The envelope had Steinberg written on it in a script a sixth-grade teacher would have envied. Jerry opened it. Inside were a California license with his photo and address but the name Gerard Sheldon Steinberg, a Social Security card with his number and the same name, and a credit card with that name and a number that wasn’t his.

  He held up the Mastercard. “Can I really use this?”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” Vic said. “Same credit limit as your real one. It’ll work.”

  “What if I need to write a check? My ID won’t match.”

  “You’re two days from sailing, so don’t, all right? You gotta get something, pay cash or charge it.”

  “I will.”

  “Good deal. Now—you’ve taken care of everything you need to do before you leave?”

  “Yeah. I’ve said my good-byes,” Jerry said. The one with Anna had been lusty and tearful, the one with his father more along the lines of Well, I’ll see you whenever you get back. He went on, “I’ve graded all my finals, too, and turned in the sheets to my prof and my department. So I’m good to go.”

  “Fine.” Vic nodded. “Gotta make sure, you know.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh! One other thing. Before you go, leave your house key with somebody. Just leave your car key—they’ll start it up every so often while you’re away so it’ll run when you get back.”

  “Cool!” Jerry’d been worrying about that.

  Before he could say anything else, the fellow searching through the stuff in his suitcase went “Ha!” and held up a handkerchief with a red, machine-embroidered J on it. By the way he displayed it, he might have found Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.

  “I forgot all about that,” Jerry said, embarrassed. “My aunt gave me some of those when I turned twenty-one.”

  “That’s why we check you out.” The CIA man threw the offending square of linen into a large metal trash can. Jerry wondered how many other people’s clothes and key rings and such already lay in there.

  Nothing else in the case seemed to be against the rules. Jerry closed it up. The hired muscle at the door politely opened it for him. He walked out into the courtyard and headed for the street.

  An older man lugging a battered suitcase of his own paused inside the entranceway, no doubt also looking for apartment 127. Jerry pointed back the way he’d come. “It’s over there.”

  “Thanks,” the man said, and then, “Hi, Jerry.”

  “Oh! Steve! Hi!” Jerry hurried forward and shook hands. “Good to see you. I didn’t know you’d be going along on this … whatever it is.”

  “Whatever it is, is right.” By the way Steve glanced at the apartments surrounding the courtyard, he figured they were full of KGB agents waiting for him to tell them everything they needed to know. The scary thing was, he might have been right. He went on, “But yeah, I’m coming. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  “Okay. Cool, even.” Jerry was glad he’d have at least one slightly familiar face on the Glomar Explorer. Being more social caterpillar than social butterfly, he didn’t make friends easily, or sometimes at all. He wanted to ask Steve about a million questions. The man from RAND’s worried expression warned him that wouldn’t be a good idea, though. He just said, “I’ll see you there, then,” and went on his way.

  He’d be back in Long Beach tomorrow evening. They’d told him to board the Glomar Explorer no later than six p.m. (actually, they’d told him no later than 1800 hours, but he knew what that meant). Since he was one of those people who were compulsively on time—maybe in reaction to his dad, whom he’d heard called “the late Hyman Stieglitz”—that wouldn’t be a problem.

  And then … a sunken Russian submarine? He understood he was only along for the ride and the cover story, but the idea intrigued him anyway. Could they really bring it up from three miles under the surface of the Pacific? Would they find anything worthwhile if they did?

  Even if they did find something, he’d never be able to talk about it. He got that. But he’d know. And if knowing wasn’t what it was all about, he didn’t know—that word again!—what was.

  * * *

  He parked the his car in the lot closest to Pier E, got his suitcase and a hydrophone with a UCLA sticker on it out of the trunk, and trudged toward … Toward whatever happens next, he thought.

  Not just anybody could get to the Glomar Explorer. A tall chain-link fence secured it from the annoying and the snoopy. As Jerry got closer, he saw that the fence was topped with razor wire. They were serious about not wanting company.

  There was a gate in the fence. A sign on it said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in big red letters. A booth about twice the size of a phone booth stood on the far side. A security guard came out of it as Jerry drew near. He was somewhere between linebacker and lineman size and wore a pistol on his hip for good measure. He carried a clipboard in his left hand. His right stayed free.

  “Your name, sir?” he said.

  “Jerry, uh, Steinberg,” Jerry answered. His first chance to use his new alias, and he damn near flubbed it!

  The guard checked the papers in the clipboard. He had to flip up a couple of them before he found what he was looking for. Jerry’d long since got used to life toward the tail end of the alphabet. “Steinberg, Gerald S.?” the guard said. At Jerry’s nod, the fellow continued, “Let me see some identification, please.”

