That was about what Jerry had thought. He and Jack were eating lunch in the messroom. He had salmon croquettes, while Jack was working his way through two slices of roast pork. “I wouldn’t have been able to do this before Vatican II,” Jack remarked.

“Hadn’t even thought of that,” Jerry said. He didn’t keep kosher; he’d just felt like fish. Friday dinner was fried shrimp and fried oysters. He intended to pig out. The dinner menu might have been a reminder of the days when Catholics weren’t supposed to eat meat on Fridays. A lot of restaurants still served clam chowder as their Friday soup, too.

As he ate the croquettes, his mind kept wandering back to Humpty Dumpty. There in the moon pool lay technology the Russians wouldn’t be able to imitate. He wondered if his own country could. And, again, he wondered whether it should. That felt like cheating. Or did he think it felt that way because Andre Norton’s The Time Traders and its sequels still echoed in his mind?

He went out to the moon pool after lunch. Dave was there before him, calling instructions to a couple of men in radiation suits who aimed Geiger counters at the spaceship from close range. “Any extra hot stuff?” Jerry asked him.

“Just a little at both ends—above background level, but not enough to be dangerous,” the recovery director answered over the chug of the small pumps that took care of the imperfect seal between the lips of the center well’s bottom gates. Dave added, “Of course, we don’t know how well the hull shields us from whatever’s inside it.”

“Uh-huh.” Jerry looked down over the rail. Three or four dead fish lay on top of the gates. He pointed at them. “We ought to pitch those, or else we’ll smell ’em all over the ship.”

Dave Schoals burst out laughing. Jerry cocked his head to one side. He didn’t think he’d said anything funny, but he’d cracked Dave up. “Sorry,” Schoals said after a bit. “Oh, my. You weren’t around for that.”

“I wasn’t around for what?” Jerry asked, more sharply than he might have. Every so often, he got tired of being reminded he was still the new kid. Not as if he didn’t know it himself.

“They built—we built—Clementine inside this great big roofed, submersible barge. Hughes Mining Barge Number One, we called it, because Hughes is fronting this operation,” Dave said. “It was made in Northern California, then towed down to a cove off Catalina Island and sunk there so the Glomar Explorer could get Clementine into the moon pool without anybody watching. You with me so far?”

“I think so,” Jerry answered.