“I saw that. It’s wild,” Jerry said. All the memory in the Honeywell 316s (so the little plaques under the monitors named them) was working flat out.

If only you could get this kind of detail into a game, it would beat the hell out of Pong. But Paul was bound to be right. How much did a machine like this cost? Twenty grand? Thirty? Somewhere in that ballpark, Jerry thought. You couldn’t stick a fancy computer like that in an arcade. Hell, a row of them would pay for an arcade, with money left over besides.

It would be amazingly cool, though.

“Oh, nice grab! So smooth!” Paul said to Eric. Jerry remembered how pumped he was whenever he got to twenty-one before Anna did. It didn’t happen often; her reflexes were quicker than his. But that thrill of victory looked mighty small next to snatching a starship. Okay, it wasn’t a real starship. Yet. But it would be.

When he got out of the container, he felt as if he were leaving the future and falling back into the mundane world of 1974, where Richard Nixon was still saying he wouldn’t resign and where the Senate was getting ready to throw him out of the White House on his crooked ass in case he meant it. He would have felt the same way if Clementine really were just going after the K-129, not a lost ship from another world. The simulator seemed as much the stuff of science fiction as the spaceship did.

He said as much to Steve. The older man nodded. “The same thought’s crossed my mind,” he answered. “We’re pushing the state of the art in a lot of areas as far as it’ll go, maybe even a little further. What we’ve learned from doing this would be worthwhile even if we didn’t bring anything up from the bottom. People will be building on it for the next fifty years.”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Jerry said. “That’s how science works. You couldn’t move forward if not for everything everybody who was working on stuff before did. Sometimes we find out the old guys were wrong, but so what? They were in there swinging. Those people fifty years from now will find stuff we’re wrong about, too.”

Behind Steve’s bifocals, one of his eyebrows quirked. “What happened to ‘Never trust anybody over thirty’?”

“That’s politics and society, man. It’s not science,” Jerry said. “Where there’s no real evidence, you can argue till you’re blue in the face—and we do. But either the Sun goes around the Earth or the Earth goes around the Sun, and the evidence tells you which.”

Steve took a couple of steps without saying anything. Then, slowly, he remarked, “You know, you just may do.”