He began to shiver. His teeth chattered uncontrollably. He tried to speak but bit his tongue, tasted blood. He felt numb and stupid. Everything was happening in slow motion.

As they approached the habitat, he could see that the eggs were sticking to the cylinders, clinging densely, making a nubbly white surface.

“Hurry!” Barnes shouted. “Hurry! It’s coming this way!” They were under the airlock, and he began to feel surging currents of water. There was something very big out there. Beth was pushing him upward and then his helmet burst above the waterline and Fletcher gripped him with strong arms, and a moment after that Beth was pulled up and the hatch slammed shut. Somebody took off his helmet and he heard the alarm, shrieking loud in his ears. By now his whole body was shaking in spasms, thumping on the deck. They stripped off his suit and wrapped him in a silver blanket and held him until his shivering lessened, then finally stopped. And abruptly, despite the alarm, he went to sleep.

MILITARY CONSIDERATIONS

“It’s not your goddamned job, that’s why,” Barnes said. “You had no authorization to do what you did. None whatsoever.”

“Levy might have still been alive,” Beth said, calm in the face of Barnes’s fury.

“But she wasn’t alive, and by going outside you risked the lives of two civilian expedition members unnecessarily.”

Norman said, “It was my idea, Hal.” Norman was still wrapped in blankets, but they had given him hot drinks and made him rest, and now he felt better.

“And you,” Barnes said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

“I guess I am,” Norman said. “But I don’t know what happened.”

“This is what happened,” Barnes said, waving a small fan in front of him. “Your suit circulator shorted out and you experienced rapid central cooling from the helium. Another couple of minutes and you would have been dead.”

“It was so fast,” Norman said. “I didn’t realize-”

“-You goddamn people,” Barnes said. “I want to make something clear. This is not a scientific conference. This is not the Underwater Holiday Inn, where you can do whatever you please. This is a military operation and you will damn well follow military orders. Is that clear?”

“This is a military operation?” Ted said.

“It is now,” Barnes said.

“Wait a minute. Was it always?”

“It is now.”

“You haven’t answered the question,” Ted said. “Because if it is a military operation, I think we need to know that. I personally do not wish to be associated with-”

“-Then leave,” Beth said.

“-a military operation that is-”

“-Look, Ted,” Barnes said. “You know what this is costing the Navy?”

“No, but I don’t see-”

“-I’ll tell you. A deep-placement, saturated gas environment with full support runs about a hundred thousand dollars an hour. By the time we all get out of here, the total project cost will be eighty to a hundred million dollars. You don’t get that kind of appropriations from the military without what they call ‘a serious expectation of military benefit.’ It’s that simple. No expectation, no money. You following me?”

“You mean like a weapon?” Beth said.

“Possibly, yes,” Barnes said.

“Well,” Ted said, “I personally would never have joined-”

“-Is that right? You’d fly all the way to Tonga and I’d say, ‘Ted, there’s a spacecraft down there that might contain life from another galaxy, but it’s a military operation,’ and you’d say, ‘Gosh, sorry to hear that, count me out’? Is that what you’d have done, Ted?”

“Well…” Ted said.

“Then you better shut up,” Barnes said. “Because I’ve had it with your posturing.”

“Hear, hear,” Beth said.

“I personally feel you’re overwrought,” Ted said.

“I personally feel you’re an egomaniacal asshole,” Barnes said.

“Just a minute, everybody,” Harry said. “Does anybody know why Levy went outside in the first place?”

Tina said, “She was on a TRL.”

“A what?”

“A Timeclock Required Lockout,” Barnes said. “It’s the duty schedule. Levy was Edmunds’s backup. After Edmunds died, it became Levy’s job to go to the submarine every twelve hours.”

“Go to the sub? Why?” Harry said.

Barnes pointed out the porthole. “You see DH-7 over there? Well, next to the single cylinder is an inverted dome hangar, and beneath the dome is a minisub that the divers left behind.

“In a situation like this,” Barnes said, “Navy regs require that all tapes and records be transferred to the sub every twelve hours. The sub is on TBDR Mode-Timed Ballast Drop and Release-set on a timer every twelve hours. That way, if somebody doesn’t get there every twelve hours, transfer the latest tapes, and press the yellow ‘Delay’ button, the sub will automatically drop ballast, blow tanks, and go to the surface unattended.”

“Why is that?”

“If there’s a disaster down here-say something happened to all of us-then the sub would automatically surface after twelve hours, with all the tapes accumulated thus far. The Navy’d recover the sub at the surface, and they’d have at least a partial record of what happened to us down here.”

“I see. The sub’s our flight recorder.”

“You could say that, yes. But it’s also our way out, our only emergency exit.”

“So Levy was going to the sub?”

“Yes. And she must have made it, because the sub is still here.”

“She transferred the tapes, pressed the ‘Delay’ button, and then she died on the way back.”

“Yes.”

“How did she die?” Harry said, looking carefully at Barnes.

“We’re not sure,” Barnes said.

“Her entire body was crushed,” Norman said. “It was like a sponge.”

Harry said to Barnes, “An hour ago you ordered the EPSA sensors to be reset and adjusted. Why was that?”

“We had gotten a strange reading in the previous hour.”

“What sort of a reading?”

“Something out there. Something very large.”

“But it didn’t trigger the alarms,” Harry said.

“No. This thing was beyond alarm-set parameters.”

“You mean it was too big to set off the alarms?”

“Yes. After the first false alarm, the settings were all cranked down. The alarms were set to ignore anything that large. That’s why Tina had to readjust the settings.”

“And what set off the alarms just now?” Harry said. “When Beth and Norman were out there?”

Barnes said, “Tina?”

“I don’t know what it was. Some kind of animal, I guess. Silent, and very big.”

“How big?”

She shook her head. “From the electronic footprint, Dr. Adams, I would say the thing was almost as big as this habitat.”

BATTLE STATIONS

Beth slipped one round white egg onto the stage of the scanning microscope. “Well,” she said, peering through the eyepiece, “it’s definitely marine invertebrate. The interesting feature is this slimy coating.” She poked at it with forceps.

“What is it?” Norman said.

“Some kind of proteinaceous material. Sticky.”

“No. I mean, what is the egg?”

“Don’t know yet.” Beth continued her examination when the alarm sounded and the red lights began to flash again. Norman felt a sudden dread.

“Probably another false alarm,” Beth said.

“Attention, all hands,” Barnes said on the intercom. “All hands, battle stations.”

“Oh shit,” Beth said.

Beth slid gracefully down the ladder as if it were a fire pole; Norman followed clumsily back down behind her. At the communications section on D Cyl, he found a familiar scene: everyone clustered around the computer, and the back panels again removed. The lights still flashed, the alarm still shrieked.

“What is it?” Norman shouted.

“Equipment breakdown!”

“What equipment breakdown?”

“We can’t turn the damn alarm off!” Barnes shouted. “It turned it on, but we can’t turn it off! Teeny-”

“-W orking on it, sir!”