Kalyakin took some pictures. “I see no photos here,” he said. “This is strange. No memories of loved ones or of favorite places? What kind of beings were these aliens?”

  “Good point. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t,” Jerry said.

  “Is permitted to touch and pick up these artifacts?” Kalyakin asked.

  “Nobody told me it wasn’t. We aren’t supposed to take anything out of Humpty Dumpty without letting people know, though.”

  “All right. Thank you.” The Russian lifted something that looked like a slightly thicker clipboard backing. One side was clear glass or plastic, and cracked. The other seemed to be made of the same tough stuff as the starship hull. “What you think this may be?”

  Jerry shrugged. “Maybe it’s a super-duper computer.” He thought of the state-of-the-art Honeywell machines in the Control container. “Or maybe it’s just a tray they ate dinner from. No way to tell, not for us.”

  “You are right. One day, maybe we know.” Kalyakin carefully put the whatever-it-was back where he’d found it. He lifted a couple of other incomprehensible objects, examined and photographed them, and set them down again. “No idea what any of this is, but so fascinating!”

  The astronomer also photographed the two centaurowls in suspended animation and the remains of the one whose gear had failed. He looked into some of the other chambers. And he eyed the two airlock-style doors the Americans had found after Jerry got booted off the ship. One apparently led toward Humpty Dumpty’s projections, the other toward the dimples at the far end of the spaceship’s long axis.

  “To say ‘Friend!’ does not make these open?” he said.

  “I guess not, or they would’ve gone through them.” Jerry’s thought about those two doors was The lady or the tiger? Except they were both liable to have tigers behind them. What might he think of or say to make them disappear so he could find out? He thought of traveling across the galaxy. He said, “Warp Factor Seven, Scotty!”

  It didn’t work. It did make Nikolai Kalyakin laugh. “This is from your show Star Trek. I know of Star Trek. I have never seen, but I know of,” he said.

  “Maybe when you get back to the American mainland, you’ll have the chance to watch some.” Jerry pitied Kalyakin. Here he was, a man who’d devoted his career to the idea of life on other planets, and he’d never seen Star Trek? That seemed almost unimaginably sad.

  “If we cannot find way through these doors, we perhaps have to try to wake up aliens and find out what they can tell us. Will tell us,” Kalyakin said.

  “Yeah.” Jerry nodded reluctantly, but he did nod. “That scares me. It scares me a lot. But we’ll never learn anything if we don’t.”

  “This is how I see things, too. Also my superiors,” Kalyakin said. Jerry wasn’t surprised; he didn’t think the Russian would come out with any views Moscow didn’t approve of. Kalyakin went on, “Now that the two most powerful nations on Earth meet this challenge together, we have better chance of success.”

  “I sure hope so.” Jerry couldn’t help thinking of the Romans and the 747 again. Or maybe it would be more like New Guinea natives paddling out to a battleship dead in the water with engine trouble. They’d have no idea what fourteen-inch guns could do …

  “When we agree to try, we must inform both governments of exact moment of effort,” Kalyakin said. “They need time to make, ah, certain preparations.”

  “Must we? They do?” Jerry didn’t like that. Here was the talk he’d had with Pournelle, coming to life for real. The generals would want to be sure they had people with their fingers on the launch buttons, just in case. If something went wrong, they’d try to erase the evidence. And maybe they would, and maybe not.

  The lady or the tiger? Jerry thought again. The question seemed even nastier this time around.

  But Kalyakin took it seriously. “We must, I think,” he said. “This is dangerous step. Everyone recognizes step is dangerous. If step proves to be mistake, we must do all we can to fix mistake. If all we can do is not enough … In that case, mistake is bigger than we thought.”

  “Do you already have permission from your government to go ahead and try to wake the aliens, or do you need to get in touch with Moscow so people there can give you permission?” Jerry asked. Learning Russian had also involved learning something about how Soviet society worked. He’d seen very clearly that the Russians used way more top-down control than Americans did.

