“You know it,” Jerry said. “Put it together with all the aspirins I had and it’s got to be wearing a hole in my stomach right now.”

  “I haven’t done that in a long time,” Steve said, at least half to himself. “Not since a friend of mine had a stroke and died walking to an elevator at a conference. Whitey was forty-eight—no, forty-seven.”

  “Damn!” Jerry said. Forty-seven felt old to him, but it wasn’t old enough to die, even if it was older than his mother’d got.

  For years, he hadn’t even been able to think about her, much less talk about her, without puddling up. He still sometimes wanted to. The wound had a scar on it these days, but he felt it now and then all the same.

  He and Steve sat there under the fluorescent lights for a while, not saying much. Then Jerry remarked, “The steward who cleans up’ll wonder where you scored that bottle.”

  “Probably.” Steve tried a nod. It didn’t seem to hurt him too much. “On a ship full of big mysteries, though, that’s just a little one.”

  Before Jerry could answer, the chuntering roar of a copter settling down on the helipad made his head want to fall off. Steve flinched, too. Jerry said, “Never mind termination with extreme prejudice later. Somebody kill me now.”

  Steve looked around. Not seeing anyone obviously listening to them, he relaxed—a little. Not much above a whisper, he said, “Using that phrase out in the open isn’t a great idea.”

  “Mm … I can see that. Sorry,” Jerry said. People who’d kill you if you got out of line wouldn’t like your saying they’d kill you if you got out of line, not even if you borrowed their euphemism.

  “I wonder who’s on the helicopter,” Steve said. “I always do, whenever one comes in from Midway. I wonder if it’s got my replacement aboard.”

  “You and me both, man. You and me both. I’m almost to the point where I’d sooner go home and try to forget any of this ever happened.”

  “Almost?”

  Half embarrassed, Jerry gave back a careful nod. “Yeah. Those units, those yellow buttons … Kinda want to know how the movie ends.”

  “If it has a happy ending, for us and for them.” Like Jerry, Steve didn’t go into detail in a public space.

  “Well, yeah.” The aliens might die after people tried reviving them. That would be tragic, because humanity hadn’t discovered any other sunken spaceships … as far as he knew, anyhow. Then again, the centaurowls might take control of Humpty Dumpty again. If they did, and if they were pissed off, that one ship might be able to beat everything America and Russia threw at it, even if you tossed in England, France, and China for good measure.

  The happy medium was having them wake up and tell the CIA everything they knew, either of their own accord or because the Agency got … persuasive. That was what everybody hoped for. But hope came out of Pandora’s box last for a reason.

  After a little while, the helicopter took off again. The noise didn’t seem quite so horrible this time. Jerry shoved back his chair and stood up. “I’m gonna get rid of some of this coffee before I wet my pants. Then I think I’ll go forward and see what’s happening with Humpty Dumpty.”

  “Fresh air,” Steve said solemnly.

  “Fresh air,” Jerry agreed. It was supposed to be good for a hangover. As far as he could tell, nothing but time helped much. He didn’t supposed fresh air would do him any actual harm, though.

  Some faces he’d never seen before were looking down into the moon pool. They all had one thing in common: the look of utter amazement spread across them. If the men hadn’t been reading science fiction since they were eight years old—and most of them probably had—they’d grown up hearing about flying saucers or UFOs or whatever the current label was. Now they weren’t hearing about them. They were seeing one. It made a difference. Yeah, just a little, Jerry thought.

  He walked to the rail that kept people from leaning too far forward and falling a long way to a hard bottom. He didn’t stand close to any of the new arrivals. Talking with strangers was the last thing he wanted right now.

  He peered into the moon pool—and stiffened, the way a German shepherd would if someone it had never seen hopped the fence and came down in its back yard. He wouldn’t have been surprised if his hair frizzed out like an angry dog’s, too. Two men were probing at Humpty Dumpty’s nacreous shell, one with a hammer and chisel, the other with a blowtorch.

