“Thanks, Dad.” Jerry set a hand on his father’s shoulder for a moment. “You’re a mensch, you know?”

  “I try. I don’t always make it, but I try. You aren’t doing too bad yourself, kid.”

  Jerry had his suitcase packed and dinner almost ready when Anna got home Wednesday evening. He left the dishes in the sink after they finished eating. She’d wash them, or else she wouldn’t. He wouldn’t be around to get upset if she didn’t.

  They headed for the airport. She stopped in front of the terminal Hawaiian Air flew out of. He kissed her. “I love you, babe,” he said.

  “Love you, too. Wake up one of those weird aliens for me.”

  “Ha! I wish!” Jerry took the suitcase out of the trunk and walked into the terminal. Sure enough, his boarding pass waited at the counter. He checked his luggage and went to gate 51, where the plane would leave.

  There were the Russians! Those dozen or so men sitting together couldn’t be anyone else. They were paler than Californians, and wearing sports clothes straight from 1959. Most of them were smoking. Nervously, Jerry walked over to them. “Dobry den, tovarishchi,” he said.

  XVIII

  When the plane landed in Honolulu in the wee small hours, Jerry felt sorry for the Soviet scientists. All they’d see of Hawaii was the airport. He was glad they all spoke English, some quite a bit better than he spoke Russian. That made sense; they’d need to work with their American counterparts. But Ambassador Dobrynin and Major Bronstein had been right—the Russian he did know, and his willingness to try with it, helped ease his way with his new colleagues.

  The Russians and Jerry got off the airliner in a group. Nobody draped leis around their necks or shouted “Aloha!” at them. Jack Porter, the security boss on the Glomar Explorer, stood near the entry gate with a sign: SOVIET DELEGATION. Four or five other guys in casual clothes almost as outdated as the Russians’ waited behind him. They’d be shepherds, watchdogs, minders, whatever you wanted to call them.

  Nikolai Kalyakin seemed to be the seniormost Russian. He was in his fifties, an astronomer by training, and by interests a man who would have got on well with Steve Dole. He was short and stocky, and had lost the last two fingers on his left hand. He wasn’t the only visibly injured man in the group; the USSR had had a rugged World War II.

  Kalyakin pushed his way forward now. He introduced himself to Jack Porter. “Very glad to meet you,” he said in good English.

  “And you,” Porter answered. He took a piece of paper from a pants pocket. “I have a list of the men in your party, sir. Before we head for baggage claim, I’m going to read it out so I can see who’s who.” And he did. Each Soviet scientist nodded or raised his hand like a schoolboy when his name was called. When the CIA man got to “Stieglitz, Jerome,” he took a good look at Jerry and said, “I didn’t recognize you for a second.”

  “Everybody tells me that.” Jerry was thinking about letting his whiskers grow when he got to the Glomar Explorer. His hair would take longer, but he figured he might grow it out again, too.

  After the Russians had their suitcases, Porter and his comrades led them to the area where cargo planes landed and took off. No one examined the Russians’ luggage; after a moment’s puzzlement, Jerry realized that would have been done in New York City or L.A. or wherever they landed in the United States. His suitcase would have got the once-over, too.

  They filed aboard a military transport. It was a jet, not a Warning Star; the prop job wouldn’t have carried all of them. The seats were military issue: no more roomy or comfortable than they had to be. Next to what the Hawaiian Air airliner had had, they were pathetic. The Soviet scientists took them in stride. Jerry wondered what flying on Aeroflot was like.

  It was still dark when they landed on Midway. Counting the dogleg to Hawaii, Jerry’d come more than 3,500 miles, and the Russians, of course, much farther than that. But they’d almost kept up with the sun’s motion instead of going against it as they would have heading east.

  “No photography on Midway,” Porter said as they taxied to a stop. “On the ship, you can do as you please—that’s been agreed. But not here. Everybody understand?” Nikolai Kalyakin translated for his less fluent colleagues. They all nodded.

  Sailors with flashlights guided the new arrivals straight to the mess hall. They parked their suitcases by a table and lined up for trays of Navy breakfast chow. Jerry remembered how disappointed he’d been with the food here after eating high on the hog on the Glomar Explorer. It didn’t seem too bad now.

