Terrific. I’m the designated weirdo, Jerry thought, riffing on the experiment the American League had begun the year before. It hadn’t helped his Angels a bit. They stayed lousy even with the DH. He vaguely knew a double sawbuck was a twenty-dollar bill. He never would have called a twenty that himself, but Steve’s slang came out of World War II.

  “I guess I can give it a shot,” he said. As he knew too well, he didn’t have much to do till the Glomar Explorer raised the sunken spaceship. Or till we loudly and noisily vanish away, he added to himself. If that Snark was a Boojum …

  “Good! I’ll tell Dale he can look forward to it,” Steve said. That told Jerry he really did have to do it. He made himself smile and nod. Hypocrisy had its uses.

  The thesis was the first thing he’d ever tackled that was too big for him to carry all the data around inside his head. He’d made and cross-referenced more than a thousand file cards to help him organize what he knew. He went at his list the same way. When he asked, he found that the ship sure as hell did carry three-by-fives.

  He made a file card in red ink for everything he could think of that might happen once the Glomar Explorer brought up the sunken starship. Then he made a card in black ink giving every response to each scenario he could imagine. If an alien came out of the airlock shooting, what should the people it was shooting at do? Should they shoot back? (Could they shoot back? He didn’t know whether they’d brought guns aboard. Well, that was Dale’s worry, not his.)

  How fast the scenarios and responses mounted up surprised him. He had close to three hundred cards before he typed them on the correcting Selectric in the Special Measurements container—nothing but top-of-the-line equipment for this project. Jerry had heard that some of the computers in other containers had as much as thirty-two kilobytes of memory. No, nothing but the best.

  Once he got the list typed, he stowed it in the safe. It would stay there till he worked up the nerve to beard the project director in his den.

  * * *

  “Dale Neuwirth, Project Director,” said the neatly printed sign taped to the head honcho’s door. Jerry suspected the man in charge of the mission really owned some other last name starting with N. That seemed to be how the people in that Long Beach apartment operated.

  He carried the list in a manila folder in his left hand. No one unauthorized could turn his head sideways and sneak a peek at the typed pages. He gulped. He felt like a buck private reporting to a general. He gulped again, then knocked on the door.

  A moment later, Dale opened it. He was a solidly made man of about fifty, his brown hair going gray. To nervous Jerry, his smile seemed somewhere between perfunctory and professional. “Come in, Mr. Steinberg, come in,” he said, his baritone warm enough. “Steve said you’d have something to show me.”

  “Th-that’s right.” Jerry swore at himself for stammering.

  As director, Neuwirth had a cabin to himself. It still seemed small to Jerry. Dale waved him to one chair, then sat in another, almost knee-to-knee with him. After pulling reading glasses from a leather case clipped to his breast pocket and setting them on his nose, he started in on the list.

  He soon peered at Jerry over the tops of his glasses. “As a matter of fact, we do have guns on the ship,” he said. “A few rifles and shotguns.”

  “Do we?” Jerry said.

  “Afraid so. The CIA insisted on it, to fight off Russian boarders.” Dale’s mouth twisted in distaste, or maybe just in scorn.

  The way he said that made Jerry ask, “Uh, you’re not CIA yourself, sir?”

  “Me? Good Lord, no!” Neuwirth said. “I’m a civilian under contract. I work at the Lawrence Livermore Lab up in Northern California. Nuclear physics. They wanted someone in that field in charge of things, both for what’s in the K-129 and for what’s in the … the Midlothian object.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Jerry said. “Will we really shoot it out with the Russian Navy?”

  “Good Lord, no!” Dale repeated. “They’d slaughter us. We’ll try to hold them off with our fire hoses. If that doesn’t work, we’ll let them board—but we’ll deep-six our secret materials first. You know about that, right?”

  “Yes, sir. Steve showed me.” A weighted steel-mesh box stood outside the Special Measurements container. In case of emergency, secret papers went in there. Then the box slid down a chute and straight into the Pacific.

