Michael Crichton - Sphere

“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.