  Most of the Russians went back for seconds, and a couple for thirds. “So much!” one of them said to another.

  “So good!” his friend added. Jerry wouldn’t have gone that far. Again, he suspected the Soviet scientists had different standards of comparison.

  “We may rest now?” Kalyakin asked Jack Porter. How weary and jet-lagged were he and his fellows? If they’d left from Moscow, they’d come more than halfway around the world.

  But the security chief shook his head. “First helicopter leaves at sunrise, second one forty-five minutes later. Once you get aboard the Glomar Explorer, you people can take all the downtime you need. Till then, I’m sorry, but no.”

  If Jerry had been Nikolai Kalyakin, he would have raised hell. The astronomer just sighed, nodded, and turned Porter’s words into Russian. None of the other scientists fussed, either, though they must have been dead on their feet. They were bound to be used to having security personnel tell them what to do.

  One of Porter’s subordinates read the names of who’d go out on the first flight and who on the second. Jerry was on the first. So was Kalyakin. He gave low-voiced instructions to an engineer named Vitaly Yushchenko, who’d fly to the Glomar Explorer on the second chopper. Keep your half of the guys in line till we get back together, was Jerry’s guess.

  Along with half a dozen Russians and a couple of CIA men, Jerry boarded the Navy helicopter and strapped down. The sun was just coming up. Away from the base, the gooney birds began to stir. Kalyakin pointed at them. “Al’batrosov!” he said, which probably meant Russian had borrowed the name from English.

  The whirlybird’s engine roared to life. Jerry’d thought he remembered how horribly noisy it was in the cabin, but he turned out to be wrong. He gritted his teeth so hard, he hoped he didn’t break one. The helicopter hopped off the ground and flew across the Pacific.

  Midway’s two islets were just specks that soon vanished. All was seawater and raucous racket. The Russians stared down at the vast blue ocean. Now they could see it, which they hadn’t been able to do between Los Angeles and Midway. Somewhere out there lay Site 126–1, unless they’d moved the Glomar Explorer after Jerry lost his place there.

  An hour later, he spied the ship. The copter bounced once when it touched down on the helipad. Jerry grabbed his suitcase and jumped out. It was very strange: he hardly felt he’d been away.

  * * *

  Dale Neuwirth stood near the edge of the landing platform. Jerry wondered whether to shake hands with him. After a moment, he did, more as a façade for the Russians than for any other reason. Dale sounded warm enough when he said, “Good to see you, Jerry, and good to have you back again.”

  “Good to be back,” Jerry said. “I wish Steve could be here, too.”

  Neuwirth’s lips skinned back from his teeth. “That was not my idea, and I didn’t know about it till after the fact. I wish it hadn’t happened. Some people on the mainland went a little bonkers.”

  “Yeah, a little. They almost bonked me, too,” Jerry answered tightly. Still, he gave Dale credit for coming closer to admitting what had happened than John P. had. Then he noticed Kalyakin and the other Russians were hanging back to let him talk with Dale. He waved them up. “Here are our new colleagues,” he said to Dale, and introduced them one by one.

  “Very pleased to meet you, gentlemen,” Neuwirth said, and shook hands with all of them. “I’m sure your contributions will be invaluable to us.” He waved them forward. “As soon as we all get off the helipad, the chopper can take off.” He had to pause while it did; he couldn’t shout over it. Then he went on, “Here are the stewards, who will give you your cabins and guide you to them if you need that. Jerry, if it’s all right with you, I’m going to put you back in cabin 116. Doctor Parker has had it to himself for a couple of weeks, since the last personnel rotation. A roommate won’t do him any lasting harm.”

  “Okay by me, yeah,” Jerry said. “I know where it is, anyhow.”

  “It’ll be kind of a ‘Jerry-built’ cabin,” Dale said with a small chuckle. “That’s his first name, too.”

  “Is it? That should confuse things.” Jerry looked around to make sure the Russians were being properly taken care of. Seeing that they were, he got a key to the cabin from a steward and headed for the cabin to throw his stuff into one of the lockers inside.

  Instead of just using the key, he knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” The voice from within easily pierced the metal.

  “Jerry Stieglitz.” Nobody’d told Jerry he had to be Steinberg this time around, even if he had the papers to show he was.

