Not having the pushy, annoying tug around felt wonderful. Jerry wondered if it would get boring after a while. Then he remembered how Dave Schoals had pointed out that the ideal mission was one where everything went the way it was supposed to. They hadn’t had that, but at least they didn’t need to worry about Russian snoops anymore … unless the SB-10 came back again.

Jerry ambled forward, toward the moon pool (and snickered when he realized that had a whole new meaning now). Most of the strain was off the derrick and the lifting system. Now it only—that word again!—had to support the two thousand tons or so of Clementine, plus however much the Midlothian object added. Compared to what it had been doing, that was a piece of cake.

Everything in the moon pool seemed calm and serene. The water inside it was as placid as the rest of the ocean—they’d finally got the mild weather they’d wanted all along. Things were going in a way Dave undoubtedly liked.

A rent-a-frog who’d been attaching the claw to the docking legs popped up near the edge of the moon pool. Treading water, he pulled off his mask and shed the mouthpiece that hooked him up to the tanks on his back. “Holy motherfucking shit!” he shouted. “How come nobody told us we were gonna grab Humpty Dumpty?”

As far as Jerry knew, no one ever said “Midlothian object” again. In the same way the capture vehicle had become Clementine, everybody aboard the Glomar Explorer called the spaceship Humpty Dumpty from then on.

The name fit. Jerry wished he’d thought of it himself. The spaceship did look like an enormous egg. It had had a great fall. And it wasn’t even slightly obvious whether all the president’s horses and all the president’s men could put Humpty Dumpty together again.

All the president’s men … He hadn’t read the Woodward and Bernstein book; it came out only a few days before he’d parked the Rambler in the lot near Pier E. Events had outrun it now. But in a sense he, like everyone else on this ship, was one of the president’s men himself. He didn’t like that much.

Nixon had to resign now … didn’t he? He couldn’t hang on anymore … could he? Jerry had joked about taking aliens to see Nixon. Right this minute, the joke didn’t seem so funny.

Other things didn’t seem so funny, either. He’d done a lot of hard work trying to imagine as many scenarios as he could about what might happen when the spaceship—when Humpty Dumpty—lay on the leaky bottom of the moon pool. Easy to be glib when it was still three miles down.