we’ve had to fall back on classical archaeological procedures. We’re digging exploratory trenches in the coral, looking for an entrance or a hatch of some kind. We hope to find it within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Once we do, you’re going in. Anything else?”

“Yes,” Ted said. “What was the Russian reaction to this discovery?”

“We haven’t told the Russians,” Barnes said.

“You haven’t told them?”

“No. We haven’t.”

“But this is an incredible, unprecedented development in human history. Not just American history. Human history. Surely we should share this with all the nations of the world. This is the sort of discovery that could unite all of mankind-”

“You’d have to speak to the President,” Barnes said. “I don’t know the reasoning behind it, but it’s his decision. Any other questions?”

Nobody said anything. The team looked at each other.

“Then I guess that’s it,” Barnes said.

The lights came on. There was the scraping of chairs as people stood, stretched. Then Harry Adams said, “Captain Barnes, I must say I resent this briefing very much.”

Barnes looked surprised. “What do you mean, Harry?” The others stopped, looked at Adams. He remained seated in his chair, an irritated look on his face. “Did you decide you have to break the news to us gently?”

“What news?”

“The news about the door.”

Barnes laughed uneasily. “Harry, I just got through telling you that the divers are cutting exploratory trenches, looking for the door-”

“-I’d say you had a pretty good idea where the door was three days ago, when you started flying us in. And I’d say that by now you probably know exactly where the door is. Am I right?”

Barnes said nothing. He stood with a fixed smile on his face.

My God, Norman thought, looking at Barnes. Harry’s right. Harry was known to have a superbly logical brain, an astonishing and cold deductive ability, but Norman had never seen him at work.

“Yes,” Barnes said, finally. “You’re right.”

“You know the location of the door?”

“We do. Yes.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Ted said, “But this is fantastic! Absolutely fantastic! When will we go down there to enter the spacecraft?”

“Tomorrow,” Barnes said, never taking his eyes off Harry. And Harry, for his own part, stared fixedly at Barnes. “The minisubs will take you down in pairs, starting at oh eight hundred hours tomorrow morning.”

“This is exciting!” Ted said. “Fantastic! Unbelievable.”

“So,” Barnes said, still watching Harry, “you should all get a good night’s sleep-if you can.”

“ ‘Innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,’ ” Ted said. He was literally bobbing up and down in his chair with excitement.

“During the rest of the day, supply and technical officers will be coming to measure and outfit you. Any other questions,” Barnes said, “you can find me in my office.”

He left the room, and the meeting broke up. When the others filed out, Norman remained behind, with Harry Adams. Harry never moved from his chair. He watched the technician packing up the portable screen.

“That was quite a performance just now,” Norman said.

“Was it? I don’t see why.”

“You deduced that Barnes wasn’t telling us about the door.”

“Oh, there’s much more he’s not telling us about,” Adams said, in a cold voice. “He’s not telling us about any of the important things.”

“Like what?”

“Like the fact,” Harry said, getting to his feet at last, “that Captain Barnes knows perfectly well why the President decided to keep this a secret.”

“He does?”

“The President had no choice, under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“He knows that the object down there is not an alien spacecraft.”

“Then what is it?”

“I think it’s quite clear what it is.”

“Not to me,” Norman said.

Adams smiled for the first time. It was a thin smile, entirely without humor. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” he said. And he left the room.

TESTS

Arthur levine, the marine biologist, was the only member of the expedition Norman Johnson had not met. It was one of the things we hadn’t planned for, he thought. Norman had assumed that any contact with unknown life would occur on land; he hadn’t considered the most obvious possibility-that if a spacecraft landed at random somewhere on the Earth, it would most likely come down on water, since 70 percent of the planet was covered with water. It was obvious in retrospect that they would need a marine biologist.

What else, he wondered, would prove obvious in retrospect?

He found Levine hanging off the port railing. Levine came from the oceanographic institute at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. His hand was damp when Norman shook it. Levine looked extremely ill at ease, and finally admitted that he was seasick.

“Seasick? A marine biologist?” Norman said.

“I work in the laboratory,” he said. “At home. On land. Where things don’t move all the time. Why are you smiling?”

“Sorry,” Norman said.

“You think it’s funny, a seasick marine biologist?”

“Incongruous, I guess.”

“A lot of us get seasick,” Levine said. He stared out at the sea. “Look out there,” he said. “Thousands of miles of flat. Nothing.”

“The ocean.”

“It gives me the creeps,” Levine said.

“So?” Barnes said, back in his office. “What do you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of the team, for Christ’s sake.”

“It’s the team I chose, six years later. Basically a good group, certainly very able.”

“I want to know who will crack.”

