Sphere (Page 73)

"Jesus."

"Yeah. You want to get up?"

"Yeah, I’ll get in the bunk. I’m real tired, Norman. I could sleep for a year."

Norman helped him to his feet. Harry dropped quickly onto the nearest bunk.

"Okay if I sleep for a while?"

"Sure."

"That’s good. I’m real tired, Norman. I could sleep for a year."

"Yes, you said that – "

He broke off. Harry was snoring. Norman reached over to remove something crumpled on the pillow beneath Harry’s head.

It was Ted Fielding’s notebook.

Norman suddenly felt overwhelmed. He sat on his bunk, holding the notebook in his hands. Finally he looked at a couple of pages, filled with Ted’s large, enthusiastic scrawl. A photograph fell onto his lap. He turned it over. It was a photo of a red Corvette. And the feelings just overwhelmed him. Norman didn’t know if he was crying for Ted, or crying for himself, because it was clear to him that one by one, they were all dying down here. He was very sad, and very afraid.

Beth was in D Cyl, at the communications console, turning on all the monitors.

"They did a pretty good job with this place," she said. "Everything is marked; everything has instructions; there’re computer help files. An idiot could figure it out. There’s just one problem that I can see."

"What’s that?"

"The galley was in E Cyl, and E Cyl is flooded. We’ve got no food, Norman."

"None at all?"

"I don’t think so."

"Water?"

"Yes, plenty of water, but no food."

"Well, we can make it without food. How much longer have we got down here?"

"It looks like two more days."

"We can make it," Norman said, thinking: Two days, Jesus. Two more days in this place.

"That’s assuming the storm clears on schedule," Beth added. "I’ve been trying to figure out how to release a surface balloon, and see what it’s like up there. Tina used to punch some special code to release a balloon."

"We can make it," Norman said again.

"Oh sure. If worse comes to worst, we can always get food from the spaceship. There’s plenty over there."

"You think we can risk going outside?"

"We’ll have to," she said, glancing at the screens, "sometime in the next three hours."

"Why?"

"The minisub. It has that automatic surfacing timer, unless someone goes over and punches the button."

"The hell with the sub," Norman said. "Let the sub go." "Well, don’t be too hasty," Beth said. "That sub can hold three people."

"You mean we could all get out of here in it?"

"Yeah. That’s what I mean."

"Christ," Norman said. "Let’s go now."

"There are two problems with that," Beth said. She pointed to the screens. "I’ve been going over the specs. First, the sub is unstable on the surface. If there are big waves on the surface, it’ll bounce us around worse than anything we’ve had down here. And the second thing is that we have to link up with a decompression chamber on the surface. Don’t forget, we still have ninety-six hours of decompression ahead of us."

"And if we don’t decompress?" Norman said. He was thinking, Let’s just go to the surface in the sub and throw open the hatch and see the clouds and the sky and breathe some normal earth air.

"We have to decompress," Beth said. "Your bloodstream is saturated with helium gas in solution. Right now you’re under pressure, so everything is fine. But if you release that pressure suddenly, it’s just the same as when you pop the top off a soda bottle. The helium will bubble explosively out of your system. You’ll die instantly."

"Oh," Norman said.

"Ninety-six hours," Beth said. "That’s how long it takes to get the helium out of you."

"Oh."

Norman went to the porthole and looked across at DH-7, and the minisub. It was a hundred yards away. "You think the squid will come back?"

She shrugged. "Ask Jerry."

Norman thought, No more of that Geraldine stuff now. Or did she prefer to think of this malevolent entity as masculine?

"Which monitor is it?"

"This one." She flicked it on. The screen glowed.

Norman said, "Jerry? Are you there?"

No answer.

He typed, JERRY? ARE YOU THERE?

There was no response.

"I’ll tell you something about Jerry," Beth said. "He can’t really read minds. When we were talking to him before, I sent him a thought and he didn’t respond."

"I did, too," Norman said. "I sent both messages and images. He never responded."

"If we speak, he answers, but if we just think, he doesn’t answer," Beth said. "So he’s not all-powerful. He actually behaves as if he hears us."

"That’s right," Norman said. "Although he doesn’t seem to be hearing us now."

"No. I tried earlier, too."

"I wonder why he isn’t answering."

"You said he was emotional. Maybe he’s sulking."

Norman didn’t think so. Child kings didn’t sulk. They were vindictive and whimsical, but they didn’t sulk.

"By the way," she said, "you might want to look at these." She handed him a stack of printouts. "They’re the record of all the interactions we’ve had with him."

"They may give us a clue," Norman said, thumbing through the sheets without any real enthusiasm. He felt suddenly tired.

"Anyway, it’ll occupy your mind."

"True."

"Personally," Beth said, "I’d like to go back to the ship."