“Running away with me,” he sang softly, yielding to the Temptations.

  But the longer he stood there, the longer he looked, the more sure he grew that he really was seeing the ship from another world … through the sea darkly now, but soon face-to-face. He stayed where he was, watching, and stayed, and stayed some more. He wasn’t the only one, either. Some of the divers and roughnecks looked down and into the moon pool, too. Dale was there, and Dave, and Jack, and Steve. So were the guys from the Control container. They’d all worked longer and harder than Jerry had. They wanted to find out what they’d done.

  Jerry stayed there till his feet ached. By dinnertime, Humpty Dumpty was in the moon pool, with the gates sliding together toward their imperfect seal beneath it. Steak tonight, but no one moved.

  “Will you look at that?” Dave said. “Will you just look at that?”

  Look Jerry did. Whatever the spaceship was made of, it wasn’t metal. Still mostly underwater, with the sun dropping toward the horizon, Humpty Dumpty glistened and gleamed and shone, like mother-of-pearl. Jerry gaped. He’d expected all kinds of wonderful things, but never such beauty.

  VII

  At last, when full darkness came, he went back to the messroom. He put A.1. Sauce on his steak, the way he usually did. He remembered that the next day. He didn’t recall much about eating. He shoveled in food as fast as he could so he could go back out again and see what was going on.

  Big, noisy pumps were throwing water from the moon pool out over the side and into the ocean. Aside from that, the view was disappointing. The Glomar Explorer showed her usual running lights, but the spotlights that could light up the moon pool stayed off. Jerry’d wondered whether Humpty Dumpty would glow in the dark. No such luck.

  Steve came forward a few minutes later. Like Jerry, he had only gloom to examine. “I wanted to see more,” Jerry grumbled.

  “So did I,” the older man said, nodding. “Five gets you ten a Russian spy satellite’s due to come over before too long. We don’t want to light everything up and show the Kremlin what we’ve got.”

  “Oh,” Jerry said, and then, “Could they really tell from that high up?”

  “This isn’t my area of expertise, you understand, but I think we could, and we don’t dare assume their technology is any worse than ours,” Steve said. “Jack could tell you more, and maybe Dave, too.”

  “They could, but would they?” Jerry answered his own question: “I don’t think so. I don’t have the waddayacallit, the need to know.” If he sounded bitter, he did because he was.

  Steve couldn’t very well have missed that, but pretended not to hear it. “Well, neither do I,” he said, mild as usual. “That kind of thing comes with the territory here. They like to compartmentalize information.”

  “Man, do they!” Jerry said.

  “But we know the important thing.” Steve waved down toward Humpty Dumpty. “The most important thing since the bomb, for sure—maybe ever. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be able to see what we’ve got here.”

  * * *

  Jerry got his newsletter at breakfast the next morning. It announced that the president would resign that day. Jerry demolished his bacon and eggs, and enjoyed them, too. Whatever aliens might lurk inside Humpty Dumpty, they wouldn’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.

  After eating, he went up to the moon pool again. The big pumps were still going, but spitting less water than they had the night before. The center well had to be nearly dry.

  That didn’t mean he could see in. An enormous tarp, not far from the size of the one that would cover the infield during a rain delay at a ball game, went over the top of it. One of the Glomar sailors waved to Jerry. “We’ll take it off in fifteen minutes, soon as the satellite’s gone again.”

  “Do we have to cover up every time one goes overhead?” Jerry asked. “That’ll make working on Humpty Dumpty complicated.”

  “Orders,” the man replied. Jerry had seen bumper stickers that read God said it. I believe it. That settles it. Could those stickers have spoken, they would have sounded the way the sailor did when he said Orders.

  He and his comrades took off the tarp as neatly as groundskeepers would have. Jerry stared at Humpty Dumpty with an avidity he hadn’t known since the very first time he opened a Playboy to the centerfold.

  The starship’s curves were different from that long-ago Miss May’s. He marveled at them just the same. Now out in the open air, the outer shell still put him in mind of mother-of-pearl or opal or something like that. If it was metal, it was no kind of metal human beings knew how to make. If it wasn’t metal, what was it?