  “I have permission to ask authorities for permission when I think time is right,” the astronomer answered. “I have talked with Doctor Neuwirth, your American leader here, about this matter. He has same arrangement, or one very much like ours.”

  “That’s interesting,” Jerry said. So much for the Americans being less top-down than their Soviet counterparts. Well, it wasn’t as if this wasn’t important. No less than the general secretary, the president would want to make the final decision. Jerry found another question: “Did Dale pull out some of the liquor he has in his cabin?”

  “He did. He told me why he had it, too. He is clever man.” Nikolai Kalyakin smiled. “I drank some. I drank not much. However clever is Dr. Neuwirth, he belongs to odd religion that does not let him use liquors. Maybe he is virtuous, but how can he be happy?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t drink to get drunk—not very often, anyway—but a little every now and then is nice. Takes the edge off the day, if you know what I mean.”

  The way Kalyakin looked at him said he was almost as naive as the Mormon mission director. Jerry had the feeling days in the USSR needed a lot more edges taken off them than days in the States did. His eyes went for a moment to Kalyakin’s mutilated hand. How much did you need not to think about what might happen to you when you charged into battle against the Nazis?

  His father might have been able to answer the question. He couldn’t. Till now, he hadn’t really thought about how lucky that made him.

  “We will do what we can do,” the astronomer said. “If our luck is good, we revive an alien and he is friendly. If our luck is not so good, we die a few minutes later, but it is quick and we know nothing of it. If our luck is very bad … They tell me you are man who writes nauchnaya fantastika.”

  That meant scientific fantasy or fantastic science. Jerry needed a second to get it. “We say science fiction in English.”

  “Science fiction, yes. Thank you. You can for yourself imagine what may happen if our luck is very bad.”

  “I’ve done that more than once. Probably everybody who’s had anything to do with the Glomar Explorer has,” Jerry said.

  “Yes, probably,” Kalyakin said. “It is thought that cannot help coming up. But so is thought of all we can gain if we succeed here. Sometimes is necessary to gamble.”

  The other choice, as Jerry Pournelle had said, was sinking Humpty Dumpty somewhere like the Marianas Trench and hoping no one ever figured out how to bring it up from there. But somebody would surely try, and, with the better technology the future would have, might well do it. Then the problem would start all over again.

  If it happens, let it happen while I’m here to see it, Jerry thought. He sighed, but he said, “Yeah, sometimes it is.”

  * * *

  Jerry found himself at the meeting that officially decided things because Nikolai Kalyakin invited him to sit in as part of the Soviet foursome along with himself, Vitaly Yushchenko, and a spaceflight doctor named Pyotr Shuvalov. On the U.S. side of the table were Dale Neuwirth, Dave Schoals, Jack Porter, and Jerry Pournelle. They all looked less than thrilled to have Jerry there. That, of course, would also have been a big part of why Kalyakin asked him to come along.

  His presence turned out not to matter much. As often happened, the meeting just formalized what everybody had already decided: they were going to try to revive one of the centaurowls. They did settle on a date and time there—Tuesday, the fifteenth of April, at noon Midway time.

  “You’ll have the chance to pass this on to your government, of course,” Dale told Kalyakin.

  “Yes, of course,” the Russian said. “What do we do in case something goes wrong? We need to plan now.”

  “I’ll speak to that,” Jack said. “We have military rifles on this ship.”

  “Bozhe moi!” Vitaly Yushchenko exploded. “Why?”

  “For the same reason we brought liquor aboard: to defend the ship in case Soviet sailors boarded us,” the security director answered.

  “Liquor is better notion,” Yushchenko said.

  “Yeah, I think so, too,” Jack said. “But we have them. Armed men will be in the chamber when we attempt the revival. They’ll try to disable or kill the centaurowl if it wants to take control of the ship. If that fails, you and we will both have lines out to warn our people on the bridge to warn our governments. And they will do what they do, and may God have mercy on our souls.” He crossed himself.

  “And if even two thermonuclear missiles don’t solve things, the rest of the planet will put up the best fight it can,” Jerry Pournelle added.

  No one said anything about that. Saying something would just have called attention to the difference between the best fight it can and a good enough fight.

