He took three or four steps down the corridor. It felt as real and unreal at the same time under his feet as the outside of the entranceway had to his knuckles. If this was an airlock, its inner door had disappeared at the same time as the outer one, and as completely.

  Steve followed his lead. Stowing the camera, he wrote, Wonder what the atmosphere is. Not too different from ours?

  Pressure seems close to the same, anyway, Jerry answered. There hadn’t been any big whoosh of air in or out when the door vanished. Then again, who could say anything for sure about how Humpty Dumpty worked?

  If the air the aliens who’d built the starship liked wasn’t too different from Earth’s, why not take off the masks, breathe it, and talk instead of writing? Why not? Jerry imagined spores, bacteria, and viruses, all waiting to chow down on a tasty human after going hungry for Lord only knew how many years. He left his mask on.

  A glance at his watch told him he’d been breathing from the tank for six minutes. It only felt like six months. How brave do you want to be? he asked Steve.

  I don’t want to lose sight of the way out, the older man wrote.

  Jerry nodded. Sounds like a plan.

  We should’ve grabbed some bread crumbs from the galley so we could leave a trail, he thought, remembering “Hansel and Gretel” from some long-vanished kids’ book of fairy tales. What would eat the crumbs in these corridors? Do I really want to find out?

  Instead of bread crumbs, the next time they came in they’d bring a roll of nylon twine or something that they could unspool behind them as they went. That had worked for good old What’s-his-name in the Minotaur’s Labyrinth. It ought to do the trick here, too.

  Down the passageway they went, Jerry leading, Steve a pace behind. He hoped they would find more writing, if the stuff on the outside was writing. No such luck. For all Jerry knew, the stuff on the outside was an advertisement. If buses had them, why not spaceships?

  They came to the end of the stretch of corridor that led in from the entrance. It branched there, going left and right. On the wall of the left branch was a yellow line—not a straight line (Jerry had started wondering if the aliens believed in straight lines), but a line. A little beyond it was an opening in the wall. Another corridor? A way up? A way down? He couldn’t tell.

  Steve took more pictures, facing into both branches. Then he stashed the camera in his belt pouch. He wrote on the pad again: Let’s go.

  Jerry didn’t argue with him. They’d got in. Nothing had tried to kill them. For a first try, that would do. They retraced their steps, Steve in the lead this time. He turned around and got down, awkwardly leaving Humpty Dumpty tuchus-first. Jerry jumped down, feet thumping on the steel of the gate with a good honest thud.

  Steve was staring and pointing. Jerry spun around. The airlock door was back in place. How it had got there, Jerry had no idea. Chances were, no one else on Earth did, either.

  * * *

  The Glomar Explorer didn’t have a conference room. Dale Neuwirth’s cabin did duty for one now. The mission director was there, along with Jack and Dave and Steve and Jerry. There weren’t enough chairs. Jack and Dave sat on the bed.

  Dale shut the door and locked it. He put on a Bing Crosby tape to make sure no one going down the corridor could overhear anything that went on. Jerry let out a resigned internal sigh—it was his father’s kind of music. The other men in the cabin seemed to enjoy it. They would, he thought.

  “Doc Borden says you guys both check out clean, as far as he can tell,” Dale said. “You feel all right?”

  “Fine,” Stephen Dole answered.

  “I guess so,” Jerry said. After getting out of the suit, getting checked for radioactivity, and taking three showers with hot water, harsh soap, and a brush, he’d fallen into the doctor’s hands. He’d breathed over culture medium. He’d spat into another flask of it. Then he’d had his mouth cleansed with nasty antiseptic, his mouth and as far down his throat as a swab would reach without making him puke. After that, he’d had to turn the other cheek for an enema. He’d enjoyed none of it.

  “Good. We have to be careful, you know,” Dale said. Jerry grudged a nod, wishing he could take everything in stride like Steve. The mission director went on, “I want to congratulate you for finding a nondestructive way to get into Humpty Dumpty. Your cleverness will be noted in the report.”

  “Uh, thanks,” Jerry said. By the way Dave and Jack looked at him, they thought that was a bigger deal than he did. Well, they were career CIA guys. What if you’re a career alien-relations guy all of a sudden? he asked himself. Yeah, what if?

