He glanced at his watch. "I'm going to brief the team members at eleven hundred hours. I want you to come along, and see what you think about the team members," Barnes said. "After all, we followed your ULF report recommendations."

You followed my recommendations, Norman thought with a sinking feeling. Jesus Christ, I was just paying for a house.

"I knew you'd jump at the opportunity to see your ideas put into practice," Barnes said. "That's why I've included you on the team as the psychologist, although a younger man would be more appropriate."

"I appreciate that," Norman said.

"I knew you would," Barnes said, smiling cheerfully. He extended a beefy hand. "Welcome to the ULF Team, Dr. Johnson."

BETH

An ensign showed norman to his room, tiny and gray, more like a prison cell than anything else. Norman's day bag lay on his bunk. In the corner was a computer console and a keyboard. Next to it was a thick manual with a blue cover.

He sat on the bed, which was hard, unwelcoming. He leaned back against a pipe on the wall.

"Hi, Norman," a soft voice said. "I'm glad to see they dragged you into this. This is all your fault, isn't it?" A woman stood in the doorway.

Beth Halpern, the team zoologist, was a study in contrasts. She was a tall, angular woman of thirty-six who could be called pretty despite her sharp features and the almost masculine quality of her body. In the years since Norman had last seen her, she seemed to have emphasized her masculine side even more. Beth was a serious weight-lifter and runner; the veins and muscles bulged at her neck and on her forearms, and her legs, beneath her shorts, were powerful. Her hair was cut short, hardly longer than a man's.

At the same time, she wore jewelry and makeup, and she moved in a seductive way. Her voice was soft, and her eyes were large and liquid, especially when she talked about the living things that she studied. At those times she became almost maternal. One of her colleagues at the University of Chicago had referred to her as "Mother Nature with muscles."

Norman got up, and she gave him a quick peck on the cheek. "My room's next to yours, I heard you arrive. When did you get in?"

"An hour ago. I think I'm still in shock," Norman said. "Do you believe all this? Do you think it's real?"

"I think that's real." She pointed to the blue manual next to his computer.

Norman picked it up: Regulations Governing Personnel Conduct During Classified Military Operations. He thumbed through pages of dense legal text.

"It basically says," Beth said, "that you keep your mouth shut or you spend a long time in military prison. And there's no calls in or out. Yes, Norman, I think it must be real."

"There's a spacecraft down there?"

"There's something down there. It's pretty exciting." She began to speak more rapidly. "Why, for biology alone, the possibilities are staggering - everything we know about life comes from studying life on our own planet. But, in a sense, all life on our planet is the same. Every living creature, from algae to human beings, is basically built on the same plan, from the same DNA. Now we may have a chance to contact life that is entirely different, different in every way. It's exciting, all right."

Norman nodded. He was thinking of something else. "What did you say about no calls in or out? I promised to call Ellen."

"Well, I tried to call my daughter and they told me the mainland com links are out. If you can believe that. The Navy's got more satellites than admirals, but they swear there's no available line to call out. Barnes said he'd approve a cable. That's it."

"How old is Jennifer now?" Norman asked, pleased to pull the name from his memory. And what was her husband's name? He was a physicist, Norman remembered, something like that. Sandy blond man. Had a beard. Wore bow ties.

"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 BRIEFING

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 na?vete 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.

Many theorists argued that communication with extraterrestrials would prove impossible, because human beings would have nothing in common with them. These thinkers pointed out that just as human bodies represented the outcome of many evolutionary events, so did human thought. Like our bodies, our ways of thinking could easily have turned out differently; there was nothing inevitable about how we looked at the universe.

Men already had trouble communicating with intelligent Earthly creatures such as dolphins, simply because dolphins lived in such a different environment and had such different sensory apparatus.

Yet men and dolphins might appear virtually identical when compared with the vast differences that separated us from an extraterrestrial creature - a creature who was the product of billions of years of divergent evolution in some other planetary environment. Such an extraterrestrial would be unlikely to see the world as we did. In fact, it might not see the world at all. It might be blind, and it might learn about the world through a highly developed sense of smell, or temperature, or pressure. There might be no way to communicate with such a creature, no common ground at all. As one man put it, how would you explain Wordsworth's poem about daffodils to a blind watersnake?

