* * *

  A lot of systems on the Glomar Explorer and extending down to Clementine through all that pipe were hydraulically controlled. Just about all of them went haywire at one time or another while the pipe string descended toward the Midlothian object. Several different kinds of oil leaked, sometimes at high pressure.

  Jerry eyed his sneakers with sad resignation. After he’d walked through those assorted kinds of oil, they’d never be the same. If he’d worn Blue Tips when he was in junior high, he would have been one of the cool kids. Surfers loved them, for instance. He’d mostly worn Hush Puppies: his dad was the one with the wallet, and with the last word.

  Now I’ve got the Blue Tips, and what are they? Just shoes, he thought. Some profound life lesson probably lurked in there somewhere, but it seemed too depressing for him to try to ferret it out.

  And the sneakers weren’t the only thing the hydraulic oil spread over. The Glomar Explorer had its very own oil slick. People wondered out loud how far across the Pacific it was stretching.

  Another question occurred to Jerry. He asked Dave Schoals, “What can the guys in the SB-10 learn if they scoop up some of the slick and analyze the hell out of it?”

  “Huh!” The recovery director sent him a thoughtful stare. “You do come up with the interesting questions, don’t you?”

  “I try,” Jerry said modestly, adding, “People say I’m trying a lot of the time, as a matter of fact.”

  “Wonder why,” Dave said with a grin. Then he caught himself. “Wait. You’re writing your thesis now, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. I mean, I was till all this happened.”

  “You’ve got an excuse in that case. Doing doctoral work’ll drive anybody halfway round the bend. More than halfway. Finishing my dissertation isn’t the smallest reason I’m single again.”

  “Yeah?” Jerry said. Schoals nodded. That wasn’t the kind of thing Jerry wanted to hear. Anna was much less enthusiastic about the academic life than he was. He hoped that would work out in time (he also hoped that making at least as much money as she did would give him more clout, or anyway more talking points, in the relationship than he had now).

  Maybe his flinch was visible. Dave got back to the matter at hand: “I don’t think they can find out too much. That we’re using a lot of heavy-duty hydraulic stuff, sure. But not what we’re using it for, even the K-129.” He waited a beat, the way a stand-up comedian would have. “I hope.”

  “Okay. I’m glad,” Jerry said. These guys did have veins of humanity streaking the hard, dutiful, secret rock of their souls. They had them, but the stuff could be goddamn rough to extract.

  * * *

  On the morning of July thirtieth, Clementine hung about a hundred feet above the Midlothian object. The Glomar Explorer maneuvered ever so slightly to position the claw just where the men in the Control container wanted it to be. Then those guys would do what they did, and things would either work or they wouldn’t.

  Lunch that day was a choice of lamb chops or sirloin tips. Jerry was working meat off the bone of a lamb chop when Dale Neuwirth stood up and clinked his fork against his glass till the crowded messroom quieted. Everybody eyed the mission director, for more reasons than one. Dale didn’t usually act that way; he tried to be one of the guys. Not now. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out something was up.

  He looked around the messroom. “Some of you will have a notion of what I’m going to tell you now. Most of you won’t,” he said. “When we bring Clementine back up into the moon pool—and yes, that’s when, not if—she won’t have a big chunk of a Russian submarine in her claws. She’ll be holding something else. Yes, the sub is down there. Yes, it’s important. But if everything works the way we want it to, what we bring up will make the submarine hardly matter at all.

  “We’re getting close. It didn’t seem fair to spring this on you by surprise when you see what Clementine has. But I’m gonna tell you—what we’re doing out here isn’t just important for the United States. It’s important for the whole human race. And you’re part of it. It’ll be something to tell your grandchildren about, that you were here for this.” He chuckled wryly. “If you ever get cleared to talk about it at all, I mean.”

  He sat down again. Several people called questions. He ignored them. The messroom buzzed. “Hey, Mr. Steinberg, what’s goin’ on?” the sailor named Tony asked from the next table over.

  “We’ll all find out pretty soon,” Jerry said. Or we’ll get fried like bacon, or the ship’ll break in half even if we don’t. Not mentioning any of that seemed a good plan.

  VI

  Jerry wanted to watch the guys who’d spent so much time and hard work on the simulator doing their things with the genuine, gigantic Clementine. He saw that none of the other people who knew Midlothian nested inside Azorian made a beeline for the Control container, though, so he also stayed away. He knew he wouldn’t have wanted kibitzers while he was doing something hard and important, either.

  It turned out not to matter for the next couple of days. One glitch after another kept the claw from descending to the bottom and scooping the spaceship. And some of the replacement sensors on Clementine didn’t want to work. The engineers talked among themselves and no doubt talked to themselves, too. They couldn’t figure out what was going wrong.

  Steve and Jerry found themselves with a mystery of their own. Steve said, “I hear the TV cameras down there are showing a hammer on the seafloor next to the Midlothian object. Do you remember seeing one there, Jerry?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jerry answered. “It would have stood out, wouldn’t it?”

  “Just a little. But I don’t remember it, either. If it wasn’t there before and it is now, how did it get there?”

  “Maybe the Russians brought it over from the K-129. Maybe that’s what the dead guy who’s nothing but a skeleton in boots was doing outside the sub,” Jerry suggested.

  Stephen Dole sent him a severe look. “I thought you wrote science fiction, not the kind of stuff that’s supposed to make your hair stand up on the back of your neck.”

  “Well, I haven’t tried horror yet. There’s not much of a market for it,” Jerry replied. “But who knows? There wasn’t a great big market for fantasy till The Lord of the Rings made one. Now it probably sells better than sf does. Maybe somebody will come along and be, like, a Tolkien for horror.”

  “Fine.” Steve held on to his patience with both hands. “That still doesn’t explain the hammer, unless we missed it on the Halibut photos.”

  They went over them in the Special Measurements container, both separately and together. The hammer hadn’t been there then. It lay so close to the egg-shaped Midlothian object, it might have slid down that smooth curve before hitting the bottom. The photographs from five years before surely would have picked it up. Only they hadn’t.

  “Maybe it really was that dead Russian. Maybe I can get a story out of it—if I make the spaceship into a freighter full of gold or something, I mean.” Listening to himself, Jerry liked the idea. He wrote it down. Then he glanced over at Steve with a sly smile. “Or maybe whatever’s inside the spaceship threw it out there.”

  “I hear it looks like an ordinary hammer, like the ones you’d buy at a hardware store,” Steve said. “Either the aliens are just like us or there’s a simpler story.”

  A little to Jerry’s disappointment, there was. One of the men who worked in the pipe farm remembered that he’d fumbled a hammer over the rail a week or ten days earlier. The roughneck’s comment was, “Who woulda thought it’d go straight down like that?”

  “He’s right,” Jerry said when he heard the story. “Who would’ve thought that?”

  “I wouldn’t have,” Steve said. “But now we know. No dead Russians involved.”

  “That’s ’cause I haven’t written it yet,” Jerry retorted. He got a chuckle—a small one, but a chuckle—out of the man from the RAND Corporation.

  The next day, Clementine went all the way down to the bottom and moved toward the sunken spaceship. The people who knew what the claw would be grappling, Jerry among them, went around with optimistic smiles pasted on their faces. They were the ones who also knew exactly what could go wrong, the ones who’d heard the hot-grease noise that doomed the K-129.

  Jerry’d never before been in a situation where he knew he might die very soon. His father had fought in Italy during World War II; he had friends who’d come back from Vietnam. One of them had been on a river gunboat that hit a mine. Jerry’d asked him what it was like.

  “It wasn’t like anything,” Bill told him. “One second, we were chugging along on routine patrol. Next thing I knew, I was in the goddamn Mekong with my pants full.”

  He hadn’t understood that in his belly when he heard it. He did now. It wasn’t something the writer in him wanted to analyze, not anymore. His balls kept trying to crawl up into his belly. Somebody’d fished Bill out of the Mekong. If he went into the North Pacific, who’d rescue him?

