“Ooh,” Dave said softly. It was half a noise awe, half what he might’ve come out with had Steve punched him in the belly. Dale and Jack both looked as if they’d got clobbered, too.

  Jerry added, “There used to be three of them. The life support on one failed. He’s just bones and … and I don’t know what. They look more like feathery centaurs than anything else, but they don’t really look a whole lot like anything.” Steve nodded.

  “Photos will be ready in a few hours,” Jack said. The Glomar Explorer might not boast a Fotomat kiosk, but one of the fancy containers held a developing plant that could double as one.

  “Do you have any idea how to revive the two surviving … things, aliens, whatever they are?” Dale asked.

  “Not really,” Steve answered. “We would want to be very sure before we try that. It’s not the sort of mistake we could fix.”

  “Other question is, do we want them awake?” Dave said. “That ship is stronger than anything we have, way stronger. Who knows what two aliens could do with it? Whatever it did to the K-129, I’d guess it did that without them. Jerry, would you say the dead one’s been that way since before March 1968?”

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s a pretty good guess, yeah,” Jerry replied.

  “How much before?”

  “No way to tell.” Jerry spread his hands. “Just no way. How fast the aliens decay naturally, temperature, germs involved, whatever chemicals it may have used when it went into suspended animation with the others … We don’t know any of that stuff. What’s the old line? ‘The probability of predicting correctly in complete ignorance is zero.’” He’d got the line from an Analog he’d read in high school. That made it old for him, anyhow.

  “He’s right,” Dale said. “We need to do more work before we try anything we can’t repair.”

  “I agree a hundred percent—I said so already.” Steve gave the mission director a nod that seemed more than half a salute.

  “Let’s talk some more after the photos get developed,” Jack said. “Then we’ll all be more or less on the same page.” Nobody said no, so the meeting broke up. Gator nodded to Jerry and Steve as they came out of Dale’s cabin. Jerry nodded back. He would have done the same with any other guard dog.

  * * *

  Jerry heard some grim news at dinner that night, brought by one of the B crew newcomers. He didn’t know who the man was; more unfamiliar faces sat at the table every day, it seemed. The engineer who’d had the little heart attack—Bob was his name—had flown from Midway to Honolulu to head home to the mainland. The connection was tight. He’d had to run to make it. He did … but moments after he fastened his seat belt, he had a big coronary and died on the spot.

  “He was a good guy. I bet his family will miss him like anything,” Jerry said. He knew people his age to whom death seemed unreal: something to worry about in the great by-and-by, maybe, but not now. He wasn’t like that. He hadn’t been since he was seven. Death was real, and death was forever. He’d noticed his friends who’d fought in Vietnam had the same attitude.

  So did Stephen Dole. Jerry supposed years piling up could also give it to you. “Too young,” Steve said, and then, “Anyone younger than I am who dies is too young by definition.”

  Said a different way, it would have been a joke. Steve sounded altogether serious. Jerry nodded and said, “I hear you, man.” He sounded the same way.

  After they ate, they headed for the Special Measurements container. Documents that had to do with the spaceship lived there. That included the photos Jerry and Steve had taken inside Humpty Dumpty.

  Gator stood outside the door. “Hello again,” he said. Jerry said hello back, but made sure he shielded the keypad with his body as he punched in the entry code just the same.

  When he and Steve went in, Dale was there ahead of them, going through the photos they’d taken earlier in the day. Jack and Dave showed up together a couple of minutes later. For the next little while, people passed stacks of pictures back and forth.

  “What’s the scale on these critters?” Dave asked.

  “They aren’t as big as a centaur made from a horse and a person would be, but they’re bigger than we are,” Jerry said.

  He eyed the prints with an odd, almost touristy, fascination. They reminded him of where he’d been and what he’d seen, yes. But they were also what he’d remember of all that, because they were permanent and stable while what went on inside his head was subject to change without notice.

  The higher-ups flipped through the photographs of the kitchen?/laboratory? and the messroom fairly fast. They were much more interested in the shots that showed the aliens and the clear domes encasing them. And you’re not? Jerry asked himself. Himself had no good answer.

