THE DISCOVERY
“Welcome aboard, Dr. Johnson. How are you feeling?”
“I’d like to know what’s going on,” Norman Johnson said.
“How about some coffee first?” Barnes said, and then the room suddenly went dark except for a ray of sunlight that streamed in from a side porthole. A man came in through a side door. “Working on it, Captain, but the sea is rough, so it may take some time,” he said.
“These things weren’t built for the kind of power loads we put on them now. And – ah, there we are.” The lights came back on. Barnes smiled. “Coffee, Dr. Johnson?”
“Black is fine,” Norman said. Barnes poured him a mug. “Thank you. So, why was I called here? I’m usually called to airplane crash sites,” Norman said. Barnes seemed uncomfortable.
“Actually, this isn’t an airplane crash site, Dr. Johnson. It’s a spacecraft crash site.”
Norman nodded, “I see.”
“That doesn’t surprise you?” Barnes said.
“No,” Norman said. “Actually, it explains a lot. If a military spacecraft crashed in the ocean, I can understand the secrecy. When did it crash?”
Barnes hesitated before answering. “We believe,” he said, “it crashed about three hundred years ago.”
There was a silence. Norman struggled to understand what he was being told. Three hundred years ago, he thought. But the space program wasn’t three hundred years old. It was barely thirty years old. So how could a spacecraft be three hundred years old? Barnes must be mistaken. But how could Barnes be mistaken? He went over it again and again, getting nowhere, his mind dazed and shocked.
“Absolutely no question about it,” Barnes was saying. “We can approximate the date from coral growth with great accuracy. Pacific coral grows two-and-a-half centimetres a year, and the object – whatever it is – is covered in about five metres of coral. That’s a lot of coral. Of course, coral doesn’t grow at a depth of a thousand feet, which means that the present shelf collapsed to a lower depth at some point in the past. The geologists are telling us that happened about a century ago, so they’re assuming the craft is about three hundred years old. But it could, in fact, be much older. It could be a thousand years old.”
Barnes shifted papers on his desk, arranging them into neat stacks, lining up the edges.
“I don’t mind telling you, Dr. Johnson, this thing really scares me. That’s why you’re here.”
Norman shook his head. “I still don’t understand.”
“We sent for you,” Barnes said, “because of your association with the ULF project.”
“ULF?” Norman said. And he almost added, “But ULF was a joke…” Seeing how serious
Barnes was, he was glad he had caught himself in time.
Na podstawie: Sphere by Michael Crichton