  “That’s not how it reads in the contingency plan we gave the CIA,” Dale said. “But the CIA is back on dry land and we’re out here in the middle of the Pacific. They put me in charge. I’m going to do what I think has the best chance to keep us all in one piece. And if the CIA doesn’t like it, too darn bad. You got me?”

  “I sure do,” Jerry replied. So a real, live human being lurked under Dale’s bland exterior. Jerry wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t heard it with his own ears.

  “Okay,” the project director said. “Let’s see what else we’ve got here.” He went on through Jerry’s list of scenarios and responses for a while, then stopped and looked up, his eyebrows rising like semaphore flags. “What do we do if there’s a methane or ammonia atmosphere inside the object? There’s one nobody worried about till you!”

  “Steve said to list all the possibilities that occurred to me, so I did.” Jerry tried not to show how pleased he was. Other people had been puzzling over this for years. He’d had only a few days. Maybe there was something to bringing along a left-handed thinker after all.

  Or maybe not. Dale said, “Any which way, we’re not set up to deal with aliens who don’t breathe oxygen. If that turns out to be what’s going on, all we can do is hope whatever’s in there stays alive till we get to either Hawaii or the mainland.”

  “Fair enough. I thought I should mention it, though.”

  “That’s fine. That’s good, in fact. And when we do go home, I’ll tell the guys back in Washington there may be more things in the heavens and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.”

  Jerry blessed a sophomore English Lit class for reminding him where that allusion came from. “So you’re telling me Washington’s just a little Hamlet in the grand scheme of things?” he said with malice aforethought.

  Neuwirth started to answer, then stopped before anything came out. He eyed Jerry over the tops of his glasses again, severely this time. “Anyone who makes puns like that can’t be all good,” he said at last.

  “Thank you, sir,” Jerry answered.

  “Hrmm.” It wasn’t really a word: more a rumble down deep in Dale’s chest. He flipped to the next page of the typescript. “I do think someone back in DC also came up with the possibility that there’s water inside the Midlothian object, not any kind of air. I don’t believe that’s likely—very hard to develop a technological civilization under the sea.”

  “I agree with you,” Jerry said. “Hard, but not quite impossible. What if it’s a technology based on biological engineering, for instance? What if they grew that spaceship instead of manufacturing it?”

  “Where do they get the motors that let them cross interstellar space with biological engineering?”

  “Beats me,” Jerry said cheerfully. “Where do they get them with mechanical or electrical engineering?”

  “A point,” Dale admitted. “We don’t even know whether the object got here from wherever it started faster than light or slower. Before I got involved in this project, I would have told you traveling faster than light was flat-out impossible. Now … Now I just don’t know. That darn object is down there.”

  “It sure is.” Jerry noticed that Dale didn’t like to call it a spaceship or a starship. Maybe he was very security conscious. Everybody on the Midlothian project seemed to be, and had good reason to be. Or maybe, down deep, Dale didn’t want to believe it. If he didn’t, how could you blame him?

  “I see you thought about sublight travel, too,” the director said. “You’re right—it may be an automated probe in that case, like the ones we’ve sent out ourselves, but more sophisticated. Or the aliens may have very long lives. Or they may be in there in some kind of suspended animation, waiting for the object to wake them, or for us to do it once we work out how to get inside.”

  “That last one interests me a lot,” Jerry said.

  “I thought it might. ‘The Sleeping Beauty problem,’ you call it. You like to joke about things that intrigue you, eh?”

  “Yeah.” Jerry felt oddly reluctant to acknowledge that. He didn’t care for other people spying out the way his beady little mind worked. Dale might be old and as ordinary as vanilla ice cream, but he was nobody’s dope. Well, he wouldn’t be, would he, if he was in charge of what might wind up being the most important project in the history of the world?

  He neatened up the stack of papers and set them on his left leg, which he’d crossed over his right. “This is a nice piece of work, Mister Steinberg, and I thank you for putting it together for me. A lot in here for me to think about. Has Mister Dahlgren seen it?”