  “Kind of convenient for us that one of them didn’t make it. Gives a notion of how they’re put together we couldn’t get from just outside views,” Jack said. Just when Jerry thought that was the most cold-blooded thing he’d ever heard in his life, the security director spoke again, in musing tones: “I wonder if they have souls.”

  Since Jerry wondered the same thing about people, he stayed quiet. But he reminded himself that nobody ever was all of one piece. He supposed that might even be true of Richard Nixon, however little he cared to admit it.

  Dave pointed to a yellow oval inset into the base of one of the cabinets. “They all have this, I think,” he said. “And yellow seems to be an important color with them, the way red is with us. If we gave one of those things a poke…”

  Jerry had had the same thought. Now he downplayed it as much as he could: “We don’t want to try anything till we know more.”

  “Agree. One way or another, we won’t get a second chance,” Steve said. Jerry nodded. They might kill the aliens, and then there’d be none. Or they might give them back control of their spaceship, and then there might be no more humans.

  “Sure, sure.” Dave nodded, too. But he sounded less convinced than Jerry wished he would have. Am I just being paranoid? he wondered. But are you paranoid when they’re really after you?

  “We won’t do anything drastic until and unless we have clear instructions from the highest authority,” Dale said. “That order got to me less than an hour ago. I missed dinner because I was decrypting it personally, as ordered. It’s a good thing the galley can crank out something tasty no matter what time it is. But the order stresses that trying to activate Humpty Dumpty or trying to revive the aliens is as much a political decision as a scientific one.”

  “That’s the way we do it, then.” Jack Porter couldn’t have been more respectful and obedient if he’d had a papal bull land in his lap. Dave nodded, too. When he had orders from people entitled to give them, that settled things for him. He got ready to follow them.

  Back in the early 1940s, German officials had orders from people entitled to give them, too. Six million Jews wound up dead, including some men and women on both sides of Jerry’s family. So did a whole bunch of Gypsies and homosexuals and people from insane asylums and anybody else the Nazis happened not to like. As far as Jerry was concerned, obeying orders just because they were orders was way overrated.

  Theoretically, the USA agreed with him. Theoretically. Lieutenant Calley’d claimed he was only following orders when he led his troops to massacre Vietnamese villagers at My Lai. He’d got court-martialed and convicted anyway, and was still serving some kind of sentence. (Captain Medina, who was supposed to have given those orders, got acquitted. It made you wonder.)

  “‘The highest authority’ here means the president, doesn’t it?” Jerry asked.

  Dale nodded. “That’s correct. And what he says, goes.”

  He wasn’t even a spook. But he’d worked for the United States his whole adult life. He’d see orders the same way Dave and Jack did.

  It wasn’t so much that orders to mess with Humpty Dumpty would be illegal or even wrong. They might not be. And politics did have to play a part. If not for the political struggle between the USSR and the USA, Humpty Dumpty might have lain on the ocean floor forever.

  No, the real question was, did Gerald Ford know enough to give orders that made sense? Did anybody? Do not call up that which you cannot put down—the line from H. P. Lovecraft bubbled up inside Jerry’s head. Eldritch horror wasn’t his thing any more than Eldridge Cleaver was, but he’d read some Lovecraft and Soul on Ice.

  “We will proceed with caution, then,” Jack said.

  “Extreme caution,” Steve said. He’d been inside the starship, too. Photographs helped, but nothing matched real experience. Jerry enjoyed centerfolds as much as any other man, but a centerfold was no more like lying down with a real woman than a picture of a steak was like dinner at a steak house.

  “Extreme caution, yeah,” he said, thinking one more time of the extreme prejudice clause in his second nondisclosure agreement.

  “We will proceed with caution, yes, and in accordance with the highest authority’s directives,” Dale said. That plainly satisfied Dave and Jack. It might even have satisfied Steve; not as if RAND didn’t feed from the government trough. What if the highest authority’s directives don’t match caution? Jerry wondered. He didn’t ask out loud. He knew useless when he saw it.

