Sphere

DESCENT

In the morning light, the submarine Charon V bobbed on the surface, riding on a pontoon platform. Bright yellow, it looked like a child’s bathtub toy sitting on a deck of oildrums.

A rubber Zodiac launch took Norman over, and he climbed onto the platform, shook hands with the pilot, who could not have been more than eighteen, younger than his son, Tim.

“Ready to go, sir?” the pilot said.

“Sure,” Norman said. He was as ready as he would ever be.

Up close, the sub did not look like a toy. It was incredibly massive and strong. Norman saw a single porthole of curved acrylic. It was held in place by bolts as big as his fist. He touched them, tentatively.

The pilot smiled. “Want to kick the tires, sir?”

“No, I’ll trust you.”

“Ladder’s this way, sir.”

Norman climbed the narrow rungs to the top of the sub, and saw the small circular hatch opening. He hesitated.

“Sit on the edge here,” the pilot said, “and drop your legs in, then follow it down. You may have to squeeze your shoulders together a bit and suck in your… That’s it, sir.” Norman wriggled through the tight hatch into an interior so low he could not stand. The sub was crammed with dials and machinery. Ted was already aboard, hunched in the back, grinning like a kid. “Isn’t this fantastic?”

Norman envied his easy enthusiasm; he felt cramped and a little nervous. Above him, the pilot clanged the heavy hatch shut and dropped down to take the controls. “Everybody okay?”

They nodded.

“Sorry about the view,” the pilot said, glancing over his shoulders. “You gentlemen are mostly going to be seeing my hindquarters. Let’s get started. Mozart okay?” He pressed a tape deck and smiled. “We’ve got thirteen minutes’ descent to the bottom; music makes it a little easier. If you don’t like Mozart, we can offer you something else.”

“Mozart’s fine,” Norman said.

“Mozart’s wonderful,” Ted said. “Sublime.”

“Very good, gentlemen.” The submarine hissed. There was squawking on the radio. The pilot spoke softly into a headset. A scuba diver appeared at the porthole, waved. The pilot waved back.

There was a sloshing sound, then a deep rumble, and they started down.

“As you see, the whole sled goes under,” the pilot explained. “The sub’s not stable on the surface, so we sled her up and down. We’ll leave the sled at about a hundred feet or so.

Through the porthole, they saw the diver standing on the deck, the water now waist-deep. Then the water covered the porthole. Bubbles came out of the diver’s scuba.

“We’re under,” the pilot said. He adjusted valves above his head and they heard the hiss of air, startlingly loud. More gurgling. The light in the submarine from the porthole was a beautiful blue.

“Lovely,” Ted said.

“We’ll leave the sled now,” the pilot said. Motors rumbled and the sub moved forward, the diver slipping off to one side. Now there was nothing to be seen through the porthole but undifferentiated blue water. The pilot said something on the radio, and turned up the Mozart.

“Just sit back, gentlemen,” he said. “Descending eighty feet a minute.”

Norman felt the rumble of the electric motors, but there was no real sense of motion. All that happened was that it got darker and darker.

“You know,” Ted said, “we’re really quite lucky about this site. Most parts of the Pacific are so deep we’d never be able to visit it in person.” He explained that the vast Pacific Ocean, which amounted to half the total surface area of the Earth, had an average depth of two miles. “There are only a few places where it is less. One is the relatively small rectangle bounded by Samoa, New Zealand, Australia, and New Guinea, which is actually a great undersea plain, like the plains of the American West, except it’s at an average depth of two thousand feet. That’s what we are doing now, descending to that plain.”

Ted spoke rapidly. Was he nervous? Norman couldn’t tell: he was feeling his own heart pound. Now it was quite dark outside; the instruments glowed green. The pilot flicked on red interior lights.

Their descent continued. “Four hundred feet.” The submarine lurched, then eased forward. “This is the river.”

“What river?” Norman said.

“Sir, we are in a current of different salinity and temperature; it behaves like a river inside the ocean. We traditionally stop about here, sir; the sub sticks in the river, takes us for a little ride.”

“Oh yes,” Ted said, reaching into his pocket. Ted handed the pilot a ten-dollar bill.

Norman glanced questioningly at Ted.

“Didn’t they mention that to you? Old tradition. You always pay the pilot on your way down, for good luck.”

“I can use some luck,” Norman said. He fumbled in his pocket, found a five-dollar bill, thought better of it, took out a twenty instead.

“Thank you, gentlemen, and have a good bottom stay, both of you,” the pilot said.

The electric motors cut back in.

The descent continued. The water was dark. “Five hundred feet,” he said. “Halfway there.”

The submarine creaked loudly, then made several explosive pops. Norman was startled.

“That’s normal pressure adjustment,” the pilot said. “No problem.”

“Uh-huh,” Norman said. He wiped sweat on his shirtsleeve. It seemed that the interior of the submarine was now much smaller, the walls closer to his face.

“Actually,” Ted said, “if I remember, this particular region of the Pacific is called the Lau Basin, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right, sir, the Lau Basin.”

“It’s a plateau between two undersea ridges, the South Fiji or Lau Ridge to the west, and the Tonga Ridge to the east.”

“That’s correct, Dr. Fielding.”

Norman glanced at the instruments. They were covered with moisture. The pilot had to rub the dials with a cloth to read them. Was the sub leaking? No, he thought. Just condensation. The interior of the submarine was growing colder. Take it easy, he told himself.

“Eight hundred feet,” the pilot said. It was now completely black outside.

“This is very exciting,” Ted said. “Have you ever done anything like this before, Norman?”

“No,” Norman said.

“Me, neither,” Ted said. “What a thrill.” Norman wished he would shut up.

“You know,” Ted said, “when we open this alien craft up and make our first contact with another form of life, it’s going to be a great moment in the history of our species on Earth. I’ve been wondering about what we should say.”

“Say?”

“You know, what words. At the threshold, with the cameras rolling.”

“Will there be cameras?”

“Oh, I’m sure there’ll be all sorts of documentation. It’s only proper, considering. So we need something to say, a memorable phrase. I was thinking of “This is a momentous moment in human history.’ ”

“Momentous moment?” Norman said, frowning.

“You’re right,” Ted said. “Awkward, I agree. Maybe ‘A turning point in human history’?”

Norman shook his head.

“How about ‘A crossroads in the evolution of the human species’?”

“Can evolution have a crossroads?”

“I don’t see why not,” Ted said.

“Well, a crossroads is a crossing of roads. Is evolution a road? I thought it wasn’t; I thought evolution was undirected.”

“You’re being too literal,” Ted said.

“Reading the bottom,” the pilot said. “Nine hundred feet.” He slowed the descent. They heard the intermittent ping of sonar.

Ted said, “ ‘A new threshold in the evolution of the human species’?”

“Sure. Think it will be?”

“Will be what?”

“A new threshold.”

“Why not?” Ted said.

“What if we open it up and it’s just a lot of rusted junk inside, and nothing valuable or enlightening at all?”

“Good point,” Ted said.

“Nine hundred fifty feet. Exterior lights are on,” the pilot said.

Through the porthole they saw white flecks. The pilot explained this was suspended matter in the water.

“Visual contact. I have bottom.”

“Oh, let’s see!” Ted said. The pilot obligingly shifted to one side and they looked.

Norman saw a flat, dead, dull-brown plain stretching away to the limit of the lights. Blackness beyond.

“Not much to look at right here, I’m afraid,” the pilot said.

“Surprisingly dreary,” Ted said, without a trace of disappointment. “I would have expected more life.”

“Well, it’s pretty cold. Water temperature is, ah, thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit.”

“Almost freezing,” Ted said.

“Yes, sir. Let’s see if we can find your new home.”

The motors rumbled. Muddy sediment churned up in front of the porthole. The sub turned, moved across the bottom. For several minutes they saw only the brown landscape.

Then lights. “There we are.”

A vast underwater array of lights, arranged in a rectangular pattern.

“That’s the grid,” the pilot said.

The submarine planed up, and glided smoothly over the illuminated grid, which extended into the distance for half a mile. Through the porthole, they saw divers standing on the bottom, working within the grid structure. The divers waved to the passing sub. The pilot honked a toy horn.

“They can hear that?”

“Oh sure. Water’s a great conductor.”

“My God,” Ted said.

Directly ahead the giant titanium fin rose sharply above the ocean floor. Norman was completely unprepared for its dimension; as the submarine moved to port, the fin blocked their entire field of view for nearly a minute. The metal was dull gray and, except for small white speckles of marine growth, entirely unmarked.

“There isn’t any corrosion,” Ted said.

“No, sir,” the pilot said. “Everybody’s mentioned that. They think it’s because it’s a metal-plastic alloy, but I don’t think anybody is quite sure.”

The fin slipped away to the stern; the submarine again turned. Directly ahead, more lights, arranged in vertical rows. Norman saw a single cylinder of yellow-painted steel, and bright portholes. Next to it was a low metal dome.

“That’s DH-7, the divers’ habitat, to port,” the pilot said. “It’s pretty utilitarian. You guys are in DH-8, which is much nicer, believe me.”

He turned starboard, and after a momentary blackness, they saw another set of lights. Coming closer, Norman counted five different cylinders, some vertical, some horizontal, interconnected in a complex way.

“There you are. DH-8, your home away from home,” the pilot said. “Give me a minute to dock.”

Metal clanged against metal; there was a sharp jolt, and then the motors cut off. Silence. Hissing air. The pilot scrambled to open the hatch, and surprisingly cold air washed down on them.

“Airlock’s open, gentlemen,” he said, stepping aside. Norman looked up through the lock. He saw banks of red lights above. He climbed up through the submarine, and into a round steel cylinder approximately eight feet in diameter. On all sides there were handholds; a narrow metal bench; the glowing heat lamps overhead, though they didn’t seem to do much good.

Ted climbed up and sat on the bench opposite him. They were so close their knees touched. Below their feet, the pilot closed the hatch. They watched the wheel spin. They heard a clank as the submarine disengaged, then the whirr of motors as it moved away.

Then nothing.

“What happens now?” Norman said.

“They pressurize us,” Ted said. “Switch us over to exotic-gas atmosphere. We can’t breathe air down here.”

“Why not?” Norman said. Now that he was down here, staring at the cold steel walls of the cylinder, he wished he had stayed awake for the briefing.

“Because,” Ted said, “the atmosphere of the Earth is deadly. You don’t realize it, but oxygen is a corrosive gas. It’s in the same chemical family as chlorine and fluorine, and hydrofluoric acid is the most corrosive acid known. The same quality of oxygen that makes a half-eaten apple turn brown, or makes iron rust, is incredibly destructive to the human body if exposed to too much of it. Oxygen under pressure is toxic-with a vengeance. So we cut down the amount of oxygen you breathe. You breathe twenty-one percent oxygen at the surface. Down here, you breathe two percent oxygen. But you won’t notice any difference-”

A voice over a loudspeaker said, “We’re starting to pressurize you now.”

“Who’s that?” Norman said.

“Barnes,” the voice said. But it didn’t sound like Barnes. It sounded gritty and artificial.

“It must be the talker,” Ted said, and then laughed. His voice was noticeably higher-pitched. “It’s the helium, Norman. They’re pressurizing us with helium.”

“You sound like Donald Duck,” Norman said, and he laughed, too. His own voice sounded squeaky, like a cartoon character’s.

“Speak for yourself, Mickey,” Ted squeaked.

“I taut I taw a puddy tat,” Norman said. They were both laughing, hearing their voices.

“Knock it off, you guys,” Barnes said over the intercom. “This is serious.”

“Yes, sir, Captain,” Ted said, but by now his voice was so high-pitched it was almost unintelligible, and they fell into laughter again, their tinny voices like those of schoolgirls reverberating inside the steel cylinder.

Helium made their voices high and squeaky. But it also had other effects.

“Getting chilled, boys?” Barnes said.

They were indeed getting colder. He saw Ted shivering, felt goosebumps on his own legs. It felt as if a wind were blowing across their bodies-except there wasn’t any wind. The lightness of the helium increased evaporation, made them cold.

Across the cylinder, Ted said something, but Norman couldn’t understand Ted at all any more; his voice was too high-pitched to be comprehensible. It was just a thin squeal.

“Sounds like a couple of rats in there now,” Barnes said, with satisfaction.

Ted rolled his eyes toward the loudspeaker and squeaked something.

“If you want to talk, get a talker,” Barnes said. “You’ll find them in the locker under the seat.”

Norman found a metal locker, clicked it open. The metal squealed loudly, like chalk on a blackboard. All the sounds in the chamber were high-pitched. Inside the locker he saw two black plastic pads with neck straps.

“Just slip them over your neck. Put the pad at the base of your throat.”

“Okay,” Ted said, and then blinked in surprise. His voice sounded slightly rough, but otherwise normal.

“These things must change the vocal-cord frequencies,” Norman said.

“Why don’t you guys pay attention to briefings?” Barnes said. “That’s exactly what they do. You’ll have to wear a talker all the time you’re down here. At least, if you want anybody to understand you. Still cold?”

“Yes,” Ted said.

“Well, hang on, you’re almost fully pressurized now.” Then there was another hiss, and a side door slid open. Barnes stood there, with light jackets over his arm. “Welcome to DH-8,” he said.

DH-8

“You’re the last to arrive,” Barnes said. “We just have time for a quick tour before we open the spacecraft.”

“You’re ready to open it now?” Ted asked. “Wonderful. I’ve just been talking about this with Norman. This is such a great moment, our first contact with alien life, we ought to prepare a little speech for when we open it up.”

“There’ll be time to consider that,” Barnes said, with an odd glance at Ted. “I’ll show you the habitat first. This way.” He explained that the DH-8 habitat consisted of five large cylinders, designated A to E. “Cyl A is the airlock, where we are now.” He led them into an adjacent changing room. Heavy cloth suits hung limply on the wall, alongside yellow sculpted helmets of the sort Norman had seen the divers wearing. The helmets had a futuristic look. Norman tapped one with his knuckles. It was plastic, and surprisingly light. He saw “JOHNSON” stenciled above one faceplate.

“We going to wear these?” Norman asked.

“That’s correct,” Barnes said.

“Then we’ll be going outside?” Norman said, feeling a twinge of alarm.

“Eventually, yes. Don’t worry about it now. Still cold?”

They were; Barnes had them change into tight-fitting jumpsuits of clinging blue polyester. Ted frowned. “Don’t you think these look a little silly?”

“They may not be the height of fashion,” Barnes said, “but they prevent heat loss from helium.”

“The color is unflattering,” Ted said.

“Screw the color,” Barnes said. He handed them light-weight jackets. Norman felt something heavy in one pocket, and pulled out a battery pack.

“The jackets are wired and electrically heated,” Barnes said. “Like an electric blanket, which is what you’ll use for sleeping. Follow me.”

They went on to Cyl B, which housed power and life-support systems. At first glance, it looked like a large boiler room, all multicolored pipes and utilitarian fittings. “This is where we generate all of our heat, power, and air,” Barnes said. He pointed out the features: “Closed-cycle IC generator, 240/110. Hydrogen-and-oxygen-driven fuel cells. LSS monitors. Liquid processor, runs on silver-zinc batteries. And that’s Chief Petty Officer Fletcher. Teeny Fletcher.” Norman saw a big-boned figure, working back among the pipes with a heavy wrench. The figure turned; Alice Fletcher gave them a grin, waved a greasy hand.

“She seems to know what she’s doing,” Ted said, approvingly.

“She does,” Barnes said. “But all the major support systems are redundant. Fletcher is just our final redundancy. Actually, you’ll find the entire habitat is self-regulating.”

He clipped heavy badges onto the jumpsuits. “Wear these at all times, even though they’re just a precaution: the alarms trigger automatically if life-support conditions go below optimum. But that won’t happen. There are sensors in each room of the habitat. You’ll get used to the fact that the environment continually adjusts to your presence. Lights will go on and off, heat lamps will turn on and off, and air vents will hiss to keep track of things. It’s all automatic, don’t sweat it. Every single major system is redundant. We can lose power, we can lose air, we can lose water entirely, and we will be fine for a hundred and thirty hours.”

One hundred and thirty hours didn’t sound very long to Norman. He did the calculation in his head: five days. Five days didn’t seem very long, either.

They went into the next cylinder, the lights clicking on as they entered. Cylinder C contained living quarters: bunks, toilets, showers (“plenty of hot water, you’ll find”). Barnes showed them around proudly, as if it were a hotel.

The living quarters were heavily insulated: carpeted deck, walls and ceilings all covered in soft padded foam, which made the interior appear like an overstuffed couch. But, despite the bright colors and the evident care in decoration, Norman still found it cramped and dreary. The portholes were tiny, and they revealed only the blackness of the ocean outside. And wherever the padding ended, he saw heavy bolts and heavy steel plating, a reminder of where they really were. He felt as if he were inside a large iron lung-and, he thought, that isn’t so far wrong.

They ducked through narrow bulkheads into D Cyl: a small laboratory with benches and microscopes on the top level, a compact electronics unit on the level below.

“This is Tina Chan,” Barnes said, introducing a very still woman. They all shook hands. Norman thought that Tina Chan was almost unnaturally calm, until he realized she was one of those people who almost never blinked their eyes.

“Be nice to Tina,” Barnes was saying. “She’s our only link to the outside-she runs the com ops, and the sensor systems as well. In fact, all the electronics.”

Tina Chan was surrounded by the bulkiest monitors Norman had ever seen. They looked like TV sets from the 1950s. Barnes explained that certain equipment didn’t do well in the helium atmosphere, including TV tubes. In the early days of undersea habitats, the tubes had to be replaced daily. Now they were elaborately coated and shielded; hence their bulk.

Next to Chan was another woman, Jane Edmunds, whom Barnes introduced as the unit archivist.

“What’s a unit archivist?” Ted asked her.

“Petty Officer First Class, Data Processing, sir,” she said formally. Jane Edmunds wore spectacles and stood stiffly. She reminded Norman of a librarian.

“Data Processing…” Ted said.

“My mission is to keep all the digital recordings, visual materials, and videotapes, sir. Every aspect of this historic moment is being recorded, and I keep everything neatly filed.” Norman thought: She is a librarian.

“Oh, excellent,” Ted said. “I’m glad to hear it. Film or tape?”

“Tape, sir.”

“I know my way around a video camera,” Ted said, with a smile. “What’re you putting it down on, half-inch or threequarter?”

“Sir, we use a datascan image equivalent of two thousand pixels per side-biased frame, each pixel carrying a twelvetone gray scale.”

“Oh,” Ted said.

“It’s a bit better than commercial systems you may be familiar with, sir.”

“I see,” Ted said. But he recovered smoothly, and chatted with Edmunds for a while about technical matters.

“Ted seems awfully interested in how we’re going to record this,” Barnes said, looking uneasy.

“Yes, he seems to be.” Norman wondered why that troubled Barnes. Was Barnes worried about the visual record? Or did he think Ted would try to hog the show? Would Ted try to hog the show? Did Barnes have any worries about having this appear to be a civilian operation?

“No, the exterior lights are a hundred-fifty-watt quartz halogen,” Edmunds was saying. “We’re recording at equivalent of half a million ASA, so that’s ample. The real problem is backscatter. We’re constantly fighting it.”

Norman said, “I notice your support team is all women.”

“Yes,” Barnes said. “All the deep-diving studies show that women are superior for submerged operations. They’re physically smaller and consume less nutrients and air, they have better social skills and tolerate close quarters better, and they are physiologically tougher and have better endurance.

The fact is, the Navy long ago recognized that all their submariners should be female.” He laughed. “But just try to implement that one.” He glanced at his watch. “We’d better move on. Ted?”

They went on. The final cylinder, E Cyl, was more spacious than the others. There were magazines, a television, and a large lounge; and on the deck below was an efficient mess and a kitchen. Seaman Rose Levy, the cook, was a redfaced woman with a Southern accent, standing beneath giant suction fans. She asked Norman whether he had any favorite desserts.

“Desserts?”

“Yes sir, Dr. Johnson. I like to make everybody’s favorite dessert, if I can. What about you, you have a favorite, Dr. Fielding?”

“Key lime pie,” Ted said. “I love key lime pie.”

“Can do, sir,” Levy said, with a big smile. She turned back to Norman. “I haven’t heard yours yet, Dr. Johnson.”

“Strawberry shortcake.”

“Easy. Got some nice New Zealand strawberries coming down on the last sub shuttle. Maybe you’d like that shortcake tonight?”

“Why not, Rose,” Barnes said heartily.

Norman looked out the black porthole window. From the portholes of D Cyl, he could see the rectangular illuminated grid that extended across the bottom, following the half-mile-long buried spacecraft. Divers, illuminated like fireflies, moved over the glowing grid surface.

Norman thought: I am a thousand feet beneath the surface of the ocean, and we are talking about whether we should have strawberry shortcake for dessert. But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. The best way to make somebody comfortable in a new environment was to give him familiar food.

“Strawberries make me break out,” Ted said.

“I’ll make your shortcake with blueberries,” Levy said, not missing a beat.

“And whipped cream?” Ted said.

“Well…”

“You can’t have everything,” Barnes said. “And one of the things you can’t have at thirty atmospheres of mixed gas is whipped cream. Won’t whip. Let’s move on.”

Beth and Harry were waiting in the small, padded conference room, directly above the mess. They both wore jumpsuits and heated jackets. Harry was shaking his head as they arrived. “Like our padded cell?” He poked the insulated walls. “It’s like living in a vagina.”

Beth said, “Don’t you like going back to the womb, Harry?”

“No,” Harry said. “I’ve been there. Once was enough.”

“These jumpsuits are pretty bad,” Ted said, plucking at the clinging polyester.

“Shows your belly nicely,” Harry said.

“Let’s settle down,” Barnes said.

“A few sequins, you could be Elvis Presley,” Harry said.

“Elvis Presley’s dead.”

“Now’s your chance,” Harry said.

Norman looked around. “Where’s Levine?”

“Levine didn’t make it,” Barnes said briskly. “He got claustrophobic in the sub coming down, and had to be taken back. One of those things.”

“Then we have no marine biologist?”

“We’ll manage without him.”

“I hate this damn jumpsuit,” Ted said. “I really hate it.”

“Beth looks good in hers.”

“Yes, Beth works out.”

“And it’s damp in here, too,” Ted said. “Is it always so damp?”

Norman had noticed that humidity was a problem; everything they touched felt slightly wet and clammy and cold. Barnes warned them of the danger of infections and minor colds, and handed out bottles of skin lotion and ear drops.

“I thought you said the technology was all worked out,” Harry said.

“It is,” Barnes said. “Believe me, this is plush compared to the habitats ten years ago.”

“Ten years ago,” Harry said, “they stopped making habitats because people kept dying in them.”

Barnes frowned. “There was one accident.”

“There were two accidents,” Harry said. “A total of four people.”

“Special circumstances,” Barnes said. “Not involving Navy technology or personnel.”

“Great,” Harry said. “How long did you say we going to be down here?”

“Maximum, seventy-two hours,” Barnes said.