  The Russians on the SB-10? Would he want that? Would it matter? Or would the starship fry them, too, to make good and sure not even one survived to tell the tale? Those were all questions he hoped he didn’t have to answer. And he understood his old man and his buddies better than he had before.

  Because of what the Glomar Explorer was doing, she had to hold her position above the Midlothian object very precisely. The SB-10 chose that moment to make run after run at and around the bigger ship.

  We are maneuvering with difficulty, the Explorer signaled to the tug: another good-sized understatement. The SB-10 paid no attention and gave no sign of understanding. John Porter’s comments had made Jerry imagine the Russians as intelligent aliens. Now the SB-10’s behavior reinforced that.

  Because John and Dave and Dale were up to their eyebrows in problems bigger than soothing an anxious grad student, Jerry asked Steve, “Do you think they know what we’re up to right now?”

  “They haven’t shown any sign of it,” the older man said. “Best guess is, they’re just making pests of themselves. I’ve heard stories about Cold War ocean games that would curl anybody’s hair.”

  Jerry had heard stories like that, too, mostly secondhand from oceanographers who’d got whale song tapes from Navy personnel. He hadn’t known how much to believe. Now he had the feeling the swabbies were playing things down, not puffing them up.

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” he said. “Let’s hope they don’t run into us, too, ’cause I bet they don’t have insurance.” He’d got rear-ended like that himself, coming off the San Diego Freeway on his way to campus. The Rambler’s trunk had a smoothed-out, Bondoed-over dent because he’d paid a fly-by-night guy twenty bucks to fix it instead of shelling out plenty more at a body shop.

  By the way Steve’s mouth twisted, he’d met at least one uninsured driver himself. “Yes, let’s,” he said, and left it there.

  Just to delight everyone on the Glomar Explorer even further, the guys in the Control container decided they needed one final double added to the pipe string, to give Clementine’s breakout legs more play when they rose up and broke whatever suction was holding the spaceship to the seafloor. The trouble was, the pipe wranglers had to disconnect the hydraulics to attach the sixty feet of pipe, then hook things up again once the attachment was made.

  They were loudly unhappy about that, the way anyone would have been. Much bad language ensued. Jerry listened to some of it in slack-jawed wonderment. He was good with words, good enough to get paid for them (occasionally). He’d never dreamt the English language could be so creatively profaned. He scribbled stupid whistleass chucklefucks in his notebook, vowing to use it as soon as he found an editor who’d let him sneak it into print.

  Getting the hydraulics disconnected from the pipe string, adding the new double, and hooking the hydraulics up again should have taken a few hours. To make things all the more delightful, one of the heave compensators, which shielded the string from the ship’s motions, chose that moment to go on the fritz. The seas stayed moderate, but the engineers swore like pipe-farm guys as they worked around the clock to get the compensator compensating again.

  Another day gone. Another month gone. They didn’t try lowering the breakout legs till after noon on the first of August. Jerry still didn’t go into the Control container, but he and Steve and a lot of the CIA guys hung around near it to hear the word as soon as there was word to hear.

  “Like sitting around in the waiting room while your wife is having a baby,” Dave Schoals muttered.

  “Like sitting around in the waiting room hoping your wife does have a baby,” Steve added.

  Jerry topped them both: “Like sitting around in the waiting room hoping your wife doesn’t have Rosemary’s Baby.”

  Dave winced. Steve thumped Jerry on the shoulder. He thought both reactions were similar.

  A few minutes later, Paul opened the door to Control. He came halfway out and said, “We have the object off the bottom! We’ve jettisoned the breakout legs from Clementine—well, we’ve jettisoned three of them. The fourth one doesn’t want to let go, so we’re leaving it on for now. Extraction went as well as though we’d been practicing for weeks or something.”

  He grinned a wide, foolish, relieved grin and started to duck back into his sanctum. Before he could, Dave held up a hand. “Hang on! Do you have any feel for the object’s weight?”