But the field of knowledge we were most likely to share with extraterrestrials was mathematics. So the team mathematician was going to play a crucial role. Norman had selected Adams because, despite his youth, Harry had already made important contributions to several different fields.

"What do you think about all this, Harry?" Norman said, dropping into a chair next to him.

"I think it's perfectly clear," Harry said, "that it is a waste of time."

"This fin they've found underwater?"

"I don't know what it is, but I know what it isn't. It isn't a spacecraft from another civilization."

Ted, standing nearby, turned away in annoyance. Harry and Ted had evidently had this same conversation already. "How do you know?" Norman asked.

"A simple calculation," Harry said, with a dismissing wave of his hand. "Trivial, really. You know the Drake equation?"

Norman did. It was one of the famous proposals in the literature on extraterrestrial life. But he said, "Refresh me."

Harry sighed irritably, pulled out a sheet of paper. "It's a probability equation." He wrote:

p = fpnhflfifc

"What it means," Harry Adams said, "is that the probability, p, that intelligent life will evolve in any star system is a function of the probability that the star will have planets, the number of habitable planets, the probability that simple life will evolve on a habitable planet, the probability that intelligent life will evolve from simple life, and the probability that intelligent life will attempt interstellar communication within five billion years. That's all the equation says."

"Uh-huh," Norman said.

"But the point is that we have no facts," Harry said. "We must guess at every single one of these probabilities. And it's quite easy to guess one way, as Ted does, and conclude there are probably thousands of intelligent civilizations. It's equally easy to guess, as I do, that there is probably only one civilization. Ours." He pushed the paper away. "And in that case, whatever is down there is not from an alien civilization. So we're all wasting our time here."

"Then what is down there?" Norman said again.

"It is an absurd expression of romantic hope," Adams said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. There was a vehemence about him that troubled Norman. Six years earlier, Harry Adams had still been a street kid whose obscure talent had carried him in a single step from a broken home in the slums of Philadelphia to the manicured green lawns of Princeton. In those days Adams had been playful, amused at his turn of fortune. Why was he so harsh now?

Adams was an extraordinarily gifted theoretician, his reputation secured in probability-density functions of quantum mechanics which were beyond Norman's comprehension, although Adams had worked them out when he was seventeen. But Norman could certainly understand the man himself, and Harry Adams seemed tense and critical now, ill at ease in this group.

Or perhaps it had to do with his presence as part of a group. Norman had worried about how he would fit in, because Harry had been a child prodigy.

There were really only two kinds of child prodigies - mathematical and musical. Some psychologists argued there was only one kind, since music was so closely related to mathematics. While there were precocious children with other talents, such as writing, painting, and athletics, the only areas in which a child might truly perform at the level of an adult were in mathematics or music. Psychologically, such children were complex: often loners, isolated from their peers and even from their families by their gifts, for which they were both admired and resented. Socialization skills were often retarded, making group interactions uncomfortable. As a slum kid, Harry's problems would have been, if anything, magnified. He had once told Norman that when he first learned about Fourier transforms, the other kids were learning to slam-dunk. So maybe Harry was feeling uncomfortable in the group now.

But there seemed to be something else. ... Harry appeared almost angry.

"You wait," Adams said. "A week from now, this is going to be recognized as one big fat false alarm. Nothing more."

You hope, Norman thought. And again wondered why.

"Well, I think it's exciting," Beth Halpern said, smiling brightly. "Even a slim chance of finding new life is exciting, as far as I am concerned."

"That's right," Ted said. "After all, Harry, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy."

Norman looked over at the final member of the team, Arthur Levine, the marine biologist. Levine was the only person he didn't know. A pudgy man, Levine looked pale and uneasy, wrapped in his own thoughts. He was about to ask Levine what he thought when Captain Barnes strode in, a stack of files under his arm.

"Welcome to the middle of nowhere," Barnes said, "and you can't even go to the bathroom." They all laughed nervously. "Sorry to keep you waiting," he said. "But we don't have a lot of time, so let's get right down to it. If you'll kill the lights, we can begin."

