“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 CO₂ in 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.”

“Exactly what Barnes said.” Beth started pushing equipment around on her counter top, nervously. Rearranging things.

“Too bad we don’t have a sample of those jellyfish,” Norman said.

“Yes, but I’m not sure how much good it would do, to tell the truth.” She frowned, shifted papers on the counter again. “Norman, I’m not thinking very clearly down here.”

“How’s that?”

“After the, uh, accident, I came up here to look over my notes, review things. And I checked the shrimps. Remember how I told you they didn’t have any stomach? Well, they do. I’d made a bad dissection, out of the midsagittal plane. I just missed all the midline structures. But they’re there, all right; the shrimps are normal. And the squid? It turns out the one squid I dissected was a little anomalous. It had an atrophic gill, but it had one. And the other squid are perfectly normal. Just what you’d expect. I was wrong, too hasty. It really bothers me.”

“Is that why you took the Valium?”

She nodded. “I hate to be sloppy.”

“Nobody’s criticizing you.”

“If Harry or Ted reviewed my work and found that I’d made these stupid mistakes…”

“What’s wrong with a mistake?”

“I can hear them now: Just like a woman, not careful enough, too eager to make a discovery, trying to prove herself, too quick to draw conclusions. Just like a woman.”

“Nobody’s criticizing you, Beth.”

“I am.”

“Nobody else,” Norman said. “I think you ought to give yourself a break.”

She stared at the lab bench. Finally she said, “I can’t.” Something about the way she said it touched him. “I understand,” Norman said, and a memory came rushing back to him. “You know, when I was a kid, I went to the beach with my younger brother. Tim. He’s dead now, but Tim was about six at the time. He couldn’t swim yet. My mother told me to watch him carefully, but when I got to the beach all my friends were there, body-surfing. I didn’t want to be bothered with my brother. It was hard, because I wanted to be out in the big surf, and he had to stay close to shore.

“Anyway, in the middle of the afternoon he comes out of the water screaming bloody murder, absolutely screaming. And tugging at his right side. It turned out he had been stung by some kind of a jellyfish. It was still attached to him, sticking to his side. Then he collapsed on the beach. One of the mothers ran over and took Timmy to the hospital, before I could even get out of the water. I didn’t know where he had gone. I got to the hospital later. My mother was already there. Tim was in shock; I guess the poison was a heavy dose for his small body. Anyway, nobody blamed me. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had been sitting right on the beach watching him like a hawk, he would still have been stung. But I hadn’t been sitting there, and I blamed myself for years, long after he was fine. Every time I’d see those scars on his side, I felt terrible guilt. But you get over it. You’re not responsible for everything that happens in the world. You just aren’t.”

There was a silence. Somewhere in the habitat he heard a soft rhythmic knocking, a sort of thumping. And the everpresent hum of the air handlers.

Beth was staring at him. “Seeing Edmunds die must have been hard for you.”

“It’s funny,” Norman said. “I never made the connection, until right now.”

“Blocked it, I guess. Want a Valium?”

He smiled. “No.”

“You looked as if you were about to cry.”

“No. I’m fine.” He stood up, stretched. He went over to the medicine kit and closed the white lid, came back.

Beth said, “What do you think about these messages we’re getting?”

“Beats me,” Norman said. He sat down again. “Actually, I did have one crazy thought. Do you suppose the messages and these animals we’re seeing are related?”

“Why?”

“I never thought about it until we started to get spiral messages. Harry says it’s because the thing-the famous it-believes we think in spirals. But it’s just as likely that it thinks in spirals and so it assumes we do, too. The sphere is round, isn’t it? And we’ve been seeing all these radially symmetrical animals. Jellyfish, squid.”

“Nice idea,” Beth said, “except for the fact that squid aren’t radially symmetrical. An octopus is. And, like an octopus, squid have a round circle of tentacles, but squid’re bilaterally symmetrical, with a matching left and right side, the way we have. And then there’s the shrimps.”

“That’s right, the shrimps.” Norman had forgotten about the shrimps.

“I can’t see a connection between the sphere and the animals,” Beth said.

They heard the thumping again, soft, rhythmic. Sitting in his chair, Norman realized that he could feel the thumping as well, as a slight impact. “What is that, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Sounds like it’s coming from outside.”

He had started toward the porthole when the intercom clicked and he heard Barnes say, “Now hear this, all hands to communications. All hands to communications. Dr. Adams has broken the code.”

Harry wouldn’t tell them the message right away. Relishing his triumph, he insisted on going through the decoding process, step by step. First, he explained, he had thought that the messages might express some universal constant, or some physical law, stated as a way to open conversation. “But,” Harry said, “it might also be a graphic representation of some kind-code for a picture-which presented immense problems. After all, what’s a picture? We make pictures on a flat plane, like a piece of paper. We determine positions within a picture by what we call X and Y axes. Vertical and horizontal. But another intelligence might see images and organize them very differently. It might assume more than three dimensions. Or it might work from the center of the picture outward, for example. So the code might be very tough. I didn’t make much progress at first.” Later, when he got the same message with gaps between number sequences, Harry began to suspect that the code represented discrete chunks of information-suggesting words, not pictures. “Now, word codes fall into several types, from simple to complex. There was no way to know immediately which method of encoding had been used. But then I had a sudden insight.”