  Instead of saying anything about Pournelle’s comment, Dale remarked, “April fifteenth is the day American taxes are due. I hope my wife’s taking care of that.”

  “It is thirtieth of April for us,” Kalyakin said. “I hope what we do here is not too much taxing experience for us. You say that—taxing experience?”

  “Yeah, we say that.” Jerry wanted to applaud. He admired anybody who could make a pun in a language he didn’t grow up speaking. It was a bad pun, but then, most puns were bad puns. He’d made enough of them to know.

  The Americans and Russians both readied and tested the phone lines that would connect the people in the suspended-animation chamber with the bridge and ultimately with Moscow and Washington. Whatever Humpty Dumpty’s hull was made of, it blocked radio signals. The Americans had found that out, Jerry learned, not long after he and Steve left the Glomar Explorer.

  Jerry Pournelle was designated the American responsible for shooting the alien if it caused trouble. He got one of the AR-15s stowed in Dale’s cabin. “More firepower than I carried in Korea,” he told Jerry. “I was a punk second lieutenant, and I had a punk second lieutenant’s piece: an M1 carbine. Deadlier weapon than a flyswatter, but not a whole lot.”

  “Okay.” Jerry’s interest in firearms was only writerly. He’d played with cap pistols and toy rifles when he was a kid, but he’d never handled a real gun.

  Nikolai Kalyakin chose Vitaly Yushchenko as the Russians’ rifleman. “I would do it myself, but man with rifle should have two good hands.” He wiggled the surviving fingers on his left hand. “I was wounded near Lake Balaton in Hungary in 1945.”

  “My father fought in Italy. He was up close to Milan when the war ended.”

  “We were allies then. And now again,” Kalyakin said. Jerry nodded. Neither mentioned the thirty years in between. Hitler had been deadly dangerous to both the USA and the USSR. No one knew if the centaurowls were, but no one could deny they might be.

  Two unarmed Americans and two unarmed men from the Soviet team would go into the suspended-animation chamber with the riflemen. Dale picked Jack Porter to accompany him. Dave Schoals did not take that well. He asked Dale for one of the vodka bottles from the formerly secret stash, and hurt himself with it.

  And Nikolai Kalyakin chose Jerry. “Are you sure?” Jerry said when the astronomer told him over dinner. “Won’t everybody else on your team hate you if you do that?”

  “They will hate me even more if I take one of them—all of them except that one, I mean. If they want to hate you … well, I can manage that. And you deserve to be there, same way you deserve to be here on ship. You found way into Humpty Dumpty. And you were first to see centaurowls. Centaurowls—is word I like.” Kalyakin paused for a bite of filet mignon. He followed it with one from his lobster tail.

  Jerry ate some lobster, too. He realized the astronomer headed the Soviet delegation not just for his seniority and scientific brilliance. He was also a shrewd practical politician. If his comrades blamed Jerry, they wouldn’t blame him.

  Kalyakin ate more steak. “Is food on ship always so good, or do you have special things now because Russians are here?” He understood Potemkin villages, all right. Well, a Russian would.

  But Jerry answered with the truth: “It’s always been like this.”

  “I guessed it was so,” Kalyakin said with a sigh. “In Great Patriotic War, soldiers who saw countries in Western Europe saw they were richer than the rodina, the motherland. I saw this in Hungary. Men who fought in Germany said it was so rich, they wondered why Nazis also wanted what little we had. And United States, I know, is richer than Germany ever was.”

  Enough to eat, a tolerable place to live, a car of his own … Listening to the man from the Soviet Union reminded Jerry how much he took for granted. The freedom to tell a senior CIA man Fuck you! was bound to be one more thing Kalyakin would be jealous of, if he could imagine it at all.

  “Next to the centaurowls, we’re all a bunch of ignorant barbarians,” Jerry said, remembering his vision of New Guinea natives rowing out to a battleship.

