“Man, do they!” Jerry said.

“But we know the important thing.” Steve waved down toward Humpty Dumpty. “The most important thing since the bomb, for sure—maybe ever. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be able to see what we’ve got here.”

Jerry got his newsletter at breakfast the next morning. It announced that the president would resign that day. Jerry demolished his bacon and eggs, and enjoyed them, too. Whatever aliens might lurk inside Humpty Dumpty, they wouldn’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.

After eating, he went up to the moon pool again. The big pumps were still going, but spitting less water than they had the night before. The center well had to be nearly dry.

That didn’t mean he could see in. An enormous tarp, not far from the size of the one that would cover the infield during a rain delay at a ball game, went over the top of it. One of the Glomar sailors waved to Jerry. “We’ll take it off in fifteen minutes, soon as the satellite’s gone again.”

“Do we have to cover up every time one goes overhead?” Jerry asked. “That’ll make working on Humpty Dumpty complicated.”

“Orders,” the man replied. Jerry had seen bumper stickers that read God said it. I believe it. That settles it. Could those stickers have spoken, they would have sounded the way the sailor did when he said Orders.

He and his comrades took off the tarp as neatly as groundskeepers would have. Jerry stared at Humpty Dumpty with an avidity he hadn’t known since the very first time he opened a Playboy to the centerfold.

The starship’s curves were different from that long-ago Miss May’s. He marveled at them just the same. Now out in the open air, the outer shell still put him in mind of mother-of-pearl or opal or something like that. If it was metal, it was no kind of metal human beings knew how to make. If it wasn’t metal, what was it?

He was looking at the end with the golf ball–style dimples. He went to the other end of the moon pool so he could see the tubes that stuck out. They were made of the same stuff as the rest of the spaceship’s exterior. And yes, those marks he’d seen on the photograph were still there. If they weren’t writing … then they were something else, that was all.

One of the men who’d dealt with the tarpaulin was snapping away with an Instamatic. “Do they let you do that?” Jerry asked.

“Nobody told me not to,” the sailor said.

Nobody guessed you’d try it, went through Jerry’s mind. He didn’t push it. That wasn’t his place. He suspected something would happen to the film before the fellow could get it developed. He wouldn’t have sworn to that, but he would have bet on it.