“You know, I’d tell you you were making that up if I heard it anywhere else,” Dr. Rogers said. “When I look at that”—he nodded down toward Humpty Dumpty—“I believe you. Nothing seems impossible right now.”

“No kidding! If we can figure out even a little bit of what whoever made that can do, the world won’t be the same,” Jerry said.

“Just seeing it there makes the world not the same,” Rogers said. “It tells us this isn’t the only world with life on it. That’s got to be the biggest news since Columbus got back to Spain with word of the New World.”

“Bigger, I bet, but yeah,” Jerry said, thinking, Columbus again! Next year, NASA planned to launch two Viking probes to Mars to see if life existed on the red planet. Those Vikings would try to learn whether Earth was unique in the universe or life sprang up whenever it got the chance. There in the moon pool lay the answer, shining as if scraped from the inside of a pearl oyster’s shell.

“Are you going back inside?” The new man revised the question: “When are you going back in?”

“Steve—that’s Steven, uh, Dahlgren—and I will take another shot whenever the mission director tells us to,” Jerry answered. “I’m trying to get used to being part of a team, not doing my own thing whenever I feel like it.”

John Rogers smiled. “What … thing were you doing before you wound up on the Glomar Explorer?”

“Grad student at UCLA, writing my thesis on whale songs,” Jerry said. “This is a little different from that.”

“I’ll say. They didn’t even tell me what they’d brought up from the bottom of the ocean till I got to Midway. Before that, I thought it was … I thought it was something else, anyway.” Half a beat slower than he might have, he remembered to bow before the great god Security. He’d answered Jerry’s unspoken question, though.

Jerry said, “Hey, I didn’t find out what was really going on till I was a couple of days out to sea, either. They don’t want news of this getting out,” Jerry said.

“How can you blame them?” the doctor said.

“Can’t.” Again, Jerry wondered how much he meant that. Was Humpty Dumpty for the United States or for the whole world? Like Hamlet’s To be or not to be?, that was the question. Jerry still had no answer he liked. He didn’t think he’d do anything like make a beeline for Jack Anderson’s office the second he got back on the mainland, but he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t. As Watergate showed, sometimes the best thing you could do was shine a bright light on stuff.