  “Is bound to be true.” Kalyakin sighed again. “If we learn from them, before long we are not so ignorant, not so much barbarians.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Jerry imagined humans suddenly bursting into whatever interspecies society there was in this part of the galaxy. Wouldn’t the races that had been part of it for a long time look down their noses—if they had noses—at the upstart bumpkins moving in and lowering planetary real-estate values? Jerry didn’t know they would, but it sure seemed likely to him. Hadn’t Japan needed to thump the czar in the Russo-Japanese War before the other great powers, all of them white, grudgingly began to admit her to their club?

  “I hope so, too,” the Russian astronomer said. “If I am wrong, Earth remains in danger even if the centaurowls here prove friendly.”

  Somewhere in the USSR and somewhere in the USA, soldiers would be making sure the missiles in their silos were ready to launch and the warheads atop them would blossom into thermonuclear fire above a particular patch of ocean. Did Humpty Dumpty’s sensors know anything about that? What would the starship do if those missiles flew? Jerry could only wonder and worry.

  Tuesday came. At a little past eleven, the American and Soviet delegations entered Humpty Dumpty, trailing their telephone lines behind them as they walked to the suspended-animation chamber. Carrying rifles, both Jerry Pournelle and Vitaly Yushchenko looked serious and military. And well they might have; they’d both seen their share of hell on earth.

  “Which one are we going to wake up?” Pournelle asked when they went in.

  “One closer to doorway. Is easier to reach yellow button for this one,” Kalyakin said. Dale Neuwirth didn’t try to tell him no. Maybe they’d settled it ahead of time. Maybe Dale just thought the astronomer’s words made good sense.

  Kalyakin and Jack Porter spoke into their phones, each making sure he had the connection with his government he needed. Kalyakin nodded to show he did. Jack gave a thumbs-up. Everybody was as ready as humanly possible, and hoped the humanly possible would prove ready enough.

  Then Pournelle asked, “Who pushes the button? Who gets the credit—or the blame?”

  “Should be Stieglitz,” Kalyakin said. “He is American on Soviet delegation, part of both. And he found way into spaceship to start with. Who better?”

  By the look on Dale’s face, and Jack’s, they didn’t want the USSR’s delegation there at all. Want it or not, they had it. Dale, as was his way, managed to be gracious: “One small push for man, one giant leap for mankind. Let’s see what happens.”

  “Okay,” Jerry said in a small voice. Dale had borrowed Neil Armstrong’s first words on the Moon. If this went well, it would make what Armstrong had done seem not just a small step but a baby step. If it didn’t … He tried not to think about that.

  He eyed his watch. At noon exactly, he reached up and pushed the raised yellow area as hard as he could. Something happened; he could feel it. Pournelle and Yushchenko pointed their rifles at the centaurowl inside its glassy half-dome.

  Silently and without any fuss, the half-dome disappeared the way the airlock door had when Jerry said Friend! He hoped that meant the centaurowl wasn’t suspended anymore but back in the real world, the world of time.

  Did its beak quiver, ever so slightly? He wasn’t sure—he might have been imagining things. But then the centaurowl blinked. When its yellow eyes opened again, they moved until they met his. Then their gaze steadied, and the two very different beings regarded each other for the first time.

  TOR BOOKS BY HARRY TURTLEDOVE

  Between the Rivers

  Conan of Venarium

  The Two Georges

  (by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove)

  Household Gods

  (by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove)

  The First Heroes

  (edited by Harry Turtledove and Noreen Doyle)

  The House of Daniel

  Through Darkest Europe

  DARKNESS

  Into the Darkness

  Darkness Descending

  Through the Darkness

  Rulers of the Darkness

  Jaws of Darkness

  Out of the Darkness

  CROSSTIME TRAFFIC

  Gunpowder Empire

  Curious Notions

  In High Places

  The Disunited States of America

  The Gladiator

  The Valley-Westside War

  THE OPENING OF THE WORLD

  Beyond the Gap

  The Breath of God

  The Golden Shrine

  WRITING AS H. N. TURTELTAUB

  Justinian

  Over the Wine-Dark Sea

  The Gryphon’s Skull

  The Sacred Land

  Owls to Athens

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR