He gripped the arms of his chair and reminded himself of what he had told Beth. Whatever had happened up to this point, there was nothing any of them could do about it now. He would indeed give Barnes hell - he promised himself he would - but only when they got back to the surface. Until then, it was no use making trouble.
He shook his head and swore.
Then he turned the console off.
The hours crept by. Harry was still in the sphere. Tina ran her image intensification of the videotape that showed the sphere open, trying to see interior detail. "Unfortunately, we have only limited computing power in the habitat," she said. "If I could hard-link to the surface I could really do a job, but as it is ..." She shrugged.
She showed them a series of enlarged freeze-frames from the open sphere. The images clicked through at one-second intervals. The quality was poor, with jagged, intermittent static.
"The only internal structures we can see in the blackness," Tina said, pointing to the opening, "are these multiple pointsources of light. The lights appear to move from frame to frame."
"It's as if the sphere is filled with fireflies," Beth said. "Except these lights are much dimmer than fireflies, and they don't blink. They are very numerous. And they give the impression of moving together, in surging patterns ..."
"A flock of fireflies?"
"Something like that." The tape ran out. The screen went dark.
Ted said, "That's it?"
"I'm afraid so, Dr. Fielding."
"Poor Harry," Ted said mournfully.
Of all the group, Ted was the most visibly upset about Harry. He kept staring at the closed sphere on the monitor, saying, "How did he do that?" Then he would add, "I hope he's all right."
He repeated it so often that finally Beth said, "I think we know your feelings, Ted."
"I'm seriously concerned about him."
"I am, too. We all are."
"You think I'm jealous, Beth? Is that what you're saying?"
"Why would anyone think that, Ted?"
Norman changed the subject. It was crucial to avoid confrontations among group members. He asked Ted about his analysis of the flight data aboard the spaceship.
"It's very interesting," Ted said, warming to his subject. "My detailed examination of the earliest flight-data images," he said, "convinced me that they show three planets - Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto - and the sun, very small in the background. Therefore, the pictures are taken from some point beyond the orbit of Pluto. This suggests that the black hole is not far beyond our own solar system."
"Is that possible?" Norman said.
"Oh sure. In fact, for the last ten years some astrophysicists have suspected that there's a black hole - not a large one, but a black hole just outside our solar system."
"I hadn't heard that."
"Oh yes. In fact, some of us have argued that, if it was small enough, in a few years we could go out and capture the black hole, bring it back, park it in Earth orbit, and use the energy it generates to power the entire planet."
Barnes smiled. "Black-hole cowboys?"
"In theory, there's no reason it couldn't be done. Then just think: the entire planet would be free of its dependency on fossil fuels. ... The whole history of mankind would be changed."
Barnes said, "Probably make a hell of a weapon, too."
"Even a very tiny black hole would be a little too powerful to use as a weapon."
"So you think this ship went out to capture a black hole?"
"I doubt it," Ted said. "The ship is so strongly made, so shielded against radiation, that I suspect it was intended to go through a black hole. And it did."
"And that's why the ship went back in time?" Norman said.
"I'm not sure," Ted said. "You see, a black hole really is the edge of the universe. What happens there isn't clear to anybody now alive. But what some people think is that you don't go through the hole, you sort of skip into it, like a pebble skipping over water, and you get bounced into a different time or space or universe."
"So the ship got bounced?"
"Yes. Possibly more than once. And when it bounced back here, it undershot and arrived a few hundred years before it left."
"And on one of its bounces, it picked up that?" Beth said, pointing to the monitor.
They looked. The sphere was still closed. But lying next to it, sprawled on the deck in an awkward pose, was Harry Adams.
For a moment they thought he was dead. Then Harry lifted his head and moaned.
THE SUBJECT
Norman wrote in his notebook: Subject is a thirty-year-old black mathematician who has spent three hours inside a sphere of unknown origin. On recovery from the sphere was stuporous and unresponsive; he did not know his name, where he was, or what year it was. Brought back to habitat; slept for one half-hour then awoke abruptly complaining of headache.
"Oh God."
Harry was sitting in his bunk, holding his head in his hands, groaning.
"Hurt?" Norman asked.
"Brutal. Pounding."
"Anything else?"
"Thirsty. God." He licked his lips. "Really thirsty."
Extreme thirst, Norman wrote.
Rose Levy, the cook, showed up with a glass of lemonade. Norman handed the glass to Harry, who drank it in a single gulp, passed it back.
"More."
"Better bring a pitcher," Norman said. Levy went off. Norman turned to Harry, still holding his head, still groaning, and said, "I have a question for you."
"What?"
"What's your name?"