The happy medium was having them wake up and tell the CIA everything they knew, either of their own accord or because the Agency got … persuasive. That was what everybody hoped for. But hope came out of Pandora’s box last for a reason.

After a little while, the helicopter took off again. The noise didn’t seem quite so horrible this time. Jerry shoved back his chair and stood up. “I’m gonna get rid of some of this coffee before I wet my pants. Then I think I’ll go forward and see what’s happening with Humpty Dumpty.”

“Fresh air,” Steve said solemnly.

“Fresh air,” Jerry agreed. It was supposed to be good for a hangover. As far as he could tell, nothing but time helped much. He didn’t supposed fresh air would do him any actual harm, though.

Some faces he’d never seen before were looking down into the moon pool. They all had one thing in common: the look of utter amazement spread across them. If the men hadn’t been reading science fiction since they were eight years old—and most of them probably had—they’d grown up hearing about flying saucers or UFOs or whatever the current label was. Now they weren’t hearing about them. They were seeing one. It made a difference. Yeah, just a little, Jerry thought.

He walked to the rail that kept people from leaning too far forward and falling a long way to a hard bottom. He didn’t stand close to any of the new arrivals. Talking with strangers was the last thing he wanted right now.

He peered into the moon pool—and stiffened, the way a German shepherd would if someone it had never seen hopped the fence and came down in its back yard. He wouldn’t have been surprised if his hair frizzed out like an angry dog’s, too. Two men were probing at Humpty Dumpty’s nacreous shell, one with a hammer and chisel, the other with a blowtorch.

Rage burned away Jerry’s hangover. He knew another grad student who’d been on LSD on a waterbed right near the epicenter of the 1971 Sylmar quake. “I was straight like that,” Karl would say, snapping his fingers. “Adrenaline murdered the acid.” Jerry hadn’t been sure whether to believe him. He did now.

Swearing under his breath, he swarmed down ladderlike stairways till he got down to the bottom deck. He hurried to the chamber that adjoined the moon pool … and was not at all surprised to find Dave Schoals standing in there.

Jerry stabbed his index finger at the dogged doorway out. “What the fuck is going on in the moon pool?” he ground out.