Wouldn’t they be right? Sure they would. All the same, he felt like a Star Trek extra in a red shirt, doomed to die before the next commercial break.

“Right now, I think the plan is to wait till we get to the site off Midway,” Dave said carefully. “I’m pretty sure we’ll want to take a shot at it before we head for Lahaina. If anything goes wrong, better it goes wrong where there aren’t many eyes around.”

“That might be good, yeah,” Jerry said. If a death ray incinerated the Glomar Explorer in Lahaina harbor, people would talk. And in case strange space bacteria started turning the crewfolk green with orange polka dots, they also probably ought to do it well out to sea.

Dave nodded. “Glad you think so.”

Jerry raised an eyebrow at the tone. Said another way, the words would have been sarcastic enough to sting. But Schoals sounded as if he meant them. Jerry was no more used to getting taken seriously by older people than any other grad student—hell, than any other twenty-six-year-old.

I could start enjoying this, he thought, and then, If it ever happens again, I mean. He had trouble taking himself seriously, too.

Midway lay about 725 nautical miles south and a little east of where the Glomar Explorer had plucked Humpty Dumpty from the bottom of the Pacific. Jerry used nautical miles for some of his work, but he didn’t think in them. A little slide-rule work told him they made 835 statute miles, more or less. That, he could wrap his head around.

The Explorer cruised at ten knots, so Site 126–1 was about three days away. Jerry thought he would sleep and relax on the trip: he couldn’t do anything that involved the spaceship in the moon pool. Orders were to look but not to touch, no matter what.

“We mean that. We no-shit mean it,” Jack Porter told him. “Remember the nondisclosure agreement you signed before Steve would clue you in on what we were really going after?”

“You mean the one that talked about ‘termination with extreme prejudice’?” Jerry said.

“Yeah. That one.” The security director nodded.

“Nah. Remind me again what it said.”

Jack snorted. “Funny guy! Listen up, funny guy. This is like that. If anybody lays a finger on Humpty Dumpty before we’re ready, we’ll dip the stupid son of a bitch in ketchup and drop him into the Pacific for the sharks’ brunch buffet. You get me, or do I have to make that plainer?”

“I hear you. I’ll be good,” Jerry said. “But if anybody’s awake inside Humpty Dumpty, or even if that was a robot that fried the K-129, don’t you think it might have suspected something when a giant steel claw on the end of a pipe string grabbed hold of it and hauled it up here?”