“I guess I can give it a shot,” he said. As he knew too well, he didn’t have much to do till the Glomar Explorer raised the sunken spaceship. Or till we loudly and noisily vanish away, he added to himself. If that Snark was a Boojum …

“Good! I’ll tell Dale he can look forward to it,” Steve said. That told Jerry he really did have to do it. He made himself smile and nod. Hypocrisy had its uses.

The thesis was the first thing he’d ever tackled that was too big for him to carry all the data around inside his head. He’d made and cross-referenced more than a thousand file cards to help him organize what he knew. He went at his list the same way. When he asked, he found that the ship sure as hell did carry three-by-fives.

He made a file card in red ink for everything he could think of that might happen once the Glomar Explorer brought up the sunken starship. Then he made a card in black ink giving every response to each scenario he could imagine. If an alien came out of the airlock shooting, what should the people it was shooting at do? Should they shoot back? (Could they shoot back? He didn’t know whether they’d brought guns aboard. Well, that was Dale’s worry, not his.)

How fast the scenarios and responses mounted up surprised him. He had close to three hundred cards before he typed them on the correcting Selectric in the Special Measurements container—nothing but top-of-the-line equipment for this project. Jerry had heard that some of the computers in other containers had as much as thirty-two kilobytes of memory. No, nothing but the best.

Once he got the list typed, he stowed it in the safe. It would stay there till he worked up the nerve to beard the project director in his den.

“Dale Neuwirth, Project Director,” said the neatly printed sign taped to the head honcho’s door. Jerry suspected the man in charge of the mission really owned some other last name starting with N. That seemed to be how the people in that Long Beach apartment operated.

He carried the list in a manila folder in his left hand. No one unauthorized could turn his head sideways and sneak a peek at the typed pages. He gulped. He felt like a buck private reporting to a general. He gulped again, then knocked on the door.

A moment later, Dale opened it. He was a solidly made man of about fifty, his brown hair going gray. To nervous Jerry, his smile seemed somewhere between perfunctory and professional. “Come in, Mr. Steinberg, come in,” he said, his baritone warm enough. “Steve said you’d have something to show me.”

“Th-that’s right.” Jerry swore at himself for stammering.