“About three thousand feet so far,” the recovery director answered. “Doesn’t sound like much for two days’ work, I know, but we’ve been taking it real easy while we’re near max weight. If everything goes right, we’ll pick up steam from now on.”

  In lieu of knocking wood, Jerry rapped his knuckles on his own forehead. “And every double we bring in takes off more weight.”

  “You got it—something like twenty tons every time,” Dave said. “Of course, when you have thousands of tons on the string, that doesn’t seem like so much.”

  “Everett Dirksen said something like that, didn’t he? A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money,” Jerry said.

  “He was a piece of work, Everett Dirksen was,” Dave said. Jerry nodded. They could agree on that, even if they might not agree on what kind of piece of work the flamboyant Republican senator had been.

  The next morning, the ship’s newsletter reported that John Dean had got one to four years for his role in the Watergate coverup. It also said that John Ehrlichman had got twenty months for perjury and conspiracy a few days earlier. The paranoid part of Jerry wondered whether the people who put the newsletter together had held off on mentioning Ehrlichman’s sentence sooner because they hoped it was only an isolated incident. With Nixon having to turn over more and more tapes, that seemed a forlorn hope, but who would be sure of anything in these crazy times?

  Slowly but pretty surely, more doubles came off the pipe string. Operations did go better as the weight the system was pulling against shrank. People who didn’t have to be there, though, were strongly discouraged from venturing anywhere near the moon pool.

  “What the fuck you think you’re doing, dumbshit?” a rent-a-frog yelled at an engineer who forgot or thought he could ignore those instructions. The guy with the slide rule clipped to his belt retreated in confused dismay.

  There but for the grace of common sense go I, Jerry thought, as the red-faced engineer stumbled past him. He looked down at the industrial carpeting under his sneakers so the other man didn’t have to respond to him. That was the only comfort he could give.

  He was walking around the helipad the following morning, working off some of his high-calorie breakfast, when he noticed the docking legs had quietly come up forty or fifty feet. He took that for a good sign: the guys who knew about such things had to think the Glomar Explorer was less likely to turn turtle now.

  Which left only the Midlothian object to worry about. Only! The spaceship was more than halfway up from the bottom. It hadn’t done anything but lie in Clementine’s claws. It might have been as dead as the K-129.

  It might have been, but Jerry didn’t think it was.

  * * *

  All hell broke loose the next day. Not on the ship; pipe kept coming up steadily, if still slower than people whose opinions mattered would have liked. Jerry wasn’t one of those people. As long as Clementine didn’t break and drop the spaceship back into the abyss, he wasn’t complaining.

  In Washington, though … Jerry didn’t find out about it till the following morning, but he’d got used to that. There’d been a Doonesbury where one congressman at the Watergate hearings groused to his colleague, “If only he’d knock over a bank or something…”

  “By George, we’d have him then!” the second congressman replied.

  And Richard Nixon, it turned out, had knocked over a bank after all. The tapes the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over proved it, too. They showed that when he’d talked with H. R. Haldeman twice on June 23, 1972, about using the CIA to stop the FBI from investigating the Watergate break-in. The Glomar Explorer newsletter headline, surely not written by anybody who hated the president, read “Smoking Howitzer!”

  Even a Republican representative like Orange County’s Charles Wiggins, who’d led Nixon’s defenders in the Judiciary Committee, said he would have voted for the articles of impeachment had he known. Three other Republicans on the committee joined him. The others announced they were “reassessing” their stance.

  There was another Doonesbury where Mark chortled, “Guilty! That’s guilty, guilty, guilty!!” Some newspapers refused to run that strip, calling it too one-sided. Jerry hoped their editors felt properly foolish now. He wouldn’t have bet on it, though.

  When he went into the messroom for lunch, he felt like waving the newsletter over his head and screaming, “Guilty! That’s guilty, guilty, guilty!!” himself. Only the worry that some of the divers might baptize him with hot coffee made him hold back. He even tried not to look like somebody who was gloating.

