“Comes in handy,” Jerry said. A fair number of people who went into the sciences had minds like that. Able to leap tall mountains of data at a single bound! he thought. Again more slowly than he might have, he was beginning to realize the wider world did things differently.

“What’s that one got?” Steve pointed again.

“Half a hamburger bun, looks like,” Jerry said—burgers had been on the lunch menu. “That won’t hurt it.”

“I guess not.” Steve changed the subject: “Have you thought about what we’ll do if we get inside Humpty Dumpty?”

“Never once crossed my mind,” Jerry answered, deadpan.

Stephen Dole started to gape, then stopped and exhaled through his nose. He was more annoyed at himself than at Jerry, for he said, “I should be used to your sense of humor by now.”

“Always nice to know somebody thinks I’ve got one,” Jerry said. “The thing I really hope is that we don’t do too much damage breaking into the spaceship. That could be bad all kinds of ways.”

“Bad for us or bad for whoever or whatever’s in there?”

“Yes,” Jerry said. Steve started to give him a fishy look, but pulled his face straight in a hurry. It wasn’t as if Jerry was wrong. Obviously, smashing a hole in Humpty Dumpty or breaking in through what everybody thought was the airlock could do all kinds of destructive work. Just as obviously, the starship could do a lot of that, too. Anyone who doubted it had only to look at the photo of the skeleton in seaboots next to the K-129.

After a moment, Steve said, “You pack a lot into a little, don’t you?”

“Well, I try,” Jerry said. That was a useful knack for a writer, perhaps less so when talking: speech had repetition and redundancy built in, because it was there and then gone. He went on, “What if we can’t get in any easy way? Whatever goes into Humpty Dumpty’s shell, we don’t know anything about it.”

“True. It can’t be weak. It survived space travel and years three miles underwater. I’ve talked with Dale about that. I’ve urged him not to be too, well, heroic trying to break in.”

“Good. That’s good.” Jerry silently clapped his hands together.

“You could have done the same thing, you know. You should have.”

“He wouldn’t have paid any attention to me!” Jerry said it as if it were a law of nature. To him, it was. Professors and other senior people never paid attention to grad students unless they needed something from them.

But Steve shook his head. “I think he would have. I think he still will, if you go talk with him. You know more about what’s likely to be in there than anybody else on the ship. That’s what you’re here for.”