“You sure you aren’t the skiffy writer?” Jerry said. Jack laughed and waved away the compliment, if it was one. Jerry continued, “If it does read minds, I bet it doesn’t need contact, though. The Russian sub was three miles above it when it did … whatever it did.”

  Jack grunted. “There is that. We don’t want to take chances even so. Hear me?”

  “I already said so once.”

  Jerry waited. If Jack got huffy about that, he meant to get huffy right back. Being expendable brought certain advantages … till expending time came, anyhow. But the security officer just said, “Okay, fine,” and left it alone. Jerry felt deflated. He’d braced himself for a fight that didn’t happen.

  The weather got warmer as the Glomar Explorer chugged south. In California, 40 degrees north latitude was well north of San Francisco, about halfway between Fort Bragg and Eureka. Midway, on the other hand, lay at 28 degrees north. That parallel split Baja California into two equal parts.

  He’d seen albatrosses while the ship was grappling for and grappling with Humpty Dumpty. The gooney birds had wingspans that put him in mind of light planes. However magnificently they flew, though, they were as avid for garbage as Hermosa Beach herring gulls. The farther south the Explorer came, the more of them there were to squabble over the uneaten food the ship threw into the ocean.

  Steve pointed at one that rose now after skimming along the surface of the sea. “I think it’s eating a big piece of cellophane.”

  “That can’t be good for it. Probably figured it caught a jellyfish or something,” Jerry said. “People throw all kinds of shit into the ocean these days. I wonder how much of it birds and fish and sea turtles try to eat. A lot, I bet.”

  “Whales and porpoises, too,” Steve said.

  “Yeah.” Jerry scratched his head. “That might be interesting, y’know? I don’t remember any research studies about it. Not saying there aren’t any, but I’ve never run across one.”

  “Have you ever looked?”

  “Not really, but I’ve pawed through a bunch of journals doing homework for the diss. If I’d seen an article like that in a table of contents or flipped past it going to something I was after, I’d know I had.” Jerry was proud of his memory. It let him do things most people couldn’t, or not so easily. It let him be right most of the time, too. Only very slowly was he starting to wonder if being right most of the time wasn’t an overrated talent.

  Steve didn’t challenge him. He said, “My mind works the same way.”

  “Comes in handy,” Jerry said. A fair number of people who went into the sciences had minds like that. Able to leap tall mountains of data at a single bound! he thought. Again more slowly than he might have, he was beginning to realize the wider world did things differently.

  “What’s that one got?” Steve pointed again.

  “Half a hamburger bun, looks like,” Jerry said—burgers had been on the lunch menu. “That won’t hurt it.”

  “I guess not.” Steve changed the subject: “Have you thought about what we’ll do if we get inside Humpty Dumpty?”

  “Never once crossed my mind,” Jerry answered, deadpan.

  Stephen Dole started to gape, then stopped and exhaled through his nose. He was more annoyed at himself than at Jerry, for he said, “I should be used to your sense of humor by now.”

  “Always nice to know somebody thinks I’ve got one,” Jerry said. “The thing I really hope is that we don’t do too much damage breaking into the spaceship. That could be bad all kinds of ways.”

  “Bad for us or bad for whoever or whatever’s in there?”

  “Yes,” Jerry said. Steve started to give him a fishy look, but pulled his face straight in a hurry. It wasn’t as if Jerry was wrong. Obviously, smashing a hole in Humpty Dumpty or breaking in through what everybody thought was the airlock could do all kinds of destructive work. Just as obviously, the starship could do a lot of that, too. Anyone who doubted it had only to look at the photo of the skeleton in seaboots next to the K-129.

  After a moment, Steve said, “You pack a lot into a little, don’t you?”

  “Well, I try,” Jerry said. That was a useful knack for a writer, perhaps less so when talking: speech had repetition and redundancy built in, because it was there and then gone. He went on, “What if we can’t get in any easy way? Whatever goes into Humpty Dumpty’s shell, we don’t know anything about it.”

  “True. It can’t be weak. It survived space travel and years three miles underwater. I’ve talked with Dale about that. I’ve urged him not to be too, well, heroic trying to break in.”

