“Who is?”
“Barnes. The Navy. Everybody. This is all a setup, Norman.”
“Come on, Beth. No conspiracies, now. We have enough to worry about without-”
“-Just look at this,” she said. She led him back upstairs, flicked on a console, pressed buttons.
“I started putting it together when Barnes was on the phone,” she said. “Barnes was talking to somebody right up to the moment when the cable started to coil down. Except that cable is a thousand feet long, Norman. They would have broken communications several minutes before unhooking the cable itself.”
“Probably, yes…”
“So who was Barnes talking to at the last minute? Nobody.”
“Beth…”
“Look,” she said, pointing to the screen.
COM SUMMARY DH-SURCOM/l
0910 BARNES TO SURCOM/1:
CIVILIAN AND USN PERSONNEL POLLED. ALTHOUGH ADVISED OF RISKS, ALL PERSONNEL ELECT TO REMAIN DOWN FOR DURATION OF STORM TO CONTINUE INVESTIGATION OF ALIEN SPHERE AND ASSOCIATED SPACECRAFT.
BARNES, USN.
“You’re kidding,” Norman said. “I thought Barnes wanted to leave.”
“He did, but he changed his mind when he saw that last room, and he didn’t bother to tell us. I’d like to kill the bastard,” Beth said. “You know what this is about, Norman, don’t you?”
Norman nodded. “He hopes to find a new weapon.”
“Right. Barnes is a Pentagon-acquisition man, and he wants to find a new weapon.”
“But the sphere is unlikely-”
“It’s not the sphere,” Beth said. “Barnes doesn’t really care about the sphere. He cares about the ‘associated spacecraft.’ Because, according to congruity theory, it’s the spacecraft that is likely to pay off. Not the sphere.”
Congruity theory was a troublesome matter for the people who thought about extraterrestrial life. In a simple way, the astronomers and physicists who considered the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial life imagined wonderful benefits to mankind from such a contact. But other thinkers, philosophers and historians, did not foresee any benefits to contact at all.
For example, astronomers believed that if we made contact with extraterrestrials, mankind would be so shocked that wars on Earth would cease, and a new era of peaceful cooperation between nations would begin.
But historians thought that was nonsense. They pointed out that when Europeans discovered the New World-a similarly world-shattering discovery-the Europeans did not stop their incessant fighting. On the contrary: they fought even harder. Europeans simply made the New World an extension of pre-existing animosities. It became another place to fight, and to fight over.
Similarly, astronomers imagined that when mankind met extraterrestrials, there would be an exchange of information and technology, giving mankind a wonderful advancement.
Historians of science thought that was nonsense, too. They pointed out that what we called “science” actually consisted of a rather arbitrary conception of the universe, not likely to be shared by other creatures. Our ideas of science were the ideas of visually oriented, monkey-like creatures who enjoyed changing their physical environment. If the aliens were blind and communicated by odors, they might have evolved a very different science, which described a very different universe. And they might have made very different choices about the directions their science would explore. For example, they might ignore the physical world entirely, and instead develop a highly sophisticated science of mind-in other words, the exact opposite of what Earth science had done. The alien technology might be purely mental, with no visible hardware at all.
This issue was at the heart of congruity theory, which said that unless the aliens were remarkably similar to us, no exchange of information was likely. Barnes of course knew that theory, so he knew he wasn’t likely to derive any useful technology from the alien sphere. But he was very likely to get useful technology from the spaceship itself, since the spaceship had been made by men, and congruity was high.
And he had lied to keep them down. To keep the search going.
“What should we do with the bastard?” Beth said. “Nothing, for the moment,” Norman said.
“You don’t want to confront him? Jesus, I do.”
“It won’t serve any purpose,” Norman said. “Ted won’t care, and the Navy people are all following orders. And anyway, even if it had been arranged for us to depart as planned, would you have gone, leaving Harry behind in the sphere?”
“No,” Beth admitted.
“Well, then. It’s all academic.”
“Jesus, Norman…”
“I know. But we’re here now. And for the next couple of days, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Let’s deal with that reality as best we can, and point the finger later.”
“You bet I’m going to point the finger!”
“That’s fine. But not now, Beth.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “Not now.”
She went back upstairs.
Alone, Norman stared at the console. He had his work cut out for him, keeping everybody calm for the next few days. He hadn’t looked into the computer system before; he started pressing buttons. Pretty soon he found a file marked ULF CONTACT TEAM BIOG. He opened it up.
Civilian Team Members
1. Theodore Fielding, astrophysicist/planetary geologist
2. Elizabeth Halpern, zoologist/biochemist
3. Harold J. Adams, mathematician/logician
4. Arthur Levine, marine biologist/biochemist
5. John F. Thompson, psychologist
Choose one:
Norman stared in disbelief at the list.
He knew Jack Thompson, an energetic young psychologist from Yale. Thompson was world-renowned for his studies of the psychology of primitive peoples, and in fact for the past year had been somewhere in New Guinea, studying native tribes.
Norman pressed more buttons.
ULF TEAM PSYCHOLOGIST: CHOICES BY RANK
1. John F. Thompson, Yale-approved
2. William L. Hartz, UCB-approved
3. Jeremy White, UT-approved (pending clearance)
4. Norman Johnson, SDU-rejected (age)
He knew them all. Bill Hartz at Berkeley was seriously ill with cancer. Jeremy White had gone to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and would never get clearance.
That left Norman.
He understood now why he had been the last to be called in. He understood now about the special tests. He felt a burst of intense anger at Barnes, at the whole system which had brought him down here, despite his age, with no concern for his safety. At fifty-three, Norman Johnson had no business being a thousand feet underwater in a pressurized exotic gas environment-and the Navy knew it.
It was an outrage, he thought. He wanted to go upstairs and give Barnes hell in no uncertain terms. That lying son of a bitch
He gripped the arms of his chair and reminded himself of what he had told Beth. Whatever had happened up to this point, there was nothing any of them could do about it now. He would indeed give Barnes hell-he promised himself he would-but only when they got back to the surface. Until then, it was no use making trouble.
He shook his head and swore.
Then he turned the console off.
The hours crept by. Harry was still in the sphere. Tina ran her image intensification of the videotape that showed the sphere open, trying to see interior detail. “Unfortunately, we have only limited computing power in the habitat,” she said. “If I could hard-link to the surface I could really do a job, but as it is…” She shrugged.
She showed them a series of enlarged freeze-frames from the open sphere. The images clicked through at one-second intervals. The quality was poor, with jagged, intermittent static.