The first slide showed a large ship with an elaborate superstructure on the stern.

"The Rose Sealady," Barnes said. "A cable-laying vessel chartered by Transpac Communications to lay a submarine telephone line from Honolulu to Sydney, Australia. The Rose left Hawaii on May 29 of this year, and by June 16 it had gotten as far as Western Samoa in the mid-Pacific. It was laying a new fiber-optics cable, which has a carrying capacity of twenty thousand simultaneous telephonic transmissions. The cable is covered with a dense metal-and-plastics web matrix, unusually tough and resistant to breaks. The ship had already laid more than forty-six hundred nautical miles of cable across the Pacific with no mishaps of any sort. Next."

A map of the Pacific, with a large red spot.

"At ten p.m. on the night of June 17, the vessel was located here, midway between Pago Pago in American Samoa and Viti Levu in Fiji, when the ship experienced a wrenching shudder. Alarms sounded, and the crew realized the cable had snagged and torn. They immediately consulted their charts, looking for an underwater obstruction, but could see none. They hauled up the loose cable, which took several hours, since at the time of the accident they had more than a mile of cable paid out behind the ship. When they examined the cut end, they saw that it had been cleanly sheared-as one crewman said, 'like it was cut with a huge pair of scissors.' Next."

A section of Fiberglas cable held toward the camera in the rough hand of a sailor.

"The nature of the break, as you can see, suggests an artificial obstruction of some sort. The Rose steamed north back over the scene of the break. Next."

A series of ragged black-and-white lines, with a region of small spikes.

"This is the original sonar scan from the ship. If you can't read sonar scans this'll be hard to interpret, but you see here the thin, knife-edge obstruction. Consistent with a sunken ship or aircraft, which cut the cable.

"The charter company, Transpac Communications, notified the Navy, requesting any information we had about the obstruction. This is routine: whenever there is a cable break, the Navy is notified, on the chance that the obstruction is known to us. If it's a sunken vessel containing explosives, the cable company wants to know about it before they start repair. But in this case the obstruction was not in Navy files. And the Navy was interested.

"We immediately dispatched our nearest search ship, the Ocean Explorer, from Melbourne. The Ocean Explorer reached the site on June 21 of this year. The reason for the Navy interest was the possibility that the obstruction might represent a sunken Chinese Wuhan-class nuclear submarine fitted with SY-2 missiles. We knew the Chinese lost such a sub in this approximate area in May 1984. The Ocean Explorer scanned the bottom, using a most sophisticated sidelooking sonar, which produced this picture of the bottom."

In color, the image was almost three-dimensional in its clarity.

"As you see, the bottom appears flat except for a single triangular fin which sticks up some two hundred and eighty feet above the ocean floor. You see it here," he said, pointing. "Now, this wing dimension is larger than any known aircraft manufactured in either the United States or the Soviet Union. This was very puzzling at first. Next."

A submersible robot, being lowered on a crane over the side of a ship. The robot looked like a series of horizontal tubes with cameras and lights nestled in the center.

"By June 24, the Navy had the ROV carrier Neptune IV on site, and the Remote Operated Vehicle Scorpion, which you see here, was sent down to photograph the wing. It returned an image that clearly showed a control surface of some sort. Here it is."

There were murmurs from the group. In a harshly lit color image, a gray fin stuck up from a flat coral floor. The fin was sharp-edged and aeronautical-looking, tapered, definitely artificial.

"You'll notice," Barnes said, "that the sea bottom in this region consists of scrubby dead coral. The wing or fin disappears into the coral, suggesting the rest of the aircraft might be buried beneath. An ultra-high-resolution SLS bottom scan was carried out, to detect the shape underneath the coral. Next."

Another color sonar image, composed of fine dots instead of lines.

"As you see, the fin seems to be attached to a cylindrical object buried under the coral. The object has a diameter of a hundred and ninety feet, and extends west for a distance of 2,754 feet before tapering to a point."

More murmurings from the audience.

