“We won’t do anything drastic until and unless we have clear instructions from the highest authority,” Dale said. “That order got to me less than an hour ago. I missed dinner because I was decrypting it personally, as ordered. It’s a good thing the galley can crank out something tasty no matter what time it is. But the order stresses that trying to activate Humpty Dumpty or trying to revive the aliens is as much a political decision as a scientific one.”

“That’s the way we do it, then.” Jack Porter couldn’t have been more respectful and obedient if he’d had a papal bull land in his lap. Dave nodded, too. When he had orders from people entitled to give them, that settled things for him. He got ready to follow them.

Back in the early 1940s, German officials had orders from people entitled to give them, too. Six million Jews wound up dead, including some men and women on both sides of Jerry’s family. So did a whole bunch of Gypsies and homosexuals and people from insane asylums and anybody else the Nazis happened not to like. As far as Jerry was concerned, obeying orders just because they were orders was way overrated.

Theoretically, the USA agreed with him. Theoretically. Lieutenant Calley’d claimed he was only following orders when he led his troops to massacre Vietnamese villagers at My Lai. He’d got court-martialed and convicted anyway, and was still serving some kind of sentence. (Captain Medina, who was supposed to have given those orders, got acquitted. It made you wonder.)

“‘The highest authority’ here means the president, doesn’t it?” Jerry asked.

Dale nodded. “That’s correct. And what he says, goes.”

He wasn’t even a spook. But he’d worked for the United States his whole adult life. He’d see orders the same way Dave and Jack did.

It wasn’t so much that orders to mess with Humpty Dumpty would be illegal or even wrong. They might not be. And politics did have to play a part. If not for the political struggle between the USSR and the USA, Humpty Dumpty might have lain on the ocean floor forever.

No, the real question was, did Gerald Ford know enough to give orders that made sense? Did anybody? Do not call up that which you cannot put down—the line from H. P. Lovecraft bubbled up inside Jerry’s head. Eldritch horror wasn’t his thing any more than Eldridge Cleaver was, but he’d read some Lovecraft and Soul on Ice.

“We will proceed with caution, then,” Jack said.

“Extreme caution,” Steve said. He’d been inside the starship, too. Photographs helped, but nothing matched real experience. Jerry enjoyed centerfolds as much as any other man, but a centerfold was no more like lying down with a real woman than a picture of a steak was like dinner at a steak house.