As director, Neuwirth had a cabin to himself. It still seemed small to Jerry. Dale waved him to one chair, then sat in another, almost knee-to-knee with him. After pulling reading glasses from a leather case clipped to his breast pocket and setting them on his nose, he started in on the list.

He soon peered at Jerry over the tops of his glasses. “As a matter of fact, we do have guns on the ship,” he said. “A few rifles and shotguns.”

“Do we?” Jerry said.

“Afraid so. The CIA insisted on it, to fight off Russian boarders.” Dale’s mouth twisted in distaste, or maybe just in scorn.

The way he said that made Jerry ask, “Uh, you’re not CIA yourself, sir?”

“Me? Good Lord, no!” Neuwirth said. “I’m a civilian under contract. I work at the Lawrence Livermore Lab up in Northern California. Nuclear physics. They wanted someone in that field in charge of things, both for what’s in the K-129 and for what’s in the … the Midlothian object.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Jerry said. “Will we really shoot it out with the Russian Navy?”

“Good Lord, no!” Dale repeated. “They’d slaughter us. We’ll try to hold them off with our fire hoses. If that doesn’t work, we’ll let them board—but we’ll deep-six our secret materials first. You know about that, right?”

“Yes, sir. Steve showed me.” A weighted steel-mesh box stood outside the Special Measurements container. In case of emergency, secret papers went in there. Then the box slid down a chute and straight into the Pacific.

“That’s not how it reads in the contingency plan we gave the CIA,” Dale said. “But the CIA is back on dry land and we’re out here in the middle of the Pacific. They put me in charge. I’m going to do what I think has the best chance to keep us all in one piece. And if the CIA doesn’t like it, too darn bad. You got me?”

“I sure do,” Jerry replied. So a real, live human being lurked under Dale’s bland exterior. Jerry wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t heard it with his own ears.

“Okay,” the project director said. “Let’s see what else we’ve got here.” He went on through Jerry’s list of scenarios and responses for a while, then stopped and looked up, his eyebrows rising like semaphore flags. “What do we do if there’s a methane or ammonia atmosphere inside the object? There’s one nobody worried about till you!”

“Steve said to list all the possibilities that occurred to me, so I did.” Jerry tried not to show how pleased he was. Other people had been puzzling over this for years. He’d had only a few days. Maybe there was something to bringing along a left-handed thinker after all.