  * * *

  Back in the cabin later, though, he did ask Steve. He wasn’t close to sure that was safe, but he had to talk to somebody. He piercingly missed Anna, though he’d never be able to tell her about any of this unless he wanted to learn more about “extreme prejudice” than he’d ever wanted to know.

  Stephen Dole listened patiently. He did most of the time—and he’d gone into Humpty Dumpty, too. “It’s a problem, no question,” he said when Jerry ran dry. “They don’t seem to understand that this is as much a you-only-get-one-chance situation as raising the starship was. If they make a mistake, chances are they can’t go back and fix it.”

  “Bingo!” Jerry said admiringly. “I couldn’t have put it that well myself. You oughta be a writer or something.”

  “Or something.” Steve’s smile was wry. “We’ve tried to tell them every way we know how. If they won’t listen, what else can we do?”

  “‘You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think,’” Jerry said.

  Steve gave him a curious look. “Aren’t you too young to be quoting Dorothy Parker?”

  “It’s my fiancée’s fault,” Jerry said. “She’s into that whole radio-celebrity thing. Dorothy Parker, Oscar Levant, all those crazy people. Oscar, he was a piece of work and then some.”

  “You’ve got that right. Up till a few years ago, he’d still show up on The Merv Griffin Show, places like that.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jerry’d watched The Merv Griffin Show while he still lived at home because his father liked it. He didn’t think he’d seen it once since he got his own place. “Anna gave me his autobiography. It’s … interesting. ‘I’m gonna memorize your name and throw away my head,’ he told somebody. Hard to beat that.”

  “Isn’t it?” Steve paused, then sighed. “If they won’t listen to us, we can’t make them, you know.”

  “I can’t, not by myself. That’s for fucking sure. Nobody would pay any attention to me if I tried. I’d just be some grad student who’s messed up with acid and talking crazy talk. But what are they most afraid of right now? Publicity, that’s what!” Jerry brought it out as confidently as Mr. McGuire had said “Plastics!” in The Graduate. “You’re the world’s leading expert on what goes into making planets with aliens on them possible, and—”

  “No, I’m not. Not even close,” Steve broke in. In his own way, different from Jerry’s, he was also a modest man. “I could name a dozen people who—”

  “Okay, fine. Have it your way.” Jerry interrupted right back. “You’re one of the world’s leading experts on planets with aliens on them. If somebody like you said the CIA was doing strange things with a couple of them and with their starship, people would pay attention.” He wanted to say, The Russians would pay attention. He didn’t. He wasn’t a Red, and didn’t want Steve thinking he was. He was just somebody who believed in the balance of power. What lay in the moon pool seemed too important to belong to only one country.

  The older man took off his glasses, polished them with a soft cotton handkerchief, and put them back on his nose. His look said he understood where Jerry was coming from. Gently, he answered, “You need to remember, son, I signed the same nondisclosure agreement you did.”

  “Did you sign it thinking you’d be looking at a couple of centaurs in suspended-animation tanks?”

  “I knew the possibility was there. They showed me some of the pictures the Halibut took to help enlist me.”

  They trusted you a lot further than they did me, Jerry thought resentfully. But why wouldn’t they? Steve already worked for RAND, and RAND and the CIA were in each other’s pockets half the time. He wasn’t a freaky, freaked-out, unreliable grad student. Muttering, Jerry said, “They can’t swing this by themselves, dammit. They aren’t big enough. Ford isn’t big enough. Kissinger isn’t, either.”

  “Well, I won’t tell you you’re wrong, but do you think Brezhnev and Gromyko are?”

  “Hell, no, not by themselves. Added in with our people, maybe. But the way things are, it doesn’t look like we’ll get the chance to find out, does it?”

  Steve puckered his lips and blew air out through them. “Remember the clause you noticed in the agreement? The one that talks about termination with extreme prejudice?”

  “I’m not likely to forget it! I was remembering it earlier today, in fact.”

  “Okay. Good. If you think for even a minute that they don’t mean it, you’d better think again. Anybody who talks out of turn about this, anybody at all, is a sudden fatal accident waiting to happen. He won’t have to wait long, either. This game is for keeps.”