  He might not have done too well, because Steve greeted him with, “Seems you were right all along.”

  “Yeah, well…” Jerry shrugged. “The important thing is, we’ve gotta make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”

  “If we can,” the older man said. “People aren’t perfect. The things they make aren’t perfect, either. Chances are we’ll get ourselves another power-hungry president one of these years.”

  That felt more likely than Jerry wished it did. He’d been thinking about imperfections, too, in a different context. “Clementine and the pipe string have had plenty of problems, but the object is still coming up.” He kept avoiding Midlothian where anyone not in the inner circle could hear, but with luck that wouldn’t matter much longer.

  “It is,” Steve said with a small nod. “Getting close now. They should be hooking Clementine up to the docking legs this afternoon. If everything works the way it should, the rent-a-frogs will get the first live look at the object then.”

  “Alevai omayn!” Jerry exclaimed. Steve gave him a quizzical look. Sheepishly, he translated: “May it work the way you said.” He wasn’t sure he was the only Jew aboard the Glomar Explorer, but he thought so. No black guys at all, or Asians. The people pulling up the spaceship for the United States didn’t look just like the country they worked for.

  “Ah.” Steve stayed smooth and polite, as he always did.

  Something else occurred to Jerry. “The things those other folks built”—yes, he was staying as oblique as he could for as long as he could—“aren’t perfect all the time, either, or what was the object doing on the bottom of the Pacific for however long it was down there?”

  “That’s a good point,” Stephen Dole replied. “An important point, I think. We look at all the things the builders can do that we can’t, and sometimes we feel they have to be gods.”

  “Chariots of the Gods?” Jerry rolled his eyes. “I read it. All it made me think was, von Däniken didn’t have any real ideas himself, so he didn’t believe ancient people could have had any, either. But what do I know? He’s laughing all the way to the bank.”

  “Did you see the movie?” Steve asked.

  “No, thank God.”

  “It’s worse than the book.”

  “They said it couldn’t be done!”

  “Oh, it was.” Steve’s smile was lopsided. “It got nominated for a Best Documentary Academy Award, too. Didn’t win, so there’s a little justice in the world. Not enough, but a little.”

  “I didn’t know that. I wish I still didn’t. I mean, it’s good that it didn’t win, but it should have got laughed at, not nominated. Hell, it shouldn’t even have got made.”

  “‘No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.’ H. L. Mencken was a nasty man in a good many ways, but you’d have a devil of a time persuading me he was wrong about that,” Steve said.

  “I heard it ‘of the American people,’” Jerry said.

  “I heard it that way, too. I used it in an article that way without checking, and my editor called me on it,” Steve said. “Now I quote it the way Mencken wrote it.”

  “Good for you. Good for your editor.” Jerry enjoyed being edited no more than any other halfway sane person did. When you were wrong, though, all you could do was tip your cap and thank the fellow who’d kept you from committing stupidity in public.

  After lunch, some of the divers went into the Pacific to secure Clementine—and what Clementine held in its claws—to the Glomar Explorer’s docking legs. Jealousy stabbed at Jerry as they swam down to the moon pool. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to be the one who first saw the Midlothian object for real.

  Right after they went into the gray-green water, he and everybody else still on the Explorer had something else to worry about. The SB-10 buzzed around the American ship like an angry bumblebee, sometimes coming within fifty yards of her. Captain Gresham signaled to the Russian tug that the Glomar Explorer couldn’t maneuver at all. As usual, the SB-10 ignored the signal.

  Jerry watched the tug’s antics from the helipad. So did Jack Porter. The bearded security director was biting his lip with worry. “If they put a diver in the water, they can find out what we’ve got here,” he said, perhaps more to himself than to Jerry. “Wouldn’t that just screw everything to the wall?”

  “Oh, maybe a little,” Jerry said. Jack sent him a startled look—yes, he had been talking to himself. More quietly, Jerry went on, “We have some guns aboard? Did I hear that right?”

