Michael Crichton - Sphere

The screens all flashed “EMERGENCY-LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS.”

“What’s going on?” Norman shouted.

Fletcher waved a hand dismissingly.

“Tell me!”

He turned, saw Harry sitting in the corner near Edmunds’s video section like a zombie, with a pencil and a pad of paper on his knee. He seemed completely indifferent to the sirens, the lights flashing on his face.

“Harry!”

Harry didn’t respond; Norman turned back to the two women.

“For God’s sake, will you tell me what it is?” Norman shouted.

And then the sirens stopped. The screens went blank. There was silence, except for soft classical music.

“Sorry about that,” Tina said.

“It was a false alarm,” Fletcher said.

“Jesus Christ,” Norman said, dropping into a chair. He took a deep breath.

“Were you asleep?” He nodded.

“Sorry. It just went off by itself.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“The next time it happens, you can check your badge,” Fletcher said, pointing to the badge on her own chest. “That’s the first thing to do. You see the badges are all normal now.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Take it easy, Norman,” Harry said. “When the psychiatrist goes crazy, it’s a bad sign.”

“I’m a psychologist.”

“Whatever.”

Tina said, “Our computer alarm has a lot of peripheral sensors, Dr. Johnson. It goes off sometimes. There’s not much we can do about it.”

Norman nodded, went into E Cyl to the galley. Levy had made strawberry shortcake for lunch, and nobody had eaten it because of the accident with Edmunds. He was sure it would still be there, but when he couldn’t find it, he felt frustrated. He opened cabinet doors, slammed them shut. He kicked the refrigerator door.

Take it easy, he thought. It was just a false alarm.

But he couldn’t overcome the feeling that he was trapped, stuck in some damned oversized iron lung, while things slowly fell apart around him. The worst moment had been Barnes’s briefing, when he came back from sending Edmunds’s body to the surface.

Barnes had decided it was time to make a little speech. Deliver a little pep talk.

“I know you’re all upset about Edmunds,” he had said, “but what happened to her was an accident. Perhaps she made an error of judgment in going out among jellyfish. Perhaps not. The fact is, accidents happen under the best of circumstances, and the deep sea is a particularly unforgiving environment.”

Listening, Norman thought, He’s writing his report. Explaining it away to the brass.

“Right now,” Barnes was saying, “I urge you all to remain calm. It’s sixteen hours since the gale hit topside. We just sent up a sensor balloon to the surface. Before we could make readings, the cable snapped, which suggests that surface waves are still thirty feet or higher, and the gale is still in full force. The weather satellite estimates were for a sixty-hour storm on site, so we have two more full days down here. There’s not much we can do about it. We just have to remain calm. Don’t forget, even when you do go topside you can’t throw open the hatch and start breathing. You have to spend four more days decompressing in a hyperbaric chamber on the surface.”

That was the first Norman had heard of surface decompression. Even after they left this iron lung, they would have to sit in another iron lung for another four days?

“I thought you knew,” Barnes had said. “That’s SOP for saturated environments. You can stay down here as long as you like, but you have a four-day decompress when you go back. And believe me, this habitat’s a lot nicer than the decompression chamber. So enjoy this while you can.”

Enjoy this while you can, he thought. Jesus Christ. Strawberry shortcake would help. Where the hell was Levy, anyway?

He went back to D Cyl. “Where’s Levy?”

“Dunno,” Tina said. “Around here somewhere. Maybe sleeping.”

“Nobody could sleep through that alarm,” Norman said.

“Try the galley?”

“I just did. Where’s Barnes?”

“He went back to the ship with Ted. They’re putting more sensors around the sphere.”

“I told them it was a waste of time,” Harry said.

“So nobody knows where Levy is?” Norman said.

Fletcher finished screwing the computer panels back on. “Doctor,” she said, “are you one of those people who need to keep track of where everyone is?”

“No,” Norman said. “Of course not.”

“Then what’s the big deal about Levy, sir?”

“I only wanted to know where the strawberry shortcake was.”

“Gone,” Fletcher said promptly. “Captain and I came back from funeral duty and we sat down and ate the whole thing, just like that.” She shook her head.

“Maybe Rose’ll make some more,” Harry said.

He found Beth in her laboratory, on the top level of D Cyl. He walked in just in time to see her take a pill.

“What was that?”

“Valium. God.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Look,” she said, “don’t give me any psychotalk about it-”

“-I was just asking.”

Beth pointed to a white box mounted on the wall in the corner of the lab. “There’s a first-aid kit in every cylinder. Turns out to be pretty complete, too.”

Norman went over to the box, flipped open the lid. There were neat compartments with medicines, syringes, bandages. Beth was right, it was quite complete-antibiotics, sedatives, tranquilizers, even surgical anesthetics. He didn’t recognize all the names on the bottles, but the psychoactive drugs were strong.

“You could fight a war with the stuff in this kit.”

“Yeah, well. The Navy.”

“There’s everything you need here to do major surgery.” Norman noticed a card on the inside of the box. It said “MEDAID CODE 103.”

“Any idea what this means?”

She nodded. “It’s a computer code. I called it up.”

“And?”

“The news,” she said, “is not good.”

“Is that right?” He sat at the terminal in her room and punched in 103. The screen said:

HYPERBARIC SATURATED ENVIRONMENT

MEDICAL COMPLICATIONS (MAJOR-FATAL)

1.01 Pulmonary Embolism

1.02 High Pressure Nervous Syndrome 1.03 Aseptic Bone Necrosis

1.04 Oxygen Toxicity

1.05 Thermal Stress Syndrome

1.06 Disseminated Pseudomonas Infection 1.07 Cerebral Infarction

Choose One:

“Don’t choose one,” Beth said. “Reading the details will only upset you. Just leave it at this-we’re in a very dangerous environment. Barnes didn’t bother to give us all the gory details. You know why the Navy has that rule about pulling people out within seventy-two hours? Because after seventy-two hours, you increase your risk of something called ‘aseptic bone necrosis.’ Nobody knows why, but the pressurized environment causes bone destruction in the leg and hip. And you know why this habitat constantly adjusts as we walk through it? It’s not because that’s slick and hightech. It’s because the helium atmosphere makes body-heat control very volatile. You can quickly become overheated, and just as quickly overchilled. Fatally so. It can happen so fast you don’t realize it until it’s too late and you drop dead. And ‘high pressure nervous syndrome’-that turns out to be sudden convulsions, paralysis, and death if the carbondioxide content of the atmosphere drops too low. That’s what the badges are for, to make sure we have enough CO 2in the air. That’s the only reason we have the badges. Nice, huh?”

Norman flicked off the screen, sat back. “Well, I keep coming back to the same point-there’s not much we can do about it now.”