He turned back to the chamber, sat down at the table. His knee throbbed, and the skin was swollen around the white bandage. He had been treated by a Navy physician during their transfer from the submarine to the decompression chamber. They had been taken off the minisub Deepstar III in a pressurized diving bell, and from there had been transferred to the large chamber on the deck of the ship-the SDC, the Navy called it, the surface decompression chamber. They were going to spend four days here. Norman wasn’t sure how long he had been here so far. They had all immediately gone to sleep, and there was no clock in the chamber. The face of his own wristwatch was smashed, although he didn’t remember it happening.

On the table in front of him, someone had scratched “U.S.N. SUCKS” into the surface. Norman ran his fingers over the grooves, and remembered the grooves in the silver sphere. But he and Harry and Beth were in the hands of the Navy now.

And he thought: What are we going to tell them?

“What are we going to tell them?” Beth said.

It was several hours later; Beth and Harry had awakened, and now they were all sitting around the scarred metal table. None of them had made any attempt to talk to the crew outside. It was, Norman thought, as if they shared an unspoken agreement to remain in isolation a while longer.

“I think we’ll have to tell them everything,” Harry said.

“I don’t think we should,” Norman said. He was surprised by the strength of his conviction, the firmness of his own voice.

“I agree,” Beth said. “I’m not sure the world is ready for that sphere. I certainly wasn’t.”

She gave Norman a sheepish look. He put his hand on her shoulder.

“That’s fine,” Harry said. “But look at it from the standpoint of the Navy. The Navy has mounted a large and expensive operation; six people have died, and two habitats have been destroyed. They’re going to want answers-and they’re going to keep asking until they get them.”

“We can refuse to talk,” Beth said.

“That won’t make any difference,” Harry said. “Remember, the Navy has all the tapes.”

“That’s right, the tapes,” Norman said. He had forgotten about the videotapes they had brought up in the submarine. Dozens of tapes, documenting everything that had happened in the habitat during their time underwater. Documenting the squid, the deaths, the sphere. Documenting everything.

“We should have destroyed those tapes,” Beth said.

“Perhaps we should have,” Harry said. “But it’s too late now. We can’t prevent the Navy from getting the answers they want.”

Norman sighed. Harry was right. At this point there was no way to conceal what had happened, or to prevent the Navy from finding out about the sphere, and the power it conveyed. That power would represent a kind of ultimate weapon: the ability to overcome your enemies simply by imagining it had happened. It was frightening in its implications, and there was nothing they could do about it. Unless-

“I think we can prevent them from knowing,” Norman said.

“How?” Harry said.

“We still have the power, don’t we?”

“I guess so.”

“And that power,” Norman said, “consists of the ability to make anything happen, simply by thinking it.”

“Yes…”

“Then we can prevent the Navy from knowing. We can decide to forget the whole thing.”

Harry frowned. “That’s an interesting question: whether we have the power to forget the power.”

“I think we should forget it,” Beth said. “That sphere is too dangerous.”

They fell silent, considering the implications of forgetting the sphere. Because forgetting would not merely prevent the Navy from knowing about the sphere-it would erase all knowledge of it, including their own. Make it vanish from human consciousness, as if it had never existed in the first place. Remove it from the awareness of the human species, forever.

“Big step,” Harry said. “After all we’ve been through, just to forget about it…”

“It’s because of all we’ve been through, Harry,” Beth said. “Let’s face it-we didn’t handle ourselves very well.” Norman noticed that she spoke without rancor now, her previous combative edge gone.

“I’m afraid that’s true,” Norman said.”The sphere was built to test whatever intelligent life might pick it up, and we simply failed that test.”

“Is that what you think the sphere was made for?” H said. “I don’t.”

“Then what?” Norman said.

“Well,” Harry said, “look at it this way: Suppose you were an intelligent bacterium floating in space, and you came upon one of our communication satellites, in orbit around the Earth. You would think, What a strange, alien object this is, let’s explore it. Suppose you opened it up and crawled inside. You would find it very interesting in there, with lots of huge things to puzzle over. But eventually you might climb into one of the fuel cells, and the hydrogen would kill you. And your last thought would be: This alien device was obviously made to test bacterial intelligence and to kill us if we make a false step.

“Now, that would be correct from the standpoint of the dying bacterium. But that wouldn’t be correct at all from the standpoint of the beings who made the satellite. From our point of view, the communications satellite has nothing to do with intelligent bacteria. We don’t even know that there are intelligent bacteria out there. We’re just trying to communicate, and we’ve made what we consider a quite ordinary device to do it.”

“You mean the sphere might not be a message or a trophy or a trap at all?”

“That’s right,” Harry said. “The sphere may have nothing to do with the search for other life forms, or testing life, as we might imagine those activities to occur. It may be an accident that the sphere causes such profound changes in us.”

“But why would someone build such a machine?” Norman said.

“That’s the same question an intelligent bacterium would ask about a communications satellite: Why would anyone build such a thing?”

“For that matter,” Beth said, “it may not be a machine. The sphere may be a life form. It may be alive.”

“Possible,” Harry said, nodding.

Beth said, “So, if the sphere is alive, do we have an obligation to keep it alive?”

“We don’t know if it is alive.”

Norman sat back in the chair. “All this speculation is interesting,” he said, “but when you get down to it, we don’t really know anything about the sphere. In fact, we shouldn’t even be calling it the sphere. We probably should just call it ‘sphere.’ Because we don’t know what it is. We don’t know where it came from. We don’t know whether it’s living or dead. We don’t know how it came to be inside that spaceship. We don’t know anything about it except what we imagine-and what we imagine says more about us than it does about the sphere.”

“Right,” Harry said.

“Because it’s literally a sort of mirror for us,” Norman said.

“Speaking of which, there’s another possibility,” Harry said. “It may not be alien at all. It may be man-made.” That took Norman completely by surprise. Harry explained.

“Consider,” Harry said. “A ship from our own future went through a black hole, into another universe, or another part of our universe. We cannot imagine what would happen as a result of that. But suppose there were some major distortion of time. Suppose that ship, which left with a human crew in the year 2043, actually has been in transit for thousands and thousands of years. Couldn’t the human crew have invented it during that time?”

“I don’t think that’s likely,” Beth said.

“Well, let’s consider for a moment, Beth,” Harry said gently. Norman noticed that Harry wasn’t arrogant any more. They were all in this together, Norman thought, and they were working together in a way they never had before. All the time underwater they had been at odds, but now they functioned smoothly together, coordinated. A team.