  “How did you think of something so simple and so brilliant?” Dale asked.

  “You really wanna know?” Jerry laughed. Then he told him, and the others.

  Dale, Jack, and Dave all wore identical Am I really hearing this? expressions. Steve said, “Gentlemen, I’d like to remind you John P. chose Jerry for a reason. Now you see what the reason was, and that it’s a good one. I’ve thought so all along.”

  “It worked. Hard to knock stuff that works.” Jack then proceeded to do just that: “But how did it work? Why? You’re not going to tell me Humpty Dumpty understands English?” By the way he stuck out his jaw, he’d get mad fast if Jerry tried telling him that.

  “Humpty Dumpty doesn’t understand English,” Dave said decisively, before Jerry could answer. “Paul went out there and said ‘Friend’ at it over and over, and it didn’t open up.”

  “When Gandalf did it in The Fellowship of the Ring, he said, ‘Mellon!’ That’s Elvish for ‘friend,’” Jerry said. By the looks on the older men’s faces, they didn’t want to hear about Elvish. Jerry went on anyway: “I don’t think Humpty Dumpty speaks English, either. Or Elvish, for that matter. But when I said ‘Friend,’ I wasn’t just saying it. I was thinking about everything friendship means, and that I wasn’t dangerous to the starship. My guess is, it picked up on that, not on the word itself.”

  “A spaceship that does read minds?” Jack rolled his eyes. “Give me a break!”

  “Could explain why Jerry got the door to open and Paul didn’t,” Dave observed. “Far as I know, Paul was going through the same motions Jerry did, but without the feeling behind them.”

  “Sounds … pretty wild,” Dale said. Jerry guessed he got as much mileage with that as one of the pipe-farm guys did with ten minutes of inspired cussing.

  “Maybe it isn’t. We can measure brain waves and stuff,” Jerry said. “If Humpty Dumpty’s sensitive enough and smart enough to do it at a distance and analyze what it means … It wouldn’t be telepathy or anything.”

  “It would be about as good, though,” Steve put in.

  “Doesn’t seem likely.” Jack thrust out his jaw again and looked stubborn.

  “Nothing about this seems likely,” Dave said. “How likely is it that we’ve got a spaceship lying in the moon pool? Based on everything we thought, everything we knew, before the Halibut took those photos, unlikely as hell. But Humpty Dumpty’s there. Likely or not, that’s true. We’ve gotta deal with it.”

  “That is a scientific attitude,” Dale said.

  “Engineering attitude,” Dave replied. “Scientists worry about how and why things happen. Engineers don’t care. We just want to know what happens. Then we go on from there.”

  “I’ve heard engineers at Livermore talk the same way,” Dale said, his voice dry as a martini wished it were.

  “I bet you have. You need people like that to keep the theoretical guys from inflating like helium balloons and floating away from reality,” Dave said.

  “Play nice, boys.” Jack Porter sounded amused. Then his head swung toward Jerry and Steve. “Okay. You two got in, and—”

  “Jerry got us in,” Steve interrupted. “Give him the credit. You’d blame him if we were still stuck outside that door.”

  The security director plainly didn’t want to give Jerry any credit. He muttered something that sounded like, “Elvish!” But then he eyed Jerry. “Do you think you can pull your trick twice?”

  “I’ll try. That’s as much as I can tell you right now. I’m not the only player in the game, remember. Humpty Dumpty’s playing, too,” Jerry said.

  “If you do get in again…” No, Jack didn’t seem happy about dealing in uncertainties. “If you get in, what do you think you should do when you explore more of the interior?”

  Slowly, Jerry answered. “Well, that yellow line on the corridor wall is interesting, because we didn’t see anything else like it. Maybe we should follow the yellow brick line?”

  “Brick?” Jack didn’t get it. That made Jerry sad. He’d had the Oz books read to him, then read them himself. He’d seen The Wizard of Oz a bunch of times, the first several on a black-and-white TV that muted the difference between Kansas and Technicolor Oz.

  Steve understood him. Dale and Dave did, too. Dale said, “I think Jerry has the right idea.”