  Rage burned away Jerry’s hangover. He knew another grad student who’d been on LSD on a waterbed right near the epicenter of the 1971 Sylmar quake. “I was straight like that,” Karl would say, snapping his fingers. “Adrenaline murdered the acid.” Jerry hadn’t been sure whether to believe him. He did now.

  Swearing under his breath, he swarmed down ladderlike stairways till he got down to the bottom deck. He hurried to the chamber that adjoined the moon pool … and was not at all surprised to find Dave Schoals standing in there.

  Jerry stabbed his index finger at the dogged doorway out. “What the fuck is going on in the moon pool?” he ground out.

  Dave gaped at him. Later, Jerry realized he wasn’t in the habit of barking at people who had a lot more seniority than he did—and not only barking, but barking with authority that declared he was entitled to answers. After Dave pulled his face straight, he gave him one: “We have orders to see if we can get samples of Humpty Dumpty’s outer skin so we can find out what it’s made of and whether we can duplicate it.”

  “Orders from who?” Most of the time, Jerry tried to talk grammatically. He was too rattled now to care.

  “From the highest authority,” Dave said.

  “Oh, bullshit. Gerald Ford doesn’t give a rat’s ass what Humpty Dumpty’s made of. Could be snips and snails and puppy dogs’ tails for all he cares.”

  “What it is wouldn’t matter. Knowing what it is and knowing whether it’s anything we can match—that matters.”

  “Does making the ship notice us and maybe blow us away matter?”

  “For God’s sake, Jerry, be reasonable. You’ve gone inside it, remember.”

  “I had permission. It opened up for me. What if screwing with the hull weakens it so it can’t fly or something? You think it won’t know? You think it can’t protect itself? Ask the Russians!”

  “Dale thought the risk was small enough to be justifiable,” Dave said.

  “Fuck Dale, too.”

  Jerry would have gone on, but somebody—presumably the men who’d been messing with Humpty Dumpty’s hide—rapped on the steel door. Dave let them in. “Any luck?” he asked, as he closed the door again and secured it.

  “Not a goddamn bit,” answered the guy with the hammer and chisel. He added, “Hey, Jerry.”

  “Hi, Woodie,” Jerry said. The technician was—what else?—only following orders.

  “What do you mean, not a bit?” Dave said.

  “Chisel wouldn’t bite.” Woodie held it up. “It just slid, like. And Bert’s torch didn’t heat the shell even a little. We both struck out.”

  “Shit,” Dave said, most sincerely. Jerry found himself relieved and happy at the same time. Ever since he first tried knocking on the airlock door, he’d wondered whether Humpty Dumpty was fully in contact with the world he lived in. You could lift it. You could touch it. But could you truly get a grip on it? Maybe not.

  X

  At breakfast the next morning, Dale bussed his tray and plate and silverware, then came over to the table where Jerry was eating. Nodding, he said, “Stop by my cabin when you get done, will you?”

  “Uh, sure,” Jerry said, but he was talking to Dale’s back. The bite of sausage he was chewing seemed to lose flavor in his mouth. A friendly, casual order was still an order. He’d waited nervously for the other shoe to drop. Here it was.

  “The condemned man ate a hearty meal?” Steve asked quietly. Jerry’d told him what had happened. He hadn’t been thrilled to hear it, either.

  “Nyeh—could be!” Jerry said in his best Bugs Bunny tones, which weren’t too bad. One of his aunts knew Mel Blanc, but he’d never met the man of a thousand voices himself.

  “For the record, I still think you were a hundred percent right,” Steve said.

  “Far out! That and a quarter’ll get me a cup of coffee.”

  “They’ll do whatever they do.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Jerry methodically finished his sausage and eggs and home fries. It was a hearty meal. He thought about getting seconds so he could dawdle over them and piss Dale off, but decided he was already in enough trouble. He climbed to his feet. “Wish me luck.”

  “You know I do.” Steve crossed his fingers for a moment. Jerry wondered if that would do a Jew any good. He hoped so. Twisting the fingers even of two hands into a Star of David was next to impossible.