"That's correct," Barnes said. "The cylindrical object is half a mile long. The shape is consistent with a rocket or spacecraft - it certainly looks like that - but from the beginning we were careful to refer to this object as 'the anomaly.' "

Norman glanced over at Ted, who was smiling up at the screen. But alongside Ted in the darkness, Harry Adams frowned and pushed his glasses up on his nose.

Then the projector light went out. The room was plunged into darkness. There were groans. Norman heard Barnes say, "God damn it, not again!" Someone scrambled for the door; there was a rectangle of light.

Beth leaned over to Norman and said, "They lose power here all the time. Reassuring, huh?"

Moments later, the electricity came back on; Barnes continued. "On June 25 a SCARAB remote vehicle cut a piece from the tail fin and brought it to the surface. The fin segment was analyzed and found to be a titanium alloy in an epoxy-resin honeycomb. The necessary bonding technology for such metal/plastic materials was currently unknown on Earth.

"Experts confirmed that the fin could not have originated on this planet - although in ten or twenty years we'd probably know how to make it."

Harry Adams grunted, leaned forward, made a note on his pad.

Meanwhile, Barnes explained, other robot vessels were used to plant seismic charges on the bottom. Seismic analysis showed that the buried anomaly was of metal, that it was hollow, and that it had a complex internal structure.

"After two weeks of intensive study," Barnes said, "we concluded the anomaly was some sort of spacecraft."

The final verification came on June 27 from the geologists. Their core samples from the bottom indicated that the present seabed had formerly been much shallower, perhaps only eighty or ninety feet deep. This would explain the coral, which covered the craft to an average thickness of thirty feet. Therefore, the geologists said, the craft had been on the planet at least three hundred years, and perhaps much longer: five hundred, or even five thousand years.

"However reluctantly," Barnes said, "the Navy concluded that we had, in fact, found a spacecraft from another civilization. The decision of the President, before a special meeting of the National Security Council, was to open the spacecraft. So, starting June 29, the ULF team members were called in."

On July 1, the subsea habitat DH-7 was lowered into position near the spacecraft site. DH-7 housed nine Navy divers working in a saturated exotic-gas environment. They proceeded to do primary drilling work. "And I think that brings you up to date," Barnes said. "Any questions?"

Ted said, "The internal structure of the spacecraft. Has it been clarified?"

"Not at this point. The spacecraft seems to be built in such a way that shock waves are transmitted around the outer shell, which is tremendously strong and well engineered. That prevents a clear picture of the interior from the seismics."

"How about passive techniques to see what's inside?"

"We've tried," Barnes said. "Gravitometric analysis, negative. Thermography, negative. Resistivity mapping, negative. Proton precision magnetometers, negative."

"Listening devices?"

"We've had hydrophones on the bottom from day one. There have been no sounds emanating from the craft. At least not so far."

"What about other remote inspection procedures?"

"Most involve radiation, and we're hesitant to irradiate the craft at this time."

Harry said, "Captain Barnes, I notice the fin appears undamaged, and the hull appears a perfect cylinder. Do you think that this object crashed in the ocean?"

"Yes," Barnes said, looking uneasy.

"So this object has survived a high-speed impact with the water, without a scratch or a dent?"

"Well, it's tremendously strong."

Harry nodded. "It would have to be. ..."

Beth said, "The divers who are down there now - what exactly are they doing?"

"Looking for the front door." Barnes smiled. "For the time being, we've had to fall back on classical archaeological procedures. We're digging exploratory trenches in the coral, looking for an entrance or a hatch of some kind. We hope to find it within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Once we do, you're going in. Anything else?"

"Yes," Ted said. "What was the Russian reaction to this discovery?"

"We haven't told the Russians," Barnes said.

"You haven't told them?"

"No. We haven't."

"But this is an incredible, unprecedented development in human history. Not just American history. Human history. Surely we should share this with all the nations of the world. This is the sort of discovery that could unite all of mankind - "

"You'd have to speak to the President," Barnes said. "I don't know the reasoning behind it, but it's his decision. Any other questions?"

Nobody said anything. The team looked at each other.

"Then I guess that's it," Barnes said.

The lights came on. There was the scraping of chairs as people stood, stretched. Then Harry Adams said, "Captain Barnes, I must say I resent this briefing very much."