“You sure about that?”

“It’s Navy regs,” Barnes said.

“Why?” Norman asked, puzzled.

Barnes shook his head. “Never,” he said, “never ask a reason for Navy regulations.”

The intercom clicked, and Tina Chan said, “Captain Barnes, we have a signal from the divers. They are mounting the airlock now. Another few minutes to open.”

The feeling in the room changed immediately; the excitement was palpable. Ted rubbed his hands together. “You realize, of course, that even without opening that spacecraft, we have already made a major discovery of profound importance.”

“What’s that?” Norman said.

“We’ve shot the unique event hypothesis to hell,” Ted said, glancing at Beth.

“The unique event hypothesis?” Barnes said.

“He’s referring,” Beth said, “to the fact that physicists and chemists tend to believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life, while biologists tend not to. Many biologists feel the development of intelligent life on Earth required so many peculiar steps that it represents a unique event in the universe, that may never have occurred elsewhere.”

“Wouldn’t intelligence arise again and again?” Barnes said.

“Well, it barely arose on the Earth,” Beth said. “The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and single-celled life appeared 3.9 billion years ago-almost immediately, geologically speaking. But life remained single-celled for the next three billion years. Then in the Cambrian period, around six hundred million years ago, there was an explosion of sophisticated life forms. Within a hundred million years, the ocean was full of fish. Then the land became populated: Then the air. But nobody knows why the explosion occurred in the first place. And since it didn’t occur for three billion years, there’s the possibility that on some other planet, it might never occur at all.

“And even after the Cambrian, the chain of events leading to man appears to be so special, so chancy, that biologists worry it might never have happened. Just consider the fact that if the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out sixty-five million years ago-by a comet or whatever-then reptiles might still be the dominant form on Earth, and mammals would never have had a chance to take over. No mammals, no primates. No primates, no apes. No apes, no man… There are a lot of random factors in evolution, a lot of luck. That’s why biologists think intelligent life might be a unique event in the universe, only occurring here.”

“Except now,” Ted said, “we know it’s not a unique event. Because there is a damn big spacecraft out there.”

“Personally,” Beth said, “I couldn’t be more pleased.” She bit her lip.

“You don’t look pleased,” Norman said.

“I’ll tell you,” Beth said. “I can’t help being nervous. Ten years ago, Bill Jackson at Stanford ran a series of weekend seminars on extraterrestrial life. This was right after he won the Nobel prize in chemistry. He split us into two groups. One group designed the alien life form, and worked it all out scientifically. The other group tried to figure out the life form, and communicate with it. Jackson presided over the whole thing as a hard scientist, not letting anybody get carried away. One time we brought in a sketch of a proposed creature and he said, very tough, ‘Okay, where’s the anus?’ That was his criticism. But many animals on Earth have no anus. There are all kinds of excretory mechanisms that don’t require a special orifice. Jackson assumed an anus was necessary, but it isn’t. And now…” She shrugged. “Who knows what we’ll find?”

“We’ll know, soon enough,” Ted said.

The intercom clicked. “Captain Barnes, the divers have the airlock mounted in place. The robot is now ready to enter the spacecraft.”

Ted said, “What robot?”

THE DOOR

“I don’t think it’s appropriate at all,” Ted said angrily. “We came down here to make a manned entry into this alien spacecraft. I think we should do what we came here to do-make a manned entry.”

“Absolutely not,” Barnes said. “We can’t risk it.”

“You must think of this,” Ted said, “as an archaeological site. Greater than Chichen Itza, greater than Troy, greater than Tutankhamen’s tomb. Unquestionably the most important archaeological site in the history of mankind. Do you really intend to have a damned robot open that site? Where’s your sense of human destiny?”

“Where’s your sense of self-preservation?” Barnes said.

“I strongly object, Captain Barnes.”

“Duly noted,” Barnes said, turning away. “Now let’s get on with it. Tina, give us the video feed.”

Ted sputtered, but he fell silent as two large monitors in front of them clicked on. On the left screen, they saw the complex tubular metal scaffolding of the robot, with exposed motors and gears. The robot was positioned before the curved gray metal wall of the spacecraft.

Within that wall was a door that looked rather like an airliner door. The second screen gave a closer view of the door, taken by the video camera mounted on the robot itself. “It’s rather similar to an airplane door,” Ted said.

Norman glanced at Harry, who smiled enigmatically. Then he looked at Barnes. Barnes did not appear surprised. Barnes already knew about the door, he realized.

“I wonder how we can account for such parallelism in door design,” Ted said. “The likelihood of its occurring by chance is astronomically small. Why, this door is the perfect size and shape for a human being!”

“That’s right,” Harry said.

“It’s incredible,” Ted said. “Quite incredible.” Harry smiled, said nothing.

Barnes said, “Let’s find control surfaces.”

The robot video scanner moved left and right across the spacecraft hull. It stopped on the image of a rectangular panel mounted to the left of the door.

“Can you open that panel?”

“Working on it now, sir.”

Whirring, the robot claw extended out toward the panel. But the claw was clumsy; it scraped against the metal, leaving a series of gleaming scratches. But the panel remained closed.

“Ridiculous,” Ted said. “It’s like watching a baby.”

The claw continued to scratch at the panel.

“We should be doing this ourselves,” Ted said.

“Use suction,” Barnes said.

Another arm extended out, with a rubber sucker. “Ah, the plumber’s friend,” Ted said disdainfully.

As they watched, the sucker attached to the panel, flattened. Then, with a click, the panel lifted open.

“At last!”

“I can’t see…”

The view inside the panel was blurred, out of focus. They could distinguish what appeared to be a series of colored round metal protrusions, red, yellow, and blue. There were also intricate black-and-white symbols above the knobs.

“Look,” Ted said, “red, blue, yellow. Primary colors. This is a very big break.”

“Why?” Norman said.

“Because it suggests that the aliens have the same sensory equipment that we do-they may see the universe the same way, visually, in the same colors, utilizing the same part of the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s going to help immeasurably in making contact with them. And those black-and-white markings… that must be some of their writing! Can you imagine! Alien writing!” He smiled enthusiastically. “This is a great moment,” he said. “I feel truly privileged to be here.”

“Focus,” Barnes called. “Focusing now, sir.”

The image became even more blurred. “No, the other way.”

“Yes Sir. Focusing now.”

The image changed, slowly resolved into sharp focus. “Uh-oh,” Ted said, staring at the screen.

They now saw that the blurred knobs were actually three colored buttons: yellow, red, and blue. The buttons were each an inch in diameter and had knurled or machined edges. The symbols above the buttons resolved sharply into a series of neatly stenciled labels.

From left to right the labels read: “Emergency Ready,” “Emergency Lock,” and “Emergency Open.”

In English.

There was a moment of stunned silence. And then, very softly, Harry Adams began to laugh.

THE SPACECRAFT

“That’s English,” Ted said, staring at the screen. “Written English.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “Sure is.”

“What’s going on?” Ted said. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“No,” Harry said. He was calm, oddly detached.

“How could this spacecraft be three hundred years old, and carry instructions in modem English?”

“Think about it,” Harry said.

Ted frowned. “Maybe,” he said, “this alien spacecraft is somehow presenting itself to us in a way that will make us comfortable.”

“Think about it some more,” Harry said.

There was a short silence. “Well, if it is an alien spacecraft-”

“It’s not an alien spacecraft,” Harry said.

There was another silence. Then Ted said, “Well, why don’t you just tell us all what it is, since you’re so sure of yourself!”

“All right,” Harry said. “It’s an American spacecraft.”

“An American spacecraft? Half a mile long? Made with technology we don’t have yet? And buried for three hundred years?”

“Of course,” Harry said. “It’s been obvious from the start. Right, Captain Barnes?”

“We had considered it,” Barnes admitted. “The President had considered it.”

“That’s why you didn’t inform the Russians.”

“Exactly.”

By now Ted was completely frustrated. He clenched his fists, as if he wanted to hit someone. He looked from one person to another. “But how did you know?”

“The first clue,” Harry said, “came from the condition of the craft itself. It shows no damage whatever. Its condition is pristine. Yet any spacecraft that crashes in water will be damaged. Even at low entry velocities-say two hundred miles an hour-the surface of water is as hard as concrete. No matter how strong this craft is, you would expect some degree of damage from the impact with the water. Yet it has no damage.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it didn’t land in the water.”

“I don’t understand. It must have flown here-”

“-It didn’t fly here. It arrived here.”

“From where?”

“From the future,” Harry said. “This is some kind of Earth craft that was-will be-made in the future, and has traveled backward in time, and appeared under our ocean, several hundred years ago.”

“Why would people in the future do that?” Ted groaned. He was clearly unhappy to be deprived of his alien craft, his great historical moment. He slumped in a chair and stared dully at the monitor screens.

“I don’t know why people in the future would do that,” Harry said. “We’re not there yet. Maybe it was an accident. Unintended.”

“Let’s go ahead and open it up,” Barnes said.

“Opening, sir.”

The robot hand moved forward, toward the “Open” button. The hand pressed several times. There was a clanking sound, but nothing happened.

“What’s wrong?” Barnes said.

“Sir, we’re not able to impact the button. The extensor arm is too large to fit inside the panel.”

“Great.”

“Shall I try the probe?”

“Try the probe.”

The claw hand moved back, and a thin needle probe extended out toward the button. The probe slid forward, adjusted position delicately, touched the button. It pushed-and slipped off.

“Trying again, sir.”

The probe again pressed the button, and again slid off.

“Sir, the surface is too slippery.”

“Keep trying.”

“You know,” Ted said thoughtfully, “this is still a remarkable situation. In one sense, it’s even more remarkable than contact with extraterrestrials. I was already quite certain that extraterrestrial life exists in the universe. But time travel! Frankly, as an astrophysicist I had my doubts. From everything we know, it’s impossible, contradicted by the laws of physics. And yet now we have proof that time travel is possible-and that our own species will do it in the future!”

Ted was smiling, wide-eyed, and happy again. You had to admire him, Norman thought-he was so wonderfully irrepressible.

“And here we are,” Ted said, “on the threshold of our first contact with our species from the future! Think of it! We are going to meet ourselves from some future time!”

The probe pressed again, and again, without success.

“Sir, we cannot impact the button.”

“I see that,” Barnes said, standing up. “Okay, shut it down and get it out of there. Ted, looks like you’re going to get your wish after all. We’ll have to go in and open it up manually. Let’s suit up.”

INTO THE SHIP

In the changing room in cylinder A, Norman stepped into his suit. Tina and Edmunds helped fit the helmet over his head, and snap-locked the ring at the neck. He felt the heavy weight of the rebreather tanks on his back; the straps pressed into his shoulders. He tasted metallic air. There was a crackle as his helmet intercom came on.

The first words he heard were “What about ‘At the threshold of a great opportunity for the human species’?” Norman laughed, grateful for the break in the tension.

“You find it funny?” Ted asked, offended.

Norman looked across the room at the suited man with “FIELDING” stenciled on his yellow helmet.

“No,” Norman said. “I’m just nervous.”

“Me, too,” Beth said.

“Nothing to it,” Barnes said.

“Trust me.”

“What are the three biggest lies in DH-8?” Harry said, and they laughed again.

They crowded together into the tiny airlock, bumping helmeted heads, and the bulkhead hatch to the left was sealed, the wheel spinning. Barnes said, “Okay, folks, just breathe easy.” He opened the lower hatch, exposing black water. The water did not rise into the compartment. “The habitat’s on positive pressure,” Barnes said. “The level won’t come up. Now watch me, and do this the way I do. You don’t want to tear your suit.” Moving awkwardly with the weight of the tanks, he crouched down by the hatch, gripped the side handholds, and let go, disappearing with a soft splash.

One by one, they dropped down to the floor of the ocean. Norman gasped as near-freezing water enveloped his suit; immediately he heard the hum of a tiny fan as the electrical heaters in his suit activated. His feet touched soft muddy ground. He looked around in the darkness. He was standing beneath the habitat. Directly ahead, a hundred yards away, was the glowing rectangular grid. Barnes was already striding forward, leaning into the current, moving slowly like a man on the moon.

“Isn’t this fantastic?”

“Calm down, Ted,” Harry said.

Beth said, “Actually, it’s odd how little life there is down here. Have you noticed? Not a sea fan, not a slug, not a sponge, not a solitary fish. Nothing but empty brown sea floor. This must be one of those dead spots in the Pacific.”

A bright light came on behind him; Norman’s own shadow was cast forward on the bottom. He looked back and saw Edmunds holding a camera and light in a bulky waterproof housing.

“We recording all this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Try not to fall down, Norman,” Beth laughed.

“I’m trying.”

They were closer now to the grid. Norman felt better seeing the other divers working there. To the right was the high fin, extending out of the coral, an enormous, smooth dark surface dwarfing them as it rose toward the surface.

Barnes led them past the fin and down into a tunnel cut in the coral. The tunnel was sixty feet long, narrow, strung with lights. They walked single file. It felt like going down into a mine, Norman thought.

“This what the divers cut?”

“That’s right.”

Norman saw a boxy, corrugated-steel structure surrounded by pressure tanks.

“Airlock ahead. We’re almost there,” Barnes said. “Everybody okay?”

“So far,” Harry said.

They entered the airlock, and Barnes closed the door. Air hissed loudly. Norman watched the water recede, down past his faceplate, then his waist, his knees; then to the floor. The hissing stopped, and they passed through another door, sealing it behind them.

Norman turned to the metal hull of the spaceship. The robot had been moved aside. Norman felt very much as if he were standing alongside a big jetliner-a curved metal surface, and a flush door. The metal was a dull gray, which gave it an ominous quality. Despite himself, Norman was nervous. Listening to the way the others were breathing, he sensed they were nervous, too.

“Okay?” Barnes said. “Everybody here?”

Edmunds said, “Wait for video, please, sir.”

“Okay. Waiting.”

They all lined up beside the door, but they still had their helmets on. It wasn’t going to be much of a picture, Norman thought.

Edmunds: “Tape is running.”

Ted: “I’d like to say a few words.”

Harry: “Jesus, Ted. Can’t you ever let up?”

Ted: “I think it’s important.”

Harry: “Go ahead, make your speech.”

Ted: “Hello. This is Ted Fielding, here at the door of the unknown spacecraft which has been discovered-”

Barnes: “Wait a minute, Ted. ‘Here at the door of the unknown spacecraft’ sounds like ‘here at the tomb of the unknown soldier.’ ”

Ted: “You don’t like it?”

Barnes: “Well, I think it has the wrong associations.”

Ted: “I thought you would like it.”

Beth: “Can we just get on with it, please?”

Ted: “Never mind.”

Harry: “What, are you going to pout now?”

Ted: “Never mind. We’ll do without any commentary on this historic moment.”

Harry: “Okay, fine. Let’s get it open.”

Ted: “I think everybody knows how I feel. I feel that we should have some brief remarks for posterity.”

Harry: “Well, make your goddamn remarks!”

Ted: “Listen, you son of a bitch, I’ve had about enough of your superior, know-it-all attitude-”

Barnes: “Stop tape, please.”

Edmunds: “Tape is stopped, sir.”

Barnes: “Let’s everyone settle down.”

Harry: “I consider all this ceremony utterly irrelevant.”

Ted: “Well, it’s not irrelevant; it’s appropriate.”

Barnes: “All right, I’ll do it. Roll the tape.”

Edmunds: “Tape is rolling.”

Barnes: “This is Captain Barnes. We are now about to open the hatch cover. Present with me on this historic occasion are Ted Fielding, Norman Johnson, Beth Halpern, and Harry Adams.”

Harry: “Why am I last?”

Barnes: “I did it left to right, Harry.”

Harry: “Isn’t it funny the only black man is named last?”

Barnes: “Harry, it’s left to right. The way we’re standing here.”

Harry: “And after the only woman. I’m a full professor, Beth is only an assistant professor.”

Beth: “Harry-”

Ted: “You know, Hal, perhaps we should be identified by our full titles and institutional affiliations-”

Harry: “-What’s wrong with alphabetical order-”

Barnes: “-That’s it! Forget it! No tape!”

Edmunds: “Tape is off, sir.”

Barnes: “Jesus Christ.”

He turned away from the group, shaking his helmeted head. He flipped up the metal plate, exposed the two buttons, and pushed one. A yellow light blinked “READY.”

“Everybody stay on internal air,” Barnes said.

They all continued to breathe from their tanks, in case the interior gases in the spacecraft were toxic.

“Everybody ready?”

“Ready.”

Barnes pushed the button marked “OPEN.”

A sign flashed: ADJUSTING ATMOSPHERE. Then, with a rumble, the door slid open sideways, just like an airplane door. For a moment Norman could see nothing but blackness beyond. They moved forward cautiously, shone their lights through the open door, saw girders, a complex of metal tubes.

“Check the air, Beth.”

Beth pulled the plunger on a small gas monitor in her hand. The readout screen glowed.

“Helium, oxygen, trace CO₂ and water vapor. The right proportions. It’s pressurized atmosphere.”

“The ship adjusted its own atmosphere?”

“Looks like it.”

“Okay. One at a time.”

Barnes removed his helmet first, breathed the air. “It seems okay. Metallic, a slight tingle, but okay.” He took a few deep breaths, then nodded. The others removed their helmets, set them on the deck.

“That’s better.”

“Shall we go?”

“Why not?”

There was a brief hesitation, and then Beth stepped through quickly: “Ladies first.”

The others followed her. Norman glanced back, saw all their yellow helmets lying on the floor. Edmunds, holding the video camera to her eye, said, “Go ahead, Dr. Johnson.” Norman turned, and stepped into the spacecraft.

INTERIOR

They stood on a catwalk five feet wide, suspended high in the air. Norman shone his flashlight down: the beam glowed through forty feet of darkness before it splashed on the lower hull. Surrounding them, dimly visible in the darkness, was a dense network of struts and girders.

Beth said, “It’s like being in an oil refinery.” She shone her light on one steel beam. Stenciled was “AVR-09.” All the stenciling was in English.

“Most of what you see is structural,” Barnes said. “Cross-stress bracing for the outer hull. Gives tremendous support along all axes. The ship is very ruggedly built, as we suspected. Designed to take extraordinary stresses. There’s probably another hull further in.” Norman was reminded that Barnes had once been an aeronautical engineer.

“Not only that,” Harry said, shining his light on the outer hull. “Look at this-a layer of lead.”

“Radiation shield?”

“Must be. It’s six inches thick.”

“So this ship was built to handle a lot of radiation.”

“A hell of a lot,” Harry said.

There was a haze in the ship, and a faintly oily feel to the air. The metal girders seemed to be coated in oil, but when Norman touched them, the oil didn’t come off on his fingers. He realized that the metal itself had an unusual texture: it was slick and slightly soft to the touch, almost rubbery.

“Interesting,” Ted said. “Some kind of new material. We associate strength with hardness, but this metal-if it is metal-is both strong and soft. Materials technology has obviously advanced since our day.”

“Obviously,” Harry said.

“Well, it makes sense,” Ted said. “If you think of America fifty years ago as compared with today, one of the biggest changes is the great variety of plastics and ceramics we have now that were not even imagined back then…” Ted continued to talk, his voice echoing in the cavernous darkness. But Norman could hear the tension in his voice. Ted’s whistling in the dark, he thought.

They moved deeper into the ship. Norman felt dizzy to be so high in the gloom. They came to a branchpoint in the catwalk. It was hard to see with all the pipes and struts-like being in a forest of metal.

“Which way?”

Barnes had a wrist compass; it glowed green. “Go right.” They followed the network of catwalks for ten minutes more. Gradually Norman could see that Barnes was right: there was a central cylinder constructed within the outer cylinder, and held away from it by a dense arrangement of girders and supports. A spacecraft within a spacecraft.

“Why would they build the ship like this?”

“You’d have to ask them.”

“The reasons must have been compelling,” Barnes said. “The power requirements for a double hull, with so much lead shielding… hard to imagine the engine you’d need to make something this big fly.”

After three or four minutes, they arrived at the door on the inner hull. It looked like the outer door.

“Breathers back on?”

“I don’t know. Can we risk it?”

Without waiting, Beth flipped up the panel of buttons, pressed “OPEN,” and the door rumbled open. More darkness beyond. They stepped through. Norman felt softness underfoot; he shined his light down on beige carpeting.

Their flashlights crisscrossed the room, revealing a large, contoured beige console with three high-backed, padded seats. The room was clearly built for human beings.

“Must be the bridge or the cockpit.”

But the curved consoles were completely blank. There was no instrumentation of any kind. And the seats were empty. They swung their beams back and forth in the darkness. “Looks like a mockup, rather than the real thing.”

“It can’t be a mockup.”

“Well, it looks like one.”

Norman ran his hand over the smooth contours of the console. It was nicely molded, pleasant to feel. Norman pressed the surface, felt it bend to his touch. Rubbery again. “Another new material.”

Norman’s flashlight showed a few artifacts. Taped to the far end of the console was a handmarked sign on a three-by-five filing card: It said, “GO BABY GO!” Nearby was a small plastic statuette of a cute animal that looked like a purple squirrel. The base said, “Lucky Lemontina.” Whatever that meant.

“These seats leather?”

“Looks like it.”

“Where are the damned controls?”

Norman continued to poke at the blank console, and suddenly the beige console surface took on depth, and appeared to contain instruments, screens. All the instrumentation was somehow within the surface of the console, like an optical illusion, or a hologram. Norman read the lettering above the instruments: “Pos Thrusters”… “F3 Piston Booster”… “Glider”… “Sieves”…

“More new technology,” Ted said. “Reminiscent of liquid crystals, but far superior. Some kind of advanced optoelectronics.”

Suddenly all the console screens glowed red, and there was a beeping sound. Startled, Norman jumped back; the control panel was coming to life.

“Watch it, everybody!”

A single bright lightning flash of intense white light filled the room, leaving a harsh afterimage.

“Oh God…”

Another flash-and another-and then the ceiling lights came on, evenly illuminating the room. Norman saw startled, frightened faces. He sighed, exhaling slowly. “Jesus…”

“How the hell did that happen?” Barnes said.

“It was me,” Beth said. “I pushed this button.”

“Let’s not go around pushing buttons, if you don’t mind,” Barnes said irritably.

“It was marked ‘ROOM LIGHTS.’ It seemed an appropriate thing to do.”

“Let’s try to stay together on this,” Barnes said.

“Well, Jesus, Hat-”

“Just don’t push any more buttons, Beth!”

They were moving around the cabin, looking at the instrument panel, at the chairs. All of them, that is, all except for Harry. He stood very still in the middle of the room, not moving, and said, “Anybody see a date anywhere?”

“No date.”

“There’s got to be a date,” Harry said, suddenly tense. “And we’ve got to find it. Because this is definitely an American spaceship from the future.”

“What’s it doing here?” Norman asked. “Damned if I know,” Harry said. He shrugged. Norman frowned.

“What’s wrong, Harry?”

“Nothing.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Norman thought: He’s figured out something, and it bothers him. But he’s not saying what it is.

