Jerry pretended to read a Newsweek even older than Gator’s magazine till Steve came out of Dr. Rogers’s sanctum. Then the two men who’d come out of Humpty Dumpty again followed the diver to Dale Neuwirth’s chamber. Gator sketched a salute to the mission director. “Here they are, sir.”

“Thanks, Gator,” Neuwirth said, and then, to Jerry and Steve, “C’mon in.”

He shut the door behind them and locked it. As before, Jack and Dave sat on the bed. Jerry noticed a stout trunk stashed in the space under the mattress. Did that hold some of the guns the CIA had insisted on having aboard? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

Dale didn’t turn on Bing Crosby this time. Instead, he started a tape recorder that sat on his desk. “Debriefing. Second entry to Humpty Dumpty,” he said clearly. Maybe Gator stood on guard in the corridor, discouraging passersby. He’d be good at it, Jerry thought.

“What did you find inside the spaceship this time?” Jack asked.

Jerry and Steve looked at each other. Steve spoke first: “The most important thing we found is, there are two aliens preserved in some kind of suspended animation in the chamber the yellow line leads to. We have photographs.”

“Ooh,” Dave said softly. It was half a noise awe, half what he might’ve come out with had Steve punched him in the belly. Dale and Jack both looked as if they’d got clobbered, too.

Jerry added, “There used to be three of them. The life support on one failed. He’s just bones and … and I don’t know what. They look more like feathery centaurs than anything else, but they don’t really look a whole lot like anything.” Steve nodded.

“Photos will be ready in a few hours,” Jack said. The Glomar Explorer might not boast a Fotomat kiosk, but one of the fancy containers held a developing plant that could double as one.

“Do you have any idea how to revive the two surviving … things, aliens, whatever they are?” Dale asked.

“Not really,” Steve answered. “We would want to be very sure before we try that. It’s not the sort of mistake we could fix.”

“Other question is, do we want them awake?” Dave said. “That ship is stronger than anything we have, way stronger. Who knows what two aliens could do with it? Whatever it did to the K-129, I’d guess it did that without them. Jerry, would you say the dead one’s been that way since before March 1968?”

“I don’t know, but I think it’s a pretty good guess, yeah,” Jerry replied.

“How much before?”