“It didn’t do anything,” Dale said stolidly. “You can speculate as much as you want. That’s fact.”

“You had no idea it would work that way.”

“I also had no idea it would work that way when Clementine grabbed Humpty Dumpty and when the pipe string hauled the spaceship up into the moon pool. Those encounters held much more potential danger than a couple of crewmen prodding at the outer hull. They caused no hostile action.”

He wasn’t wrong. Jerry hadn’t looked at it like that. He decided he was lucky; if he had looked at it like that, he might have jumped off the Glomar Explorer and tried to swim back to the mainland. He said, “With something that powerful, do you want to take chances?”

“We’ve been taking chances,” Dale said. “The highest authority thought, and I agreed, the possible reward justified the risk. We didn’t learn what we wanted to, but we also didn’t provoke or harm Humpty Dumpty.”

No harm, no foul. Jerry didn’t say it. The phrase wouldn’t mean anything to Dale Neuwirth. He didn’t live in Los Angeles, and wouldn’t have listened to Chick Hearn doing Laker games since the team moved from Minneapolis. Jerry just shook his head.

The director sighed. “I didn’t ask you to stop by here to convert you. I did my missionary work when I was younger than you are now, and I’m not sure I converted anyone then. But Dave and Jack and I did some talking last night, and we all agree it’s time to send you and Doctor Dahlgren back to the mainland so you can get on with your lives and bring in some fresh people from the B crew for ideas about how best to exploit Humpty Dumpty.”

Exploit. That was how Dale thought of it. Bound to be how the president thought of it, too. The biggest thing that might ever have happened to mankind, and they wanted to exploit it.

The next obvious question was, how did they know what Steve thought? Had he told them himself? Or did they have bugs in the cabins? By now, nothing the CIA did could surprise Jerry. The more he thought about it, the more likely the bugs seemed. Steve hadn’t known he’d be going back to the mainland, too, or if he had, he sure hadn’t let on.

Slowly, Jerry said, “I’m not asking for a trip home. I still think I can be useful here, if you’ll let me.”