Ted said, “So this is what a time-travel machine looks like.

“I don’t know,” Barnes said. “If you ask me, this instrument panel looks like it’s for flying, and this room looks like a flight deck.”

Norman thought so, too: everything about the room reminded him of an airplane cockpit. The three chairs for pilot, copilot, navigator. The layout of the instrumentation. This was a machine that flew, he was sure of it. Yet something was odd…

He slipped into one of the contoured chairs. The soft leather-like material was almost too comfortable. He heard a gurgling: water inside?

“I hope you’re not going to fly this sucker,” Ted laughed.

“No, no.”

“What’s that whirring noise?”

The chair gripped him. Norman had an instant of panic, feeling the chair move all around his body, squeezing his shoulders, wrapping around his hips. The leather padding slid around his head, covering his ears, drawing down over his forehead. He was sinking deeper, disappearing inside the chair itself, being swallowed up by it.

“Oh God…”

And then the chair snapped forward, pulling up tight before the control console. And the whirring stopped. Then nothing.

“I think,” Beth said, “that the chair thinks you are going to fly it.”

“Umm,” Norman said, trying to control his breathing, his racing pulse, “I wonder how I get out?”

The only part of his body still free were his hands. He moved his fingers, felt a panel of buttons on the arms of the chair. He pressed one.

The chair slid back, opened like a soft clam, released him. Norman climbed out, and looked back at the imprint of his body, slowly disappearing as the chair whirred and adjusted itself.

Harry poked one of the leather pads experimentally, heard the gurgle. “Water-filled.”

“Makes perfect sense,” Barnes said. “Water’s not compressible. You can withstand enormous G-forces sitting in a chair like this.”

“And the ship itself is built to take great strains,” Ted said. “Maybe time travel is strenuous? Structurally strenuous?”

“Maybe.” Norman was doubtful. “But I think Barnes is right-this is a machine that flew.”

“Perhaps it just looks that way,” Ted said. “After all, we know how to travel in space, but we don’t know how to travel in time. We know that space and time are really aspects of the same thing, space-time. Perhaps you’re required to fly in time just the way you fly in space. Maybe time travel and space travel are more similar than we think now.”

“Aren’t we forgetting something?” Beth said. “Where is everybody? If people flew this thing in either time or space, where are they?”

“Probably somewhere else on the ship.”

“I’m not so sure,” Harry said. “Look at this leather on these seats. It’s brand-new.”

“Maybe it was a new ship.”

“No, I mean really brand-new. This leather doesn’t show any scratches, any cuts, any coffee-cup spills or stains. There is nothing to suggest that these seats have ever been sat in.” “Maybe there wasn’t any crew.”

“Why would you have seats if there wasn’t any crew?”

“Maybe they took the crew out at the last minute. It seems they were worried about radiation. The inner hull’s leadshielded, too.”

“Why should there be radiation associated with time travel?”

“I know,” Ted said. “Maybe the ship got launched by accident. Maybe the ship was on the launch pad and somebody pressed the button before the crew got aboard so the ship took off empty.”

“You mean, oops, wrong button?”

“That’d be a hell of a mistake,” Norman said.

Barnes shook his head. “I’m not buying it. For one thing, a ship this big could never be launched from Earth. It had to be built and assembled in orbit, and launched from space.”

“What do you make of this?” Beth said, pointing to another console near the rear of the flight deck. There was a fourth chair, drawn up close to the console.

The leather was wrapped around a human form.

“No kidding…”

“There’s a man in there?”

“Let’s have a look.” Beth pushed the armrest buttons. The chair whirred back from the console and unwrapped itself. They saw a man, staring forward, his eyes open.

“My God, after all these years, perfectly preserved,” Ted said.

“You would expect that,” Harry said. “Considering he’s a mannequin.”

“But he’s so lifelike-”

“Give our descendants some credit for advances,” Harry said. “They’re half a century ahead of us.” He pushed the mannequin forward, exposing an umbilicus running out the back, at the base of the hips.

“Wires…”

“Not wires,” Ted said. “Glass. Optical cables. This whole ship uses optical technology, and not electronics.”

“In any case, it’s one mystery solved,” Harry said, looking at the dummy. “Obviously this craft was built to be a manned ship, but it was sent out unmanned.”

“Why?”

“Probably the intended voyage was too dangerous. They sent an unmanned vessel first, before they sent a manned vessel.”

Beth said, “And where did they send it?”

“With time travel, you don’t send it to a where. You send it to a when.”

“Okay. Then to when did they send it?”

Harry shrugged. “No information yet,” he said.

That diffidence again, Norman thought. What was Harry really thinking?

“Well, this craft is half a mile long,” Barnes said. “We have a lot more to see.”

“I wonder if they had a flight recorder,” Norman said.

“You mean like a commercial airliner?”

“Yes. Something to record the activity of the ship on its voyage.”

“They must have,” Harry said. “Trace the dummy cable back, you’re sure to find it. I’d like to see that recorder, too. In fact, I would say it is crucial.”

Norman was looking at the console, lifting up a keyboard panel. “Look here,” he said. “I found a date.”

They clustered around. There was a stamp in the plastic beneath the keyboard. “Intel Inc. Made in U.S.A. Serial No: 98004077 8/5/43.”

“August 5, 2043?”

“Looks like it.”

“So we’re walking through a ship fifty-odd years before it’s going to be built…”

“This is giving me a headache.”

“Look here.” Beth had moved forward from the console deck, into what looked like living quarters. There were twenty bunk beds.

“Crew of twenty? If it took three people to fly it, what were the other seventeen for?”

Nobody had an answer to that.

Next, they entered a large kitchen, a toilet, living quarters. Everything was new and sleekly designed, but recognizable for what it was.

“You know, Hal, this is a lot more comfortable than DH-8.”

“Yes, maybe we should move in here.”

“Absolutely not,” Barnes said. “We’re studying this ship, not living in it. We’ve got a lot more work to do before we even begin to know what this is all about.”

“It’d be more efficient to live here while we explore it.”

“I don’t want to live here,” Harry said. “It gives me the creeps.”

“Me too,” Beth said.

They had been aboard the ship for an hour now, and Norman’s feet hurt. That was another thing he hadn’t anticipated: while exploring a large spacecraft from the future, your feet could begin to hurt.

But Barnes continued on.

Leaving the crew quarters, they entered a vast area of narrow walkways set out between great sealed compartments that stretched ahead as far as they could see. The compartments turned out to be storage bays of immense size. They opened one bay and found it was filled with heavy plastic containers, which looked rather like the loading containers of contemporary airliners, except many times larger. They opened one container.

“No kidding,” Barnes said, peering inside. “What is it?”

“Food.”

The food was wrapped in layers of lead foil and plastic, like NASA rations. Ted picked one up. “Food from the future!” he said, and smacked his lips.

“You going to eat that?” Harry said.

“Absolutely,” Ted said. “You know, I once had a bottle of Dom Perignon 1897, but this will be the first time I’ve ever had anything to eat from the future, from 2043.”

“It’s also three hundred years old,” Harry said.

“Maybe you’ll want to film this,” Ted said to Edmunds. “Me eating.”

Edmunds dutifully put the camera to her eye, flicked on the light.

“Let’s not do that now,” Barnes said. “We have other things to accomplish.”

“This is human interest,” Ted said. “Not now,” Barnes said firmly.

He opened a second storage container, and a third. They all contained food. They moved to the next storage bay and opened more containers.

“It’s all food. Nothing but food.”

The ship had traveled with an enormous amount of food. Even allowing for a crew of twenty, it was enough food for a voyage of several years.

They were getting very tired; it was a relief when Beth found a button, said, “I wonder what this does-”

Barnes said, “Beth-”

And the walkway began to move, rubber tread rolling forward with a slight hum.

“Beth, I want you to stop pushing every damn button you see.”

But nobody else objected. It was a relief to ride the walkway past dozens of identical storage bays. Finally they came to a new section, much farther forward. Norman guessed by now they were a quarter of a mile from the crew compartment in the back. That meant they were roughly in the middle of the huge ship.

And here they found a room with life-support equipment, and twenty hanging spacesuits.

“Bingo,” Ted said. “It’s finally clear. This ship is intended to travel to the stars.”

The others murmured, excited by the possibility. Suddenly it all made sense: the great size, the vastness of the ship, the complexity of the control consoles…

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Harry said. “It can’t have been made to travel to the stars. This is obviously a conventional spacecraft, although very large. And at conventional speeds, the nearest star is two hundred and fifty years away.”

“Maybe they had new technology.”

“Where is it? There’s no evidence of new technology.”

“Well, maybe it’s-”

“Face the facts, Ted,” Harry said. “Even with this huge size, the ship is only provisioned for a few years: fifteen or twenty years, at most. How far could it go in that time? Barely out of the solar system, right?”

Ted nodded glumly. “It’s true. It took the Voyager spacecraft five years to reach Jupiter, nine years to reach Uranus. In fifteen years… Maybe they were going to Pluto.”

“Why would anyone want to go to Pluto?”

“We don’t know yet, but-”

The radios squawked. The voice of Tina Chan said, “Captain Barnes, surface wants you for a secure encrypted communication, sir.”

“Okay,” Barnes said. “It’s time to go back, anyway.” They headed back, through the vast ship, to the main entrance.

SPACE AND TIME

They were sitting in the lounge of DH-8, watching the divers work on the grid. Barnes was in the next cylinder, talking to the surface. Levy was cooking lunch, or dinner-a meal, anyway. They were all getting confused about what the Navy people called “surface time.”

“Surface time doesn’t matter down here,” Edmunds said, in her precise librarian’s voice. “Day or night, it just doesn’t make any difference. You get used to it.”

They nodded vaguely. Everyone was tired, Norman saw. The strain, the tension of the exploration, had taken its toll.

Beth had already drifted off to sleep, feet up on the coffee table, her muscular arms folded across her chest.

Outside the window, three small submarines had come down and were hovering over the grid. Several divers were clustered around; others were heading back to the divers’ habitat, DH-7.

“Looks like something’s up,” Harry said. “Something to do with Barnes’s call?”

“Could be.” Harry was still preoccupied, distracted. “Where’s Tina Chan?”

“She must be with Barnes. Why?”

“I need to talk to her.”

“What about?” Ted said.

“It’s personal,” Harry said.

Ted raised his eyebrows but said nothing more. Harry left, going into D Cyl. Norman and Ted were alone.

“He’s a strange fellow,” Ted said.

“Is he?”

“You know he is, Norman. Arrogant, too. Probably because he’s black. Compensating, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’d say he has a chip on his shoulder,” Ted said. “He seems to resent everything about this expedition.” He sighed. “Of course, mathematicians are all strange. He’s probably got no sort of life at all, I mean a private life, women and so forth. Did I tell you I married again?”

“I read it somewhere,” Norman said.

“She’s a television reporter,” Ted said. “Wonderful woman.” He smiled. “When we got married, she gave me this Corvette. Beautiful ‘58 Corvette, as a wedding present. You know that nice fire-engine red color they had in the fifties? That color.” Ted paced around the room, glanced over at Beth. “I just think this is all unbelievably exciting. I couldn’t possibly sleep.”

Norman nodded. It was interesting how different they all were, he thought. Ted, eternally optimistic, with the bubbling enthusiasm of a child. Harry, with the cold, critical demeanor, the icy mind, the unblinking eye. Beth, not so intellectual or so cerebral. At once more physical and more emotional. That was why, though they were all exhausted, only Beth could sleep.

“Say, Norman,” Ted said. “I thought you said this was going to be scary.”

“I thought it would be,” Norman said.

“Well,” Ted said. “Of all the people who could be wrong about this expedition, I’m glad it was you.”

“I am, too.”

“Although I can’t imagine why you would select a man like Harry Adams for this team. Not that he isn’t distinguished, but…”

Norman didn’t want to talk about Harry. “Ted, remember back on the ship, when you said space and time are aspects of the same thing?”

“Space-time, yes.”

“I’ve never really understood that.”

“Why? It’s quite straightforward.”

“You can explain it to me?”

“Sure.”

“In English?” Norman said.

“You mean, explain it without mathematics?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll try.” Ted frowned, but Norman knew he was pleased; Ted loved to lecture. He paused for a moment, then said, “Okay. Let’s see where we need to begin. You’re familiar with the idea that gravity is just geometry?”

“No.”

“Curvature of space and time?”

“Not really, no.”

“Uh. Einstein’s general relativity?”

“Sorry,” Norman said.

“Never mind,” Ted said. There was a bowl of fruit on the table. Ted emptied the bowl, setting the fruit on the table.

“Okay. This table is space. Nice, flat space.”

“Okay,” Norman said.

Ted began to position the pieces of fruit. “This orange is the sun. And these are the planets, which move in circles around the sun. So we have the solar system on this table.”

“Okay.”

“Fine,” Ted said. “Now, the sun”-he pointed to the orange in the center of the table-“is very large, so it has a lot of gravity.”

“Right.”

Ted gave Norman a ball bearing. “This is a spaceship. I want you to send it through the solar system, so it passes very close to the sun. Okay?”

Norman took the ball bearing and rolled it so it passed close to the orange. “Okay.”

“You notice that your ball rolled straight across the flat table.”

“Right.”

“But in real life, what would happen to your spacecraft when it passed near the sun?”

“It would get sucked into the sun.”

“Yes. We say it would ‘fall into’ the sun. The spacecraft would curve inward from a straight line and hit the sun. But your spacecraft didn’t.”

“No.

“So we know that the flat table is wrong,” Ted said. “Real space can’t be flat like the table.”

“It can’t?”

“No,” Ted said.

He took the empty bowl and set the orange in the bottom. “Now roll your ball straight across past the sun.”

Norman flicked the ball bearing into the bowl. The ball curved, and spiraled down the inside of the bowl until it hit the orange.

“Okay,” Ted said. “The spacecraft hit the sun, just like it would in real life.”

“But if I gave it enough speed,” Norman said, “it’d go right past it. It’d roll down and up the far side of the bowl and out again.”

“Correct,” Ted said. “Also like real life. If the spacecraft has enough velocity, it will escape the gravitational field of the sun.”

“Right.”

“So,” Ted said, “what we are showing is that a spacecraft passing the sun in real life behaves as if it were entering a curved region of space around the sun. Space around the sun is curved like this bowl.”

“Okay…”

“And if your ball had the right speed, it wouldn’t escape from the bowl, but instead would just spiral around endlessly inside the rim of the bowl. And that’s what the planets are doing. They are endlessly spiraling inside the bowl created by the sun.”

He put the orange back on the table. “In reality, you should imagine the table is made out of rubber and the planets are all making dents in the rubber as they sit there. That’s what space is really like. Real space is curved-and the curvature changes with the amount of gravity.”

“Yes…”

“So,” Ted said, “space is curved by gravity.”

“Okay.”

“And that means that you can think of gravity as nothing more than the curvature of space. The Earth has gravity because the Earth curves the space around it.”

“Okay.”

“Except it’s not that simple,” Ted said.

Norman sighed. “I didn’t think it would be.”

Harry came back into the room, looked at the fruit on the table, but said nothing.

“Now,” Ted said, “when you roll your ball bearing across the bowl, you notice that it not only spirals down, but it also goes faster, right?”

“Yes.”

“Now, when an object goes faster, time on that object passes slower. Einstein proved that early in the century. What it means is that you can think of the curvature of space as also representing a curvature of time. The deeper the curve in the bowl, the slower time passes.”

Harry said, “Well…”

“Layman’s terms,” Ted said. “Give the guy a break.”

“Yeah,” Norman said, “give the guy a break.”

Ted held up the bowl. “Now, if you’re doing all this mathematically, what you find is that the curved bowl is neither space nor time, but the combination of both, which is called space-time. This bowl is space-time, and objects moving on it are moving in space-time. We don’t think about movement that way, but that’s really what’s happening.”

“It is?”

“Sure. Take baseball.”

“Idiot game,” Harry said. “I hate games.”

“You know baseball?” Ted said to Norman.

“Yes,” Norman said.

“Okay. Imagine the batter hits a line drive to the center fielder. The ball goes almost straight out and takes, say, half a second.”

“Right.”

“Now imagine the batter hits a high pop fly to the same center fielder. This time the ball goes way up in the air, and it takes six seconds before the center fielder catches it.”

“Okay.”

“Now, the paths of the two balls-the line drive and the pop fly-look very different to us. But both these balls moved exactly the same in space-time.”

“No,” Norman said.

“Yes,” Ted said. “And in a way, you already know it. Suppose I ask you to hit a high pop fly to the center fielder, but to make it reach the fielder in half a second instead of six seconds.”

“That’s impossible,” Norman said.

“Why? Just hit the pop fly harder.”

“If I hit it harder, it will go higher and end up taking longer.”

“Okay, then hit a low line drive that takes six seconds to reach center field.”

“I can’t do that, either.”

“Right,” Ted said. “So what you are telling me is that you can’t make the ball do anything you want. There is a fixed relationship governing the path of the ball through space and time.”

“Sure. Because the Earth has gravity.”

“Yes,” Ted said, “and we’ve already agreed that gravity is a curvature of space-time, like the curve of this bowl. Any baseball on Earth must move along the same curve of space-time, as this ball bearing moves along this bowl. Look.” He put the orange back in the bowl. “Here’s the Earth.” He put two fingers on opposite sides of the orange. “Here’s batter and fielder. Now, roll the ball bearing from one finger to the other, and you’ll find you have to accommodate the curve of the bowl. Either you flick the ball lightly and it will roll close to the orange, or you can give it a big flick and it will go way up the side of the bowl, before falling down again to the other side. But you can’t make this ball bearing do anything you want, because the ball bearing is moving along the curved bowl. And that’s what your baseball is really doing-it’s moving on curved space-time.”

Norman said, “I sort of get it. But what does this have to do with time travel?”

“Well, we think the gravitational field of the Earth is strong-it hurts us when we fall down-but in reality it’s very weak. It’s almost nonexistent. So space-time around the Earth isn’t very curved. Space-time is much more curved around the sun. And in other parts of the universe, it’s very curved, producing a sort of roller-coaster ride, and all sorts of distortions of time may occur. In fact, if you consider a black hole-”

He broke off.

“Yes, Ted? A black hole?”

“Oh my God,” Ted said softly.

Harry pushed his glasses up on his nose and said, “Ted, for once in your life, you just might be right.”

They both grabbed for paper, began scribbling.

“It couldn’t be a Schwartzschild hole-”

“-No, no. Have to be rotating-”

“-Angular momentum would assure that-”

“-And you couldn’t approach the singularity-”

“-No, the tidal forces-”

“-rip you apart-”

“But if you just dipped below the event horizon…”

“Is it possible? Did they have the nerve?”

The two fell silent, making calculations, muttering to themselves.

“What is it about a black hole?” Norman said. But they weren’t listening to him any more.

The intercom clicked. Barnes said, “Attention. This is the Captain speaking. I want all hands in the conference room on the double.”

“We’re in the conference room,” Norman said.

“On the double. Now.”

“We’re already there, Hal.”

“That is all,” Barnes said, and the intercom clicked off.

THE CONFERENCE

“I’ve just been on the scrambler with Admiral Spaulding of CincComPac Honolulu,” Barnes said. “Apparently Spaulding just learned that I had taken civilians to saturated depths for a project about which he knew nothing. He wasn’t happy about it.”

There was a silence. They all looked at him.

“He demanded that all the civilians be sent up topside.” Good, Norman thought. He had been disappointed by what they had found so far. The prospect of spending another seventy-two hours in this humid, claustrophobic environment while they investigated an empty space vehicle did not appeal to him.

“I thought,” Ted said, “we had direct authorization from the President.”

“We do,” Barnes said, “but there is the question of the storm.”

“What storm?” Harry said.

“They’re reporting fifteen-knot winds and southeast swells on the surface. It looks like a Pacific cyclone is headed our way and will reach us within twenty-four hours.”

“There’s going to be a storm here?” Beth said.

“Not here,” Barnes said. “Down here we won’t feel anything, but it’ll be rough on the surface. All our surface support ships may have to pull out and steam for protected harbors in Tonga.”

“So we’d be left alone down here?”

“For twenty-four to forty-eight hours, yes. That wouldn’t be a problem-we’re entirely self-sufficient-but Spaulding is nervous about pulling surface support when there are civilians below. I want to know your feelings. Do you want to stay down and continue exploring the ship, or leave?”

“Stay. Definitely,” Ted said. Barnes said, “Beth?”

“I came here to investigate unknown life,” Beth said, “but there isn’t any life on that ship. It just isn’t what I thought it would be-hoped it would be. I say we go.”

Barnes said, “Norman?”

“Let’s admit the truth,” Norman said. “We’re not really trained for a saturated environment and we’re not really comfortable down here. At least I’m not. And we’re not the best people to evaluate this spacecraft. At this point, the Navy’d be much better off with a team of NASA engineers. I say, go.”

“Harry?”

“Let’s get the hell out,” Harry said.

“Any particular reason?” Barnes said.

“Call it intuition.”

Ted said, “I can’t believe you would say that, Harry, just when we have this fabulous new idea about the ship-

“That’s beside the point now,” Barnes said crisply. “I’ll make the arrangements with the surface to pull us out in another twelve hours.”

Ted said, “God damn it!”

But Norman was looking at Barnes. Barnes wasn’t upset. He wants to leave, he thought. He’s looking for an excuse to leave, and we’re providing his excuse.

“Meantime,” Barnes said, “we can make one and perhaps even two more trips to the ship. We’ll rest for the next two hours, and then go back. That’s all for now.”

“I have more I’d like to say-”

“That’s all, Ted. The vote’s been taken. Get some rest.” As they headed toward their bunks, Barnes said, “Beth, I’d like a word with you, please.”

“What about?”

“Beth, when we go back to the ship, I don’t want you pushing every button you come across.”

“All I did was turn on the lights, Hal.”

“Yes, but you didn’t know that when you-”

“-Sure I did. The button said ‘ROOM LIGHTS.’ It was pretty clear.”

As they moved off, they heard Beth say, “I’m not one of your little Navy people you can order around, Hal-” and then Barnes said something else, and the voices faded.

“Damn it,” Ted said. He kicked one of the iron walls; it rang hollowly. They passed into C Cylinder, on their way to the bunks. “I can’t believe you people want to leave,” Ted said. “This is such an exciting discovery. How can you walk away from it? Especially you, Harry. The mathematical possibilities alone! The theory of the black hole-”

“-I’ll tell you why,” Harry said. “I want to go because Barnes wants to go.”

“Barnes doesn’t want to go,” Ted said. “Why, he put it to a vote-”

“-I know what he did. But Barnes doesn’t want to look as if he’s made the wrong decision in the eyes of his superiors, or as if he’s backing down. So he let us decide. But I’m telling you, Barnes wants to go.”

Norman was surprised: the cliche image of mathematicians was that they had their heads in the clouds, were absent-minded, inattentive. But Harry was astute; he didn’t miss a thing.

“Why would Barnes want to go?” Ted said.