  “Good. That’s good.” Jerry silently clapped his hands together.

  “You could have done the same thing, you know. You should have.”

  “He wouldn’t have paid any attention to me!” Jerry said it as if it were a law of nature. To him, it was. Professors and other senior people never paid attention to grad students unless they needed something from them.

  But Steve shook his head. “I think he would have. I think he still will, if you go talk with him. You know more about what’s likely to be in there than anybody else on the ship. That’s what you’re here for.”

  “I don’t know a goddamn thing. And c’mon, Steve! You’re sandbagging like a son of a bitch.”

  “Not me. I’m a reliable academic type who’s thought some about extraterrestrial life. That’s why I’m here. But you’re the one who’s done all the wondering and played things out in his head. I wouldn’t have come up with half the scenarios you gave Dale.”

  “Sure you would. Only reason I spun them out in a hurry was, I was stealing from half the things I’ve read. That doesn’t exactly qualify me to meet the first aliens, if any aliens are in there to meet.”

  “Nobody knows what qualifies someone to do that. A habit of thinking about it can’t hurt.”

  He made a certain amount of sense, even if Jerry didn’t want to admit it. To keep from admitting it, he said, “One thing I’m pretty sure of—if Humpty Dumpty does hatch little green men, the politicians’ll grab ’em so fast it’ll make your head spin. I’ve got a hundred bucks that says Henry Kissinger starts picking their pockets by this time next Wednesday.”

  “No bet,” Steve said.

  In spite of nerves that made his stomach knot, Jerry did go see Dale Neuwirth. He worked himself up to knock on the mission director’s door, then found he didn’t have to: it was open. Warily, he stuck his head inside. Dale was scribbling notes at his desk. When he looked up, Jerry said, “If you’re real busy now, I can come back.”

  “Don’t come back. Come in,” Neuwirth said. “Shut the door behind you and grab a chair. I see so little of you, I worry. You keep to yourself even more than the guys in the Control container.”

  “I do?” Jerry said in surprise; he hadn’t even noticed. But he realized Dale wasn’t wrong. As he sat, he went on, “I was talking with Steve, and I just wanted to let you know I think he’s right—we’d better not get too rough with Humpty Dumpty.”

  “We don’t have flamethrowers or artillery. I’m not going to break out one of the rifles and blow the lock off the door—if it has a lock,” Dale said. “We have power saws aboard, too. I won’t use one of them, either.”

  “Okay. I’m real glad to hear it.”

  “Whatever’s in there, it belongs to a civilization that can do all kinds of things we can’t. Fly here from wherever it started, for instance. And sink that Russian sub from three miles under it. Getting all tough-guy with it doesn’t seem smart.”

  “Not to me, either,” Jerry said. “If we mess this up, we may not get a second chance.” He thought of Inca sentries watching Spaniards rowing ashore from their galleons. They’d be freaking out. They couldn’t build ships like that. What kind of powerful strangers could?

  Before long, they found out.

  Dale said, “What I will do tomorrow is have Clementine’s central claw retracted so it doesn’t obstruct the airlock … if that is an airlock. A day or two after that, we can find out whether there’s any obvious way in.”

  “‘We’?” Jerry echoed. Waddaya mean, we, Kemosabe? went through his head. He didn’t come out with that, luckily. He just asked, “Do you mean me?”

  “Are you volunteering?” Dale returned. “If you are, you’re the logical person to try it first. If you’re not, I won’t order you to and I won’t hold it against you. I wouldn’t order any man to risk his life. I understand you’d be doing that here.”

  “I’ve been risking my life ever since I signed up to go after the K-129, haven’t I?” Jerry said. He hesitated again. He’d known there was danger since he found out the sub lay on the bottom because it did something—nobody was sure what, even now—to piss off the starship that got there first. But the danger of just knocking on Humpty Dumpty’s door seemed a lot more immediate. He sighed. “Yeah, I guess I’m volunteering. This is what I came along for, isn’t it?”

  “Nobody came along to be a victim.” Dale was thinking along with him, all right. “The goal is to get inside and learn as much as we can. There are risks involved, sure. But we’ve run risks since we started lowering Clementine toward Humpty Dumpty.”