  “Yeah. Some of ’em are in a chest under my bed, in fact,” Jack answered. “Only we can’t use ’em. That would be an act of war, or close enough, and sure as the devil they’d get off a signal before we could take them all out.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jerry made himself nod and smile. He got the feeling that, had Jack owned a death ray that could have vaporized the SB-10 without leaving a trace, he would have fired it without thinking twice.

  If we get inside the starship, maybe he will get a ray like that, Jerry thought uneasily. Do I want him to?

  While that was going through his head, the SB-10 hove to, still no more than fifty yards astern of the Glomar Explorer. Most of the crew lined the starboard rail, the one nearer the U.S. vessel. Jerry didn’t see the woman or women aboard the tug. He understood why a moment later. In unison, the Russians spun around, bent over, and dropped their pants.

  Laughing fit to bust, Jerry mooned the Soviet sailors right back. Jack Porter and the rest of the Americans on the helipad did, too. “Turn the other cheek,” Jack said. “It’s in the Bible, you know?”

  “It sure is.” Straightening, Jerry pulled up his cords.

  The Russians also covered themselves. They waved to the Americans. “Urra! Urra! Urra!” they shouted. The SB-10’s whistle blew three long blasts. The tug’s engine growled to busier life. The little ship headed off to the northwest, as the Chazhma had earlier.

  “Do you think it’s gone for good?” Jerry asked.

  “Christ, I hope so!” Jack answered. “But I hoped so the last time it disappeared, too, so we just have to wait and see.”

  “No divers, anyway,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah!” Porter crossed himself, whether ironically or for real Jerry couldn’t guess.

  Not having the pushy, annoying tug around felt wonderful. Jerry wondered if it would get boring after a while. Then he remembered how Dave Schoals had pointed out that the ideal mission was one where everything went the way it was supposed to. They hadn’t had that, but at least they didn’t need to worry about Russian snoops anymore … unless the SB-10 came back again.

  Jerry ambled forward, toward the moon pool (and snickered when he realized that had a whole new meaning now). Most of the strain was off the derrick and the lifting system. Now it only—that word again!—had to support the two thousand tons or so of Clementine, plus however much the Midlothian object added. Compared to what it had been doing, that was a piece of cake.

  Everything in the moon pool seemed calm and serene. The water inside it was as placid as the rest of the ocean—they’d finally got the mild weather they’d wanted all along. Things were going in a way Dave undoubtedly liked.

  A rent-a-frog who’d been attaching the claw to the docking legs popped up near the edge of the moon pool. Treading water, he pulled off his mask and shed the mouthpiece that hooked him up to the tanks on his back. “Holy motherfucking shit!” he shouted. “How come nobody told us we were gonna grab Humpty Dumpty?”

  * * *

  As far as Jerry knew, no one ever said “Midlothian object” again. In the same way the capture vehicle had become Clementine, everybody aboard the Glomar Explorer called the spaceship Humpty Dumpty from then on.

  The name fit. Jerry wished he’d thought of it himself. The spaceship did look like an enormous egg. It had had a great fall. And it wasn’t even slightly obvious whether all the president’s horses and all the president’s men could put Humpty Dumpty together again.

  All the president’s men … He hadn’t read the Woodward and Bernstein book; it came out only a few days before he’d parked the Rambler in the lot near Pier E. Events had outrun it now. But in a sense he, like everyone else on this ship, was one of the president’s men himself. He didn’t like that much.

  Nixon had to resign now … didn’t he? He couldn’t hang on anymore … could he? Jerry had joked about taking aliens to see Nixon. Right this minute, the joke didn’t seem so funny.

  Other things didn’t seem so funny, either. He’d done a lot of hard work trying to imagine as many scenarios as he could about what might happen when the spaceship—when Humpty Dumpty—lay on the leaky bottom of the moon pool. Easy to be glib when it was still three miles down.

  Now it lay only about 135 feet down. The docking legs had hold of Clementine at either end. Raising them would help the derrick bring the claw and Humpty Dumpty the rest of the way up. The spaceship wouldn’t be a scenario, a hypothetical, anymore. It would be right there, as real as a punch in the face.