“I think it’s clear,” Harry said. “Because of the storm on the surface.”

“The storm isn’t here yet,” Ted said.

“No,” Harry said. “And when it comes, we don’t know how long it will last.”

“Barnes said twenty-four to forty-eight hours-”

“Neither Barnes nor anyone else can predict how long the storm will last,” Harry said. “What if it lasts five days?”

“We can hold out that long. We have air and supplies for five days. What’re you so worried about?”

“I’m not worried,” Harry said. “But I think Barnes is worried.”

“Nothing will go wrong, for Christ’s sake,” Ted said. “I think we should stay.” And then there was a squishing sound. They looked down at the all-weather carpeting at their feet. The carpet was dark, soaked.

“What’s that?”

“I’d say it was water,” Harry said.

“Salt water?” Ted said, bending over, touching the damp spot. He licked his finger. “Doesn’t taste salty.”

From above them, a voice said, “That’s because it’s urine.” Looking up, they saw Teeny Fletcher standing on a platform among a network of pipes near the curved top of the cylinder. “Everything’s under control, gentlemen. Just a small leak in the liquid waste disposal pipe that goes to the H₂O recycler.”

“Liquid waste?” Ted was shaking his head.

“Just a small leak,” Fletcher said. “No problem, sir.” She sprayed one of the pipes with white foam from a spray canister. The foam sputtered and hardened on the pipe. “We just urethane the suckers when we get them. Makes a perfect seal.

“How often do you get these leaks?” Harry said.

“Liquid waste?” Ted said again.

“Hard to say, Dr. Adams. But don’t worry. Really.”

“I feel sick,” Ted said.

Harry slapped him on the back. “Come on, it won’t kill you. Let’s get some sleep.”

“I think I’m going to throw up.”

They went into the sleeping chamber. Ted immediately ran off to the showers; they heard him coughing and gagging.

“Poor Ted,” Harry said, shaking his head.

Norman said, “What’s all this business about a black hole, anyway?”

“A black hole,” Harry said, “is a dead, compressed star. Basically, a star is like a big beach ball inflated by the atomic explosions occurring inside it. When a star gets old, and runs out of nuclear fuel, the ball collapses to a much smaller size. If it collapses enough, it becomes so dense and it has so much gravity that it keeps on collapsing, squeezing down on itself until it is very dense and very small-only a few miles in diameter. Then it’s a black hole. Nothing else in the universe is as dense as a black hole.”

“So they’re black because they’re dead?”

“No. They’re black because they trap all the light. Black holes have so much gravity, they pull everything into them, like vacuum cleaners-all the surrounding interstellar gas and dust, and even light itself. They just suck it right up.”

“They suck up light?” Norman said. He found it hard to think of that.

“Yes.”

“So what were you two so excited about, with your calculations?”

“Oh, it’s a long story, and it’s just speculation.” Harry yawned. “It probably won’t amount to anything, anyway. Talk about it later?”

“Sure,” Norman said.

Harry rolled over, went to sleep. Ted was still in the showers, hacking and sputtering. Norman went back to D Cyl, to Tina’s console.

“Did Harry find you all right?” he said. “I know he wanted to see you.”

“Yes, sir. And I have the information he requested now. Why? Did you want to make out your will, too?”

Norman frowned.

“Dr. Adams said he didn’t have a will and he wanted to make one. He seemed to feel it was quite urgent. Anyway, I checked with the surface and you can’t do it. It’s some legal problem about it being in your own handwriting; you can’t transmit your will over electronic lines.”

“I see.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Johnson. Should I tell the others as well?”

“No,” Norman said. “Don’t bother the others. We’ll be going to the surface soon. Right after we have one last look at the ship.”

THE LARGE GLASS

This time they split up inside the spaceship. Barnes, Ted, and Edmunds continued forward in the vast cargo bays, to search the parts of the ship that were still unexplored. Norman, Beth, and Harry stayed in what they now called the flight deck, looking for the flight recorder.

Ted’s parting words were “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.” Then he set off with Barnes. Edmunds left them a small video monitor so they could see the progress of the other team in the forward section of the ship. And they could hear: Ted chattered continuously to Barnes, giving his views about structural features of the ship. The design of the big cargo bays reminded Ted of the stonework of the ancient Mycenaeans in Greece, particularly the Lion Gate ramp at Mycenae…

“Ted has more irrelevant facts at his fingertips than any man I know,” Harry said. “Can we turn the volume down?” Yawning, Norman turned the monitor down. He was tired. The bunks in DH-8 were damp, the electric blankets heavy and clinging. Sleep had been almost impossible. And then Beth had come storming in after her talk with Barnes.

She was still angry now. “God damn Barnes,” she said. “Where does he get off?”

“He’s doing the best he can, like everyone else,” Norman said.

She spun. “You know, Norman, sometimes you’re too psychological and understanding. The man is an idiot. A complete idiot.”

“Let’s just find the flight recorder, shall we?” Harry said. “That’s the important thing now.” Harry was following the umbilicus cable that ran out the back of the mannequin, into the floor. He was lifting up floor panels, tracing the wires aft.

“I’m sorry,” Beth said, “but he wouldn’t speak like that to a man. Certainly not to Ted. Ted’s hogging the whole show, and I don’t see why he should be allowed to.”

“What does Ted have to do with-” Norman began.

“-The man is a parasite, that’s what he is. He takes the ideas of others and promotes them as his own. Even the way he quotes famous sayings-it’s outrageous.”

“You feel he takes other people’s ideas?” Norman said.

“Listen, back on the surface, I mentioned to Ted that we ought to have some words ready when we opened this thing. And the next thing I know, Ted’s making up quotes and positioning himself in front of the camera.”

“Well…”

“Well what, Norman? Don’t well me, for Christ’s sake. It was my idea and he took it without so much as a thank you.”

“Did you say anything to him about it?” Norman said.

“No, I did not say anything to him about it. I’m sure he wouldn’t remember if I did; he’d go, ‘Did you say that, Beth? I suppose you might have mentioned something like that, yes…’ ”

“I still think you should talk to him.”

“Norman, you’re not listening to me.”

“If you talked to him, at least you wouldn’t be so angry about it now.”

“Shrink talk,” she said, shaking her head. “Look, Ted does whatever he wants on this expedition, he makes his stupid speeches, whatever he wants. But I go through the door first and Barnes gives me hell. Why shouldn’t I go first? What’s wrong with a woman being the first, for once in the history of science?”

“Beth-”

“-And then I had the gall to turn on the lights. You know what Barnes said about that? He said I might have started a short-circuit and put us all in jeopardy. He said I didn’t know what I was doing. He said I was impulsive. Jesus. Impulsive. Stone-age military cretin.”

“Turn the volume back up,” Harry said. “I’d rather hear Ted.”

“Come on, guys.”

“We’re all under a lot of pressure, Beth,” Norman said. “It’s going to affect everybody in different ways.”

She glared at Norman. “You’re saying Barnes was right?”

“I’m saying we’re all under pressure. Including him. Including you.”

“Jesus, you men always stick together. You know why I’m still an assistant professor and not tenured?”

“Your pleasant, easygoing personality?” Harry said.

“I can do without this. I really can.”

“Beth,” Harry said, “you see the way these cables are going? They’re running toward that bulkhead there. See if they go up the wall on the other side of the door.”

“You trying to get rid of me?”

“If possible.”

She laughed, breaking the tension. “All right, I’ll look on the other side of the door.”

When she was gone, Harry said, “She’s pretty worked up.”

Norman said, “You know the Ben Stone story?”

“Which one?”

“Beth did her graduate work in Stone’s lab.”

“Oh.”

Benjamin Stone was a biochemist at BU. A colorful, engaging man, Stone had a reputation as a good researcher who used his graduate students like lab assistants, taking their results as his own. In this exploitation of others’ work, Stone was not unique in the academic community, but he proceeded a little more ruthlessly than his colleagues.

“Beth was living with him as well.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Back in the early seventies. Apparently, she did a series of important experiments on the energetics of ciliary inclusion bodies. They had a big argument, and Stone broke off his relationship with her. She left the lab, and he published five papers-all her work-without her name on them.”

“Very nice,” Harry said. “So now she lifts weights?”

“Well, she feels mistreated, and I can see her point.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “But the thing is, lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, you know what I mean?”

“Jesus,” Beth said, returning. “This is like ‘The girl who’s raped is always asking for it,’ is that what you’re saying?”

“No,” Harry said, still lifting up floor panels, following the wires. “But sometimes you gotta ask what the girl is doing in a dark alley at three in the morning in a bad part of town.”

“I was in love with him.”

“It’s still a bad part of town.”

“I was twenty-two years old.”

“How old do you have to be?”

“Up yours, Harry.”

Harry shook his head. “You find the wires, Butch?”

“Yes, I found the wires. They go into some kind of a glass grid.”

“Let’s have a look,” Norman said, going next door. He’d seen flight recorders before; they were long rectangular metal boxes, reminiscent of safe-deposit boxes, painted red or bright orange. If this was-

He stopped.

He was looking at a transparent glass cube one foot on each side. Inside the cube was an intricate grid arrangement of fine glowing blue lines. Between the glowing lines, blue lights flickered intermittently. There were two pressure gauges mounted on top of the cube, and three pistons; and there were a series of silver stripes and rectangles on the outer surface on the left side. It didn’t look like anything he had seen before.

“Interesting.” Harry peered into the cube. “Some kind of optronic memory, is my guess. We don’t have anything like it.” He touched the silver stripes on the outside. “Not paint, it’s some plastic material. Probably machine-readable.”

“By what? Certainly not us.”

“No. Probably a robot recovery device of some kind.”

“And the pressure gauges?”

“The cube is filled with some kind of gas, under pressure.

Maybe it contains biological components, to attain that compactness. In any case, I’ll bet this large glass is a memory device.”

“A flight recorder?”

“Their equivalent, yes.”

“How do we access it?”

“Watch this,” Beth said, going back to the flight deck. She began pushing sections of the console, activating it. “Don’t tell Barnes,” she said over her shoulder.

“How do you know where to press?”

“I don’t think it matters,” she said. “I think the console can sense where you are.”

“The control panel keeps track of the pilot?”

“Something like that.”

In front of them, a section of the console glowed, making a screen, yellow on black.

RV-LHOOQ DCOMI U.S.S. STAR VOYAGER

Then nothing.

Harry said, “Now we’ll get the bad news.”

“What bad news?” Norman said. And he wondered: Why had Harry stayed behind to look for the flight recorder, instead of going with Ted and Barnes to explore the rest of the ship? Why was he so interested in the past history of this vessel?

“Maybe it won’t be bad,” Harry said.

“Why do you think it might be?”

“Because,” Harry said, “if you consider it logically, something vitally important is missing from this ship-”

At that moment, the screen filled with columns:

SHIP SYSTEMS PROPULSION SYSTEMS

LIFE SYSTEMS WASTE MANAG (V9)

DATA SYSTEMS STATUS OM2 (OUTER)

QUARTERMASTER STATUS OM3 (INNER)

FLIGHT RECORDS STATUS OM4 (FORE)

CORE OPERATIONS STATUS DV7 (AFT)

DECK CONTROL STATUS V (SUMMA)

INTEGRATION (DIRECT) STATUS COMREC (2)

LSS TEST 1.0 LINE A9-11

LSS TEST 2.0 LINE A 12-BX

LSS TEST 3.0 STABILIX

“What’s your pleasure?” Beth said, hands on the console. “Flight records,” Harry said. He bit his lip.

FLIGHT DATA SUMMARIES RV-LHOOQ

FDS 01/01/43-12/31/45

FDS 01/01/46-12/31/48

FDS 01/01/49-12/31/51

FDS 01/01/52-12/31/53

FDS 01/01/54-12/31/54

FDS 01/01/55-06/31/55

FDS 07/01/55-12/31/55

FDS 01/01/56-01/31/56

FDS 02/01/56-ENTRY EVENT

FDS ENTRY EVENT

FDS ENTRY EVENT SUMMARY

8 amp;6!!OZ/010/Odd-000/XXX/X

F$S XXX/X% ^/XXX-X@X/X!X/X

“What do you make of that?” Norman said.

Harry was peering at the screen. “As you see, the earliest records are in three-year intervals. Then they’re shorter, one year, then six months, and finally one month. Then this entry event business.”

“So they were recording more and more carefully,” Beth said. “As the ship approached the entry event, whatever it was.”

“I have a pretty good idea what it was,” Harry said. “I just can’t believe that-let’s start. How about entry event summary?”

Beth pushed buttons.

On the screen, a field of stars, and around the edges of the field, a lot of numbers. It was three-dimensional, giving the illusion of depth.

“Holographic?”

“Not exactly. But similar.”

“Several large-magnitude stars there…”

“Or planets.”

“What planets?”

“I don’t know. This is one for Ted,” Harry said. “He may be able to identify the image. Let’s go on.”

He touched the console; the screen changed.

“More stars.”

“Yeah, and more numbers.”

The numbers around the edges of the screen were flickering, changing rapidly. “The stars don’t seem to be moving, but the numbers are changing.”

“No, look. The stars are moving, too.”

They could see that all the stars were moving away from the center of the screen, which was now black and empty. “No stars in the center, and everything moving away…” Harry said thoughtfully.

The stars on the outside were moving very quickly, streaking outward. The black center was expanding.

“Why is it empty like that in the center, Harry?” Beth said.

“I don’t think it is empty.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“No, but it’s not empty. In just a minute we should see-There!”

A dense white cluster of stars suddenly appeared in the center of the screen. The cluster expanded as they watched. It was a strange effect, Norman thought. There was still a distinct black ring that expanded outward, with stars on the outside and on the inside. It felt as if they were flying through a giant black donut.

“My God,” Harry said softly. “Do you know what you are looking at?”

“No,” Beth said. “What’s that cluster of stars in the center?”

“It’s another universe.”

“It’s what?”

“Well, okay. It’s probably another universe. Or it might be a different region of our own universe. Nobody really knows for sure.”

“What’s the black donut?” Norman said.

“It’s not a donut. It’s a black hole. What you are seeing is the recording made as this spacecraft went through a black hole and entered into another-Is someone calling?” Harry turned, cocked his head. They fell silent, but heard nothing. “What do you mean, another universe-”

“-Sssssh.”

A short silence. And then a faint voice crying “Hellooo…”

“Who’s that?” Norman said, straining to listen. The voice was so soft. But it sounded human. And maybe more than one voice. It was coming from somewhere inside the spacecraft.

“Yoo-hoo! Anybody there? Hellooo.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Beth said. “It’s them, on the monitor.”

She turned up the volume on the little monitor Edmunds had left behind. On the screen they saw Ted and Barnes, standing in a room somewhere and shouting. “Hellooo… Hel-lo-oooo.”

“Can we talk back?”

“Yes. Press that button on the side.” Norman said, “We hear you.”

“High damn time!” Ted.

“All right, now,” Barnes said. “Listen up.”

“What are you people doing back there?” Ted said.

“Listen up,” Barnes said. He stepped to one side, revealing a piece of multicolored equipment. “We now know what this ship is for.”

“So do we,” Harry said.

“We do?” Beth and Norman said together.

But Barnes wasn’t listening. “And the ship seems to have picked up something on its travels.”

“Picked up something? What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Barnes said. “But it’s something alien.”

“SOMETHING ALIEN”

The moving walkway carried them past endless large cargo bays. They were going forward, to join Barnes and Ted and Edmunds. And to see their alien discovery.

“Why would anyone send a spaceship through a black hole?” Beth asked.

“Because of gravity,” Harry said. “You see, black holes have so much gravity they distort space and time incredibly. You remember how Ted was saying that planets and stars make dents in the fabric of space-time? Well, black holes make tears in the fabric. And some people think it’s possible to fly through those tears, into another universe, or another part of our universe. Or to another time.”

“Another time!”

“That’s the idea,” Harry said.

“Are you people coming?” Barnes’s tinny voice, on the monitor.

“In transit now,” Beth said, glowering at the screen. “He can’t see you,” Norman said.

“I don’t care.”

They rode past more cargo areas. Harry said, “I can’t wait to see Ted’s face when we tell him.”

Finally they reached the end of the walkway. They passed through a midsection of struts and girders, and entered a large forward room which they had previously seen on the monitor. With ceilings nearly a hundred feet high, it was enormous.

You could put a six-story building in this room, Norman thought. Looking up, he saw a hazy mist or fog.

“What’s that?”

“That’s a cloud,” Barnes said, shaking his head. “The room is so big it apparently has its own weather. Maybe it even rains in here sometimes.”

The room was filled with machinery on an immense scale. At first glance, it looked like oversized earth-moving machinery, except it was brightly painted in primary colors, glistening with oil. Then Norman began to notice individual features. There were giant claw hands, enormously powerful arms, moving gear wheels. And an array of buckets and receptacles.

He realized suddenly he was looking at something very similar to the grippers and claws mounted on the front end of the Charon V submersible he had ridden down on the day before. Was it the day before? Or was it still the same day? Which day? Was this July 4? How long had they been down here?

“If you look carefully,” Barnes was saying, “you can see that some of these devices appear to be large-scale weapons. Others, like that long extensor arm, the various attachments to pick things up, in effect make this ship a gigantic robot.”

“A robot…”

“No kidding,” Beth said.

“I guess it would have been appropriate for a robot to open it after all,” Ted said thoughtfully. “Maybe even fitting.”

“Snug fitting,” Beth said.

“Pipe fitting,” Norman said.

“Sort of robot-to-robot, you mean?” Harry said. “Sort of a meeting of the threads and treads?”

“Hey,” Ted said. “I don’t make fun of your comments even when they’re stupid.”

“I wasn’t aware they ever were,” Harry said.

“You say foolish things sometimes. Thoughtless.”

“Children,” Barnes said, “can we get back to the business at hand?”

“Point it out the next time, Ted.”

“I will.”

“I’ll be glad to know when I say something foolish.”

“No problem.”

“Something you consider foolish.”

“Tell you what,” Barnes said to Norman, “when we go back to the surface, let’s leave these two down here.”

“Surely you can’t think of going back now,” Ted said.

“We’ve already voted.”

“But that was before we found the object.”

“Where is the object?” Harry said.

“Over here, Harry,” Ted said, with a wicked grin. “Let’s see what your fabled powers of deduction make of this.” They walked deeper into the room, moving among the giant hands and claws. And they saw, nestled in the padded claw of one hand, a large, perfectly polished silver sphere about thirty feet in diameter. The sphere had no markings or features of any kind.

They moved around the sphere, seeing themselves reflected in the polished metal. Norman noticed an odd shifting iridescence, faint rainbow hues of blue and red, gleaming in the metal.

“It looks like an oversized ball bearing,” Harry said.

“Keep walking, smart guy.”

On the far side, they discovered a series of deep, convoluted grooves, cut in an intricate pattern into the surface of the sphere. The pattern was arresting, though Norman could not immediately say why. The pattern wasn’t geometric. And it wasn’t amorphous or organic, either. It was hard to say what it was. Norman had never seen anything like it, and as he continued to look at it he felt increasingly certain this was a pattern never found on Earth. Never created by any man. Never conceived by a human imagination.

Ted and Barnes were right. He felt sure of it.

This sphere was something alien.

PRIORITIES

“Huh,” harry said, after staring in silence for a long time.

“I’m sure you’ll want to get back to us on this,” Ted said. “About where it came from, and so on.”

“Actually, I know where it came from.” And he told Ted about the star record, and the black hole.

“Actually,” Ted said, “I suspected that this ship was made to travel through a black hole for some time.”

“Did you? What was your first clue?”

“The heavy radiation shielding.”

Harry nodded. “That’s true. You probably guessed the significance of that before I did.” He smiled. “But you didn’t tell anybody.”

“Hey,” Ted said, “there’s no question about it. I was the one who proposed the black hole first.”

“You did?”

“Yes. No question at all. Remember, in the conference room? I was explaining to Norman about space-time, and I started to do the calculations for the black hole, and then you joined in. Norman, you remember that? I proposed it first.” Norman said, “That’s true, you had the idea.”

Harry grinned. “I didn’t feel that was a proposal. I thought it was more like a guess.”

“Or a speculation. Harry,” Ted said, “you are rewriting history. There are witnesses.”

“Since you’re so far ahead of everybody else,” Harry said, “how about telling us your proposals for the nature of this object?”

“With pleasure,” Ted said. “This object is a burnished sphere approximately ten meters in diameter, not solid, and composed of a dense metal alloy of an as-yet-unknown nature. The cabalistic markings on this side-”

“-These grooves are what you’re calling cabalistic?”

“-Do you mind if I finish? The cabalistic markings on this side clearly suggest artistic or religious ornamentation, evoking a ceremonial quality. This indicates the object has significance to whoever made it.”

“I think we can be sure that’s true.”

“Personally, I believe that this sphere is intended as a form of contact with us, visitors from another star, another solar system. It is, if you will, a greeting, a message, or a trophy. A proof that a higher form of life exists in the universe.”

“All well and good and beside the point,” Harry said. “What does it do?”

“I’m not sure it does anything. I think it just is. It is what it is.

“Very Zen.”

“Well, what’s your idea?”

“Let’s review what we know,” Harry said, “as opposed to what we imagine in a flight of fancy. This is a spacecraft from the future, built with all sorts of materials and technology we haven’t developed yet, although we are about to develop them. This ship was sent by our descendants through a black hole and into another universe, or another part of our universe.”

“Yes.”

“This spacecraft is unmanned, but equipped with robot arms which are clearly designed to pick up things that it finds. So we can think of this ship as a huge version of the unmanned Mariner spacecraft that we sent in the 1970s to Mars, to look for life there. This spacecraft from the future is much bigger, and more complicated, but it’s essentially the same sort of machine. It’s a probe.”

“Yes…

“So the probe goes into another universe, where it comes upon this sphere. Presumably it finds the sphere floating in space. Or perhaps the sphere is sent out to meet the spacecraft.”

“Right,” Ted said. “Sent out to meet it. As an emissary. That’s what I think.”

“In any case, our robot spacecraft, according to whatever built-in criteria it has, decides that this sphere is interesting. It automatically grabs the sphere in its big claw hand here, draws it inside the ship, and brings it home.”

“Except in going home it goes too far, it goes into the past.”

“Its past,” Harry said. “Our present.”

“Right.”

Barnes snorted impatiently. “Fine, so this spacecraft goes out and picks up a silver alien sphere and brings it back. Get to the point: what is this sphere?”

Harry walked forward to the sphere, pressed his ear against the metal, and rapped it with his knuckles. He touched the grooves, his hands disappearing in the deep indentations. The sphere was so highly polished Norman could see Harry’s face, distorted, in the curve of the metal. “Yes. As I suspected. These cabalistic markings, as you call them, are not decorative at all. They have another purpose entirely, to conceal a small break in the surface of the sphere. Thus they represent a door.” Harry stepped back.

“What is the sphere?”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Harry said. “I think this sphere is a hollow container, I think there’s something inside, and I think it scares the hell out of me.”

