"Ten seconds," Harry said. "Nine ... eight ... Brace yourself!"
Norman pulled Beth to his chest as the explosion rocked the submarine, spinning it like a toy, upending it, then righting it again, and lifting it in a giant upward surge.
"Mama!" Harry shouted, but they were still rising, they were okay. "We did it!"
"Two hundred feet," Norman said. The water outside was now light blue. He pushed buttons, slowing the ascent. They were going up very fast.
Harry was screaming, pounding Norman on the back. "We did it! God damn it, you son of a bitch, we did it! We survived! I never thought we would! We survived!"
Norman was having trouble seeing the instruments for tears in his eyes.
And then he had to squint as bright sunlight streamed into the bubble canopy as they surfaced, and they saw calm seas, sky, and fluffy clouds.
"Do you see that?" Harry cried. He was screaming in Norman's ear. "Do you see that? It is a perfect goddamned day!"
0000 HOURS
Norman awoke to see a brilliant shaft of light, streaming through the single porthole, shining down on the chemical toilet in the corner of the decompression chamber. He lay on his bunk and looked around the chamber, a horizontal cylinder fifty feet long: bunks, a metal table and chairs in the center of the cylinder, toilet behind a small partition. Harry snored in the bunk above him. Across the chamber, Beth slept, one arm flung over her face. Faintly, from a distance, he heard men shouting.
Norman yawned, and swung off the bunk. His body was sore but he was otherwise all right. He walked to the shining porthole and looked out, squinting in the bright Pacific sun.
He saw the rear deck of the research ship John Hawes: the white helicopter pad, heavy coiled cables, the tubular metal frame of an underwater robot. A Navy crew was lowering a second robot over the side, with a lot of shouting and swearing and waving of hands; Norman had heard their voices faintly through the thick steel walls of the chamber.
Near the chamber itself, a muscular seaman rolled a large green tank marked "Oxygen" alongside a dozen other tanks on the deck. The three-man medical crew which supervised the decompression chamber played cards.
Looking through the inch-thick glass of the porthole, Norman felt as if he were peering into a miniature world to which he had little connection, a kind of terrarium populated by interesting and exotic specimens. This new world was as alien to him as the dark ocean world had once seemed from inside the habitat.
He watched the crew slap down their cards on a wooden packing crate, watched them laugh and gesture as the game proceeded. They never glanced in his direction, never looked at the decompression chamber. Norman didn't understand these young men. Were they supposed to be paying attention to the decompression? They looked young and inexperienced to Norman. Focused on their card game, they seemed indifferent to the huge metal chamber nearby, indifferent to the three survivors inside the chamber - and indifferent to the larger meaning of the mission, to the news the survivors had brought back to the surface. These cheerful Navy cardplayers didn't seem to give a damn about Norman's mission. But perhaps they didn't know.
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."