But the longer he stood there, the longer he looked, the more sure he grew that he really was seeing the ship from another world … through the sea darkly now, but soon face-to-face. He stayed where he was, watching, and stayed, and stayed some more. He wasn’t the only one, either. Some of the divers and roughnecks looked down and into the moon pool, too. Dale was there, and Dave, and Jack, and Steve. So were the guys from the Control container. They’d all worked longer and harder than Jerry had. They wanted to find out what they’d done.

Jerry stayed there till his feet ached. By dinnertime, Humpty Dumpty was in the moon pool, with the gates sliding together toward their imperfect seal beneath it. Steak tonight, but no one moved.

“Will you look at that?” Dave said. “Will you just look at that?”

Look Jerry did. Whatever the spaceship was made of, it wasn’t metal. Still mostly underwater, with the sun dropping toward the horizon, Humpty Dumpty glistened and gleamed and shone, like mother-of-pearl. Jerry gaped. He’d expected all kinds of wonderful things, but never such beauty.

VII

At last, when full darkness came, he went back to the messroom. He put A.1. Sauce on his steak, the way he usually did. He remembered that the next day. He didn’t recall much about eating. He shoveled in food as fast as he could so he could go back out again and see what was going on.

Big, noisy pumps were throwing water from the moon pool out over the side and into the ocean. Aside from that, the view was disappointing. The Glomar Explorer showed her usual running lights, but the spotlights that could light up the moon pool stayed off. Jerry’d wondered whether Humpty Dumpty would glow in the dark. No such luck.

Steve came forward a few minutes later. Like Jerry, he had only gloom to examine. “I wanted to see more,” Jerry grumbled.

“So did I,” the older man said, nodding. “Five gets you ten a Russian spy satellite’s due to come over before too long. We don’t want to light everything up and show the Kremlin what we’ve got.”

“Oh,” Jerry said, and then, “Could they really tell from that high up?”

“This isn’t my area of expertise, you understand, but I think we could, and we don’t dare assume their technology is any worse than ours,” Steve said. “Jack could tell you more, and maybe Dave, too.”

“They could, but would they?” Jerry answered his own question: “I don’t think so. I don’t have the waddayacallit, the need to know.” If he sounded bitter, he did because he was.

Steve couldn’t very well have missed that, but pretended not to hear it. “Well, neither do I,” he said, mild as usual. “That kind of thing comes with the territory here. They like to compartmentalize information.”