FIRST EVALUATION

“No, Mr. Secretary,” Barnes said into the phone. “We’re pretty sure it is an alien artifact. There doesn’t seem to be any question about that.”

He glanced at Norman, sitting across the room. “Yes, sir,” Barnes said. “Very damn exciting.”

They were back in the habitat, and Barnes had immediately called Washington. He was trying to delay their return to the surface.

“Not yet, we haven’t opened it. Well, we haven’t been able to open it. The door is a weird shape and it’s very finely milled… No, you couldn’t wedge anything in the crack.” He looked at Norman, rolled his eyes.

“No, we tried that, too. There don’t seem to be any exterior controls. No, no message on the outside. No, no labels either. All it is, is a highly polished sphere with some convoluted grooves on one side. What? Blast it open?”

Norman turned away. He was in D Cylinder, in the communications section run by Tina Chan. She was adjusting a dozen monitors with her usual calm. Norman said, “You seem like the most relaxed person here.”

She smiled. “Just inscrutable, sir.”

“Is that it?”

“It must be, sir,” she said, adjusting the vertical gain on one rolling monitor. The screen showed the polished sphere. “Because I feel my heart pounding, sir. What do you think is inside that thing?”

“I haven’t any idea,” Norman said.

“Do you think there’s an alien inside? You know, some kind of a living creature?”

“Maybe.”

“And we’re trying to open it up? Maybe we shouldn’t let it out, whatever is in there.”

“Aren’t you curious?” Norman said.

“Not that curious, sir.”

“I don’t see how blasting would work,” Barnes was saying on the phone. “Yes, we have SMTMP’s, yes. Oh, different sizes. But I don’t think we can blast the sucker open. No. Well, if you saw it, you’d understand. The thing is perfectly made. Perfect.”

Tina adjusted a second monitor. They had two views of the sphere, and soon there would be a third. Edmunds was setting up cameras to watch the sphere. That had been one of Harry’s suggestions. Harry had said, “Monitor it. Maybe it does something from time to time, has some activity.”

On the screen, he saw the network of wires that had been attached to the sphere. They had a full array of passive sensors: sound, and the full electromagnetic spectrum from infrared to gamma and X-rays. The readouts on the sensors were displayed on a bank of instruments to the left.

Harry came in. “Getting anything yet?”

Tina shook her head. “So far, nothing.”

“Has Ted come back?”

“No,” Norman said. “Ted’s still there.”

Ted had remained behind in the cargo bay, ostensibly to help Edmunds set up the cameras. But in fact they knew he would try to open the sphere. They saw Ted now on the second monitor, probing the grooves, touching, pushing.

Harry smiled. “He hasn’t got a prayer.”

Norman said, “Harry, remember when we were in the flight deck, and you said you wanted to make out your will because something was missing?”

“Oh, that,” Harry said. “Forget it. That’s irrelevant now.”

Barnes was saying, “No, Mr. Secretary, raising it to the surface would be just about impossible-well, sir, it is presently located inside a cargo bay half a mile inside the ship, and the ship is buried under thirty feet of coral, and the sphere itself is a good thirty feet across, it’s the size of a small house…

“I just wonder what’s in the house,” Tina said.

On the monitor, Ted kicked the sphere in frustration.

“Not a prayer,” Harry said again. “He’ll never get it open.”

Beth came in. “How are we going to open it?”

Harry said, “How?” Harry stared thoughtfully at the sphere, gleaming on the monitor. There was a long silence. “Maybe we can’t.”

“We can’t open it? You mean not ever?”

“That’s one possibility.”

Norman laughed. “Ted would kill himself.”

Barnes was saying, “Well, Mr. Secretary, if you wanted to commit the necessary Navy resources to do a full-scale salvage from one thousand feet, we might be able to undertake it starting six months from now, when we were assured of a month of good surface weather in this region. Yes… it’s winter in the South Pacific now. Yes.”

Beth said, “I can see it now. At great expense, the Navy brings a mysterious alien sphere to the surface. It is transported to a top-secret government installation in Omaha. Experts from every branch come and try to open it. Nobody can.”

“Like Excalibur,” Norman said.

Beth said, “As time goes by, they try stronger and stronger methods. Eventually they try to blow it open with a small nuclear device. And still nothing. Finally, nobody has any more ideas. The sphere sits there. Decades go by. The sphere is never opened.” She shook her head. “One great frustration for mankind…”

Norman said to Harry, “Do you really think that’d happen? That we’d never get it open?”

Harry said, “Never is a long time.”

“No, sir,” Barnes was saying, “given this new development, we’ll stay down to the last minute. Weather topside is holding-at least six more hours, yes, sir, from the Metsat reports-well, I have to rely on that judgment. Yes, sir. Hourly; yes, sir.”

He hung up, turned to the group. “Okay. We have authorization to stay down six to twelve hours more, as long as the weather holds. Let’s try to open that sphere in the time remaining.”

“Ted’s working on it now,” Harry said.

On the video monitor, they saw Ted Fielding slap the polished sphere with his hand and shout, “Open! Open Sesame! Open up, you son of a bitch!”

The sphere did not respond.

“THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC PROBLEM”

“Seriously,” Norman said, “I think somebody has to ask the question: should we consider not opening it up?”

“Why?” Barnes said. “Listen, I just got off the phone-”

“-I know,” Norman said. “But maybe we should think twice about this.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tina nodding vigorously. Harry looked skeptical. Beth rubbed her eyes, sleepy.

“Are you afraid, or do you have a substantive argument?” Barnes said.

“I have the feeling,” Harry said, “that Norman’s about to quote from his own work.”

“Well, yes,” Norman admitted. “I did put this in my report.”

In his report, he had called it “the Anthropomorphic Problem.” Basically, the problem was that everybody who had ever thought or written about extraterrestrial life imagined that life as essentially human. Even if the extraterrestrial life didn’t look human-if it was a reptile, or a big insect, or an intelligent crystal-it still acted in a human way. “You’re talking about the movies,” Barnes said.

“I’m talking about research papers, too. Every conception of extraterrestrial life, whether by a movie maker or a university professor, has been basically human-assuming human values, human understanding, human ways of approaching a humanly understandable universe. And generally a human appearance-two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and so on.”

“So?”

“So,” Norman said, “that’s obviously nonsense. For one thing, there’s enough variation in human behavior to make understanding just within our own species very troublesome. The differences between, say, Americans and Japanese are very great. Americans and Japanese don’t really look at the world the same way at all.”

“Yes, yes,” Barnes said impatiently. “We all know the Japanese are different-”

“-And when you come to a new life form, the differences may be literally incomprehensible. The values and ethics of this new form of life may be utterly different.”

“You mean it may not believe in the sanctity of life, or ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ ” Barnes said, still impatient.

“No,” Norman said. “I mean that this creature may not be able to be killed, and so it may have no concept of killing in the first place.”

Barnes stopped. “This creature may not be able to be killed?”

Norman nodded. “As someone once said, you can’t break the arms of a creature that has no arms.”

“It can’t be killed? You mean it’s immortal?”

“I don’t know,” Norman said. “That’s the point.”

“I mean, Jesus, a thing that couldn’t be killed,” Barnes said. “How would we kill it?” He bit his lip. “I wouldn’t like to open that sphere and release a thing that couldn’t be killed.”

Harry laughed. “No promotions for that one, Hal.” Barnes looked at the monitors, showing several views of the polished sphere. Finally he said, “No, that’s ridiculous. No living thing is immortal. Am I right, Beth?”

“Actually, no,” Beth said. “You could argue that certain living creatures on our own planet are immortal. For example, single-celled organisms like bacteria and yeasts are apparently capable of living indefinitely.”

“Yeasts.” Barnes snorted. “We’re not talking about yeasts.”

“And to all intents and purposes a virus could be considered immortal.”

“A virus?” Barnes sat down in a chair. He hadn’t considered a virus. “But how likely is it, really? Harry?”

“I think,” Harry said, “that the possibilities go far beyond what we’ve mentioned so far. We’ve only considered threedimensional creatures, of the kind that exist in our threedimensional universe-or, to be more precise, the universe that we perceive as having three dimensions. Some people think our universe has nine or eleven dimensions.”

Barnes looked tired.

“Except the other six dimensions are very small, so we don’t notice them.”

Barnes rubbed his eyes.

“Therefore this creature,” Harry continued, “may be multidimensional, so that it literally does not exist-at least not entirely-in our usual three dimensions. To take the simplest case, if it were a four-dimensional creature, we would only see part of it at any time, because most of the creature would exist in the fourth dimension. That would obviously make it difficult to kill. And if it were a five-dimensional creature-”

“-Just a minute. Why haven’t any of you mentioned this before?”

“We thought you knew,” Harry said.

“Knew about five-dimensional creatures that can’t be killed? Nobody said a word to me.” He shook his head. “Opening this sphere could be incredibly dangerous.”

“It could, yes.”

“What we have here is, we have Pandora’s box.”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” Barnes said. “Let’s consider worst cases. What’s the worst case for what we might find?”

Beth said, “I think that’s clear. Irrespective of whether it’s a multidimensional creature or a virus or whatever, irrespective of whether it shares our morals or has no morals at all, the worst case is that it hits us below the belt.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that it behaves in a way that interferes with our basic life mechanisms. A good example is the AIDS virus. The reason why AIDS is so dangerous is not that it’s new. We get new viruses every year-every week. And all viruses work in the same way: they attack cells and convert the machinery of the cells to make more viruses. What makes the AIDS virus dangerous is, it attacks the specific cells that we use to defend against viruses. AIDS interferes with our basic defense mechanism. And we have no defense against it.”

“Well,” Barnes said, “if this sphere contains a creature that interferes with our basic mechanisms-what would that creature be like?”

“It could breathe in air and exhale cyanide gas,” Beth said. “It could excrete radioactive waste,” Harry said.

“It could disrupt our brain waves,” Norman said. “Interfere with our ability to think.”

“Or,” Beth said, “it might merely disrupt cardiac conduction. Stop our hearts from beating.”

“It might produce a sound vibration that would resonate in our skeletal system and shatter our bones,” Harry said. He smiled at the others. “I rather like that one.”

“Clever,” Beth said. “But, as usual, we’re only thinking of ourselves. The creature might do nothing directly harmful to us at all.”

“Ah,” Barnes said.

“It might simply exhale a toxin that kills chloroplasts, so that plants could no longer convert sunlight. Then all the plants on Earth would die-and consequently all life on Earth would die.”

“Ah,” Barnes said.

“You see,” Norman said, “at first I thought the Anthropomorphic Problem-the fact that we can only conceive of extraterrestrial life as basically human-I thought it was a failure of imagination. Man is man, all he knows is man, and all he can think of is what he knows. Yet, as you can see, that’s not true. We can think of plenty of other things. But we don’t. So there must be another reason why we only conceive of extraterrestrials as humans. And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don’t like to be reminded of how frail we are-how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended. So we imagine other life forms as being like us, so we don’t have to think of the real threat-the terrifying threat-they may represent, without ever intending to.”

There was a silence.

“Of course, we mustn’t forget another possibility,” Bames said. “It may be that the sphere contains some extraordinary benefit to us. Some wondrous new knowledge, some astonishing new idea or new technology which will improve the condition of mankind beyond our wildest dreams.”

“Although the chances are,” Harry said, “that there won’t be any new idea that is useful to us.”

“Why?” Barnes said.

“Well, let’s say that the aliens are a thousand years ahead of us, just as we are relative to, say, medieval Europe. Suppose you went back to medieval Europe with a television set? There wouldn’t be any place to plug it in.”

Barnes stared from one to another for a long time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is too great a responsibility for me. I can’t make the decision to open it up. I have to call Washington on this.”

“Ted won’t be happy,” Harry said.

“The hell with Ted,” Barnes said. “I’m going to give this to the President. Until we hear from him, I don’t want anybody trying to open that sphere.”

Barnes called for a two-hour rest period, and Harry went to his quarters to sleep. Beth announced that she was going off to sleep, too, but she remained at the monitor station with Tina Chan and Norman. Chan’s station had comfortable chairs with high backs, and Beth swiveled in the chair, swinging her legs back and forth. She played with her hair, making little ringlets by her ear, and she stared into space.

Tired, Norman thought. We’re all tired. He watched Tina, who moved smoothly and continuously, adjusting the monitors, checking the sensor inputs, changing the videotapes on the bank of VCR’s, tense, alert. Because Edmunds was in the spaceship with Ted, Tina had to look after the recording units as well as her own communications console. The Navy woman didn’t seem to be as tired as they were, but, then, she hadn’t been inside the spaceship. To her, that spaceship was something she saw on the monitors, a TV show, an abstraction. Tina hadn’t been confronted face-to-face with the reality of the new environment, the exhausting mental struggle to understand what was going on, what it all meant.

“You look tired, sir,” Tina said.

“Yes. We’re all tired.”

“It’s the atmosphere,” she said. “Breathing the heliox.” So much for psychological explanations, Norman thought. Tina said, “The density of the air down here has a real effect. We’re at thirty atmospheres. If we were breathing regular air at this pressure, it would be almost as thick as a liquid. Heliox is lighter, but it’s far denser than what we’re used to. You don’t realize it, but it’s tiring just to breathe, to move your lungs.”

“But you aren’t tired.”

“Oh, I’m used to it. I’ve been in saturated environments before.”

“Is that right? Where?”

“I really can’t say, Dr. Johnson.”

“Navy operations?”

She smiled. “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

“Is that your inscrutable smile?”

“I hope so, sir. But don’t you think you ought to try and sleep?”

He nodded. “Probably.”

Norman considered going to sleep, but the prospect of his damp bunk was unappealing. Instead he went down to the galley, hoping to find one of Rose Levy’s desserts. Levy was not there, but there was some coconut cake under a plastic dome. He found a plate, cut a slice, and took it over to one of the portholes. But it was black outside the porthole; the grid lights were turned off, the divers gone. He saw lights in the portholes of DH-7, the divers’ habitat, located a few dozen yards away. The divers must be getting ready to go back to the surface. Or perhaps they had already gone.

In the porthole, he saw his own face reflected. The face looked tired, and old. “This is no place for a fifty-three-year-old man,” he said, watching his reflection.

As he looked out, he saw some moving lights in the distance, then a flash of yellow. One of the minisubs pulled up under a cylinder at DH-7. Moments later, a second sub arrived, to dock alongside it. The lights on the first sub went out. After a short time, the second sub pulled away, into the black water. The first sub was left behind.

What’s going on, he wondered, but he was aware he didn’t really care. He was too tired. He was more interested in what the cake would taste like, and looked down. The cake was eaten. Only a few crumbs remained.

Tired, he thought. Very tired. He put his feet up on the coffee table and put his head back against the cool padding of the wall.

He must have fallen asleep for a while, because he awoke disoriented, in darkness. He sat up and immediately the lights came on. He saw he was still in the galley.

Barnes had warned him about that, the way the habitat adjusted to the presence of people. Apparently the motion sensors stopped registering you if you fell asleep, and automatically shut off the room lights. Then when you awoke, and moved, the lights came back. He wondered if the lights would stay on if you snored. Who had designed all this? he wondered. Had the engineers and designers working on the Navy habitat taken snoring into account? Was there a snore sensor? More cake.

He got up and walked across to the galley kitchen. Several pieces of cake were now missing. Had he eaten them? He wasn’t sure, couldn’t remember.

“Lot of videotapes,” Beth said. Norman turned around.

“Yes,” Tina said. “We are recording everything that goes on in this habitat as well as the other ship. It’ll be a lot of material.”

There was a monitor mounted just above his head. It showed Beth and Tina, upstairs at the communications console. They were eating cake.

Aha, he thought. So that was where the cake had gone. “Every twelve hours the tapes are transferred to the submarine,” Tina said.

“What for?” Beth said.

“That’s so, if anything happens down here, the submarine will automatically go to the surface.”

“Oh, great,” Beth said. “I won’t think about that too much. Where is Dr. Fielding now?”

Tina said, “He gave up on the sphere, and went into the main flight deck with Edmunds.”

Norman watched the monitor. Tina had stepped out of view. Beth sat with her back to the monitor, eating the cake. On the monitor behind Beth, he could clearly see the gleaming sphere. Monitors showing monitors, he thought. The Navy people who eventually review this stuff are going to go crazy. Tina said, “Do you think they’ll ever get the sphere open?” Beth chewed her cake. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know.” And to Norman’s horror, he saw on the monitor behind Beth that the door of the sphere was sliding silently open, revealing blackness inside.

OPEN

They must have thought he was crazy, running through the lock to D Cylinder and stumbling up the narrow stairs to the upper level, shouting, “It’s open! It’s open!”

He came to the communications console just as Beth was wiping the last crumbs of coconut from her lips. She set down her fork.

“What’s open?”

“The sphere!”

Beth spun in her chair. Tina ran over from the bank of VCR’s. They both looked at the monitor behind Beth. There was an awkward silence.

“Looks closed to me, Norman.”

“It was open. I saw it.” He told them about watching in the galley, on the monitor. “It was just a few seconds ago, and the sphere definitely opened. It must have closed again while I was on my way here.”

“Are you sure?”

“That’s a pretty small monitor in the galley…”

“I saw it,” Norman said. “Replay it, if you don’t believe me.”

“Good idea,” Tina said, and she went to the recorders to play the tape back.

Norman was breathing heavily, trying to catch his breath. This was the first time he had exerted himself in the dense atmosphere, and he felt the effects strongly. DH-8 was not a good place to get excited, he decided.

Beth was watching him. “You okay, Norman?”

“I’m fine. I tell you, I saw it. It opened. Tina?”

“It’ll take me a second here.”

Harry walked in, yawning. “Beds in this place are great, aren’t they?” he said. “Like sleeping in a bag of wet rice. Sort of combination bed and cold shower.” He sighed. “It’ll break my heart to leave.”

Beth said, “Norman thinks the sphere opened.”

“When?” he said, yawning again.

“Just a few seconds ago.”

Harry nodded thoughtfully. “Interesting, interesting. I see it’s closed now.”

“We’re rewinding the videotapes, to look again.”

“Uh-huh. Is there any more of that cake?”

Harry seems very cool, Norman thought. This is a major piece of news and he doesn’t seem excited at all. Why was that? Didn’t Harry believe it, either? Was he still sleepy, not fully awake? Or was there something else?

“Here we go,” Tina said.

The monitor showed jagged lines, and then resolved. On the screen, Tina was saying, “-hours the tapes are transferred to the submarine.”

Beth: “What for?”

Tina: “That’s so, if anything happens down here, the submarine will automatically go to the surface.”

Beth: “Oh, great. I won’t think about that too much. Where is Dr. Fielding now?”

Tina: “He gave up on the sphere, and went into the main flight deck with Edmunds.”

On the screen, Tina stepped out of view. Beth remained alone in the chair, eating the cake, her back to the monitor.

Onscreen, Tina was saying, “Do you think they’ll ever get the sphere open?”

Beth ate her cake. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know.”

There was a short pause, and then on the monitor behind Beth, the door of the sphere slid open.

“Hey! It did open!”

“Keep the tape running!”

Onscreen, Beth didn’t notice the monitor. Tina, still somewhere offscreen, said, “It scares me.”

Beth: “I don’t think there’s a reason to be scared.”

Tina: “It’s the unknown.”

“Sure,” Beth said, “but an unknown thing is not likely to be dangerous or frightening. It’s most likely to be just inexplicable.”

“I don’t know how you can say that.”

“You afraid of snakes?” Beth said, onscreen.

All during this conversation, the sphere remained open.

Watching, Harry said, “Too bad we can’t see inside it.”

“I may be able to help that,” Tina said. “I’ll do some image-intensification work with the computer.”

“It almost looks like there are little lights,” Harry said. “Little moving lights inside the sphere…”

Onscreen, Tina came back into view. “Snakes don’t bother me.”

“Well, I can’t stand snakes,” Beth said. “Slimy, cold, disgusting things.”

“Ah, Beth,” Harry said, watching the monitor. “Got snake envy?”

Onscreen, Beth was saying, “If I were a Martian who came to Earth and I stumbled upon a snake-a funny, cold, wiggling, tube-like life-I wouldn’t know what to think of it. But the chance that I would stumble on a poisonous snake is very small. Less than one percent of snakes are poisonous. So, as a Martian, I wouldn’t be in danger from my discovery of snakes; I’d just be perplexed. That’s what’s likely to happen with us. We’ll be perplexed.”

Onscreen, Beth was saying, “Anyway, I don’t think we’ll ever get the sphere open, no.”

Tina: “I hope not.”

Behind her on the monitor, the sphere closed.

“Huh!” Harry said. “How long was it open all together?” “Thirty-three point four seconds,” Tina said.

They stopped the tape. Tina said, “Anybody want to see it again?” She looked pale.

“Not right now,” Harry said. He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, stared off, thinking.

No one else said anything; they just waited patiently for Harry. Norman realized how much the group deferred to him. Harry is the person who figures things out for us, Norman thought. We need him, rely on him.

“Okay,” Harry said at last. “No conclusions are possible. We have insufficient data. The question is whether the sphere was responding to something in its immediate environment, or whether it just opened, for reasons of its own. Where’s Ted?”

“Ted left the sphere and went to the flight deck.”

“Ted’s back,” Ted said, grinning broadly. “And I have some real news.”

“So do we,” Beth said.

“It can wait,” Ted said.

“But-”

“-I know where this ship went,” Ted said excitedly. “I’ve been analyzing the flight data summaries on the flight deck, looking at the star fields, and I know where the black hole is located.”

“Ted,” Beth said, “the sphere opened.”

“It did? When?”

“A few minutes ago. Then it closed again.”

“What did the monitors show?”

“No biological hazard. It seems to be safe.”

Ted looked at the screen. “Then what the hell are we doing here?”

Barnes came in. “Two-hour rest period is over. Everybody ready to go back to the ship for a last look?”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Harry said.

The sphere was polished, silent, closed. They stood around it and stared at themselves, distorted in reflection. Nobody spoke. They just walked around it.

Finally Ted said, “I feel like this is an IQ test, and I’m flunking.”

“You mean like the Davies Message?” Harry said.

“Oh that,” Ted said.

Norman knew about the Davies Message. It was one of the episodes that the SETI promoters wished to forget. In 1979, there had been a large meeting in Rome of the scientists involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Basically, SETI called for a radio astronomy search of the heavens. Now the scientists were trying to decide what sort of message to search for.

Emerson Davies, a physicist from Cambridge, England, devised a message based on fixed physical constants, such as the wavelength of emitted hydrogen, which were presumably the same throughout the universe. He arranged these constants in a binary pictorial form.

Because Davies thought this would be exactly the kind of message an alien intelligence might send, he figured it would be easy for the SETI people to figure out. He distributed his picture to everybody at the conference.

Nobody could figure it out.

When Davies explained it, they all agreed it was a clever idea, and a perfect message for extraterrestrials to send. But the fact remained that none of them had been able to figure out this perfect message.

One of the people who had tried to figure it out, and had failed, was Ted.

