“The condemned man ate a hearty meal?” Steve asked quietly. Jerry’d told him what had happened. He hadn’t been thrilled to hear it, either.

“Nyeh—could be!” Jerry said in his best Bugs Bunny tones, which weren’t too bad. One of his aunts knew Mel Blanc, but he’d never met the man of a thousand voices himself.

“For the record, I still think you were a hundred percent right,” Steve said.

“Far out! That and a quarter’ll get me a cup of coffee.”

“They’ll do whatever they do.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Jerry methodically finished his sausage and eggs and home fries. It was a hearty meal. He thought about getting seconds so he could dawdle over them and piss Dale off, but decided he was already in enough trouble. He climbed to his feet. “Wish me luck.”

“You know I do.” Steve crossed his fingers for a moment. Jerry wondered if that would do a Jew any good. He hoped so. Twisting the fingers even of two hands into a Star of David was next to impossible.

He disposed of his stuff, then went to the mission director’s cabin. The door was closed. When he tapped on it, Dale opened it right away. “Hi. C’mon in,” he said, still friendly and casual and still in command.

“Thanks.” In Jerry came.

Dale shut the door behind him and waved him to a chair. He sat down himself, steepling his fingers. “Dave tells me you aren’t happy about the line of research we started yesterday.”

“He’s right.” Jerry admitted what he couldn’t very well deny.

“Even if experiments like that were ordered by the president of the United States?”

“Especially if they were. The president’s five or six thousand miles away. He’s never seen Humpty Dumpty. He doesn’t know what it can do, and—”

“Neither do you,” Dale pointed out.

“That’s true, but I’ve got a lot more imagination than Gerald Ford does. And if Humpty Dumpty does something, it’ll do something to me, not to him.”

“Yesterday’s experiments did no damage and provoked no reaction.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t know they wouldn’t before you went ahead with them. What if they’d punched a hole in the shell or something?”

“That seems unlikely, in a ship that stayed at the bottom of the Pacific undamaged for an unknown but large number of years.”

“Not undamaged. You saw the photos Steve and I took. Everything in there is all higgledy-piggledy, and one of those aliens is long, long dead.”

Dale made an impatient noise: “Mff. You know what I mean. The ship is still structurally sound. The computers or whatever controls it in the absence of the crew are still operational. So is the weapons system that sank the K-129.”

“It sure is,” Jerry said. “What would it do to us, huh?”