  He disposed of his stuff, then went to the mission director’s cabin. The door was closed. When he tapped on it, Dale opened it right away. “Hi. C’mon in,” he said, still friendly and casual and still in command.

  “Thanks.” In Jerry came.

  Dale shut the door behind him and waved him to a chair. He sat down himself, steepling his fingers. “Dave tells me you aren’t happy about the line of research we started yesterday.”

  “He’s right.” Jerry admitted what he couldn’t very well deny.

  “Even if experiments like that were ordered by the president of the United States?”

  “Especially if they were. The president’s five or six thousand miles away. He’s never seen Humpty Dumpty. He doesn’t know what it can do, and—”

  “Neither do you,” Dale pointed out.

  “That’s true, but I’ve got a lot more imagination than Gerald Ford does. And if Humpty Dumpty does something, it’ll do something to me, not to him.”

  “Yesterday’s experiments did no damage and provoked no reaction.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t know they wouldn’t before you went ahead with them. What if they’d punched a hole in the shell or something?”

  “That seems unlikely, in a ship that stayed at the bottom of the Pacific undamaged for an unknown but large number of years.”

  “Not undamaged. You saw the photos Steve and I took. Everything in there is all higgledy-piggledy, and one of those aliens is long, long dead.”

  Dale made an impatient noise: “Mff. You know what I mean. The ship is still structurally sound. The computers or whatever controls it in the absence of the crew are still operational. So is the weapons system that sank the K-129.”

  “It sure is,” Jerry said. “What would it do to us, huh?”

  “It didn’t do anything,” Dale said stolidly. “You can speculate as much as you want. That’s fact.”

  “You had no idea it would work that way.”

  “I also had no idea it would work that way when Clementine grabbed Humpty Dumpty and when the pipe string hauled the spaceship up into the moon pool. Those encounters held much more potential danger than a couple of crewmen prodding at the outer hull. They caused no hostile action.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Jerry hadn’t looked at it like that. He decided he was lucky; if he had looked at it like that, he might have jumped off the Glomar Explorer and tried to swim back to the mainland. He said, “With something that powerful, do you want to take chances?”

  “We’ve been taking chances,” Dale said. “The highest authority thought, and I agreed, the possible reward justified the risk. We didn’t learn what we wanted to, but we also didn’t provoke or harm Humpty Dumpty.”

  No harm, no foul. Jerry didn’t say it. The phrase wouldn’t mean anything to Dale Neuwirth. He didn’t live in Los Angeles, and wouldn’t have listened to Chick Hearn doing Laker games since the team moved from Minneapolis. Jerry just shook his head.

  The director sighed. “I didn’t ask you to stop by here to convert you. I did my missionary work when I was younger than you are now, and I’m not sure I converted anyone then. But Dave and Jack and I did some talking last night, and we all agree it’s time to send you and Doctor Dahlgren back to the mainland so you can get on with your lives and bring in some fresh people from the B crew for ideas about how best to exploit Humpty Dumpty.”

  Exploit. That was how Dale thought of it. Bound to be how the president thought of it, too. The biggest thing that might ever have happened to mankind, and they wanted to exploit it.

  The next obvious question was, how did they know what Steve thought? Had he told them himself? Or did they have bugs in the cabins? By now, nothing the CIA did could surprise Jerry. The more he thought about it, the more likely the bugs seemed. Steve hadn’t known he’d be going back to the mainland, too, or if he had, he sure hadn’t let on.

  Slowly, Jerry said, “I’m not asking for a trip home. I still think I can be useful here, if you’ll let me.”

  “I’m sure Doctor Dahlgren will say the same thing. The attitude does you both credit,” Dale replied. “We aren’t angry at either one of you, believe me. If you ever need a letter of recommendation, if you ever need any kind of favor, get hold of one of us. We’ll take care of you. And you won’t suffer financially from what you’ve done here—I guarantee you that.”

  “You guys have paid me more than I thought I’d make for years and years. I’m not complaining about that. I never would,” Jerry said.

  The mission director waved his words aside. “Don’t worry about it. Listen to me—I’m telling you what’s what. Oh, and there’s this.” Dale went over to his desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a small piece of paper, and gave it to Jerry.