“Well, we didn’t try very hard,” Ted said. “There was a lot going on at the conference. And we didn’t have you there, Harry.”

“You just wanted a free trip to Rome,” Harry said.

Beth said, “Is it my imagination, or have the door markingschanged?”

Norman looked. At first glance, the deep grooves appeared the same, but perhaps the pattern was different. If so, the change was subtle.

“We can compare it with old videotapes,” Barnes said. “It looks the same to me,” Ted said. “Anyway, it’s metal. I doubt it could change.”

“What we call metal is just a liquid that flows slowly at room temperature,” Harry said. “It’s possible that this metal is changing.”

“I doubt it,” Ted said.

Barnes said, “You guys are supposed to be the experts. We know this thing can open. It’s been open already. How do we get it open again?”

“We’re trying, Hal.”

“It doesn’t look like you’re doing anything.”

From time to time, they glanced at Harry, but Harry just stood there, looking at the sphere, his hand on his chin, tapping his lower lip thoughtfully with his finger.

“Harry?”

Harry said nothing.

Ted went up and slapped the sphere with the flat of his hand. It made a dull sound, but nothing happened. Ted pounded the sphere with his fist; then he winced and rubbed his hand.

“I don’t think we can force our way in. I think it has to let you in,” Norman said. Nobody said anything after that. “My hand-picked, crack team,” Barnes said, needling them. “And all they can do is stand around and stare at it.”

“What do you want us to do, Hal? Nuke it?”

“If you don’t get it open, there are people who will try that, eventually.” He glanced at his watch. “Meanwhile, you got any other bright ideas?”

Nobody did.

“Okay,” Barnes said. “Our time is up. Let’s go back to the habitat and get ready to be ferried to the surface.”

DEPARTURE

Norman pulled the small navy-issue bag from beneath his bunk in C Cylinder. He got his shaving kit from the bathroom, found his notebook and his extra pair of socks, and zipped the bag shut.

“I’m ready.”

“Me, too,” Ted said. Ted was unhappy; he didn’t want to leave. “I guess we can’t delay it any longer. The weather’s getting worse. They’ve got all the divers out from DH-7, and now there’s only us.”

Norman smiled at the prospect of being on the surface again. I never thought I’d look forward to seeing Navy battleship gray on a ship, but I do.

“Where’re the others?” Norman said.

“Beth’s already packed. I think she’s with Barnes in communication. Harry, too, I guess.” Ted plucked at his jumpsuit. “I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll be glad to see the last of this suit.

They left the sleeping quarters, heading down to communications. On the way, they squeezed past Teeny Fletcher, who was going toward B Cylinder.

“Ready to leave?” Norman said.

“Yes, sir, all squared away,” Fletcher said, but her features were tense, and she seemed rushed, under pressure.

“Aren’t you going the wrong way?” Norman asked.

“Just checking the diesel backups.”

Backups? Norman thought. Why check the backups now that they were leaving?

“She probably left something on that she shouldn’t have,” Ted said, shaking his head.

In the communications console, the mood was grim. Barnes was on the phone with the surface vessels. “Say that again,” he said. “I want to hear who’s authorized that.” He was frowning, angry.

They looked at Tina. “How’s the weather on the surface?”

“Deteriorating fast, apparently.”

Barnes spun: “Will you idiots keep it down?”

Norman dropped his day bag on the floor. Beth was sitting near the portholes, tired, rubbing her eyes. Tina was turning off the monitors, one after another, when she suddenly stopped.

“Look.”

On one monitor, they saw the polished sphere. Harry was standing next to it.

“What’s he doing there?”

“Didn’t he come back with us?”

“I thought he did.”

“I didn’t notice; I assumed he did.”

“God damn it, I thought I told you people-” Barnes began, and then stopped. He stared at the monitor.

On the screen, Harry turned toward the video camera and made a short bow.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. I think you will find this of interest.”

Harry turned to face the sphere. He stood with his arms at his sides, relaxed. He did not move or speak. He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath.

The door to the sphere opened.

“Not bad, huh?” Harry said, with a sudden grin.

Then Harry stepped inside the sphere. The door closed behind him.

They all began talking at once. Barnes was shouting over everyone else, shouting for quiet, but no one paid any attention until the lights in the habitat went out. They were plunged into darkness.

Ted said, “What’s happened?”

The only light came through the portholes, faintly, from the grid lights. A moment later, the grid went out, too.

“No power…”

“I tried to tell you,” Barnes said.

There was a whirring sound, and the lights flickered, then came back on. “We have internal power; we’re running on our diesels now.”

“Why?”

“Look,” Ted said, pointing out the porthole.

Outside they saw what looked like a wriggling silver snake. Then Norman realized it was the cable that linked them to the surface, sliding back and forth across the porthole as it coiled in great loops on the bottom.

“They’ve cut us free!”

“That’s right,” Barnes said. “They’ve got full gale-force conditions topside. They can no longer maintain cables for power and communications. They can no longer use the submarines. They’ve taken all the divers up, but the subs can’t come back for us. At least not for a few days, until the seas calm down.”

“Then we’re stuck down here?”

“That’s correct.”

“For how long?”

“Several days,” Barnes said.

“For how long?”

“Maybe as long as a week.”

“Jesus Christ,” Beth said.

Ted tossed his bag onto the couch. “What a fantastic piece of luck,” he said.

Beth spun. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Let’s all stay calm,” Barnes said. “Everything’s under control. This is just a temporary delay. There’s no reason to get upset.”

But Norman didn’t feel upset. He felt suddenly exhausted. Beth was sulking, angry, feeling deceived; Ted was excited, already planning another excursion to the spacecraft, arranging equipment with Edmunds.

But Norman felt only tired. His eyes were heavy; he thought he might go to sleep standing there in front of the monitors. He excused himself hurriedly, went back to his bunk, lay down. He didn’t care that the sheets were clammy; he didn’t care that the pillow was cold; he didn’t care that diesels were droning and vibrating in the next cylinder. He thought: This is a very strong avoidance reaction. And then he was asleep.

BEYOND PLUTO

Norman rolled out of bed and looked for his watch, but he’d gotten into the habit of not wearing one down here. He had no idea what time it was, how long he had been asleep. He looked out the porthole, saw nothing but black water. The grid lights were still off. He lay back in his bunk and looked at the gray pipes directly over his head; they seemed closer than before, as if they had moved toward him while he slept. Everything seemed cramped, tighter, more claustrophobic.

Several more days of this, he thought. God.

He hoped the Navy would think to notify his family. After so many days, Ellen would start to worry. He imagined her first calling the FAA, then calling the Navy, trying to find out what had happened. Of course, no one would know anything, because the project was classified; Ellen would be frantic.

Then he stopped thinking about Ellen. It was easier, he thought, to worry about your loved ones than to worry about yourself. But there wasn’t any point. Ellen would be okay. And so would he. It was just a matter of waiting. Staying calm, and waiting out the storm.

He got into the shower, wondering if they’d still have hot water while the habitat was on emergency power. They did, and he felt less stiff after his shower. It was odd, he thought, to be a thousand feet underwater and to relish the soothing effects of a hot shower.

He dressed and headed for the C Cylinder. He heard Tina’s voice say, “-think they’ll ever get the sphere open?”

Beth: “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“It scares me.”

“I don’t think there’s a reason to be scared.”

“It’s the unknown,” Tina said.

When Norman came in, he found Beth running the videotape, looking at herself and Tina. “Sure,” Beth said on the videotape, “but an unknown thing is not likely to be dangerous or frightening. It’s most likely to be just inexplicable.”

Tina said, “I don’t know how you can say that.”

“You afraid of snakes?” Beth said, onscreen.

Beth snapped off the videotape. “Just trying to see if I could figure out why it opened,” she said.

“Any luck?” Norman said.

“Not so far.” On the adjacent monitor, they could see the sphere itself. The sphere was closed.

“Harry still in there?” Norman said.

“Yes,” Beth said.

“How long has it been now?”

She looked up at the consoles. “A little more than an hour.”

“I only slept an hour?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m starving,” Norman said, and he went down to the galley to eat. All the coconut cake was gone. He was looking for something else to eat when Beth showed up.

“I don’t know what to do, Norman,” she said, frowning.

“About what?”

“They’re lying to us,” she said.

“Who is?”

“Barnes. The Navy. Everybody. This is all a setup, Norman.”

“Come on, Beth. No conspiracies, now. We have enough to worry about without-”

“-Just look at this,” she said. She led him back upstairs, flicked on a console, pressed buttons.

“I started putting it together when Barnes was on the phone,” she said. “Barnes was talking to somebody right up to the moment when the cable started to coil down. Except that cable is a thousand feet long, Norman. They would have broken communications several minutes before unhooking the cable itself.”

“Probably, yes…”

“So who was Barnes talking to at the last minute? Nobody.”

“Beth…”

“Look,” she said, pointing to the screen.

COM SUMMARY DH-SURCOM/l

0910 BARNES TO SURCOM/1:

CIVILIAN AND USN PERSONNEL POLLED. ALTHOUGH ADVISED OF RISKS, ALL PERSONNEL ELECT TO REMAIN DOWN FOR DURATION OF STORM TO CONTINUE INVESTIGATION OF ALIEN SPHERE AND ASSOCIATED SPACECRAFT.

BARNES, USN.

“You’re kidding,” Norman said. “I thought Barnes wanted to leave.”

“He did, but he changed his mind when he saw that last room, and he didn’t bother to tell us. I’d like to kill the bastard,” Beth said. “You know what this is about, Norman, don’t you?”

Norman nodded. “He hopes to find a new weapon.”

“Right. Barnes is a Pentagon-acquisition man, and he wants to find a new weapon.”

“But the sphere is unlikely-”

“It’s not the sphere,” Beth said. “Barnes doesn’t really care about the sphere. He cares about the ‘associated spacecraft.’ Because, according to congruity theory, it’s the spacecraft that is likely to pay off. Not the sphere.”

Congruity theory was a troublesome matter for the people who thought about extraterrestrial life. In a simple way, the astronomers and physicists who considered the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial life imagined wonderful benefits to mankind from such a contact. But other thinkers, philosophers and historians, did not foresee any benefits to contact at all.

For example, astronomers believed that if we made contact with extraterrestrials, mankind would be so shocked that wars on Earth would cease, and a new era of peaceful cooperation between nations would begin.

But historians thought that was nonsense. They pointed out that when Europeans discovered the New World-a similarly world-shattering discovery-the Europeans did not stop their incessant fighting. On the contrary: they fought even harder. Europeans simply made the New World an extension of pre-existing animosities. It became another place to fight, and to fight over.

Similarly, astronomers imagined that when mankind met extraterrestrials, there would be an exchange of information and technology, giving mankind a wonderful advancement.

Historians of science thought that was nonsense, too. They pointed out that what we called “science” actually consisted of a rather arbitrary conception of the universe, not likely to be shared by other creatures. Our ideas of science were the ideas of visually oriented, monkey-like creatures who enjoyed changing their physical environment. If the aliens were blind and communicated by odors, they might have evolved a very different science, which described a very different universe. And they might have made very different choices about the directions their science would explore. For example, they might ignore the physical world entirely, and instead develop a highly sophisticated science of mind-in other words, the exact opposite of what Earth science had done. The alien technology might be purely mental, with no visible hardware at all.

This issue was at the heart of congruity theory, which said that unless the aliens were remarkably similar to us, no exchange of information was likely. Barnes of course knew that theory, so he knew he wasn’t likely to derive any useful technology from the alien sphere. But he was very likely to get useful technology from the spaceship itself, since the spaceship had been made by men, and congruity was high.

And he had lied to keep them down. To keep the search going.

“What should we do with the bastard?” Beth said. “Nothing, for the moment,” Norman said.

“You don’t want to confront him? Jesus, I do.”

“It won’t serve any purpose,” Norman said. “Ted won’t care, and the Navy people are all following orders. And anyway, even if it had been arranged for us to depart as planned, would you have gone, leaving Harry behind in the sphere?”

“No,” Beth admitted.

“Well, then. It’s all academic.”

“Jesus, Norman…”

“I know. But we’re here now. And for the next couple of days, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Let’s deal with that reality as best we can, and point the finger later.”

“You bet I’m going to point the finger!”

“That’s fine. But not now, Beth.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “Not now.”

She went back upstairs.

Alone, Norman stared at the console. He had his work cut out for him, keeping everybody calm for the next few days. He hadn’t looked into the computer system before; he started pressing buttons. Pretty soon he found a file marked ULF CONTACT TEAM BIOG. He opened it up.

Civilian Team 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. John F. Thompson, psychologist

Choose one:

Norman stared in disbelief at the list.

He knew Jack Thompson, an energetic young psychologist from Yale. Thompson was world-renowned for his studies of the psychology of primitive peoples, and in fact for the past year had been somewhere in New Guinea, studying native tribes.

Norman pressed more buttons.

ULF TEAM PSYCHOLOGIST: CHOICES BY RANK

1. John F. Thompson, Yale-approved

2. William L. Hartz, UCB-approved

3. Jeremy White, UT-approved (pending clearance)

4. Norman Johnson, SDU-rejected (age)

He knew them all. Bill Hartz at Berkeley was seriously ill with cancer. Jeremy White had gone to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and would never get clearance.

That left Norman.

He understood now why he had been the last to be called in. He understood now about the special tests. He felt a burst of intense anger at Barnes, at the whole system which had brought him down here, despite his age, with no concern for his safety. At fifty-three, Norman Johnson had no business being a thousand feet underwater in a pressurized exotic gas environment-and the Navy knew it.

It was an outrage, he thought. He wanted to go upstairs and give Barnes hell in no uncertain terms. That lying son of a bitch

He gripped the arms of his chair and reminded himself of what he had told Beth. Whatever had happened up to this point, there was nothing any of them could do about it now. He would indeed give Barnes hell-he promised himself he would-but only when they got back to the surface. Until then, it was no use making trouble.

He shook his head and swore.

Then he turned the console off.

The hours crept by. Harry was still in the sphere. Tina ran her image intensification of the videotape that showed the sphere open, trying to see interior detail. “Unfortunately, we have only limited computing power in the habitat,” she said. “If I could hard-link to the surface I could really do a job, but as it is…” She shrugged.

She showed them a series of enlarged freeze-frames from the open sphere. The images clicked through at one-second intervals. The quality was poor, with jagged, intermittent static.

“The only internal structures we can see in the blackness,” Tina said, pointing to the opening, “are these multiple pointsources of light. The lights appear to move from frame to frame.”

“It’s as if the sphere is filled with fireflies,” Beth said. “Except these lights are much dimmer than fireflies, and they don’t blink. They are very numerous. And they give the impression of moving together, in surging patterns…”

“A flock of fireflies?”

“Something like that.” The tape ran out. The screen went dark.

Ted said, “That’s it?”

“I’m afraid so, Dr. Fielding.”

“Poor Harry,” Ted said mournfully.

Of all the group, Ted was the most visibly upset about Harry. He kept staring at the closed sphere on the monitor, saying, “How did he do that?” Then he would add, “I hope he’s all right.”

He repeated it so often that finally Beth said, “I think we know your feelings, Ted.”

“I’m seriously concerned about him.”

“I am, too. We all are.”

“You think I’m jealous, Beth? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Why would anyone think that, Ted?”

Norman changed the subject. It was crucial to avoid confrontations among group members. He asked Ted about his analysis of the flight data aboard the spaceship.

“It’s very interesting,” Ted said, warming to his subject. “My detailed examination of the earliest flight-data images,” he said, “convinced me that they show three planets-Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto-and the sun, very small in the background. Therefore, the pictures are taken from some point beyond the orbit of Pluto. This suggests that the black hole is not far beyond our own solar system.”

“Is that possible?” Norman said.

“Oh sure. In fact, for the last ten years some astrophysicists have suspected that there’s a black hole-not a large one, but a black hole just outside our solar system.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“Oh yes. In fact, some of us have argued that, if it was small enough, in a few years we could go out and capture the black hole, bring it back, park it in Earth orbit, and use the energy it generates to power the entire planet.”

Barnes smiled. “Black-hole cowboys?”

“In theory, there’s no reason it couldn’t be done. Then just think: the entire planet would be free of its dependency on fossil fuels… The whole history of mankind would be changed.”

Barnes said, “Probably make a hell of a weapon, too.”

“Even a very tiny black hole would be a little too powerful to use as a weapon.”

“So you think this ship went out to capture a black hole?”

“I doubt it,” Ted said. “The ship is so strongly made, so shielded against radiation, that I suspect it was intended to go through a black hole. And it did.”

“And that’s why the ship went back in time?” Norman said.

“I’m not sure,” Ted said. “You see, a black hole really is the edge of the universe. What happens there isn’t clear to anybody now alive. But what some people think is that you don’t go through the hole, you sort of skip into it, like a pebble skipping over water, and you get bounced into a different time or space or universe.”

“So the ship got bounced?”

“Yes. Possibly more than once. And when it bounced back here, it undershot and arrived a few hundred years before it left.”

“And on one of its bounces, it picked up that?” Beth said, pointing to the monitor.

They looked. The sphere was still closed. But lying next to it, sprawled on the deck in an awkward pose, was Harry Adams.

For a moment they thought he was dead. Then Harry lifted his head and moaned.

THE SUBJECT

Norman wrote in his notebook: Subject is a thirty-year-old black mathematician who has spent three hours inside a sphere of unknown origin. On recovery from the sphere was stuporous and unresponsive; he did not know his name, where he was, or what year it was. Brought back to habitat; slept for one half-hour then awoke abruptly complaining of headache.

“Oh God.”

Harry was sitting in his bunk, holding his head in his hands, groaning.

“Hurt?” Norman asked.

“Brutal. Pounding.”

“Anything else?”

“Thirsty. God.” He licked his lips. “Really thirsty.”

Extreme thirst, Norman wrote.

Rose Levy, the cook, showed up with a glass of lemonade. Norman handed the glass to Harry, who drank it in a single gulp, passed it back.

“More.”

“Better bring a pitcher,” Norman said. Levy went off. Norman turned to Harry, still holding his head, still groaning, and said, “I have a question for you.”

“What?”

“What’s your name?”

“Norman, I don’t need to be psychoanalyzed right now.”

“Just tell me your name.”

“Harry Adams, for Christ’s sake. What’s the matter with you? Oh, my head.”

“You didn’t remember before,” Norman said. “When we found you.”

“When you found me?” he asked. He seemed confused again.

Norman nodded. “Do you remember when we found you?”

“It must have been… outside.”

“Outside?”

Harry looked up, suddenly furious, eyes glowing with rage. “Outside the sphere, you goddamn idiot! What do you think I’m talking about?”

“Take it easy, Harry.”

“Your questions are driving me crazy!”

“Okay, okay. Take it easy.”

Emotionally labile. Rage and irritability. Norman made more notes.

“Do you have to make so much noise?”

Norman looked up, puzzled.

“Your pen,” Harry said. “It sounds like Niagara Falls.”

Norman stopped writing. It must be a migraine, or something like migraine. Harry was holding his head in his hands delicately, as if it were made of glass.

“Why can’t I have any aspirin, for Christ’s sake?”

“We don’t want to give you anything for a while, in case you’ve hurt yourself. We need to know where the pain is.”

“The pain, Norman, is in my head. It’s in my goddamn head! Now, why won’t you give me any aspirin?”

“Barnes said not to.”

“Is Barnes still here?”

“We’re all still here.”

Harry looked up slowly. “But you were supposed to go to the surface.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“The weather went bad, and they couldn’t send the subs.”

“Well, you should go. You shouldn’t be here, Norman.”

Levy arrived with more lemonade. Harry looked at her as he drank.

“You’re still here, too?”

“Yes, Dr. Adams.”

“How many people are down here, all together?”

Levy said, “There are nine of us, sir.”

“Jesus.” He passed the glass back. Levy refilled it. “You should all go. You should leave.”

“Harry,” Norman said. “We can’t go.”

“You have to go.”

Norman sat on the bunk opposite Harry and watched as Harry drank. Harry was demonstrating a rather typical manifestation of shock: the agitation, the irritability, the nervous, manic flow of ideas, the unexplained fears for the safety of others-it was all characteristic of shocked victims of severe accidents, such as major auto crashes or airplane crashes. Given an intense event, the brain struggled to assimilate, to make sense, to reassemble the mental world even as the physical world was shattered around it. The brain went into a kind of overdrive, hastily trying to reassemble things, to get things right, to re-establish equilibrium. Yet it was fundamentally a confused period of wheel-spinning.

You just had to wait it out.

Harry finished the lemonade, handed the glass back.

“More?” Levy asked.

“No, that’s good. Headache’s better.”

Perhaps it was dehydration after all, Norman thought. But why would Harry be dehydrated after three hours in the sphere?

“Harry…?”

“Tell me something. Do I look different, Norman?”

“No.”

“I look the same to you?”

“Yes. I’d say so.”

“Are you sure?” Harry said. He jumped up, went to a mirror mounted on the wall. He peered at his face.

“How do you think you look?” Norman said.

“I don’t know. Different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know!” … He pounded the padded wall next to the mirror. The mirror image vibrated. He turned away, sat down on the bunk again. He sighed. “Just different.”

“Harry…”

“What?”

“Do you remember what happened?”

“Of course.”

“What happened?”

“I went inside.”

He waited, but Harry said nothing further. He just stared at the carpeted floor.

“Do you remember opening the door?” Harry said nothing.

“How did you open the door, Harry?”

Harry looked up at Norman. “You were all supposed to leave. To go back to the surface. You weren’t supposed to stay.

“How did you open the door, Harry?”

There was a long silence. “I opened it.” He sat up straight, his hands at his sides. He seemed to be remembering, reliving it.

“And then?”

“I went inside.”

“And what happened inside?”

“It was beautiful…”

“What was beautiful?”

“The foam,” Harry said. And then he fell silent again, staring vacantly into space.

“The foam?” Norman prompted.

“The sea. The foam. Beautiful…”

Was he talking about the lights? Norman wondered. The swirling pattern of lights?

“What was beautiful, Harry?”

“Now, don’t kid me,” Harry said. “Promise you won’t kid me.”

“I won’t kid you.”

“You think I look the same?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You don’t think I’ve changed at all?”

“No. Not that I can see. Do you think you’ve changed?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I-maybe.”

“Did something happen in the sphere to change you?”

“You don’t understand about the sphere.”

“Then explain it to me,” Norman said.

“Nothing happened in the sphere.”

“You were in the sphere for three hours…”

‘Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens inside the sphere. It’s always the same, inside the sphere.”

“What’s always the same? The foam?”

“The foam is always different. The sphere is always the same.”

“I don’t understand,” Norman said.

“I know you don’t,” Harry said. He shook his head. “What can I do?”

“Tell me some more.”

“There isn’t any more.”

“Then tell me again.”

“It won’t help,” Harry said. “Do you think you’ll be leaving soon?”

“Barnes says not for several days.”

“I think you should leave soon. Talk to the others. Convince them. Make them leave.”

“Why, Harry?”

“I can’t be-I don’t know.”

