Michael Crichton: Sphere

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

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

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

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

“I need security clearance?”

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

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

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

“I don’t know,” Norman said.

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

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

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

“Oh yes.”

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

Norman promised it would.

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

“Uh-huh,” Norman said.

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

“A real moment,” Norman agreed.

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

“Doubtful,” Norman said.

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

“It’s hard to say.”

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

Norman promised he would think about it.

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

“I’m not sure,” Norman said.

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

“No, they might not.”

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

“Yes,” Norman said.

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

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

“Sure.”

“Laws of physics.”

“Right.”

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

“Yes,” Norman said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Norman said. “I do.”

And he remembered why he had said it.

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

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

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

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