Michael Crichton - Sphere

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.”

Norman awoke to a shrieking alarm and flashing red lights. He rolled out of his bunk, pulled on his insulated shoes and his heated jacket, and ran for the door, where he collided with Beth. The alarm was screaming throughout the habitat.

“What’s happening!” he shouted, over the alarm.

“I don’t know!”

Her face was pale, frightened. Norman pushed past her. In the B Cylinder, among all the pipes and consoles, a flashing sign winked: “LIFE SUPPORT EMERGENCY.” He looked for Teeny Fletcher, but the big engineer wasn’t there.

He hurried back toward C Cylinder, passing Beth again.

“Do you know?” Beth shouted.

“It’s life support! Where’s Fletcher? Where’s Barnes?”

“I don’t know! I’m looking!”

“There’s nobody in B!” he shouted, and scrambled up the steps into D Cylinder. Tina and Fletcher were there, working behind the computer consoles. The back panels were pulled off, exposing wires, banks of chips. The room lights were flashing red.