What would the world do when it found out a starship lay on the bottom of the Pacific? Besides go nuts, Jerry added to himself. He had a pretty good notion that the Russians would want to do what the United States was doing. They’d want to see who and what was inside, and what they could learn from it.

One way or another, this may be the end of the Cold War, he thought as he worked the combination to the safe. If live aliens waited for rescue inside the sunken spaceship, the world would never be the same. Even if they didn’t, the United States might learn enough from the ship itself and from what it held to gain a decisive advantage over the Soviet Union.

The lock quietly clicked. Jerry opened the door to the safe. He’d lived his life in a world where countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain knew how to destroy everything. Well, almost: he was starting to cut teeth about the time the Russians tested their first A-bomb.

What if the aliens knew enough to stop atomic explosions? Or what if they had weapons of their own, weapons that made H-bomb-tipped ICBMs seem like bows and arrows by comparison? Just for a moment, Jerry again heard inside his mind the frying-bacon sound that had doomed the Russian submarine.

And what else would they know about, besides bigger and better ways to kill? How to travel between the stars, obviously, whether faster than light or not. Other things? Things like medicine, for instance?

Jerry’s mouth tightened as he took out some more of the photos the Halibut’s probe had taken of the egg-shaped spaceship on the seafloor. He remembered how his mother had smoked like there was no tomorrow. For her, there hadn’t been much of one. She’d died of lung cancer when he was seven and she was in her early forties.

Which was how he’d been raised, erratically, by his father. He often thought he’d done most of the raising himself, though he realized his dad would have something pungent to say about that. Then again, his dad had something pungent to say about damn near everything.

And Hyman Stieglitz was pungent. He didn’t quit smoking after Jerry’s mother died. All these years later, he was still at it. He stank of stale cigarette smoke, and had for so long that he didn’t even know it anymore. So did the house. Jerry’d argued with him, yelled at him, screamed at him. Now he’d given up. As far as he could see, tobacco was as bad a jones as heroin.