  Jerry looked at it in confusion. “A post office box in Schenectady?”

  “You’re a writer. You’re going to keep on writing. This is where you’ll send your work for vetting before you submit it. You don’t need to include a self-addressed stamped envelope. We’ll spring for return postage, too. And I promise a quick turnaround—we’re only looking for things that endanger security.”

  “Uh, thanks, I guess.” Jerry folded the paper and stuck it in his wallet. He threw the dice one more time: “Can I do anything to get you to change your mind?”

  “We value your contribution very highly. The list of possible outcomes you gave me was outstanding. And you were the one who brilliantly discovered the way into Humpty Dumpty. You’ll get full credit for it, too,” Dale said.

  All of which added up to no. Jerry understood as much. He also understood that whatever credit he got would be in a classified report no one outside this extra-secret chunk of the CIA would ever see.

  Sure enough, Dale finished with, “We’re going to go in another direction now, see how that works out. If we find we need you later, we’ll know how to get hold of you, right?”

  “You’re the CIA, for God’s sake. Well, you aren’t, but the people you work for are. If they can’t find me, nobody can.”

  “True enough.” Dale smiled, no doubt happy Jerry was being so civilized. Jerry would have screamed and kicked something if he’d thought it would do any good. He didn’t, worse luck. Dale added, “Whenever you change your address from now on, drop a line to that PO box in Schenectady.”

  “Will do.” Jerry got to his feet. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. Dale held out his hand. Jerry shook it. He opened the door and left, closing it behind him. He hadn’t even got to the end of the corridor before Steve came around the corner. “I only wish I were surprised to see you,” Jerry said.

  “Jack told me Dale wanted to see me,” Steve said. “So, it is what I think it is?”

  “‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,’” Jerry answered, feeling Donne to a turn. That English Lit class paid off again.

  “Oh … hell,” Steve said.

  “Yeah. Fun while it lasted.” Jerry hurried away. He didn’t want anyone else seeing him on, or maybe over, the verge of tears.

  He had himself together—he thought so, anyway—by the time he went forward to get a nearly last look at Humpty Dumpty. He couldn’t, though; the tarpaulin stretched over the moon pool. Maybe a Soviet spy satellite was up there in the sky right now. Or maybe the powers that be didn’t want anybody else seeing what they were up to with the starship. Jerry couldn’t be sure, but he knew how he’d guess.

  He walked back to his cabin and shut the door. Then he kicked the door to the steel locker where he stashed his stuff, as hard as he could. The door barely dented. His right big toe hurt like hell.

  Swearing at the pain gave him an idea. He left the cabin again and limped down the corridor.

  * * *

  The tarp hadn’t come off the moon pool for four days. That confirmed Jerry’s suspicions. Whether he had them or not didn’t matter anymore. He stood near the edge of the helipad, waiting for the copter that would take him away from all this. His suitcase sat by one foot, the hydrophone by the other. They were both heavy; he’d got sick of holding them.

  Steve stood there, too, and four other guys who were going home. They acted overjoyed; Jerry and Steve were the glum ones.

  “Did they search what you’re taking home?” Steve asked.

  “Sure.” Jerry nodded. “I knew they would. I even helped. You?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Before they said anything more, one of them other men—he was a paramedic who’d worked with Doc Borden and Dr. Rogers—pointed southwest and said, “Here comes the chopper!” He sounded excited as hell.

  Wind whipped Jerry’s face as the Navy helicopter set down. The noise was appalling. Slowly, the rotors stopped spinning. Half a dozen men with suitcases and duffels got out. Jerry recognized one of them. If people on the Glomar Explorer thought he’d been a pain in the ass, they might not have seen anything yet. He kept quiet. They’d find out for themselves.

  The newcomers walked by, their heads on swivels, trying to see everything at once. Then it was the turn of the men going home to board the helicopter. A petty officer stood by the little metal staircase that led up to the entrance. “Make sure y’all strap in soon as you sit down,” he said.