  The door opened. The man on the other side of it was in his early forties, as tall as Jerry and thicker through the shoulders, with red-brown hair, bushy sideburns, and a mustache. He scowled at Jerry. “You’re the son of a bitch who told the Russians what we’re up to,” he growled.

  “I sure am,” Jerry agreed cheerfully. “I’m also your new roomie, or that’s what Dale told me. And you’re Jerry Pournelle. I’ve heard you talk a few times. The CIA gave you a phony name in Long Beach, too, huh?”

  “Yeah, they did.” Pournelle looked as if he wanted to stay angry but couldn’t quite manage it. He stepped aside. “Don’t stand there blocking the passageway. C’mon in, for God’s sake. Why in hell did you do such a horrible thing?” Now he sounded more curious than furious, too.

  “For one thing, I don’t think it was so horrible. For another thing, it was my best chance to keep from getting murdered. Which locker you using?”

  “The one on the right. What d’you mean, murdered?”

  “As in killed. To death.” Jerry started putting his clothes in the empty locker. While he was tossing in socks and underwear and hanging up shirts and pants, he told the sad story of Stephen Dole one more time.

  “I heard that was a robbery,” Pournelle said. Jerry just shook his head and explained why he didn’t think so. Pournelle looked troubled. “Damn! That’s terrible if it’s true. I knew Dole. Ferociously smart man.”

  “I saw that from his book. Found out for real when I worked with him.”

  “You were the one who figured out how to get into Humpty Dumpty to begin with, weren’t you? You aren’t so dumb yourself, I bet.”

  Jerry shrugged. “That hardly matters now.” He eyed Pournelle. “Have you been one of the go-slow people when it came to trying to wake the aliens? I know somebody must have been, or they would have done more after they threw Steve and me out on our ears.”

  “No, you aren’t dumb, not even slightly.” Pournelle had a habit of shouting even when he stood near you; Jerry remembered that from listening to him back in Los Angeles. He continued, “Yeah, I’m not in a hurry about it. We’re liable to damage them, or else they’re likely to damage us. I kind of had to raise my voice to Dale a couple of times to get the point across.”

  “Has anyone had any luck in the control room or with the engines?” Jerry asked.

  “We know where they are. We think we do, anyhow: behind airlock-type doors we can’t open,” Pournelle said. “That stuff the centaurowls build with, it may look like mother-of-pearl, but mother-of-pearl, is it ever tough.”

  Jerry laughed. “Anybody who does W. C. Fields can’t be all good.”

  “I may not be all good, but I’m pretty damn good,” Pournelle said with a laugh of his own. “And you aren’t too bad yourself, kid. Now I remember seeing that story of yours in Analog. Felt real. Can’t ask for more than that.”

  “Thanks,” Jerry said, astounded. “I’ve sold another one there.”

  “Good for you! Easier to do it once than twice, believe me. If you can sell regularly, you’ll build yourself a nice career.”

  “If we make it through this. Maybe. I hope.” Jerry hesitated, then went on, “But if we can’t get at the controls or the engines, we are gonna have to press those big yellow buttons pretty soon, aren’t we?”

  “Unless you or the Russians figure out how to reach them, yeah, I’m afraid so. Either that or sink Humpty Dumpty even deeper than it was before. It’s piss or get off the pot time, sure as hell.”

  “What do you want to bet we and the Russians both have missiles with H-bombs aimed at this ship right now?”

  “I won’t touch that one. I’m sure they do and we do. That’d end everything in a hurry, anyway—unless the aliens can shoot down the warheads or make it so they don’t work,” Pournelle said.

  “I think the aliens worry about nuclear weapons, or at least the ship does.” Jerry explained his idea about why Humpty Dumpty might have sunk the K-129 but suffered itself to be brought to the surface by the Glomar Explorer.

  “Huh!” Pournelle said. “That makes a fair bit of sense. I don’t recall hearing it from anybody else, either.”

  “I thought of it after I got shitcanned,” Jerry said. “Not something I can prove, not without asking one of the centaurowls, but it seems to be the way Occam’s razor slices.”

  “Yeah, it does. I first thought you had sense when Neuwirth showed me your list of scenarios. Now that I’ve met you, and now that I remember your Analog story, I see I was right—even if you do like the Russians too goddamn much.”

