"But you aren't tired."
"Oh, I'm used to it. I've been in saturated environments before."
"Is that right? Where?"
"I really can't say, Dr. Johnson."
"Navy operations?"
She smiled. "I'm not supposed to talk about it."
"Is that your inscrutable smile?"
"I hope so, sir. But don't you think you ought to try and sleep?"
He nodded. "Probably."
Norman considered going to sleep, but the prospect of his damp bunk was unappealing. Instead he went down to the galley, hoping to find one of Rose Levy's desserts. Levy was not there, but there was some coconut cake under a plastic dome. He found a plate, cut a slice, and took it over to one of the portholes. But it was black outside the porthole; the grid lights were turned off, the divers gone. He saw lights in the portholes of DH-7, the divers' habitat, located a few dozen yards away. The divers must be getting ready to go back to the surface. Or perhaps they had already gone.
In the porthole, he saw his own face reflected. The face looked tired, and old. "This is no place for a fifty-three-year-old man," he said, watching his reflection.
As he looked out, he saw some moving lights in the distance, then a flash of yellow. One of the minisubs pulled up under a cylinder at DH-7. Moments later, a second sub arrived, to dock alongside it. The lights on the first sub went out. After a short time, the second sub pulled away, into the black water. The first sub was left behind.
What's going on, he wondered, but he was aware he didn't really care. He was too tired. He was more interested in what the cake would taste like, and looked down. The cake was eaten. Only a few crumbs remained.
Tired, he thought. Very tired. He put his feet up on the coffee table and put his head back against the cool padding of the wall.
He must have fallen asleep for a while, because he awoke disoriented, in darkness. He sat up and immediately the lights came on. He saw he was still in the galley.
Barnes had warned him about that, the way the habitat adjusted to the presence of people. Apparently the motion sensors stopped registering you if you fell asleep, and automatically shut off the room lights. Then when you awoke, and moved, the lights came back. He wondered if the lights would stay on if you snored. Who had designed all this? he wondered. Had the engineers and designers working on the Navy habitat taken snoring into account? Was there a snore sensor? More cake.
He got up and walked across to the galley kitchen. Several pieces of cake were now missing. Had he eaten them? He wasn't sure, couldn't remember.
"Lot of videotapes," Beth said. Norman turned around.
"Yes," Tina said. "We are recording everything that goes on in this habitat as well as the other ship. It'll be a lot of material."
There was a monitor mounted just above his head. It showed Beth and Tina, upstairs at the communications console. They were eating cake.
Aha, he thought. So that was where the cake had gone. "Every twelve hours the tapes are transferred to the submarine," Tina said.
"What for?" Beth said.
"That's so, if anything happens down here, the submarine will automatically go to the surface."
"Oh, great," Beth said. "I won't think about that too much. Where is Dr. Fielding now?"
Tina said, "He gave up on the sphere, and went into the main flight deck with Edmunds."
Norman watched the monitor. Tina had stepped out of view. Beth sat with her back to the monitor, eating the cake. On the monitor behind Beth, he could clearly see the gleaming sphere. Monitors showing monitors, he thought. The Navy people who eventually review this stuff are going to go crazy. Tina said, "Do you think they'll ever get the sphere open?" Beth chewed her cake. "Maybe," she said. "I don't know." And to Norman's horror, he saw on the monitor behind Beth that the door of the sphere was sliding silently open, revealing blackness inside.
OPEN
They must have thought he was crazy, running through the lock to D Cylinder and stumbling up the narrow stairs to the upper level, shouting, "It's open! It's open!"
He came to the communications console just as Beth was wiping the last crumbs of coconut from her lips. She set down her fork.
"What's open?"
"The sphere!"
Beth spun in her chair. Tina ran over from the bank of VCR's. They both looked at the monitor behind Beth. There was an awkward silence.
"Looks closed to me, Norman."
"It was open. I saw it." He told them about watching in the galley, on the monitor. "It was just a few seconds ago, and the sphere definitely opened. It must have closed again while I was on my way here."
"Are you sure?"
"That's a pretty small monitor in the galley. ..."
"I saw it," Norman said. "Replay it, if you don't believe me."
"Good idea," Tina said, and she went to the recorders to play the tape back.
Norman was breathing heavily, trying to catch his breath. This was the first time he had exerted himself in the dense atmosphere, and he felt the effects strongly. DH-8 was not a good place to get excited, he decided.
Beth was watching him. "You okay, Norman?"
"I'm fine. I tell you, I saw it. It opened. Tina?"
"It'll take me a second here."
Harry walked in, yawning. "Beds in this place are great, aren't they?" he said. "Like sleeping in a bag of wet rice. Sort of combination bed and cold shower." He sighed. "It'll break my heart to leave."
Beth said, "Norman thinks the sphere opened."
"When?" he said, yawning again.