  “Not all of it,” Jerry said. “I’ve talked with him about some of the things in there, though. I’m only an amateur at this stuff—I hope I’m smart enough to remember that. He’s a pro, if anybody is.”

  “Yes, if anybody is,” Dale said, as Montresor might have said, Yes, for the love of God. “I have the feeling, though, that finding the Midlothian object makes every one of us an amateur. Don’t sell yourself short. You’re here for a reason. When I show him this, I think he’ll be as impressed with it as I am.”

  “Really?” Jerry wasn’t used to hearing things like that. Professor Krikorian took it for granted when he did things right and let him have it when he messed up. He saw that as natural enough; his father had the same style. One of the things he especially liked about Anna was how open she was in her happiness. Of course, she was also that open about being unhappy. At least he always knew where he stood.

  “Yes, absolutely.” Neuwirth’s brisk nod brought Jerry back to himself. The director went on, “Is there anything else?”

  Jerry recognized dismissal when he heard it. “Uh, no, sir.” He stood up. Dale did, too. They shook hands. Jerry got the hell out of there.

  * * *

  When Jerry let himself into the cabin that evening, Steve lay reading in the bottom bunk. “How was the movie?” he asked.

  “Well…” Steve’s voice trailed away. His ears heated at the same time.

  “That good, you say?” Steve chuckled. “What was it?”

  “Umm…” Jerry hesitated again. I don’t want to tell you was the first thing that jumped into his mind, but it would have been rude. And he never had been any damn good at lying on the spur of the moment. So he answered with the truth: “It was Deep Throat.”

  “Oh.” Steve laughed again, on a slightly different note. “Yeah, I heard we had that along, to go with the Westerns and the war movies and the spy films and the sci-fi. How was it?”

  Talking about a porno flick with a guy old enough to be his father didn’t stand high on Jerry’s Things I Want to Do list. “I don’t think anybody in it will win a best-acting Oscar,” he said, which was true enough. Then he trotted out a joke he’d heard from one of the TAs who shared the office with him: “They say Nixon watched it about a hundred times at the White House, though.”

  “Why did he do that?” Steve asked obligingly.

  “He wanted to get it down Pat.”

  Steve winced. “That’s—pretty bad.” Now it was his turn to pause. After a moment, he resumed, saying, “You may want to be careful about who you tell that joke to.”

  “I noticed that myself, uh-huh,” Jerry replied. Most of the guys who’d been in there watching Linda Lovelace do her thing and several guys’ things were from the pipe-laying crew or divers. The guys who’d send the thick steel pipe string down to the ocean floor were Southern rednecks, and proud of it. By contrast, the divers—rent-a-frogs, they called themselves—were neat and quiet and watchful. Jerry didn’t know they came out of the SEALs or some similar program, but he would have bet that way.

  They and the men who worked with the thick steel pipe made no secret about believing Richard Nixon was getting railroaded. Jerry didn’t see how any reasonable human being could think that way, but he did see they were liable to whale the snot out of him if he said so. He hadn’t been in a fight since the sixth grade, and he’d lost that one.

  For that matter, the roughnecks and divers seemed downright sane next to the Global Marine officer who skippered the Explorer. In the messroom, Tom Gresham informed anyone who would listen that Henry Kissinger spied for the Russians. Jerry hoped he had better sense about engines and navigation than he did about politics.

  He peeled off the clothes he wore during the day and donned his elegant night attire. Steve paid no attention to that, but went back to his book. As Jerry’d seen since the locker room where he changed into and out of gym clothes for junior high PE, guys—straight guys, anyway—didn’t pay much attention to one another’s naked or nearly naked bodies.

  Up to the top bunk he scrambled. He read Have Space Suit—Will Travel for a little while himself. It was the only hardback he’d brought. He knew it almost by heart—it was a birthday present to himself when he turned twelve. His dad had taken him up to Pickwick’s on Hollywood Boulevard, back in the days when it wasn’t the main Pickwick’s but the only one. He’d taken care of it, too. Even the cover was still in pretty good shape.