  “I agree,” Steve said. “Something that breaks a pattern needs to be looked at more closely than the elements that make up the pattern.”

  “Oz. You were talking about Oz.” Jack sounded accusing. The light had gone on—more slowly than it might have, but it had.

  “Who, me?” Jerry’d had a light go on more slowly than it might have, too. He wished he’d BSed about how he’d managed to get the starship to open up for him. Now that the CIA guys knew, too, they could beat the outer door the same way he had. He thought they could, anyhow.

  “You’ll carry walkie-talkies. With luck, they’ll let you communicate with us after you get out of sight,” Dave said.

  “We’d have to take out our mouthpieces inside Humpty Dumpty to use them,” Jerry pointed out. “Do you want us doing that? I mean, the temperature was okay and all, but we don’t know if that was real air in there, even if it mixed okay with what we brought in when we went inside.”

  “We don’t know about any bacteria or viruses it carries, either,” Steve added.

  “Okay. I didn’t think that one through, obviously,” Dave said. Jerry admired him for admitting it without fussing. The recovery director went on, “Well, we’ll come up with something—unless we don’t, of course.”

  “You really know how to cheer us up, don’t you?” Jerry said.

  “I try,” Dave said. Jerry laughed. Dave wasn’t and never would be the funniest guy in the world, but he did try. Considering what he could have been, that counted.

  * * *

  A copter landed on the helipad at the Glomar Explorer’s stern. It wore white American stars, not red Soviet ones. It looked sleeker than the chopper the Chazhma had carried. How much that mattered, Jerry had no idea. The Russian machine (people who knew such things had told him it was a Kamov Ka-25) seemed to do its job just fine.

  Half a dozen men got out of the whirlybird. They carried suitcases and duffel bags. Some of the B crew, Jerry thought. He’d wondered if they would import a real sf writer to take his place, somebody like Heinlein or Asimov or Niven or Anderson. None of the people on the helipad looked familiar that way, he noted with a certain amount of relief.

  Of course, that proved nothing. This would only be the first bunch of new people. Every time a helicopter set down, he’d have to worry.

  The new men wandered off the helipad. Stewards took charge of them. They’d have to learn their way around, as Jerry had. He smiled: he liked that. He wasn’t, or didn’t feel like, a freshman anymore.

  Doc Borden was one of the people who boarded the copter for the flight back to Midway, and presumably on to civilization from there. Jerry supposed that meant one of the newcomers was a doctor, too. The NSA guys who’d used Clementine to seize Humpty Dumpty also left the Glomar Explorer. The capture vehicle wouldn’t have anything more to do this trip. The last departing man from the A crew was the engineer who’d had the mild heart attack. He’d done fine since then, but he’d probably want his own doc to look him over once he got to wherever he lived.

  A voice from behind Jerry made him jump: “We still seem to be on the roster.”

  “You snuck up on me, man,” Jerry accused Steve. “But yeah, for now.”

  “I was wondering if they’d bring out somebody like Carl Sagan, someone with a big reputation,” Steve said. “And they may yet.”

  “You mean I’m not the only one who gets all hinky about shit like that?” Jerry said in surprise.

  “Now that you mention it,” Steve replied, “no. We all like to imagine we’re unique and irreplaceable. It’s an enjoyable fantasy. If you’ve got any sense, you know that’s all it is. Somebody else can always step into your shoes and do as well as you did, or close enough for government work.”

  “Government work.” The phrase tasted raunchy in Jerry’s mouth, like lunch meat that had sat in the fridge three days too long. “Does it ever bother you that this is all government work?”

  “This is the most exciting, important, worthwhile thing I’ve ever done in my life. If it weren’t government work, how would it get done? Who else would have found the K-129, and Humpty Dumpty next to it? Who else would have laid out as much as it costs for a Moon mission to build this ship and haul Humpty Dumpty off the bottom? Flying men to the Moon is government work, too, by the way.”

  Jerry started to come back with something sharp, then realized he didn’t have anything sharp to come back with. “Well, hush my mouth,” he mumbled.

  Steve didn’t rub it in. He wasn’t the type. He just said, “Think it through.” That was a good idea any old time.

