No one said anything about that. Saying something would just have called attention to the difference between the best fight it can and a good enough fight.

Instead of saying anything about Pournelle’s comment, Dale remarked, “April fifteenth is the day American taxes are due. I hope my wife’s taking care of that.”

“It is thirtieth of April for us,” Kalyakin said. “I hope what we do here is not too much taxing experience for us. You say that—taxing experience?”

“Yeah, we say that.” Jerry wanted to applaud. He admired anybody who could make a pun in a language he didn’t grow up speaking. It was a bad pun, but then, most puns were bad puns. He’d made enough of them to know.

The Americans and Russians both readied and tested the phone lines that would connect the people in the suspended-animation chamber with the bridge and ultimately with Moscow and Washington. Whatever Humpty Dumpty’s hull was made of, it blocked radio signals. The Americans had found that out, Jerry learned, not long after he and Steve left the Glomar Explorer.

Jerry Pournelle was designated the American responsible for shooting the alien if it caused trouble. He got one of the AR-15s stowed in Dale’s cabin. “More firepower than I carried in Korea,” he told Jerry. “I was a punk second lieutenant, and I had a punk second lieutenant’s piece: an M1 carbine. Deadlier weapon than a flyswatter, but not a whole lot.”

“Okay.” Jerry’s interest in firearms was only writerly. He’d played with cap pistols and toy rifles when he was a kid, but he’d never handled a real gun.

Nikolai Kalyakin chose Vitaly Yushchenko as the Russians’ rifleman. “I would do it myself, but man with rifle should have two good hands.” He wiggled the surviving fingers on his left hand. “I was wounded near Lake Balaton in Hungary in 1945.”

“My father fought in Italy. He was up close to Milan when the war ended.”

“We were allies then. And now again,” Kalyakin said. Jerry nodded. Neither mentioned the thirty years in between. Hitler had been deadly dangerous to both the USA and the USSR. No one knew if the centaurowls were, but no one could deny they might be.

Two unarmed Americans and two unarmed men from the Soviet team would go into the suspended-animation chamber with the riflemen. Dale picked Jack Porter to accompany him. Dave Schoals did not take that well. He asked Dale for one of the vodka bottles from the formerly secret stash, and hurt himself with it.

And Nikolai Kalyakin chose Jerry. “Are you sure?” Jerry said when the astronomer told him over dinner. “Won’t everybody else on your team hate you if you do that?”