Sphere

by Michael Crichton

“I don’t mind telling you, Dr. Johnson, this thing scares the hell out of me. That’s why you’re here.”

American society was increasingly one in which people worked in groups, not alone; rugged individualism was now replaced by endless corporate meetings and group decisions.

It seemed to him that a society in which the most common prescription drug was Valium was, by definition, a society with unsolved problems.

The only important human experience with extraterrestrials had been Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” And the human response was unequivocal. People had been terrified.

“Seasick? A marine biologist?” Norman said. “I work in the laboratory,” he said. “At home. On land. Where things don’t move all the time. Why are you smiling?”

“All the deep-diving studies show that women are superior for submerged operations. They’re physically smaller and consume less nutrients and air, they have better social skills and tolerate close quarters better, and they are physiologically tougher and have better endurance. The fact is, the Navy long ago recognized that all their submariners should be female.” He laughed. “But just try to implement that one.”

You see, if the technology is advanced enough, it appears to the naïve observer to be magic.

For example, you take a famous scientist from our past—Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, even Isaac Newton. Show him an ordinary Sony color-television set and he’d run screaming, claiming it was witchcraft.

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

Jesus, he thought, this is like talking to a child with a loaded gun.

You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice.

I imagine Tom Holland in his underwear maybe two or three times a day and yet he never magiclly appears.

The scientists all agreed: scientific research can’t be stopped. If we don’t build the bomb, someone else will. But then pretty soon the bomb was in the hands of new people, who said, If we don’t use the bomb, someone else will.