  “I’m not on the controls right now—obviously,” Paul answered. “Eric says he thinks it’s lighter than he was braced for, but he isn’t sure. We haven’t done much with it, and we have the whole pipe string and Clementine down there.”

  “Gotcha. Thanks,” Dave said. Paul nodded and disappeared. The lock gave forth an authoritative click as it engaged.

  “We have it. Dear God in heaven, we really have it,” Steve said softly. His head swung Jerry’s way. “And it isn’t the Devil’s kid.”

  “Or if it is, it hasn’t started acting up yet,” Jerry said. Steve stuck out his tongue at him. It wasn’t the kind of thing the man from the RAND Corporation would usually have done, but they were all giddy just then.

  Jerry wondered why the Midlothian object seemed relatively light—if that turned out to be true. Whatever it was made of, it wouldn’t be anything earthly science was familiar with. The K-129 had taken a beating while it sank to the ocean floor. The Midlothian object looked as fresh and undamaged as if it had got there only a few minutes before. It also still looked to be airtight, gastight, watertight, whatever the right word was. How, under the crushing weight of three miles of water?

  Force fields? he wondered. He’d never liked stories that used them. They seemed like hand-waving bullshit, not something that could really exist. But who could guess what kind of rules the vessel down there played by? Some Earthly physicists might go stark raving mad trying to work them out.

  If we can bring it up here for a look, he reminded himself. Yeah. If.

  * * *

  No force fields aboard the Glomar Explorer. Jerry didn’t think so, anyhow, though he still hadn’t been inside a few of the containers she carried. But the Explorer did have thousands of tons of steel. Some of it began to lower: the docking legs forward and aft of the moon pool slowly descended into the Pacific.

  Pointing, Jerry asked, “What’s going on?”

  “We’re lowering our center of gravity,” Dave answered. “We’ve got all that weight at the apex of the derrick. It makes us top-heavy. We don’t want to capsize if the waves pick up.”

  “Ah. Cool.” Jerry nodded and gave him a thumbs-up. With someone his own age, someone closer to his politics, he might have used a peace-symbol V instead. Here, not rattling anybody’s cage seemed the better part of valor.

  For the next couple of days, the SB-10 kept flitting around the Glomar Explorer. It would circle the American ship, often at less than a hundred yards. Or it would keep station a mile or two astern of the Explorer. Or it would quit doing that, run up till it was out ahead of the big ship, then kill its engine and let wind and waves shove it back again.

  Another ship, a freighter called the Bangkok, steamed past, four or five miles north of the Glomar Explorer. The Bangkok didn’t have any trouble getting in touch with the Explorer: she radioed, asking what kind of ship it was.

  “They thought we were funny looking,” Jack Porter said, not without pride, as he told the story at dinner. “And you know what? They were right.”

  “We told ’em we were scooping up manganese nodules?” Jerry asked.

  “Sure. What else would we be doing way the devil out here?” As far as a veteran CIA man could, Jack radiated innocence.

  And, while all that was going on, the pipe string started coming back into the ship. Things went slowly. The pipe-handling system was at maximum stress. Lowering the string had been easier, since gravity worked with the pipe crew then. Hauling the pipe up again, plus Clementine, plus whatever the Midlothian object weighed, took everything the system had.

  Engineers and ordinary sailors prowled through the Glomar Explorer, making sure all watertight doors stayed shut unless someone was actually going through them. Opening steel doors and dogging them shut behind him every few yards annoyed Jerry. The idea that such precautions were important alarmed him.

  “When we started doing this, I figured it would take a week—six days if everything went lickety-split.” Dave laughed a self-mocking laugh. “Shows what I knew, doesn’t it?”

  “Welcome to Murphy’s Law,” Jerry said.

  Dave laughed again, this time on a sour note. “Murphy was a goddamn optimist.”

  Jerry laughed, too, not least at himself. If the starship didn’t come to life and sink the Glomar Explorer, and if the overstrained ship didn’t break in half and sink herself, he was happy enough to have smaller things go wrong. The longer he stayed on the CIA’s payroll, the better his savings account liked it.

  “How much pipe have we brought up?” he asked Dave.