Sphere

Sonar picks out an enormous spacecraft on the Pacific seabed, and the U.S. Navy lowers a small group of civilian experts to a habitat next to it. The team: Norman Johnson, a psychologist; Harry Adams, a mathematician; Beth Halpern, a biochemist; and Ted Fielding, an astrophysicist. Retired Navy captain Harold Barnes oversees them.

The ship has rested on the seabed for centuries, and the team finds something inside that nobody predicted. At its heart sits a gleaming, joinless sphere.

Once the sphere is entered, a presence starts to speak to the team through the habitat's computer. A typhoon then seals them off from the surface for days. Strange and deadly events begin, both in the dark water outside and within the cramped habitat.

The book opens as hard science fiction about first contact, then tightens into a claustrophobic psychological thriller about the human mind. It was published in 1987 and was adapted as a 1998 film directed by Barry Levinson.

With air running low and no way out, the team must work out what the sphere has handed them, and what it is doing to the people sharing the habitat.