  He was looking at the end with the golf ball–style dimples. He went to the other end of the moon pool so he could see the tubes that stuck out. They were made of the same stuff as the rest of the spaceship’s exterior. And yes, those marks he’d seen on the photograph were still there. If they weren’t writing … then they were something else, that was all.

  One of the men who’d dealt with the tarpaulin was snapping away with an Instamatic. “Do they let you do that?” Jerry asked.

  “Nobody told me not to,” the sailor said.

  Nobody guessed you’d try it, went through Jerry’s mind. He didn’t push it. That wasn’t his place. He suspected something would happen to the film before the fellow could get it developed. He wouldn’t have sworn to that, but he would have bet on it.

  A few minutes later, Dave Schoals came to the edge of the moon pool. He also had a camera: a 35-millimeter with a fancy lens on it. A leather case on his belt probably held more lenses, and maybe more film with them. He started taking pictures of Humpty Dumpty, too. Jerry figured he had a better chance of keeping his photos than the sailor did. He was sure Dave had a fancier security clearance.

  As was often true, he had to look around for something to say. As wasn’t so often true, he found something. “Congratulations,” he told the recovery director. “We’ve got it, thanks to you.”

  “Not just me. Team effort all the way,” Dave answered. “But thanks. I was sweating bullets all the way till we got the gates as closed as they get and started pumping water out of the pool.”

  “Everybody was,” Jerry said. Anyone who wasn’t nervous about Humpty Dumpty probably wasn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, either. It could still hit the Glomar Explorer with whatever it had used on the K-129. But this was a different worry: fear of success, not fear of failure.

  “Where’s the airlock or whatever it is? I want to get some shots of that,” Dave said.

  Jerry pointed. “Starboard side. You can hardly see it. Clementine’s big claw is kind of wrapped around it.”

  “Ahh, you’re right. So it is,” Dave said. “Eventually, people like you and Steve and the guys we’ll be bringing in on the B crew will start working out how to go inside and just what we’ve got here.”

  “The B crew?” Jerry had heard the phrase at meals a few times, but he wasn’t clear about what it meant.

  “Uh-huh. We’re the A crew. For most of us, getting Humpty Dumpty up from the bottom was the big deal. The B crew will come out and exploit it more after we get where we’re going. You and Steve will be part of that, too—don’t worry.”

  “Oh.” Of course, Jerry did worry. More hotshot experts would come aboard the Glomar Explorer and not want to notice a lowly grad student (a redundancy, if ever there was one). He asked, “What are we doing now? Where are we going? We’re not staying here, right?”

  “We sure aren’t,” Dave said. “We sent out a message in the clear days ago, saying that something had gone wrong with the nodule collector and asking if we can go to an area near Midway to see what we can do about repairs. In case you don’t know, the Navy runs Midway.”

  “I did sorta know, yeah. It’s a big breeding reserve for albatrosses, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. And the Navy has generously said it’ll let us use Site 126–1.” Dave barked laughter. “The Navy did everything it could to keep the Agency from raising Humpty Dumpty. They wanted to do it themselves. If they’d tried, they’d still be yelling at each other about the design and the Russians would know all about it.”

  Jerry didn’t argue. He did wonder what the Navy would say about the CIA. Since they were heading toward Midway, he might get to find out. He admired the way the CIA gave a plausible excuse for leaving the middle of nowhere and heading south.

  “Can we do whatever we need to do near Midway or on it or however that works?” he asked.

  Dave Schoals shook his head. “I don’t think so. That’s probably just temporary, to let us get started. We’ll do most of the work in Hawaii. We’ve got a berth reserved in the harbor at Lahaina. You know, on Maui.”

  “I do know.” Jerry felt a small pang. He and Anna had had—did have again, he hoped—a room reserved at the Sheraton near Lahaina for their honeymoon. When they eventually got there from Honolulu, he’d have to remember to act as if he were seeing everything for the first time.

  He couldn’t tell her what he’d been doing while they were first scheduled to get married. Past out in the Pacific, he couldn’t tell her where he’d been. He didn’t like the idea of polluting his marriage with lies and silences. Anna, a forthright person if ever there was one, would like it even less.

  Why didn’t you worry about that more before you said you’d do this? he asked himself. But he knew the answer: $2,933 a month, all wedding expenses reimbursed, and two grand of mad money. And a starship in the moon pool, even if they hadn’t told him about that when John P. banged on his door.

  * * *

  The sailors brought in the two Waverider buoys whose electronics had helped position the Glomar Explorer as precisely as the job required. Each of the fancy gadgets was tethered to the ocean floor by a three-mile cable much less formidable than the pipe string that had gone down with Clementine to grab Humpty Dumpty. The men didn’t bother bringing up the cable; they let it sink after securing the buoys.

  “If the Russians in the tugs had taken one of the Waveriders, what could they have learned from it?” Jerry asked Jack Porter.

  “We would have done what we could to stop that,” the security director answered. “Our electronics are better than theirs—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. They aren’t better to the point where the Russians can’t imitate our stuff if they get hold of it.”

  That was about what Jerry had thought. He and Jack were eating lunch in the messroom. He had salmon croquettes, while Jack was working his way through two slices of roast pork. “I wouldn’t have been able to do this before Vatican II,” Jack remarked.

  “Hadn’t even thought of that,” Jerry said. He didn’t keep kosher; he’d just felt like fish. Friday dinner was fried shrimp and fried oysters. He intended to pig out. The dinner menu might have been a reminder of the days when Catholics weren’t supposed to eat meat on Fridays. A lot of restaurants still served clam chowder as their Friday soup, too.

  As he ate the croquettes, his mind kept wandering back to Humpty Dumpty. There in the moon pool lay technology the Russians wouldn’t be able to imitate. He wondered if his own country could. And, again, he wondered whether it should. That felt like cheating. Or did he think it felt that way because Andre Norton’s The Time Traders and its sequels still echoed in his mind?

  He went out to the moon pool after lunch. Dave was there before him, calling instructions to a couple of men in radiation suits who aimed Geiger counters at the spaceship from close range. “Any extra hot stuff?” Jerry asked him.

  “Just a little at both ends—above background level, but not enough to be dangerous,” the recovery director answered over the chug of the small pumps that took care of the imperfect seal between the lips of the center well’s bottom gates. Dave added, “Of course, we don’t know how well the hull shields us from whatever’s inside it.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jerry looked down over the rail. Three or four dead fish lay on top of the gates. He pointed at them. “We ought to pitch those, or else we’ll smell ’em all over the ship.”

  Dave Schoals burst out laughing. Jerry cocked his head to one side. He didn’t think he’d said anything funny, but he’d cracked Dave up. “Sorry,” Schoals said after a bit. “Oh, my. You weren’t around for that.”

  “I wasn’t around for what?” Jerry asked, more sharply than he might have. Every so often, he got tired of being reminded he was still the new kid. Not as if he didn’t know it himself.

  “They built—we built—Clementine inside this great big roofed, submersible barge. Hughes Mining Barge Number One, we called it, because Hughes is fronting this operation,” Dave said. “It was made in Northern California, then towed down to a cove off Catalina Island and sunk there so the Glomar Explorer could get Clementine into the moon pool without anybody watching. You with me so far?”

  “I think so,” Jerry answered.

  “Good deal. Just to make things extra secure, we made the transfer at night. That was when the bottom gates got messed up, too, and we never could quite fix ’em right. But I’m not talking about that. When we did the transfer, we had the inside of the moon pool all lit up, ’cause we needed to see what was going on.”

  “Uh-oh! And the lights drew fish?”

  “Almost. They drew squid, thousands and thousands of squid. By the time we got the claw up there and the gates as closed as they were gonna get, ol’ Clementine was ass-deep in calamari, just about. And the stink after they died…!” Dave shook his head. “Lasted for weeks. We hosed the walls down. We scrubbed ’em down. Over and over, I mean. Still smelled like dead squid. So now you know.”

  “Now I know,” Jerry agreed, and wondered if he was being too prickly. To keep from dwelling on that, he pointed to Clementine’s central claw, the thick one. “When will the guys in Control loosen that up some? If we’re gonna get inside, we’ll probably start trying with the airlock thingy, right?”

  “Hmm.” Dave scratched at one ear. Instead of answering, he said, “Your hair’s a lot longer than mine. Don’t know how you stand it. I grew mine out mostly so my ears would get covered over—ears are great identifiers on photos. But it tickles and makes me itch all the goddamn time.”

  Ears are great identifiers. If letting your hair get long to keep the other side’s spies from figuring out who you were wasn’t the most CIA thing in the world, Jerry couldn’t imagine what would be. He replied, “It doesn’t bother me. Guess I’m just used to it. Women wear theirs long most of the time. Doesn’t seem to give them any trouble.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.” By the thoughtful way Dave said it, what women did hadn’t occurred to him till that moment. Maybe that also explained a thing or two about why he was single again. Or maybe not. Before Jerry could decide if the thought was worth following, the recovery director came back to what he’d asked: “We can loosen the grip. The hydraulics are still hooked up and everything. When we decide to knock on that door, we’ll be able to go inside once it opens.”

  “Any thoughts about when we start doing that?” Jerry asked. He suspected he might be the one they’d want to take the first whack at it. Making contact with whatever Humpty Dumpty held was the reason he and Steve were here. Wouldn’t Dave and Dale and Jack figure a grad student was more expendable than a senior expert?

  Wouldn’t they be right? Sure they would. All the same, he felt like a Star Trek extra in a red shirt, doomed to die before the next commercial break.

  “Right now, I think the plan is to wait till we get to the site off Midway,” Dave said carefully. “I’m pretty sure we’ll want to take a shot at it before we head for Lahaina. If anything goes wrong, better it goes wrong where there aren’t many eyes around.”

  “That might be good, yeah,” Jerry said. If a death ray incinerated the Glomar Explorer in Lahaina harbor, people would talk. And in case strange space bacteria started turning the crewfolk green with orange polka dots, they also probably ought to do it well out to sea.

  Dave nodded. “Glad you think so.”

  Jerry raised an eyebrow at the tone. Said another way, the words would have been sarcastic enough to sting. But Schoals sounded as if he meant them. Jerry was no more used to getting taken seriously by older people than any other grad student—hell, than any other twenty-six-year-old.

  I could start enjoying this, he thought, and then, If it ever happens again, I mean. He had trouble taking himself seriously, too.

  * * *

  Midway lay about 725 nautical miles south and a little east of where the Glomar Explorer had plucked Humpty Dumpty from the bottom of the Pacific. Jerry used nautical miles for some of his work, but he didn’t think in them. A little slide-rule work told him they made 835 statute miles, more or less. That, he could wrap his head around.

  The Explorer cruised at ten knots, so Site 126–1 was about three days away. Jerry thought he would sleep and relax on the trip: he couldn’t do anything that involved the spaceship in the moon pool. Orders were to look but not to touch, no matter what.

  “We mean that. We no-shit mean it,” Jack Porter told him. “Remember the nondisclosure agreement you signed before Steve would clue you in on what we were really going after?”

  “You mean the one that talked about ‘termination with extreme prejudice’?” Jerry said.

  “Yeah. That one.” The security director nodded.

  “Nah. Remind me again what it said.”

  Jack snorted. “Funny guy! Listen up, funny guy. This is like that. If anybody lays a finger on Humpty Dumpty before we’re ready, we’ll dip the stupid son of a bitch in ketchup and drop him into the Pacific for the sharks’ brunch buffet. You get me, or do I have to make that plainer?”

  “I hear you. I’ll be good,” Jerry said. “But if anybody’s awake inside Humpty Dumpty, or even if that was a robot that fried the K-129, don’t you think it might have suspected something when a giant steel claw on the end of a pipe string grabbed hold of it and hauled it up here?”

  “Clementine’s a tool, a thing. People are people. That may not make any difference. But it may, too. Can you tell me for certain that whatever’s in there doesn’t read minds if somebody touches it?”