Barnes looked surprised. "What do you mean, Harry?" The others stopped, looked at Adams. He remained seated in his chair, an irritated look on his face. "Did you decide you have to break the news to us gently?"

"What news?"

"The news about the door."

Barnes laughed uneasily. "Harry, I just got through telling you that the divers are cutting exploratory trenches, looking for the door - "

" - I'd say you had a pretty good idea where the door was three days ago, when you started flying us in. And I'd say that by now you probably know exactly where the door is. Am I right?"

Barnes said nothing. He stood with a fixed smile on his face.

My God, Norman thought, looking at Barnes. Harry's right. Harry was known to have a superbly logical brain, an astonishing and cold deductive ability, but Norman had never seen him at work.

"Yes," Barnes said, finally. "You're right."

"You know the location of the door?"

"We do. Yes."

There was a moment of silence, and then Ted said, "But this is fantastic! Absolutely fantastic! When will we go down there to enter the spacecraft?"

"Tomorrow," Barnes said, never taking his eyes off Harry. And Harry, for his own part, stared fixedly at Barnes. "The minisubs will take you down in pairs, starting at oh eight hundred hours tomorrow morning."

"This is exciting!" Ted said. "Fantastic! Unbelievable."

"So," Barnes said, still watching Harry, "you should all get a good night's sleep - if you can."

" 'Innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,' " Ted said. He was literally bobbing up and down in his chair with excitement.

"During the rest of the day, supply and technical officers will be coming to measure and outfit you. Any other questions," Barnes said, "you can find me in my office."

He left the room, and the meeting broke up. When the others filed out, Norman remained behind, with Harry Adams. Harry never moved from his chair. He watched the technician packing up the portable screen.

"That was quite a performance just now," Norman said.

"Was it? I don't see why."

"You deduced that Barnes wasn't telling us about the door."

"Oh, there's much more he's not telling us about," Adams said, in a cold voice. "He's not telling us about any of the important things."

"Like what?"

"Like the fact," Harry said, getting to his feet at last, "that Captain Barnes knows perfectly well why the President decided to keep this a secret."

"He does?"

"The President had no choice, under the circumstances."

"What circumstances?"

"He knows that the object down there is not an alien spacecraft."

"Then what is it?"

"I think it's quite clear what it is."

"Not to me," Norman said.

Adams smiled for the first time. It was a thin smile, entirely without humor. "You wouldn't believe it if I told you," he said. And he left the room.

TESTS

Arthur levine, the marine biologist, was the only member of the expedition Norman Johnson had not met. It was one of the things we hadn't planned for, he thought. Norman had assumed that any contact with unknown life would occur on land; he hadn't considered the most obvious possibility - that if a spacecraft landed at random somewhere on the Earth, it would most likely come down on water, since 70 percent of the planet was covered with water. It was obvious in retrospect that they would need a marine biologist.

What else, he wondered, would prove obvious in retrospect?

He found Levine hanging off the port railing. Levine came from the oceanographic institute at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. His hand was damp when Norman shook it. Levine looked extremely ill at ease, and finally admitted that he was seasick.

"Seasick? A marine biologist?" Norman said.

"I work in the laboratory," he said. "At home. On land. Where things don't move all the time. Why are you smiling?"

"Sorry," Norman said.

"You think it's funny, a seasick marine biologist?"

"Incongruous, I guess."

"A lot of us get seasick," Levine said. He stared out at the sea. "Look out there," he said. "Thousands of miles of flat. Nothing."

"The ocean."

"It gives me the creeps," Levine said.

"So?" Barnes said, back in his office. "What do you think?"

"Of what?"

"Of the team, for Christ's sake."

"It's the team I chose, six years later. Basically a good group, certainly very able."

"I want to know who will crack."

"Why should anybody crack?" Norman said. He was looking at Barnes, noticing the thin line of sweat on his upper lip. The commander was under a lot of pressure himself.

"A thousand feet down?" Barnes said. "Living and working in a cramped habitat? Listen, it's not like I'm going in with military divers who have been trained and who have themselves under control. I'm taking a bunch of scientists, for God's sake. I want to make sure they all have a clean bill of health. I want to make sure nobody's going to crack."