  Clementine. Humpty Dumpty. The names sounded innocent—comical, even. No one on the K-129 was laughing. No one on the Glomar Explorer, either. Yeah, this was for keeps. Jerry sighed again. “Okay.”

  * * *

  Tape the booties over the protective outer suit. Feel all around each calf to make sure the seal was tight. Tape the surgical gloves over the ends of the suit’s sleeves. Southpaw Jerry had no problem doing up his right arm. Using his off hand to secure things on his left was harder, but he managed. He nodded to Dave, who was watching as he and Steve put on the gear that might or might not save their skins. “Glad I had some practice.”

  “Good. That’s good.” The recovery director nodded back. No I told you so in his tone or manner. He was a pro. He helped Jerry with the straps that held the air tank on his back, then did the same for Steve. “Remember, start using them as soon as you go into the moon pool. You have forty-five minutes after that.”

  “Gotcha,” Jerry said. Steve nodded. They both wore their watches outside their overgarments, Jerry on his right wrist, Steve on his left. Mask and mouthpiece should protect against a poisonous atmosphere, at least long enough for them to get away. The gear ought to keep out germs, too. But if superheated steam or frigid methane came out …

  That was why Dale had asked for volunteers. And he’d got two. Why he’d got two—

  Worry about it later, Jerry told himself. If you can.

  “You guys ready?” Dave asked. Behind the mask, Jerry looked at Steve. The older man was looking back at him. Neither of them said no. Dave set his hand first on Steve’s shoulder, then on Jerry’s. “Good luck. I mean it, from the bottom of my heart.”

  He undogged the watertight door that gave access to the center well from floor level. Jerry stuck in the breathing apparatus’s mouthpiece. It tasted rubbery, but not unpleasant. Inhale through your mouth, exhale through your nose, just like you’ve practiced.

  As the door opened, he flicked the valve that started air flowing. He stepped out into the moon pool. Steve followed. Dave shut the door behind them. Jerry heard him secure it, too. They were on their own.

  Humpty Dumpty seemed much bigger when you looked up at it, not down on it. The enormous egg, Jerry thought, and flashed on another of the very first sort-of-sf books he’d ever read. Clementine looked a lot more massive this way, too. A couple of thousand tons of steel? He believed every ounce.

  People were peering down at Steve and him from the edge of the moon pool. Jack Porter was filming with a movie camera. Someone else immortalized the moment on videotape. Jerry couldn’t see who; the video camera was bulkier than the 16-millimeter movie machine.

  Since the mouthpiece didn’t let him talk, he printed on a scratch pad and held it up for Steve to see: Let’s do it. He couldn’t wear his glasses under the mask, so he had to hold the pad close to his face to see what he was doing.

  Steve gave him a thumbs-up. They walked toward the capture vehicle’s center claw … and toward the circle scribed in Humpty Dumpty’s nacreous shell. The claw had moved away enough to let a reasonably slim person slip between it and the starship. Jerry and Steve both qualified.

  Jerry remembered every moment leading up to his doctoral orals the winter before. He remembered leaving the department lounge with Professor Krikorian and walking across the hall to the conference room where the rest of the examining committee waited. He remembered how tight his necktie felt. He didn’t wear them very often, and got reminded why every time he did. And he remembered the dreadfully final click as the conference-room door closed behind him.

  (Of the orals themselves, he recalled very little. They’d asked him things. He’d answered as best he could. He’d stood out in the hallway again afterward, this time with the door closed against him, while the committee decided his fate. Only when Professor Krikorian emerged with a smile on his face and with his arm thrust out for a congratulatory handshake was Jerry sure he’d passed.)

  He knew he would remember this approach across puddled steel the same way he remembered that shorter trip to the other side of the corridor. If he lived to be ninety, both would stay vivid in his mind. And if he didn’t live to be ninety … it was liable to be because he died in the next couple of minutes. He tried without much luck not to think about that.

  He wrote on the scratch pad again and showed it to Steve. Stay well back. If it’s too cold or too hot in there, don’t let it get us both.