  When the bad guys caught Kip and Peewee before they could make it to Tombaugh Station, he turned off the light and curled up on his side. He fell asleep easily most of the time, but not tonight, despite the book that was an old friend. Yeah, Deep Throat was stupid and gross and badly acted, but it still reminded him how much he missed Anna, and one of the reasons why.

  He hadn’t told Steve he’d seen it before. When it hit with a splash a couple of years earlier, Anna’d bugged him till he took her to it. “I want to see a really dirty movie,” she’d said, over and over, till she wore him down. Truth to tell, he hadn’t needed all that much wearing down.

  So they saw it … and she was much more grossed out than turned on. He was not a little grossed out himself, but he did take an interest in the proceedings. And when they messed around at his place afterward, he guessed she hadn’t been altogether disgusted.

  He had the sense not to tell her so. And she never asked him to take her to another porno flick.

  Eventually, he did sack out. His dreams were … interesting. He woke up just when things were getting close to the moment of truth, the way he usually did when he had dreams like that. It left him more frustrated than ever.

  He was grumpy when he got up, but he was often grumpy before he had his coffee. Two big mugs, plus eggs over medium, sizzling sausages, and hash browns improved his outlook on life, or at least gave him things besides that to think about.

  After breakfast, he went to the Special Measurements container and punched in the key code that opened the door. Once inside, he made sure the door not only closed behind him but locked. He’d thought that kind of fussing over security was paranoia personified … until Steve showed him the photos in the safe. Now, like Paul on the road to Damascus, he believed.

  What would the world do when it found out a starship lay on the bottom of the Pacific? Besides go nuts, Jerry added to himself. He had a pretty good notion that the Russians would want to do what the United States was doing. They’d want to see who and what was inside, and what they could learn from it.

  One way or another, this may be the end of the Cold War, he thought as he worked the combination to the safe. If live aliens waited for rescue inside the sunken spaceship, the world would never be the same. Even if they didn’t, the United States might learn enough from the ship itself and from what it held to gain a decisive advantage over the Soviet Union.

  The lock quietly clicked. Jerry opened the door to the safe. He’d lived his life in a world where countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain knew how to destroy everything. Well, almost: he was starting to cut teeth about the time the Russians tested their first A-bomb.

  What if the aliens knew enough to stop atomic explosions? Or what if they had weapons of their own, weapons that made H-bomb-tipped ICBMs seem like bows and arrows by comparison? Just for a moment, Jerry again heard inside his mind the frying-bacon sound that had doomed the Russian submarine.

  And what else would they know about, besides bigger and better ways to kill? How to travel between the stars, obviously, whether faster than light or not. Other things? Things like medicine, for instance?

  Jerry’s mouth tightened as he took out some more of the photos the Halibut’s probe had taken of the egg-shaped spaceship on the seafloor. He remembered how his mother had smoked like there was no tomorrow. For her, there hadn’t been much of one. She’d died of lung cancer when he was seven and she was in her early forties.

  Which was how he’d been raised, erratically, by his father. He often thought he’d done most of the raising himself, though he realized his dad would have something pungent to say about that. Then again, his dad had something pungent to say about damn near everything.

  And Hyman Stieglitz was pungent. He didn’t quit smoking after Jerry’s mother died. All these years later, he was still at it. He stank of stale cigarette smoke, and had for so long that he didn’t even know it anymore. So did the house. Jerry’d argued with him, yelled at him, screamed at him. Now he’d given up. As far as he could see, tobacco was as bad a jones as heroin.

  Steve had told him that John Graham, the naval architect who’d designed the Glomar Explorer, wasn’t aboard because he was dying of lung cancer back in California. From what Steve said, Graham was, or had been, another chain-smoker. He’d quit for a while after getting sick, then started up again when he realized it was too late for him.

  Jerry banged a fist down on his knee: not the knee the photos lay on, though. He was careful about that. But he remembered his mother doing the same thing. He hadn’t understood it then. He thought he did now. Understand it or not, he hated the hooks nicotine sank into people.