“Good deal. Just to make things extra secure, we made the transfer at night. That was when the bottom gates got messed up, too, and we never could quite fix ’em right. But I’m not talking about that. When we did the transfer, we had the inside of the moon pool all lit up, ’cause we needed to see what was going on.”

“Uh-oh! And the lights drew fish?”

“Almost. They drew squid, thousands and thousands of squid. By the time we got the claw up there and the gates as closed as they were gonna get, ol’ Clementine was ass-deep in calamari, just about. And the stink after they died…!” Dave shook his head. “Lasted for weeks. We hosed the walls down. We scrubbed ’em down. Over and over, I mean. Still smelled like dead squid. So now you know.”

“Now I know,” Jerry agreed, and wondered if he was being too prickly. To keep from dwelling on that, he pointed to Clementine’s central claw, the thick one. “When will the guys in Control loosen that up some? If we’re gonna get inside, we’ll probably start trying with the airlock thingy, right?”

“Hmm.” Dave scratched at one ear. Instead of answering, he said, “Your hair’s a lot longer than mine. Don’t know how you stand it. I grew mine out mostly so my ears would get covered over—ears are great identifiers on photos. But it tickles and makes me itch all the goddamn time.”

Ears are great identifiers. If letting your hair get long to keep the other side’s spies from figuring out who you were wasn’t the most CIA thing in the world, Jerry couldn’t imagine what would be. He replied, “It doesn’t bother me. Guess I’m just used to it. Women wear theirs long most of the time. Doesn’t seem to give them any trouble.”

“Yeah, that’s true.” By the thoughtful way Dave said it, what women did hadn’t occurred to him till that moment. Maybe that also explained a thing or two about why he was single again. Or maybe not. Before Jerry could decide if the thought was worth following, the recovery director came back to what he’d asked: “We can loosen the grip. The hydraulics are still hooked up and everything. When we decide to knock on that door, we’ll be able to go inside once it opens.”

“Any thoughts about when we start doing that?” Jerry asked. He suspected he might be the one they’d want to take the first whack at it. Making contact with whatever Humpty Dumpty held was the reason he and Steve were here. Wouldn’t Dave and Dale and Jack figure a grad student was more expendable than a senior expert?