  “I don’t like them for beans. But they’re here, whether we like them or not. We’ve got to deal with them. We’ve got to deal them in, too. Word about the Glomar Explorer was already coming out, remember. So was word about Humpty Dumpty, even if the news guys couldn’t believe it.”

  “Some people are too rational to cope with reality,” Pournelle said.

  Jerry nodded. “That’s pithy—and I’m not even lithping.” Pournelle looked as if he’d bitten down hard on a lemon. From then on, they got along with each other pretty well.

  * * *

  The men on the Glomar Explorer had made some progress since sending Jerry and Steve back to the mainland. “We know what the atmosphere is like inside Humpty Dumpty now,” Dave Schoals told him. “Eighty-two percent nitrogen, seventeen percent oxygen, one percent argon and neon and what have you. Pressure is just a skosh higher than ours, so the oxygen level is that much closer to what we’ve got here.”

  “How could the pressure difference persist if it opens up when you say ‘Friend’?” Jerry asked.

  The recovery director shrugged. “You find the answer to that one, you win the Nobel Prize. People can go in and out, but the local atmosphere stays in and ours doesn’t mingle with it.”

  “That’s … pretty crazy, man,” Jerry said.

  “No kidding,” Dave said. “Oh, we go in there without air connections now, too. We put in a cage of white mice, left ’em there with food and water for several days. They did fine in there and after we took ’em out. So we did the same thing with a monkey, to check a biochemistry closer to ours. He did all right, too. He breathed the air and didn’t come down sick or anything, even after we got him out. When we were sure he’d stay healthy, I tried it myself. Except for growing an extra pair of legs and feathers, nothing happened to me, either.”

  “Right.” Jerry couldn’t help smiling; it was the kind of joke he might have made himself. Dave was okay … for a career CIA man. How much had he known about the hit on Steve Dole, and about whatever preparations the CIA had made for Jerry? Had he and Jack approved all that? Had they suggested it?

  Jerry would have asked him, only he was sure whatever answer he got would be what Dave wanted him to believe, not the truth. He’d thought about Wernher von Braun not so long before. Von Braun had been a capable man serving unsavory bosses, too.

  “I’m allowed to go into Humpty Dumpty with the Russians, then?” Jerry asked.

  “With the other Russians, you mean?” Dave said.

  That did it. Jerry’s temper was more fragile than he’d thought. “Fuck you,” he said. “You try and murder somebody, all of a sudden you find out he’s not your best buddy anymore. And then you act surprised and snotty? Fuck you! I’m ten times the American you’ll ever be.”

  Dave Schoals went red. Jerry suspected the CIA guy could clean his clock if he wanted to. But all Dave said was, “You have the same privileges we do. That’s been agreed to. So yes, you and they can go in as you please. And…”

  He stopped for so long, Jerry said, “And?”

  “Fuck you, too.”

  Jerry blew him a kiss. By Dave’s expression, he didn’t know whether to laugh or be disgusted. He compromised with a sweeping get-away-from-me gesture. Jerry did. An hour or so later, he and Nikolai Kalyakin went up to Humpty Dumpty’s round entry door. It was closed, which meant no one—no one human—was inside. Kalyakin had a 35-millimeter camera on a strap around his neck. It wasn’t a Russian model, or even a Zeiss from East Germany, but a Japanese Nikon.

  “May I be one to open door?” the astronomer asked Jerry.

  “Sure, go ahead. Think friendly thoughts before you speak, remember.”

  “I shall do this.” After concentrating, Kalyakin said, “Dryzha!” Jerry was sure he couldn’t have brought out the vocative of dryg—friend—on a Russian test, but he recognized it when he heard it. Kalyakin addressed the airlock as if it were a person. And he looked childishly delighted when it opened as if a person were operating it.

  He went in ahead of Jerry. Yes indeed, the people on the Glomar Explorer had done more exploring since Jerry left the ship. He’d had to study almost as hard as the Russians to catch up. One of the chambers they’d found seemed to be the crew quarters. At least, it held three things that might have been centaurowl beds and a jumble of junk that had the look of personal effects, if you weren’t exactly a person.