Harry rubbed his eyes and lay back on the bed. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said, “but I’m very tired. Maybe we can continue this some other time. Talk to the others, Norman. Get them to leave. It’s… dangerous to stay here.” And he lay down in the bunk and closed his eyes.

CHANGES

“He’s sleeping,” Norman told them. “He’s in shock. He’s confused. But he seems basically intact.”

“What did he tell you,” Ted said, “about what happened in there?”

“He’s quite confused,” Norman said, “but he’s recovering. When we first found him, he didn’t even remember his name. Now he does. He remembers my name, he remembers where he is. He remembers he went into the sphere. I think he remembers what happened inside the sphere, too. He just isn’t telling.”

“Great,” Ted said.

“He mentioned the sea, and the foam. But I wasn’t clear what he meant by that.”

“Look outside,” Tina said, pointing to the portholes. Norman had an immediate impression of lights-thousands of lights filling the blackness of the ocean-and his first response was unreasoning terror: the lights in the sphere were coming out to get them. But then he saw each of the lights had a shape, and were moving, wriggling.

They pressed their faces to the portholes, looked. “Squid,” Beth said finally. “Bioluminescent squid.”

“Thousands of them.”

“More,” she said. “I’d guess at least half a million, all around the habitat.”

“Beautiful.”

“The size of the school is amazing,” Ted said. “Impressive, but not really unusual,” Beth said. “The fecundity of the sea is very great compared with the land. The sea is where life began, and where intense competition among animals first appeared. One response to competition is to produce enormous numbers of offspring. Many sea animals do that. In fact, we tend to think that animals came out onto the land as a positive step forward in the evolution of life. But the truth is, the first creatures were really driven out of the ocean. They were just trying to get away from the competition. And you can imagine when the first fish-amphibians climbed up the beach and poked their heads up to look out at the land, and saw this vast dry-land environment without any competition at all. It must have looked like the promised-”

Beth broke off, turned to Barnes. “Quick: where do you keep specimen nets?”

“I don’t want you going out there.”

“I have to,” Beth said. “Those squid have six tentacles.”

“So?”

“There’s no known species of six-tentacled squid. This is an undescribed species. I must collect samples.”

Barnes told her where the equipment locker was, and she went off. Norman looked at the school of squid with renewed interest.

The animals were each about a foot long, and seemed to be transparent. The large eyes of the squid were clearly visible in the bodies, which glowed a pale blue.

In a few minutes Beth appeared outside, standing in the midst of the school, swinging her net, catching specimens. Several squid angrily squirted clouds of ink.

“Cute little things,” Ted said. “You know, the development of squid ink is a very interesting-”

“-What do you say to squid for dinner?” Levy said.

“Hell no,” Barnes said. “If this is an undiscovered species, we’re not going to eat it. The last thing I need is everybody sick from food poisoning.”

“Very sensible,” Ted said. “I never liked squid, anyway. Interesting mechanism of propulsion, but rubbery texture.”

At that moment, there was a buzz as one of the monitors turned itself on. As they watched, the screen rapidly filled with numbers:

0003212525263203262930132104261037183016061

808213229033005182204261013083016213716040

83016211822033013130432000321252526320326

293013210426103718301606180821322903300518

220426101308301623711604083016211822033013

1304320003212525263203262932104261037183016

0618082132290330051822042610130830162137

16040830162118220330131304320003212525263

203262930132104261037183016061808213229033

005182204261013083016213716040830162118220

3301313043200032125252632032629301321042610

3718301606180821322903300518220426101308

301621371604083162118220330131304320003212

525263203262930132104261037183016061808213

229033005182204261013083016213716040830162

“Where’s that coming from?” Ted said. “The surface?”

Barnes shook his head. “We’ve cut direct contact with the surface.”

“Then is it being transmitted underwater in some way?”

“No,” Tina said, “it’s too fast for underwater transmission.”

“Is there another console in the habitat? No? How about DH-7?”

“DH-7’s empty now. The divers have gone.”

“Then where’d it come from?”

Barnes said, “It looks random to me.”

Tina nodded. “It may be a discharge from a temporary buffer memory somewhere in the system. When we switched over to internal diesel power…”

“That’s probably it,” Barnes said. “Buffer discharge on switchover.”

“I think you should keep it,” Ted said, staring at the screen. “Just in case it’s a message.”

“A message from where?”

“From the sphere.”

“Hell,” Barnes said, “it can’t be a message.”

“How do you know?”

“Because there’s no way a message can be transmitted. We’re not hooked up to anything. Certainly not to the sphere. It’s got to be a memory dump from somewhere inside our own computer system.”

“How much memory have you got?”

“Fair amount. Ten giga, something like that.”

“Maybe the helium’s getting to the chips,” Tina said. “Maybe it’s a saturation effect.”

“I still think you should keep it,” Ted said.

Norman had been looking at the screen. He was no mathematician, but he’d looked at a lot of statistics in his life, searching for patterns in the data. That was something human brains were inherently good at; finding patterns in visual material. Norman couldn’t put his finger on it, but he sensed a pattern here. He said, “I have the feeling it’s not random.”

“Then let’s keep it,” Barnes said.

Tina went forward to the console. As her hands touched the keys, the screen went blank.

“So much for that,” Barnes said. “It’s gone. Too bad we didn’t have Harry to look at it with us.”

“Yeah,” Ted said gloomily. “Too bad.”

ANALYSIS

“Take a look at this,” Beth said. “this one is still alive.”

Norman was with her in the little biological laboratory near the top of D Cylinder. Nobody had been in this laboratory since their arrival, because they hadn’t found anything living. Now, with the lights out, he and Beth watched the squid move in the glass tank.

The creature had a delicate appearance. The blue glow was concentrated in stripes along the back and sides of the creature.

“Yes,” Beth said, “the bioluminescent structures seem to be located dorsally. They’re bacteria, of course.”

“What are?”

“The bioluminescent areas. Squid can’t create light themselves. The creatures that do are bacteria. So the bioluminescent animals in the sea have incorporated these bacteria into their bodies. You’re seeing bacteria glowing through the skin.”

“So it’s like an infection?”

“Yes, in a way.”

The large eyes of the squid stared. The tentacles moved. “And you can see all the internal organs,” Beth said. “The brain is hidden behind the eye. That sac is the digestive gland, and behind it, the stomach, and below that-see it beating?-the heart. That big thing at the front is the gonad, and coming down from the stomach, a sort of funnel-that’s where it squirts the ink, and propels itself.”

“Is it really a new species?” Norman said.

She sighed. “I don’t know. Internally it is so typical. But fewer tentacles would qualify it as a new species, all right.”

“You going to get to call it Squidus bethus? “ Norman said.

She smiled. “Architeuthis bethis,” she said. “Sounds like a dental problem. Architeuthis bethis: means you need root canal.”

“How about it, Dr. Halpern?” Levy said, poking her head in. “Got some good tomatoes and peppers, be a shame to waste them. Are the squid really poisonous?”

“I doubt it,” Beth said. “Squid aren’t known to be. Go ahead,” she said to Levy. “I think it’ll be okay to eat them.” When Levy had gone, Norman said, “I thought you gave up eating these things.”

“Just octopi,” Beth said. “An octopus is cute and smart. Squid are rather… unsympathetic.”

“Unsympathetic.”

“Well, they’re cannibalistic, and rather nasty… She raised an eyebrow. “Are you psychoanalyzing me again?”

“No. Just curious.”

“As a zoologist, you’re supposed to be objective,” Beth said, “but I have feelings about animals, like anybody else. I have a warm feeling about octopi. They’re clever, you know. I once had an octopus in a research tank that learned to kill cockroaches and use them as bait to catch crabs. The curious crab would come along, investigate the dead cockroach, and then the octopus would jump out of its hiding place and catch the crab.

“In fact, an octopus is so smart that the biggest limitation to its behavior is its lifespan. An octopus lives only three years, and that’s not long enough to develop anything as complicated as a culture or civilization. Maybe if octopi lived as long as we do, they would long ago have taken over the world.

“But squid are completely different. I have no feelings about squid. Except I don’t really like ‘em.”

He smiled. “Well,” he said, “at least you finally found some life down here.”

“You know, it’s funny,” she said. “Remember how barren it was out there? Nothing on the bottom?”

“Sure. Very striking.”

“Well, I went around the side of the habitat, to get these squid. And there’re all sorts of sea fans on the bottom. Beautiful colors, blues and purples and yellows. Some of them quite large.”

“Think they just grew?”

“No. They must have always been in that spot, but we never went over there. I’ll have to investigate it later. I’d like to know why they are localized in that particular place, next to the habitat.”

Norman went to the porthole. He had switched on the exterior habitat lights, shining onto the bottom. He could indeed see many large sea fans, purple and pink and blue, waving gently in the current. They extended out to the edge of the light, to the darkness.

“In a way,” Beth said, “it’s reassuring. We’re deep for the majority of oceanic life, which is found in the first hundred feet of water. But even so, this habitat is located in the most varied and abundant marine environment in the world.” Scientists had made species counts and had determined that the South Pacific had more species of coral and sponges than anywhere else on Earth.

“So I’m glad we’re finally finding things,” she said. She looked at her benches of chemicals and reagents. “And I’m glad to finally get to work on something.”

Harry was eating bacon and eggs in the galley. The others stood around and watched him, relieved that he was all right. And they told him the news; he listened with interest, until they mentioned that there had been a large school of squid.

“Squid?”

He looked up sharply and almost dropped his fork. “Yeah, lots of ‘em,” Levy said. “I’m cooking up a bunch for dinner.”

“Are they still here?” Harry asked.

“No, they’re gone now.”

He relaxed, shoulders dropping.

“Something the matter, Harry?” Norman said.

“I hate squid,” Harry said. “I can’t stand them.”

“I don’t care for the taste myself,” Ted said.

“Terrible,” Harry said, nodding. He resumed eating his eggs. The tension passed.

Then Tina shouted from D Cylinder: “I’m getting them again! I’m getting the numbers again!”

00032125252632 032629 301321 04261037 18 3016 06180

82132 29033005 1822 04261013 0830162137 1604 083016

21 1822 033013130432 00032125252632 032629 301321 0

4261037 18 3016 0618082132 29033005 1822 04261013 08

30162137 1604 08301621 1822 033013130432 000321252

52632 032629 301321 04261037 18 3016 0618082132 290

33005 1822 04261013 0830162137 1604 08301621 1822 03

3013130432 00032125252632 032629 301321 04261037 1

8 3016 0618082132 29033005 1822 04261013 0830162137

1604 08301621 1822 033013130432 00032125252632 032

629 301321 04261037 18 3016 0618082132 29033005 1822

04261013 0830162137 1604 08301621 1822 033013130432

0003212525252632 032629 301321 04261037 18 3016 06

18082132 29033005 1822 04261013 0830162137 1604 083

01621 1822 033013130432 0003212525632 032629 301321

“What do you think, Harry?” Barnes said, pointing to the screen.

“Is this what you got before?” Harry said. “Looks like it, except the spacing is different.”

“Because this is definitely nonrandom,” Harry said. “It’s a single sequence repeated over and over. Look. Starts here, goes to here, then repeats.”

00032125252632 032629 301321 04261037 18 3016 06180

82132 29033005 1822 04261013 0830162137 1604 083016

21 1822 033013130432 00032125252632 032629 301321 0

4261037 18 3016 0618082132 29033005 1822 04261013 08

30162137 1604 08301621 1822 033013130432 000321252

52632 032629 301321 04261037 18 3016 0618082132 290

33005 1822 04261013 0830162137 1604 08301621 1822 03

3013130432 00032125252632 032629 301321 04261037 1

8 3016 0618082132 29033005 1822 04261013 0830162137

1604 08301621 1822 033013130432 00032125252632 032

629 301321 04261037 18 3016 0618082132 29033005 1822

04261013 0830162137 1604 08301621 1822 033013130432

0003212525252632 032629 301321 04261037 18 3016 06

18082132 29033005 1822 04261013 0830162137 1604 083

01621 1822 033013130432 0003212525632 032629 301321

“He’s right,” Tina said.

“Fantastic,” Barnes said. “Absolutely incredible, for you to see it like that.”

Ted drummed his fingers on the console impatiently. “Elementary, my dear Barnes,” Harry said. “That part is easy. The hard part is-what does it mean?”

“Surely it’s a message,” Ted said.

“Possibly it’s a message,” Harry said. “It could also be some kind of discharge from within the computer, the result of a programming error or a hardware glitch. We might spend hours translating it, only to find it says ‘Copyright Acme Computer Systems, Silicon Valley’ or something similar.”

“Well…” Ted said.

“The greatest likelihood is that this series of numbers originates from within the computer itself,” Harry said. “But let me give it a try.”

Tina printed out the screen for him. “I’d like to try, too,” Ted said quickly.

Tina said, “Certainly, Dr. Fielding,” and printed out a second sheet.

“If it’s a message,” Harry said, “it’s most likely a simple substitution code, like an askey code. It would help if we could run a decoding program on the computer. Can anybody program this thing?”

They all shook their heads. “Can you?” Barnes said.

“No. And I suppose there’s no way to transmit this to the surface? The NSA code-breaking computers in Washington would take about fifteen seconds to do this.”

Barnes shook his head. “No contact. I wouldn’t even put up a radio wire on a balloon. The last report, they have forty-foot waves on the surface. Snap the wire right away.”

“So we’re isolated?”

“We’re isolated.”

“I guess it’s back to the old pencil and paper. I always say, traditional tools are best-particularly when there’s nothing else.” And left the room.

“He seems to be in a good mood,” Barnes said.

“I’d say a very good mood,” Norman said.

“Maybe a little too good,” Ted said. “A little manic?”

“No,” Norman said. “Just a good mood.”

“I thought he was a little high,” Ted said.

“Let him stay that way,” Barnes snorted, “if it helps him to crack this code.”

“I’m going to try, too,” Ted reminded him.

“That’s fine,” Barnes said. “You try, too.”

TED

“I’m telling you, this reliance on Harry is misplaced.” Ted paced back and forth and glanced at Norman. “Harry is manic, and he’s overlooking things. Obvious things.”

“Like what?”

“Like the fact that the printout can’t possibly be a discharge from the computer.”

“How do you know?” Norman said.

“The processor,” Ted said. “The processor is a 68090 chip, which means that any memory dump would be in hex.”

“What’s hex?”

“There are lots of ways to represent numbers,” Ted said. “The 68090 chip uses base-sixteen representation, called ‘hexadecimal.’ Hex is entirely different from regular decimal. Looks different.”

“But the message used zero through nine,” Norman said. “Exactly my point,” Ted said. “So it didn’t come from the computer. I believe it’s definitely a message from the sphere. Furthermore, although Harry thinks it is a substitution code, I think it’s a direct visual representation.”

“You mean a picture?”

“Yes,” Ted said. “And I think it’s a picture of the creature itself!” He started searching through sheets of paper. “I started with this.”

001110101110011100111010100000 111101011101

11110110110101 100110101010100101

100101111010000 11010010100010101100000

111011111110101 1001010110 1001101010101101

1000111101000010101100101 10000100

1000111101000010101 1001010110

111111011011101100100000

001110101110011100111010100000 111101011101

11110110110101 100110101010100101 10010

1111010000 11010010100010101100000

111011111110101 1001010110 1001101010101101

1000111101000010101100101 10000100

1000111101000010101 1001010110

111111011011101100100000

001110101110011100111010100000 111101011101

11110110110101 100110101010100101 10010

1111010000 11010010100010101100000

111011111110101 1001010110 1001101010101101

1000111101000010101100101 10000100

“Now, here I have translated the message to binary,” Ted said. “You can immediately sense visual pattern, can’t you?”

“Not really,” Norman said.

“Well, it is certainly suggestive,” Ted said. “I’m telling you, all those years at JPL looking at images from the planets, I have an eye for these things. So, the next thing I did was go back to the original message and fill in the spaces. I got this.”

• •00032125252632• •032629• •301321• •04261037• •18•

•3016• •0618082132• •29033005• •1822• •04261013•

•0830162137• •1604• •08301621• •1822• •033013130432•

•00032125252632• •032629• •301321• •04261037• •18•

•3016• •0618082132• •29033005• •1822• •04261013•

•0830162137• •1604• •08301621• •1822• •033013130432•

•00032125252632• •032629• •301321• •04261037• •18•

•3016• •0618082132• •29033005• •1822• •04261013•

•0830162137• •1604• •08301621• •1822• •033013130432•

•00032125252632• •032629• •301321• •04261037• •18•

•3016• •0618082132• •29033005• •1822• •04261013•

•0830162137• •1604• •08301621• •1822• •033013130432•

•00032125252632• •032629• •301321• •04261037• •18•

•3016• •0618082132• •29033005• •1822• •04261013•

•0830162137• •1604• •08301621• •1822• •033013130432•

•00032125252632• •032629• •301321• •04261037• •18•

•3016• •0618082132• •29033005• •1822• •04261013•

•0830162137• •1604• •08301521• •1822• •033013130432•

•00032125252632• •032629• •301321• •04261037• •18•

•3016• •0618082132• •29033005• •1822• •04261013•

•0830162137• •1604• •08301621• •1822• •033013130432•

•00032125252632• •032629• •301321• •04261037• •18•

•3016• •0618082132• •29033008• •1822• •04261013•

•0830162137• •1604• •08301621• •1822• •033013130432•

•00032125252632• •032629• •301321• •04261037• •18•

“Uh-huh…” Norman said.

“I agree, it doesn’t look like anything,” Ted said. “But by changing the screen width, you get this.”

Proudly, he held up the next sheet.

• •00032125252632• •032629• •301321•

•04261037• •18• •3016• •0618082132• •29033005•

•1822• •042610134, •0830162137• •1604•

•08301621• •1822• •033013130432•

•00032125252632• •032629• •301321• •04261037•

•18• •3016• •0618082132• •29033005• •1822•

•04261013• •0830162137• •1604• •08301621•

•1822• •033013130432• •00032125252632•

•032629• •301321• •04261037• •18• •3016•

•0618082132• •29033005• •1822• •04261013•

•0830162137• •1604• •08301621• •1822•

•033013130432• •00032125252632• •032629•

•301321• •04261037• •18• •3016• •0618082132•

•29033005• •1822• •04261013• •0830162137•

•1604• •08301621• •1822• •033013130432•

•00032125252632• •0326294, •301321• •04261037•

•18• •3016• •0618082132• •29033005• •1822•

•04261013• •0830162137• •1604• •08301621•

•1822• •033013130432• •00032125252632•

•032629• •301321• •04261037• •18• •3016•

“Yes?” Norman said.

“Don’t tell me you don’t see the pattern,”

Ted said. “I don’t see the pattern,” Norman said.

“Squint at it,” Ted said.

Norman squinted. “Sorry.”

“But it is obviously a picture of the creature,” Ted said. “Look, that’s the vertical torso, three legs, two arms. There’s no head, so presumably the creature’s head is located within the torso itself. Surely you see that, Norman.”

“Ted…”

“For once, Harry has missed the point entirely! The message is not only a picture, it’s a self-portrait!”

“Ted…”

Ted sat back. He sighed. “You’re going to tell me I’m trying too hard.”

“I don’t want to dampen your enthusiasm,” Norman said.

“But you don’t see the alien?”

“Not really, no.”

“Hell.” Ted tossed the papers aside. “I hate that son of a bitch. He’s so arrogant, he makes me so mad… And on top of that, he’s young!”

“You’re forty,” Norman said. “I wouldn’t exactly call that over the hill.”

“For physics, it is,” Ted said. “Biologists can sometimes do important work late in life. Darwin was fifty when he published the Origin of Species. And chemists sometimes do good work when they’re older. But in physics, if you haven’t done it by thirty-five, the chances are, you never will.”

“But Ted, you’re respected in your field.”

Ted shook his head. “I’ve never done fundamental work. I’ve analyzed data, I’ve come to some interesting conclusions. But never anything fundamental. This expedition is my chance to really do something. To really… get my name in the books.”

Norman now had a different sense of Ted’s enthusiasm and energy, that relentlessly juvenile manner. Ted wasn’t emotionally retarded; he was driven. And he clung to his youth out of a sense that time was slipping by and he hadn’t yet accomplished anything. It wasn’t obnoxious. It was sad.

“Well,” Norman said, “the expedition isn’t finished yet.”

“No,” Ted said, suddenly brightening. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. There are more, wonderful experiences awaiting us. I just know there are. And they’ll come, won’t they.”

“Yes, Ted,” Norman said. “They’ll come.”

BETH

“Damn it, nothing works!” She waved a hand to her laboratory bench. “Not a single one of the chemicals or reagents here is worth a damn!”

“What’ve you tried?” Barnes said calmly. “Zenker-Formalin, H and E, the other stains. Proteolytic extractions, enzyme breaks. You name it. None of it works. You know what I think, I think that whoever stocked this lab did it with outdated ingredients.”

“No,” Barnes said, “it’s the atmosphere.”

He explained that their environment contained only 2 percent oxygen, 1 percent carbon dioxide, but no nitrogen at all. “Chemical reactions are unpredictable,” he said. “You ought to take a look at Levy’s recipe book sometime. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen in your life. The food looks normal when she’s finished, but she sure doesn’t make it the normal way.”

“And the lab?”

“The lab was stocked without knowing the working depth we would be at. If we were shallower, we’d be breathing compressed air, and all your chemical reactions would work-they’d just go very fast. But with heliox, reactions are unpredictable. And if they won’t go, well…” He shrugged.

“What am I supposed to do?” she said.

“The best you can,” Barnes said. “Same as the rest of us.”

“Well, all I can really do is gross anatomical analyses. All this bench is worthless.”

“Then do the gross anatomy.”

“I just wish we had more lab capability…”

“This is it,” Barnes said. “Accept it and go on.”

Ted entered the room. “You better take a look outside, everybody,” he said, pointing to the portholes. “We have more visitors.”

The squid were gone. For a moment norman saw nothing but the water, and the white suspended sediment caught in the lights.

“Look down. At the bottom.”

The sea floor was alive. Literally alive, crawling and wiggling and tremulous as far as they could see in the lights. “What is that?”

Beth said, “It’s shrimps. A hell of a lot of shrimps.” And she ran to get her net.

“Now, that’s what we ought to be eating,” Ted said. “I love shrimp. And those look perfect-size, a little smaller than crayfish. Probably delicious. I remember once in Portugal, my second wife and I had the most fabulous crayfish…”

Norman felt slightly uneasy. “What’re they doing here?”

“I don’t know. What do shrimps do, anyway? Do they migrate?”

“Damned if I know,” Barnes said. “I always buy ‘em frozen. My wife hates to peel ‘em.”

Norman remained uneasy, though he could not say why. He could clearly see now that the bottom was covered in shrimps; they were everywhere. Why should it bother him?

Norman moved away from the window, hoping his sense of vague uneasiness would go away if he looked at something else. But it didn’t go away, it just stayed there-a small tense knot in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t like the feeling at all.

HARRY

“Harry.”

