Michael Crichton: Sphere

“Nine. She’s pitching for the Evanston Little League now. Not much of a student, but a hell of a pitcher.” She sounded proud. “How’s your family? Ellen?”

“She’s fine. The kids are fine. Tim’s a sophomore at Chicago. Amy’s at Andover. How is…”

“George? We divorced three years ago,” Beth said. “George had a year at CERN in Geneva, looking for exotic particles, and I guess he found whatever he was looking for. She’s French. He says she’s a great cook.” She shrugged. “Anyway, my work is going well. For the past year I have been working with cephalopods-squid and octopi.”

“How’s that?”

“Interesting. It gives you quite a strange feeling to realize the gentle intelligence of these creatures, particularly octopi. You know an octopus is smarter than a dog, and would probably make a much better pet. It’s a wonderful, clever, very emotional creature, an octopus. Only we never think of them that way.”

Norman said, “Do you still eat them?”

“Oh, Norman.” She smiled. “Do you still relate everything to food?”

“Whenever possible,” Norman said, patting his stomach. “Well, you won’t like the food in this place. It’s terrible. But the answer is no,” she said, cracking her knuckles. “I could never eat an octopus now, knowing what I do about them. Which reminds me: What do you know about Hal Barnes?”

“Nothing, why?”

“I’ve been asking around. Turns out Barnes is not Navy at all. He’s ex -Navy.”

“You mean he’s retired?”

“Retired in ‘81. He was originally trained as an aeronautical engineer at Cal Tech, and after he retired he worked for Grumman for a while. Then a member of the Navy Science Board of the National Academy; then Assistant Undersecretary of Defense, and a member of DSARC, the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council; a member of the Defense Science Board, which advises the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense.”

“Advises them on what?”

“Weapons acquisition,” Beth said. “He’s a Pentagon man who advises the government on weapons acquisition. So how’d he get to be running this project?”

“Beats me,” Norman said. Sitting on the bunk, he kicked off his shoes. He felt suddenly tired. Beth leaned against the doorway.

“You seem to be in very good shape,” Norman said. Even her hands looked strong, he thought.

“A good thing, too, as it turns out,” Beth said. “I have a lot of confidence for what’s coming. What about you? Think you’ll manage okay?”

“Me? Why shouldn’t I?” He glanced down at his own familiar paunch. Ellen was always after him to do something about it, and from time to time he got inspired and went to the gym for a few days, but he could never seem to get rid of it. And the truth was, it didn’t matter that much to him. He was fifty-three years old and he was a university professor. What the hell.

Then he had a thought: “What do you mean, you have confidence for what’s coming? What’s coming?”

“Well. It’s only rumors so far. But your arrival seems to confirm them.”

“What rumors?”

“They’re sending us down there,” Beth said.

“Down where?”

“To the bottom. To the spaceship.”

“But it’s a thousand feet down. They’re investigating it with robot submersibles.”

“These days, a thousand feet isn’t that deep,” Beth said. “The technology can handle it. There are Navy divers down there now. And the word is, the divers have put up a habitat so our team can go down and live on the bottom for a week or so and open the spacecraft up.”

Norman felt a sudden chill. In his work with the FAA, he had been exposed to every sort of horror. Once, in Chicago, at a crash site that extended over a whole farm field, he had stepped on something squishy. He thought it was a frog, but it was a child’s severed hand, palm up. Another time he had seen a man’s charred body, still strapped into the seat, except the seat had been flung into the back yard of a suburban house, where it sat upright next to a portable plastic kiddie swimming pool. And in Dallas he had watched the investigators on the rooftops of the suburban houses, collecting the body parts, putting them in bags…

Working on a crash-site team demanded the most extraordinary psychological vigilance, to avoid being overwhelmed by what you saw. But there was never any personal danger, any physical risk. The risk was the risk of nightmares.

But now, the prospect of going down a thousand feet under the ocean to investigate a wreck…

“You okay?” Beth said. “You look pale.”

“I didn’t know anybody was talking about going down there .”

“Just rumors,” Beth said. “Get some rest, Norman. I think you need it.”

The ulf team met in the briefing room, just before eleven. Norman was interested to see the group he had picked six years before, now assembled together for the first time.

Ted Fielding was compact, handsome, and still boyish at forty, at ease in shorts and a Polo sport shirt. An astrophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, he had done important work on the planetary stratigraphy of Mercury and the moon, although he was best known for his studies of the Mangala Vallis and Valles Marineris channels on Mars. Located at the Martian equator, these great canyons were as much as twenty-five hundred miles long and two and a half miles deep-ten times the length and twice the depth of the Grand Canyon. And Fielding had been among the first to conclude that the planet most like the Earth in composition was not Mars at all, as previously suspected, but tiny Mercury, with its Earth-like magnetic field.

Fielding’s manner was open, cheerful, and pompous. At JPL, he had appeared on television whenever there was a spacecraft flyby, and thus enjoyed a certain celebrity; he had recently been remarried, to a television weather reporter in Los Angeles; they had a young son.

Ted was a longstanding advocate for life on other worlds, and a supporter of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which other scientists considered a waste of time and money. He grinned happily at Norman now.

“I always knew this would happen-sooner or later, we’d get our proof of intelligent life on other worlds. Now at last we have it, Norman. This is a great moment. And I am especially pleased about the shape.”

“The shape?”

“Of the object down there.”

“What about it?” Norman hadn’t heard anything about the shape.

“I’ve been in the monitor room watching the video feed from the robots. They’re beginning to define the shape beneath the coral. And it’s not round. It is not a flying saucer,” Ted said. “Thank God. Perhaps this will silence the lunatic fringe.” He smiled. “ ‘All things come to him who waits,’ eh?”

“I guess so,” Norman said. He wasn’t sure what Fielding meant, but Ted tended to literary quotations. Ted saw himself as a Renaissance man, and random quotations from Rousseau and Lao-tsu were one way to remind you of it. Yet there was nothing mean-spirited about him; someone once said that Ted was “a brand-name guy,” and that carried over to his speech as well. There was an innocence, almost a naivete to Ted Fielding that was endearing and genuine. Norman liked him.

He wasn’t so sure about Harry Adams, the reserved Princeton mathematician Norman hadn’t seen for six years. Harry was now a tall, very thin black man with wire-frame glasses and a perpetual frown. He wore a T-shirt that said “Mathematicians Do It Correctly”; it was the kind of thing a student would wear, and indeed, Adams appeared even younger than his thirty years; he was clearly the youngest member of the group-and arguably the most important.