“Why should anybody crack?” Norman said. He was looking at Barnes, noticing the thin line of sweat on his upper lip. The commander was under a lot of pressure himself.

“A thousand feet down?” Barnes said. “Living and working in a cramped habitat? Listen, it’s not like I’m going in with military divers who have been trained and who have themselves under control. I’m taking a bunch of scientists, for God’s sake. I want to make sure they all have a clean bill of health. I want to make sure nobody’s going to crack.”

“I don’t know if you are aware of this, Captain, but psychologists can’t predict that very accurately. Who will crack.”

“Even when it’s from fear?”

“Whatever it’s from.”

Barnes frowned. “I thought fear was your specialty.”

“Anxiety is one of my research interests and I can tell you who, on the basis of personality profiles, is likely to suffer acute anxiety in a stress situation. But I can’t predict who’ll crack under that stress and who won’t.”

“Then what good are you?” Barnes said irritably. He sighed. “I’m sorry. Don’t you just want to interview them, or give them some tests?”

“There aren’t any tests,” Norman said. “At least, none that work.”

Barnes sighed again. “What about Levine?”

“He’s seasick.”

“There isn’t any motion underwater; that won’t be a problem. But what about him, personally?”

“I’d be concerned,” Norman said.

“Duly noted. What about Harry Adams? He’s arrogant.”

“Yes,” Norman said. “But that’s probably desirable.” Studies had shown that the people who were most successful at handling pressure were people others didn’t like-individuals who were described as arrogant, cocksure, irritating.

“Maybe so,” Barnes said. “But what about his famous research paper? Harry was one of the biggest supporters of SETI a few years back. Now that we’ve found something, he’s suddenly very negative. You remember his paper?”

Norman didn’t, and was about to say so when an ensign came in. “Captain Barnes, here is the visual upgrade you wanted.”

“Okay,” Barnes said. He squinted at a photograph, put it down. “What about the weather?”

“No change, sir. Satellite reports are confirming we have forty-eight plus-minus twelve on site, sir.”

“Hell,” Barnes said.

“Trouble?” Norman asked.

“The weather’s going bad on us,” Barnes said. “We may have to clear out our surface support.”

“Does that mean you’ll cancel going down there?”

“No,” Barnes said. “We go tomorrow, as planned.”

“Why does Harry think this thing is not a spacecraft?” Norman asked.

Barnes frowned, pushed papers on his desk. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “Harry’s a theoretician. And theories are just that-theories. I deal in the hard facts. The fact is, we’ve got something damn old and damn strange down there. I want to know what it is.”

“But if it’s not an alien spacecraft, what is it?”

“Let’s just wait until we get down there, shall we?” Barnes glanced at his watch. “The second habitat should be anchored on the sea floor by now. We’ll begin moving you down in fifteen hours. Between now and then, we’ve all got a lot to do.”

“Just hold it there, Dr. Johnson.” Norman stood naked, felt two metal calipers pinch the back of his arms, just above the elbow. “Just a bit… that’s fine. Now you can get into the tank.”

The young medical corpsman stepped aside, and Norman climbed the steps to the metal tank, which looked like a military version of a Jacuzzi. The tank was filled to the top with water. As he lowered his body into the water, it spilled over the sides.

“What’s all this for?” Norman asked.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Johnson. If you would completely immerse yourself…”

“What?”

“Just for a moment, sir…”

Norman took a breath, ducked under the water, came back up.

“That’s fine, you can get out now,” the corpsman said, handing him a towel.

“What’s all this for?” he asked again, climbing down the ladder.

“Total body adipose content,” the corpsman said. “We have to know it, to calculate your sat stats.”

“My sat stats?”

“Your saturation statistics.” The corpsman marked points on his clipboard.

“Oh dear,” he said. “You’re off the graph.”

“Why is that?”

“Do you get much exercise, Dr. Johnson?”

“Some.” He was feeling defensive now. And the towel was too small to wrap around his waist. Why did the Navy use such small towels?

“Do you drink?”

“Some.” He was feeling distinctly defensive. No question about it.

“May I ask when you last consumed an alcoholic beverage, sir?”

“I don’t know. Two, three days ago.” He was having trouble thinking back to San Diego. It seemed so far away. “Why?”

“That’s fine, Dr. Johnson. Any trouble with joints, hips or knees?”

“No, why?”

“Episodes of syncope, faintness or blackouts?”

“No…”

“If you would just sit over here, sir.” The corpsman pointed to a stool, next to an electronic device on the wall. “I’d really like some answers,” Norman said.

“Just stare at the green dot, both eyes wide open…”

He felt a brief blast of air on both eyes, and blinked instinctively. A printed strip of paper clicked out. The corpsman tore it off, glanced at it.