"I don't know if you are aware of this, Captain, but psychologists can't predict that very accurately. Who will crack."

"Even when it's from fear?"

"Whatever it's from."

Barnes frowned. "I thought fear was your specialty."

"Anxiety is one of my research interests and I can tell you who, on the basis of personality profiles, is likely to suffer acute anxiety in a stress situation. But I can't predict who'll crack under that stress and who won't."

"Then what good are you?" Barnes said irritably. He sighed. "I'm sorry. Don't you just want to interview them, or give them some tests?"

"There aren't any tests," Norman said. "At least, none that work."

Barnes sighed again. "What about Levine?"

"He's seasick."

"There isn't any motion underwater; that won't be a problem. But what about him, personally?"

"I'd be concerned," Norman said.

"Duly noted. What about Harry Adams? He's arrogant."

"Yes," Norman said. "But that's probably desirable." Studies had shown that the people who were most successful at handling pressure were people others didn't like - individuals who were described as arrogant, cocksure, irritating.

"Maybe so," Barnes said. "But what about his famous research paper? Harry was one of the biggest supporters of SETI a few years back. Now that we've found something, he's suddenly very negative. You remember his paper?"

Norman didn't, and was about to say so when an ensign came in. "Captain Barnes, here is the visual upgrade you wanted."

"Okay," Barnes said. He squinted at a photograph, put it down. "What about the weather?"

"No change, sir. Satellite reports are confirming we have forty-eight plus-minus twelve on site, sir."

"Hell," Barnes said.

"Trouble?" Norman asked.

"The weather's going bad on us," Barnes said. "We may have to clear out our surface support."

"Does that mean you'll cancel going down there?"

"No," Barnes said. "We go tomorrow, as planned."

"Why does Harry think this thing is not a spacecraft?" Norman asked.

Barnes frowned, pushed papers on his desk. "Let me tell you something," he said. "Harry's a theoretician. And theories are just that - theories. I deal in the hard facts. The fact is, we've got something damn old and damn strange down there. I want to know what it is."

"But if it's not an alien spacecraft, what is it?"

"Let's just wait until we get down there, shall we?" Barnes glanced at his watch. "The second habitat should be anchored on the sea floor by now. We'll begin moving you down in fifteen hours. Between now and then, we've all got a lot to do."

"Just hold it there, Dr. Johnson." Norman stood naked, felt two metal calipers pinch the back of his arms, just above the elbow. "Just a bit ... that's fine. Now you can get into the tank."

The young medical corpsman stepped aside, and Norman climbed the steps to the metal tank, which looked like a military version of a Jacuzzi. The tank was filled to the top with water. As he lowered his body into the water, it spilled over the sides.

"What's all this for?" Norman asked.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Johnson. If you would completely immerse yourself ..."

"What?"

"Just for a moment, sir ..."

Norman took a breath, ducked under the water, came back up.

"That's fine, you can get out now," the corpsman said, handing him a towel.

"What's all this for?" he asked again, climbing down the ladder.

"Total body adipose content," the corpsman said. "We have to know it, to calculate your sat stats."

"My sat stats?"

"Your saturation statistics." The corpsman marked points on his clipboard.

"Oh dear," he said. "You're off the graph."

"Why is that?"

"Do you get much exercise, Dr. Johnson?"

"Some." He was feeling defensive now. And the towel was too small to wrap around his waist. Why did the Navy use such small towels?

"Do you drink?"

"Some." He was feeling distinctly defensive. No question about it.

"May I ask when you last consumed an alcoholic beverage, sir?"

"I don't know. Two, three days ago." He was having trouble thinking back to San Diego. It seemed so far away. "Why?"

"That's fine, Dr. Johnson. Any trouble with joints, hips or knees?"

"No, why?"

"Episodes of syncope, faintness or blackouts?"

"No ..."

"If you would just sit over here, sir." The corpsman pointed to a stool, next to an electronic device on the wall. "I'd really like some answers," Norman said.

"Just stare at the green dot, both eyes wide open. ..."