  Steve held his pad out at arm’s length as he wrote his reply. Where Jerry had trouble seeing at a distance, the older man couldn’t focus in close. Jerry had to lean in to make out his words: I want to be able to help you if I need to.

  See what happens to me before you get close, Jerry wrote. He nodded vigorously to emphasize that, and pointed at Steve to drive it home. Then he waited till Steve nodded. Steve wanted to be brave. Jerry didn’t want him to be stupid—or to need to be brave.

  He squeezed between the claw and the spaceship. The lower edge of the circle ran at about the level of his waist. He looked for a doorbell or a latch or anything suggesting a way to signal or a way in. Finding none, he did what anyone facing a closed door might do. He knocked.

  He heard the sound his latex-covered knuckles made. It didn’t sound like knocking on metal—more as if he were hitting pottery or wood. It felt … odd. He wasn’t sure he’d actually touched anything material.

  After a minute or so, he knocked again. He waited one more minute, thinking hard. He’d done a lot of that since talking with Dale, and before, too. He found himself in the same pickle as Frodo, Gandalf, and the rest of the Nine Walkers in front of the Doors of Durin, with wolves closing in. Durin’s doors stayed stubbornly closed, too.

  They did, at any rate, till Gandalf solved their riddle. Jerry thought the same trick worth a try. The best thing it had going for it was, he didn’t see how it could hurt.

  Thinking friendly thoughts, he yanked out his mouthpiece and loudly said, “Friend!” Quick as he could, he stuffed it back in. By the time he drew his next breath, the doorway had opened.

  VIII

  Oh, fuck me, Jerry thought. Since he was breathing through the mouthpiece, he couldn’t say the words out loud, but he thought them at the top of his lungs. He had no idea whether the door had slid aside, irised open, or simply disappeared. Whatever had happened, the obstruction wasn’t there anymore.

  He also realized he hadn’t been steamed, broiled, or turned into a Popsicle. He was damn glad he hadn’t, not that he could have done anything about it if he had. If viruses were penetrating his suit and trying to infect him with the Alien Itch, he couldn’t do anything about that, either.

  He peered down the entranceway. It looked … dark and blurry. Maybe he should have thought about contact lenses before he signed up for this mad jaunt. Maybe he shouldn’t have signed up to begin with.

  But then somebody else would be looking down this tube. Or maybe the CIA would have got someone who didn’t have The Lord of the Rings infused in him the way hot water had Lipton’s. In that case, Humpty Dumpty might still be a closed book.

  Steve came up, eyes wide and staring behind his mask. He held up his scratch pad. How did you do that? he’d written.

  Clean living and no fried food, Jerry answered. Aboard the Glomar Explorer, at least, the second half of that was bound to be a lie.

  Do we go inside? Steve asked. He didn’t try to give orders. Jerry had easily done what he must have thought hard or impossible. To Steve, that had to mean Jerry knew what he was up to and deserved to decide things.

  It’d be nice if that were true, Jerry thought. He’d tried it mostly because it was quick, simple, and nondestructive. When it actually worked … He still felt dazed. Too much was happening too fast.

  But the answer wouldn’t wait. I guess we do, he wrote. He showed Steve the paper, then tore it off, folded it, and stuck it in a pocket. These conversations were supposed to be preserved for history, assuming history gave a damn about contemporary maundering.

  Gulping and hoping like hell he didn’t tear the protective suit, he scrambled up into the airlock, if that was what it was. As soon as he did, the inner walls in the corridor—all curved and rounded, not with hard, human-style right angles—started to glow softly. Humpty Dumpty sensed it had company. That was beautiful and scary at the same time.

  Jerry turned around and held out a hand to help Steve in. The man from the RAND Corporation wasn’t so young anymore and might not be up to climbing into things. Latex met latex as Stephen Dole grabbed hold of him and scrambled into the spaceship, too.

  One of the pouches on Steve’s belt held a camera. He took it out and started using it. How come I didn’t get one? Jerry wondered. But that was another easy question, wasn’t it? The first redshirt down on some new planet didn’t have a prayer of lasting long enough to collect residuals.