  Even so, talking about something, anything, else also seemed a good idea right now. “Does President Ford know we’ve been inside the spaceship?” Jerry asked. No matter what Steve thought about government work, Jerry was damn glad he didn’t need to ask about President Nixon anymore.

  “I’m sure he does. I haven’t asked Dale, but we wouldn’t hold back on anything like that—especially when we got in and got out without losing anybody or doing any damage.” The man from the RAND Corporation might be quiet, but he was cynical enough for all ordinary use.

  “Makes sense.” Jerry nodded, then chuckled. “I wonder if Dave wrote more innocent-text poetry to pass the word along.”

  Steve laughed, too. “I hope so! You know the code message that announced Fermi had got a chain reaction going in the pile at the University of Chicago, don’t you?”

  “Sorry, no.” Jerry shook his head in embarrassment. “What was it?”

  “‘You’ll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has just landed in the New World,’” Steve quoted.

  “I can dig it!” Jerry said. “Echoes back to Columbus—and man, whoever came up with it sure wasn’t wrong.” His head swung toward the moon pool. “Different now. The new world’s landed on us.”

  “So it has. So it has.”

  * * *

  There were new faces in the messroom at lunch. Having seen only the same old ones for most of the past two months, Jerry found himself wondering how the men from B crew would fit in. The A crew had worried all the time, first that they’d be able to raise Humpty Dumpty from the seafloor, and then that they’d be able to get inside once the spaceship lay on the leaky gates under the moon pool.

  B crew didn’t have to sweat any of that. They would deal with knowns, not unknowns. Except for one, of course. Nobody knew what would anger the aliens or robots in charge of the starship. If anything did, a new wreck would lie on the bottom of the Pacific. I’m not even wearing seaboots, Jerry thought.

  After lunch, he went forward to the moon pool to look at the starship. Several people were always doing that. He saw three or four of the new men staring at it as if they couldn’t believe their eyes. Had anyone briefed them on the true story till they got to Midway, or had they signed up like him, thinking they were going after the sunken Russian submarine?

  One of the strangers came over to him and held out his hand. “Hi. I’m John Rogers. I’m John Rogers here, anyway,” he said. He was about forty, suntanned and fit, and had a disarming smile. “I’m the new doctor.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Jerry Steinberg. Like you say, that’s who I am here, I mean. I do oceanography and stuff.” Even with somebody who was here, Jerry watched what he said. Sure as hell, the CIA had indoctrinated him whether it meant to or not.

  Rogers pointed down at Humpty Dumpty. “That’s the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “I said the same thing. Everybody does,” Jerry said.

  “I believe it. What else can you say? Did I hear right? Did somebody really smart figure out how to get in there without blowing it up?”

  “Somebody really smart? Nah.” Jerry shook his head. “Matter of fact, it was me.”

  “You’re kidding!” the doctor exclaimed. Jerry shook his head again. He knew he didn’t look like much: a longhair with a beard, dressed the way he would have been on campus, with a T-shirt, bell-bottom jeans, and his sadly scruffy Blue Tips. John Rogers went on, “That’s wonderful! How did you ever do it?”

  “I got lucky,” Jerry answered, and told again about the Tolkien connection. He wondered if he’d be telling the same story, maybe in the same words, at conferences fifty years from now. He also wondered if he’d ever be able to tell it to people not cleared to hear it.

  “You know, I’d tell you you were making that up if I heard it anywhere else,” Dr. Rogers said. “When I look at that”—he nodded down toward Humpty Dumpty—“I believe you. Nothing seems impossible right now.”

  “No kidding! If we can figure out even a little bit of what whoever made that can do, the world won’t be the same,” Jerry said.

  “Just seeing it there makes the world not the same,” Rogers said. “It tells us this isn’t the only world with life on it. That’s got to be the biggest news since Columbus got back to Spain with word of the New World.”

  “Bigger, I bet, but yeah,” Jerry said, thinking, Columbus again! Next year, NASA planned to launch two Viking probes to Mars to see if life existed on the red planet. Those Vikings would try to learn whether Earth was unique in the universe or life sprang up whenever it got the chance. There in the moon pool lay the answer, shining as if scraped from the inside of a pearl oyster’s shell.