  “They wouldn’t do that to you!” Jerry exclaimed.

  “Of course they would. They’ll do it to anybody. You said it yourself—this is too big for them. The only way they see to have any control over it is to keep it secret and hold on tight. If they can learn things from Humpty Dumpty without waking the aliens, or if they’re positive the aliens can’t take over the ship as soon as they wake up…”

  Jerry stared at him. “You’re as scared as I am.”

  “Who in his right mind wouldn’t be? I think we’re fine as long as we’re on the ship. We can’t talk to outsiders here. But unless they’re convinced we’re harmless, I’d be real careful once I got home. If you hear a car hit me while I was crossing the street or something, maybe you should try to disappear.”

  “Yeesh!” Jerry said. By sounding so calm and reasonable, Steve made it seem more scary, not less. How far can I trust him, though? Jerry wondered. If Steve reported him to Jack and Dale, wouldn’t the man from the RAND Corporation buy safety for himself? Or was there any safety to buy anywhere? Was Steve trying to talk him into saying things that would justify punching his ticket for good?

  Once you started down that rabbit hole of suspicion, how did you ever come out again? The dangers you imagined—the ones you thought you were imagining—might prove real after all. Will I see CIA guys whenever I go outside from now on, the way John Birchers see Communists everywhere?

  “Hang on a second. I have something,” Steve said. He opened a desk drawer, pulled out a bottle, and showed it to Jerry.

  “Stolichnaya! Where’d you get that?”

  “From Dale. He brought a lot of good Russian liquor aboard. I don’t think he told the Agency about it, either. Instead of shooting it out if we got boarded, he aimed to try to bribe the Russian officers with it.”

  “No shit?” Jerry said. Steve nodded. Jerry went on, “We won’t get boarded now.”

  “That’s right. And Dale’s a good Mormon, so he won’t drink it himself.”

  “He is? I didn’t know that.” There’d been a Mormon family down the street from Jerry when he was growing up. He’d played with the kids. The dad, who’d joined the faith when he married, came over once in a while for a sly beer or cigarette with Hyman Stieglitz. Jerry thought the religion was odd, but it seemed to turn out pretty good people. Of course, there were those who said the same thing about Judaism.

  “He is.” Steve went into the bathroom, came back with his glass and Jerry’s, and poured a good knock of vodka into each. After Jerry’d taken his, the older man made a toast: “May we live long and prosper!”

  “You Trekkie, you!” Jerry said. They clinked and drank. The Stoli went down smooth as a kiss. A kiss … I haven’t had a kiss in way too long, Jerry thought. I mean, way too long.

  Steve got to the bottom of his glass before Jerry did. He didn’t drink much ordinarily, but this hadn’t been an ordinary day. He picked up the bottle by the neck. “Want a refill?”

  “Do I ever!” Jerry thrust his glass forward. They drank some more, and some more after that. A little before midnight, the dead soldier went into the wastebasket.

  * * *

  People said vodka didn’t give you a hangover. They said it wasn’t the alcohol, it was the other stuff that flavored scotch or bourbon or gin that put the hurt on you. After half a liter of the Soviet Union’s finest, Jerry woke up the next morning much the worse for wear. He groaned before he realized he’d done it.

  “How are you doing?” Steve’s voice floated up from the bottom bunk.

  “I feel like dogshit,” Jerry answered. “How about you?”

  “Pretty much the same. Misery loves company, I guess. Maybe if I stand under a hot shower for a while…”

  “Go ahead, man. It’s a good idea, but I don’t want to move yet.”

  When Steve came out of the bathroom, Jerry lurched in. He took two aspirins. Brushing his teeth got rid of some of the dead animals in his mouth. He cranked the shower up to just under parboil. When he came out, he swallowed two more aspirins for luck. By the time he’d dried and combed his hair and got some clothes on, he felt better, if nowhere near good.

  He wasn’t ready to face food when he went to the messroom, but he poured down lots of sweet coffee pale with cream. Steve was being abstemious, too. Tapping his cup with a fingernail, he said, “Breakfast of champions.”