“Oh, hi, Norman. I heard the excitement. Lot of shrimps outside, is that it?”

Harry sat on his bunk, with the paper printout of numbers on his knees. He had a pencil and pad, and the page was covered with calculations, scratchouts, symbols, arrows.

“Harry,” Norman said, “what’s going on?”

“Damned if I know.”

“I’m just wondering why we should suddenly be finding life down here-the squid, the shrimps-when before there was nothing. Ever.”

“Oh, that. I think that’s pretty clear.”

“Yes?”

“Sure. What’s different between then and now?”

“You’ve been inside the sphere.”

“No, no. I mean, what’s different in the outside environment?”

Norman frowned. He didn’t grasp what Harry was driving at.

“Well, just look outside,” Harry said. “What could you see before that you can’t see now?”

“The grid?”

“Uh-huh. The grid and the divers. Lot of activity-and a lot of electricity. I think it scared off the normal fauna of the area. This is the South Pacific, you know; it ought to be teeming with life.”

“And now that the divers are gone, the animals are back?”

“That’s my guess.”

“That’s all there is to it?” Norman said, frowning.

“Why are you asking me?” Harry said. “Ask Beth; she’ll give you a definitive answer. But I know animals are sensitive to all kinds of stimuli we don’t notice. You can’t run God knows how many million volts through underwater cables, to light a half-mile grid in an environment that has never seen light before, and not expect to have an effect.”

Something about this argument tickled the back of Norman’s mind. He knew something, something pertinent. But he couldn’t get it.

“Harry.”

“Yes, Norman. You look a little worried. You know, this substitution code is really a bitch. I’ll tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’ll be able to crack it. You see, the problem is, if it is a letter substitution, you will need two digits to describe a single letter, because there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, assuming no punctuation-which may or may not be included here as well. So when I see a two next to a three, I don’t know if it is letter two followed by letter three, or just letter twenty-three. It’s taking a long time to work through the permutations. You see what I mean?”

“Harry.”

“Yes, Norman.”

“What happened inside the sphere?”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Harry asked.

“What makes you think I’m worried about anything?” Norman asked.

“Your face,” Harry said. “That’s what makes me think you’re worried.”

“Maybe I am,” Norman said. “But about this sphere…”

“You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about that sphere.”

“And?”

“It’s quite amazing. I really don’t remember what happened.”

“Harry.”

“I feel fine-I feel better all the time, honest to God, my energy’s back, headache’s gone-and earlier I remembered everything about that sphere and what was inside it. But every minute that passes, it seems to fade. You know, the way a dream fades? You remember it when you wake up, but an hour later, it’s gone?”

“Harry.”

“I remember that it was wonderful, and beautiful. Something about lights, swirling lights. But that’s all.”

“How did you get the door to open?”

“Oh, that. It was very clear at the time; I remember I had worked it all out, I knew exactly what to do.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m sure it will come back to me.”

“You don’t remember how you opened the door?”

“No. I just remember this sudden insight, this certainty, about how it was done. But I can’t remember the details. Why, does somebody else want to go in? Ted, probably.”

“I’m sure Ted would like to go in-”

“-I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Frankly, I don’t think Ted should do it. Think how boring he’ll be with his speeches, after he comes out. ‘I visited an alien sphere’ by Ted Fielding. We’d never hear the end of it.”

And he giggled.

Ted is right, Norman thought. He’s definitely manic. There was a speedy, overly cheerful quality to Harry. His characteristic slow sarcasm was gone, replaced by a sunny, open, very quick manner. And a kind of laughing indifference to everything, an imbalance in his sense of what was important. He had said he couldn’t crack the code. He had said he couldn’t remember what happened inside the sphere, or how he had opened it. And he didn’t seem to think it mattered.

“Harry, when you first came out of the sphere, you seemed worried.”

“Did I? Had a brutal headache, I remember that.”

“You kept saying we should go to the surface.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. Why was that?”

“God only knows. I was so confused.”

“You also said it was dangerous for us to stay here.” Harry smiled.

“Norman, you can’t take that too seriously. I didn’t know if I was coming or going.”

“Harry, we need you to remember these things. If things start to come back to you, will you tell me?”

“Oh sure, Norman. Absolutely. You can count on me; I’ll tell you right away.”

THE LABORATORY

“No,” Beth said. “none of it makes sense. First of all, in areas where fish haven’t encountered human beings before, they tend to ignore humans unless they are hunted. The Navy divers didn’t hunt the fish. Second, if the divers stirred up the bottom, that’d actually release nutrients and attract more animals. Third, many species of animals are attracted to electrical currents. So, if anything, the shrimps and other animals should’ve been drawn here earlier by the electricity. Not now, with the power off.”

She was examining the shrimps under the low-power scanning microscope. “How does he seem?”

“Harry?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

Still looking through the microscope lens, she said, “Did he tell you anything about what happened inside the sphere?”

“Not yet.”

She adjusted the microscope, shook her head. “I’ll be damned.”

“What is it?” Norman said.

“Extra dorsal plating.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s another new species,” she said.

Norman said, “Shrimpus bethus? You’re making discoveries hand over fist down here, Beth.”

“Uh-huh… I checked the sea fans, too, because they seemed to have an unusual radial growth pattern. They’re a new species as well.”

“That’s great, Beth.”

She turned, looked at him. “No. Not great. Weird.” She clicked on a high-intensity light, cut open one of the shrimps with a scalpel. “I thought so.”

“What is it?”

“Norman,” she said, “we didn’t see any life down here for days-and suddenly in the last few hours we find three new species? It’s not normal.”

“We don’t know what’s normal at one thousand feet.”

“I’m telling you. It’s not normal.”

“But, Beth, you said yourself that we simply hadn’t noticed the sea fans before. And the squid and the shrimps-can’t they be migrating, passing through this area, something like that? Barnes says they’ve never had trained scientists living this deep at one site on the ocean floor before. Maybe these migrations are normal, and we just don’t know they occur.”

“I don’t think so,” Beth said. “When I went out to get these shrimps, I felt their behavior was atypical. For one thing, they were too close together. Shrimps on the bottom maintain a characteristic distance from one another, about four feet. These were packed close. In addition, they moved as if they were feeding, but there’s nothing to feed on down here.”

“Nothing that we know of.”

“Well, these shrimps can’t have been feeding.” She pointed to the cut animal on the lab bench. “They haven’t got a stomach.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Look for yourself.”

Norman looked, but the dissected shrimp didn’t mean much to him. It was just a mass of pink flesh. It was cut on a ragged diagonal, not cleanly. She’s tired, he thought. She’s not working efficiently. We need sleep. We need to get out of here.

“The external appearance is perfect, except for an extra dorsal fan at the tail,” she said. “But internally, it’s all screwed up. There’s no way for these animals to be alive. No stomach. No reproductive apparatus. This animal is like a bad imitation of a shrimp.”

“Yet the shrimps are alive,” Norman said.

“Yeah,” she said. “They are.” She seemed unhappy about it.

“And the squid were perfectly normal inside…”

“Actually, they weren’t. When I dissected one, I found that it lacked several important structures. There’s a nerve bundle called the stellate ganglion that wasn’t there.”

“Well…”

“And there were no gills, Norman. Squid possess a long gill structure for gas exchange. This one didn’t have one. The squid had no way to breathe, Norman.”

“It must have had a way to breathe.”

“I’m telling you, it didn’t. We’re seeing impossible animals down here. All of a sudden, impossible animals.”

She turned away from the high-intensity lamp, and he saw that she was close to tears. Her hands were shaking; she quickly dropped them into her lap. “You’re really worried,” he said.

“Aren’t you?” She searched his face. “Norman,” she said, “all this started when Harry came out of the sphere, didn’t it?”

“I guess it did.”

“Harry came out of the sphere, and now we have impossible sea life… I don’t like it. I wish we could get out of here. I really do.” Her lower lip was trembling.

He gave her a hug and said gently, “We can’t get out of here.”

“I know,” she said. She hugged him back, and began to cry, pushing her face into his shoulder.

“It’s all right…”

“I hate it when I get this way,” she said. “I hate this feeling.”

“I know…

‘And I hate this place. I hate everything about it. I hate Barnes and I hate Ted’s lectures and I hate Levy’s stupid desserts. I wish I wasn’t here.”

“I know…”

She sniffled for a moment, then abruptly pushed him away with her strong arms. She turned away, wiped her eyes. “I’m all right,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” he said.

She remained turned away, her back to him. “Where’s the damn Kleenex?” She found one, blew her nose. “You won’t say anything to the others…”

“Of course not.”

A bell rang, startling her. “Jesus, what’s that?”

“I think it’s dinner,” Norman said.

DINNER

“I don’t know how you can eat those things,” Harry said, pointing to the squid.

“They’re delicious,” Norman said. “Sauteed squid.” As soon as he had sat at the table, he became aware of how hungry he was. And eating made him feel better; there was a reassuring normalcy about sitting at a table, with a knife and fork in his hands. It was almost possible to forget where he was.

“I especially like them fried,” Tina said.

“Fried calamari,” Barnes said. “Wonderful. My favorite.”

“I like them fried, too,” Edmunds, the archivist, said. She sat primly, very erect, eating her food precisely. Norman noticed that she put her knife down between bites.

“Why aren’t these fried?” Norman said.

“We can’t deep-fry down here,” Barnes said. “The hot oil forms a suspension and gums up the air filters. But sauteed is fine.”

“Well, I don’t know about the squid but the shrimps are great,” Ted said. “Aren’t they, Harry?” Ted and Harry were eating shrimp.

“Great shrimp,” Harry said. “Delicious.”

“You know how I feel,” Ted said, “I feel like Captain Nemo. Remember, living underwater off the bounty of the sea?”

“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” Barnes said.

“James Mason,” Ted said. “Remember how he played the organ? Duh-duh-duh, da da da daaaaah da! Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor.”

“And Kirk Douglas.”

“Kirk Douglas was great.”

“Remember when he fought the giant squid?”

“That was great.”

“Kirk Douglas had an ax, remember?”

“Yeah, and he cut off one of the squid arms.”

“That movie,” Harry said, “scared the hell out of me. I saw it when I was a kid and it scared the hell out of me.”

“I didn’t think it was scary,” Ted said.

“You were older,” Harry said.

“Not that much older.”

“Yes, you were. For a kid it was terrifying. That’s probably why I don’t like squid now.”

“You don’t like squid,” Ted said, “because they’re rubbery and disgusting.”

Barnes said, “That was the movie that made me want to join the Navy.”

“I can imagine,” Ted said. “So romantic and exciting. And a real vision of the wonders of applied science. Who played the professor in that?”

“The professor?”

“Yes, remember there was a professor?”

“I vaguely remember a professor. Old guy.”

“Norman? You remember who was the professor?”

“No, I don’t,” Norman said.

Ted said, “Are you sitting over there keeping an eye on us, Norman?”

“How do you mean?” Norman said.

“Analyzing us. Seeing if we’re cracking up.”

“Yes,” Norman said, smiling. “I am.”

“How’re we doing?” Ted said.

“I would say it is highly significant that a group of scientists can’t remember who played the scientist in a movie they all loved.”

“Well, Kirk Douglas was the hero, that’s why. The scientist wasn’t the hero.”

“Franchot Tone?” Barnes said. “Claude Rains?”

“No, I don’t think so. Fritz somebody?”

“Fritz Weaver?”

They heard a crackle and hiss, and then the sounds of an organ playing the Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

“Great,” Ted said. “I didn’t know we had music down here.”

Edmunds returned to the table. “There’s a tape library, Ted.”

“I don’t know if this is right for dinner,” Barnes said.

“I like it,” Ted said. “Now, if we only had seaweed salad. Isn’t that what Captain Nemo served?”

“Maybe something lighter?” Barnes said.

“Lighter than seaweed?”

“Lighter than Bach.”

“What was the submarine called?” Ted said.

“The Nautilus,” Edmunds said.

“Oh, right. Nautilus.”

“It was the name of the first atomic submarine, too, launched in 1954,” she said. And she gave Ted a bright smile.

“True,” Ted said. “True.”

Norman thought, He’s met his match in irrelevant trivia. Edmunds went to the porthole and said, “Oh, more visitors.”

“What now?” Harry said, looking up quickly.

Frightened? Norman thought. No, just quick, manic. Interested.

“They’re beautiful,” Edmunds was saying. “Some kind of little jellyfish. All around the habitat. We should really film them. What do you think, Dr. Fielding? Should we go film them?”

“I think I’ll just eat now, Jane,” Ted said, a bit severely. Edmunds looked stricken, rejected. Norman thought, I’ll have to watch that. She turned to leave. The others glanced toward the porthole, but nobody left the table.

“Have you ever eaten jellyfish?” Ted said. “I hear they’re a delicacy.”

“Some of them are poisonous,” Beth said. “Toxins in the tentacles.”

“Don’t the Chinese eat jellyfish?” Harry said.

“Yes,” Tina said. “They make a soup, too. My grandmother used to make it in Honolulu.”

“You’re from Honolulu?”

“Mozart would be better for dining,” Barnes said. “Or Beethoven. Something with strings. This organ music is gloomy.”

“Dramatic,” Ted said, playing imaginary keys in the air, in time to the music. Swaying his body like James Mason.

“Gloomy,” Barnes said.

The intercom crackled. “Oh, you should see this,” Edmunds said, over the intercom. “It’s beautiful.”

“Where is she?”

“She must be outside,” Barnes said. He went to the porthole.

“It’s like pink snow,” Edmunds said. They all got up and went to the portholes.

Edmunds was outside with the video camera. They could hardly see her through the dense clouds of jellyfish. The jellyfish were small, the size of a thimble, and a delicate, glowing pink. It was indeed like a snowfall. Some of the jellyfish came quite close to the porthole; they could see them well.

“They have no tentacles,” Harry said. “They’re just little pulsating sacs.”

“That’s how they move,” Beth said. “Muscular contractions expel the water.”

“Like squid,” Ted said.

“Not as developed, but the general idea.”

“They’re sticky,” Edmunds said, over the intercom. “They’re sticking to my suit.”

“That pink color is fantastic,” Ted said. “Like snow in a sunset.”

“Very poetic.”

“I thought so.”

“You would.”

“They’re sticking to my faceplate, too,” Edmunds said. “I have to pull them off. They leave a smeary streak-”

She broke off abruptly, but they could still hear her breathing.

“Can you see her?” Ted said.

“Not very well. She’s there, to the left.”

Over the intercom, Edmunds said, “They seem to be warm. I feel heat on my arms and legs.”

“That’s not right,” Barnes said. He turned to Tina. “Tell her to get out of there.”

Tina ran from the cylinder, toward the communications console.

Norman could hardly see Edmunds any more. He was vaguely aware of a dark shape, moving arms, agitated…

Over the intercom, she said, “The smear on the faceplate-it won’t go away-they seem to be eroding the plastic-and my arms-the fabric is-”

Tina’s voice said, “Jane. Jane, get out of there.”

“On the double,” Barnes shouted. “Tell her on the double!”

Edmunds’s breathing was coming in ragged gasps. “The smears-can’t see very well-I feel-hurts-my arms burning-hurts-they’re eating through-”

“Jane. Come back. Jane. Are you reading? Jane.”

“She’s fallen down,” Harry said. “Look, you can see her lying-”

“-We have to save her,” Ted said, jumping to his feet.

“Nobody move, “ Barnes said.

“But she’s-”

“-Nobody else is going out there, mister.”

Edmunds’s breathing was rapid. She coughed, gasped. “I can’t-I can’t-oh God-”

Edmunds began to scream.

The scream was high-pitched and continuous except for ragged gasps for breath. They could no longer see her through the swarms of jellyfish. They looked at each other, at Barnes. Barnes’s face was rigidly set, his jaw tight, listening to the screams.

And then, abruptly, there was silence.

THE NEXT MESSAGES

An hour later, the jellyfish disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. They could see Edmunds’s body outside the habitat, lying on the bottom, rocking back and forth gently in the current. There were small ragged holes in the fabric of the suit.

They watched through the portholes as Barnes and the chief petty officer, Teeny Fletcher, crossed the bottom into the harsh floodlights, carrying extra air tanks. They lifted Edmunds’s body; the helmeted head flopped loosely back, revealing the scarred plastic faceplate, dull in the light.

Nobody spoke. Norman noticed that even Harry had dropped his manic effect; he sat unmoving, staring out the window.

Outside, Barnes and Fletcher still held the body. There was a great burst of silvery bubbles, which rose swiftly to the surface.

“What’re they doing?”

“Inflating her suit.”

“Why? Aren’t they bringing her back?” Ted said.

“They can’t,” Tina said. “There’s nowhere to put her here. The decomposition by-products would ruin our air.”

“But there must be some kind of a sealed container-”

“-There isn’t,” Tina said. “There’s no provision for keeping organic remains in the habitat.”

“You mean they didn’t plan on anyone dying.”

“That’s right. They didn’t.”

Now there were many thin streams of bubbles rising from the holes in the suit, toward the surface. Edmunds’s suit was puffed, bloated. Barnes released it, and it floated slowly away, as if pulled upward by the streaming silver bubbles.

“It’ll go to the surface?”

“Yes. The gas expands continuously as outside pressure diminishes.”

“And what then?”

“Sharks,” Beth said. “Probably.”

In a few moments the body disappeared into blackness, beyond the reach of the lights. Barnes and Fletcher still watched the body, helmets tilted up toward the surface. Fletcher made the sign of the cross. Then they trudged back toward the habitat.

A bell rang from somewhere inside. Tina went into D Cyl. Moments later she shouted, “Dr. Adams! More numbers!”

Harry got up and went into the next cylinder. The others trailed after him. Nobody wanted to look out the porthole any longer.

Norman stared at the screen, entirely puzzled.

But Harry clapped his hands in delight. “Excellent,” Harry said. “This is extremely helpful.”

“It is?”

“Of course. Now I have a fighting chance.”

“You mean to break the code.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why?”

“Remember the original number sequence? This is the same sequence.”

“It is?”

“Of course,” Harry said. “Except it’s in binary.”

“Binary,” Ted said, nudging Norman. “Didn’t I tell you binary was important?”

“What’s important,” Harry said, “is that this establishes the individual letter breaks from the original sequence.” “Here’s a copy of the original sequence,” Tina said, handing them a sheet.

00032125252632 032629 301321 04261037 18 3016 06180821

32 29033005 1822 04261013 0830162137 1604 08301621 1822 0

33013130432

“Good,” Harry said. “Now you can see my problem at once. Look at the word: oh-oh-oh-three-two-one, and so on. The question is, how do I break that word up into individual letters? I couldn’t decide, but now I know.”

“How?”

“Well, obviously, it goes three, twenty-one, twenty-five, twenty-five…”

Norman didn’t understand. “But how do you know that?”

“Look,” Harry said impatiently. “It’s very simple, Norman. It’s a spiral, reading from inside to outside. It’s just giving us the numbers in-”

Abruptly, the screen changed again.

“There, is that clearer for you?”

Norman frowned.

“Look, it’s exactly the same,” Harry said. “See? Center outward? Oh-oh-oh-three-twenty-one-twenty-five-twentyfive… It’s made a spiral moving outward from the center.”

“It?”

“Maybe it’s sorry about what happened to Edmunds,” Harry said.

“Why do you say that?” Norman asked, staring curiously at Harry.

“Because it’s obviously trying very hard to communicate with us,” Harry said. “It’s attempting different things.”

“Who is it?”

“It,” Harry said, “may not be a who.”

The screen went blank, and another pattern appeared.

“All right,” Harry said. “This is very good.”

“Where is this coming from?”

“Obviously, from the ship.”

“But we’re not connected to the ship. How is it managing to turn on our computer and print this?”

“We don’t know.”

“Well, shouldn’t we know?” Beth said.

“Not necessarily,” Ted said.

“Shouldn’t we try to know?”

“Not necessarily. You see, if the technology is advanced enough, it appears to the naive observer to be magic. There’s no doubt about that. For example, you take a famous scientist from our past-Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, even Isaac Newton. Show him an ordinary Sony color-television set and he’d run screaming, claiming it was witchcraft. He wouldn’t understand it at all.

“But the point,” Ted said, “is that you couldn’t explain it to him, either. At least not easily. Isaac Newton wouldn’t be able to understand TV without first studying our physics for a couple of years. He’d have to learn all the underlying concepts: electromagnetism, waves, particle physics. These would all be new ideas to him, a new conception of nature. In the meantime, the TV would be magic as far as he was concerned. But to us it’s ordinary. It’s TV.”

“You’re saying we’re like Isaac Newton?”

Ted shrugged. “We’re getting a communication and we don’t know how it’s done.”

“And we shouldn’t bother to try and find out.”

“I think we have to accept the possibility,” Ted said, “that we may not be able to understand it.”

Norman noticed the energy with which they threw themselves into this discussion, pushing aside the tragedy so recently witnessed. They’re intellectuals, he thought, and their characteristic defense is intellectualization. Talk. Ideas. Abstractions. Concepts. It was a way of getting distance from the feelings of sadness and fear and being trapped. Norman understood the impulse: he wanted to get away from those feelings himself.

Harry frowned at the spiral image. “We may not understand how, but it’s obvious what it’s doing. It’s trying to communicate by trying different presentations. The fact that it’s trying spirals may be significant. Maybe it believes we think in spirals. Or write in spirals.”

“Right,” Beth said. “Who knows what kind of weird creatures we are?”

Ted said, “If it’s trying to communicate with us, why aren’t we trying to communicate back?”

Harry snapped his fingers. “Good idea!” He went to the keyboard.

“There’s an obvious first step,” Harry said. “We just send the original message back. We’ll start with the first grouping, beginning with the double zeroes.”

“I want it made clear,” Ted said, “that the suggestion to attempt communication with the alien originated with me.”

“It’s clear, Ted,” Barnes said.

“Harry?” Ted said.

“Yes, Ted,” Harry said. “Don’t worry, it’s your idea.”

Sitting at the keyboard, Harry typed:

00032125252632

The numbers appeared on the screen. There was a pause. They listened to the hum of the air fans, the distant thump of the diesel generator. They all watched the screen.

Nothing happened.

The screen went blank, and then printed out:

0001132121051808012232

Norman felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

It was just a series of numbers on a computer screen, but it still gave him a chill. Standing beside him, Tina shivered. “He answered us.”

“Fabulous,” Ted said.

“I’ll try the second grouping now,” Harry said. He seemed calm, but his fingers kept making mistakes at the keyboard. It took a few moments before he was able to type:

032629

The reply immediately came back:

0015260805180810213

“Well,” Harry said, “looks like we just opened our line of communication.”

“Yes,” Beth said. “Too bad we don’t understand what we’re saying to each other.”

“Presumably it knows what it’s saying,” Ted said. “But we’re still in the dark.”

“Maybe we can get it to explain itself.”

Impatiently, Barnes said, “What is this it you keep referring to?”

Harry sighed, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “I think there’s no doubt about that. It,” Harry said, “is something that was previously inside the sphere, and that is now released, and is free to act. That’s what it is.”