Along with the movie theater, the Glomar Explorer boasted a pretty good little library. It had a decent science-fiction section. During the two-week trip out to where the fortieth parallel of north latitude met the International Date Line, Jerry read everything he could find there on dealing with aliens. He wasn’t sure how much that would help, but it couldn’t hurt.

The library’s history section was much smaller. No surprise, that. It did have a book about the Spanish conquests of the American Indian civilizations, though. He made himself plow through it, even if history had never been his favorite subject. The settlement of the New World seemed about as close to contact with aliens as people had ever really come.

He spent a lot of time in the Special Measurements container, too. He listened to the tape that ended in the destruction of the K-129 again and again. He kept hoping he wouldn’t hear that frying-bacon noise, but it was there every time. He did his best to imagine what might cause it. His best wasn’t good enough. Nobody’s was.

And he pored over the photos. The safe held many more than the seventy-eight in that envelope; those were just a representative sample. The ship was egg-shaped, or closer to that than anything else. It was a little smaller than the nearby chunk of Soviet submarine. One end had short tubes sticking out; the other was dimpled like a golf ball. The motor’s exhaust and the weapons system? Possibly, but which was which? Jerry couldn’t tell, any more than could anyone else who’d examined the pictures.

A circle was scribed in the hull about halfway between the tubes and the dimples. Jerry guessed it was the way into and out of the spaceship. Again, though, he was only guessing. If they raised the ship, he might find out. He wondered whether he truly wanted to.

“This is so frustrating,” he told Steve. “All I can do is think up ideas I can’t prove or disprove with what we’ve got. I bet all the other people who’ve seen these photos have thought of them, too.”

“You can bounce things off other people, too,” the older man replied. “I’ve given you the list of men cleared for Midlothian information.”

“Yeah,” Jerry said with no great enthusiasm. Like John P., Dale and Jack and Dave and Ernie had intelligence officer written all over them. They were polite enough, but Jerry got the feeling they thought he was a hippie college kid (they weren’t altogether wrong, either). All of them except Dave were old enough to be his father. So was Steve, of course, but it somehow mattered less with him. Dave, in his late thirties, wore longish hair and a mustache that looked like something from a porn flick, so he was a little less uptight than his elder colleagues.