  Which was why, that evening, he got trained in donning a suit that would, with luck, protect him from whatever Humpty Dumpty brought with it from the bottom of the sea and from wherever it had been before it found Earth.

  Dave Schoals, who gave the training, wouldn’t take no for an answer. He banged on Jerry’s cabin door and said, “You want to go down into the moon pool, you have to know how to give yourself a chance to stay safe. C’mon.” He fixed Stephen Dole with a businesslike stare. “You, too.”

  “I had the training up in Northern California,” the man from the RAND Corporation protested.

  “That would’ve been months ago,” Dave answered. “You can do with a refresher, or else you can let Jerry grab all the glory from meeting the Martians.”

  Steve said something uncharitable under his breath, but he came. There proved to be two layers of long johns that went over people’s usual underwear, a papery outer garment over regular clothes, and booties and surgical gloves for feet and hands. Those got taped to the outer garment to make an airtight seal.

  A hood fit over the hard hat everyone who went into the moon pool would have to wear. A face mask protected eyes, nose, and mouth. “If it turns out there isn’t an oxygen atmosphere inside the spaceship, we can rig up air tanks,” Dave said.

  “What if it’s a couple of hundred degrees below zero, though?” Jerry asked. Coming out of the mask, his voice sounded unearthly in his own ears.

  “In that case, we try to figure out what to do with the next man who goes in,” Dave said. Jerry was already warm enough, and then some, in the protective suit. He got warmer yet. Dave went on, “After contact with Humpty Dumpty, we’ll check you out for radiation and have you clean off till you make the Geiger counters happy.”

  Jerry found another question: “How about checking for germs?” He couldn’t have been the only guy on the Glomar Explorer who’d read things like Harry Harrison’s Plague from Space and Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.

  “We’ll do the best we can with that,” Dave told him, and said no more. After a moment, Jerry realized there wasn’t much more to be said. What could they do but their best?

  The newsletter the next morning had a breaking bulletin: Ron Ziegler announced that Richard Nixon would make an important statement the following day. The president’s press secretary didn’t say what his boss would be talking about. As far as Jerry was concerned, that was just as well. If Ziegler said the sun was shining, Jerry would have gone outside to check.

  Some people called the difference between what politicians and their flunkies said and what was actually true the credibility gap. A gang of L.A. satirists who styled themselves the Credibility Gap poked fun at such politicos, first on AM rock station KRLA and then on KPPC. Free-form FM fitted them better, no doubt.

  Having read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” at an impressionable age, Jerry had another name for politicians’ verbal shenanigans. He called them lying.

  Slowly, slowly, Humpty Dumpty rose from the ocean toward the moon pool. Along with everyone else, Jerry sweated out the last hours of the lift. If Clementine broke a claw now … That would be too painful to bear. All the way to the top (well, almost all the way) and then all the way down? No.

  Please, God, no, went through his mind. It wasn’t exactly a prayer, but it wasn’t exactly not a prayer, either. It came closer than anything he’d tried since he was a little boy and his mother was dying. Petition the Lord with prayer? Years before the Doors sang it, he’d agreed with them that you couldn’t do it. But here he was, out in the middle of the ocean, with Humpty Dumpty nearly close enough to reach out and touch. Nearly. Not quite. Not yet. Please, God.

  Lunch was roast beef. Jerry’d enjoyed it the Thursday before. It was probably just as good now; the cooks in the galley knew their stuff. But five minutes after finishing, he had trouble remembering what he’d eaten. He’d gone into the messroom because it was lunchtime. Okay, he’d fueled up. That was what it amounted to.

  He wandered forward and peered down into the moon pool. The sun was out, if hazily. A mackerel, three-quarters grown, flashed silver just below the surface, then vanished into deeper water. Jerry’s gaze went deeper still. Was that a pale, smooth curve down there, with darker bands where the black steel claws still gripped? Or was it just his imagination?