“That’s fine, Dr. Johnson. If you would come this way…” “I’d like some information from you,” Norman said. “I’d like to know what’s going on.”

“I understand, sir, but I have to finish your workup in time for your next briefing at seventeen hundred hours.”

Norman lay on his back, and technicians stuck needles in both arms, and another in his leg at the groin. He yelled in sudden pain.

“That’s the worst of it, sir,” the corpsman said, packing the syringes in ice. “If you will just press this cotton against it, here…”

There was a clip over his nostrils, a mouthpiece between his teeth.

“This is to measure your CO₂” the corpsman said. “Just exhale. That’s right. Big breath, now exhale…”

Norman exhaled. He watched a rubber diaphragm inflate, pushing a needle up a scale.

“Try it again, sir. I’m sure you can do better than that.” Norman didn’t think he could, but he tried again anyway. Another corpsman entered the room, with a sheet of paper covered with figures. “Here are his BC’s,” he said.

The first corpsman frowned. “Has Barnes seen this?”

“Yes.”

“And what’d he say?”

“He said it was okay. He said to continue.”

“Okay, fine. He’s the boss.” The first corpsman turned back to Norman. “Let’s try one more big breath, Dr. Johnson, if you would…”

Metal calipers touched his chin and his forehead. A tape went around his head. Now the calipers measured from his ear to his chin.

“What’s this for?” Norman said.

“Fitting you with a helmet, sir.”

“Shouldn’t I be trying one on?”

“This is the way we do it, sir.”

Dinner was macaroni and cheese, burned underneath. Norman pushed it aside after a few bites.

The corpsman appeared at his door. “Time for the seventeen-hundred-hours briefing, sir.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Norman said, “until I get some answers. What the hell is all this you’re doing to me?”

“Routine deepsat workup, sir. Navy regs require it before you go down.”

“And why am I off the graph?”

“Sorry, sir?”

“You said I was off the graph.”

“Oh, that. You’re a bit heavier than the Navy tables figure for, sir.”

“Is there a problem about my weight?”

“Shouldn’t be, no, sir.”

“And the other tests, what did they show?”

“Sir, you are in very good health for your age and lifestyle.”

“And what about going down there?” Norman asked, half hoping he wouldn’t be able to go.

“Down there? I’ve talked with Captain Barnes. Shouldn’t be any problem at all, sir. If you’ll just come this way to the briefing, sir…”

The others were sitting around in the briefing room, with Styrofoam cups of coffee. Norman felt glad to see them. He dropped into a chair next to Harry. “Jesus, did you have the damn physical?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Had it yesterday.”

“They stuck me in the leg with this long needle,” Norman said.

“Really? They didn’t do that to me.”

“And how about breathing with that clip on your nose?”

“I didn’t do that, either,” Harry said. “Sounds like you got some special treatment, Norman.”

Norman was thinking the same thing, and he didn’t like the implications. He felt suddenly tired.

“All right, men, we’ve got a lot to cover and just three hours to do it,” a brisk man said, turning off the lights as he came into the room. Norman hadn’t even gotten a good look at him. Now it was just a voice in the dark. “As you know, Dalton’s law governs partial pressures of mixed gases, or, as represented here in algebraic form…”

The first of the graphs flashed up.

PP_a = P_tot x % Vol_a

“Now let’s review how calculation of the partial pressure might be done in atmospheres absolute, which is the most common procedure we employ-”

The words were meaningless to Norman. He tried to pay attention, but as the graphs continued and the voice droned on, his eyes grew heavier and he fell asleep.

“-be taken down in the submarine and once in the habitat module you will be pressurized to thirty-three atmospheres. At that time you will be switched over to mixed gases, since it is not possible to breathe Earth atmosphere beyond eighteen atmospheres-”

Norman stopped listening. These technical details only filled him with dread. He went back to sleep, awakening only intermittently.

“-since oxygen toxicity only occurs when the PO₂ exceeds point 7 ATA for prolonged periods-

“-nitrogen narcosis, in which nitrogen behaves like an anesthetic, will occur in mixed-gas atmospheres if partial pressures exceeds 1.5 ATA in the DDS-

“-demand open circuit is generally preferable, but you will be using semiclosed circuit with inspired fluctuations of 608 to 760 millimeters-”

He went back to sleep.

When it was over, they walked back to their rooms. “Did I miss anything?” Norman said.

“Not really.” Harry shrugged. “Just a lot of physics.”

In his tiny gray room, Norman got into bed. The glowing wall clock said 2300. It took him a while to figure out that that was 11:00 p.m. In nine more hours, he thought, I will begin the descent.

Then he slept.