  “Here you go.” Jerry showed his phony license.

  “Thanks.” It satisfied the guard. He unlocked the gate and held it open so Jerry could bring through the suitcase and hydrophone. Once he got inside, the guard locked up again. That felt very final to Jerry. Then, as Jerry’d been told he would, the guard said, “Give me your car keys? You are in the lot across the way, right?”

  “I sure am! Thanks!” As Jerry set down the suitcase and dug out his key ring, he went on, “It’s a ’65 Rambler American, light blue. License plate is ONR 541.”

  “A ’65 American. Light blue. ONR 541. Steinberg.” The guard wrote in a little notebook he pulled from his breast pocket. Then he looked up. “Okay. We’ll take care of it. Hope you have a safe trip and everything works like it’s supposed to.”

  “Me, too. Thanks again.” Jerry wondered whether the guard knew the whole story or thought the Glomar Explorer was going to try deep-ocean mining. He would have bet on the latter, but had better sense than to ask.

  As he walked down the pier to the ship, its sheer size smacked him in the face. He’d seen it before in a couple of black-and-white newspaper photos, and in news snippets on his twelve-inch black-and-white TV. Those gave shape, but not scale. The Hughes Glomar Explorer was 619 feet long, with a beam of 116 feet—bigger than some American battleships that had fought in World War II. The central derrick rose more than 250 feet above the keel.

  If they’d put guns aboard her … but they hadn’t. She carried pipe instead, more than three miles of pipe. They’d join it all together when they got where they were going, join it together and use it to lower the giant grabber to the lost K-129. Then they’d bring it up again.

  How much weight did the sub, the grabber, and all that heavy-duty pipe add up to? Had to be thousands of tons. How many thousands, Jerry didn’t know. But he could see why the Russians figured anything that big, lost three miles underwater, was lost for good. Anybody in his right mind would.

  Which says what about me, exactly? he wondered as he came up the gangplank connecting the Glomar Explorer to the pier. At the pier end, another armed guard checked his name off a list and examined his counterfeit driver’s license. It passed muster one more time.

  A fellow in crisp whites waited at the other end of the gangplank. A steward—Jerry was pleased with himself for finding the right word. “Welcome aboard, sir. You are…?” the man said.

  “Jerry Steinberg.” This time, Jerry brought out the name that wasn’t his with assurance.

  “Steinberg.” The steward checked a list, too. He nodded to himself. “Okay. We have you quartered with Mr. Dahlgren in cabin 116.” He pointed toward the stern.

  “Dahlgren. Gotcha.” Jerry added, “Oh. Thanks,” as the steward handed him a key. He hoped it would work out all right. Except for nights with Anna, he was in the habit of sleeping alone. You couldn’t get much further from that than sharing a cabin with somebody for a couple of months.

  He made his way aft. There was a huge square opening beneath the derrick, covered over now. He soon found out everybody called it the moon pool. When they got where they were going, the cover would come off, the bottom would open however it opened, and they would start stringing pipe segments together and lowering the claw toward the K-129.

  In the meantime, relatively narrow steel passageways skirted the moon pool to port and starboard. The pipe farm lay aft of the derrick, in front of the bridge near the stern. The pipes were painted in a rainbow of colors: red, white, blue, yellow, and green. The setup looked as if it came from offshore oil drilling.

  He wondered if he would have to ask somebody where cabin 116 was. He didn’t, though; signs gave him all the directions he needed. For a moment, he stood outside the steel door with 116 painted on it, gathering his nerve. Then he turned the key in the lock, worked the latch, and went inside.

  His new roommate was lying on the bottom bunk. Fair enough—first come, first served. The man turned his head. He and Jerry both started to laugh at the same moment. “Hi, Steve. Long time no see,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah, we’ve got to stop meeting like this,” the older man answered. They laughed some more.

  “I don’t suppose Dahlgren is your real last name, either,” Jerry said.

  “I have the papers to prove it is,” Steve said. “Of course, you’ve got that kind of paperwork, too. They told me I’d be with a fellow called Steinberg. I wondered who that would be. Now I know. I hope I don’t snore.”

  “Hope I don’t, too.” Jerry looked around. “This is a pretty nice hamster cage, isn’t it?”

  “Could be worse. I’ve stayed in hotel rooms I liked less.” Steve waved toward a pair of tall steel lockers welded to the wall. “I put my stuff in the one on the right. The one on the left’s all yours. They’ve got shelves and hangers and whatever you need.”

  “Sounds good.” Jerry nodded.

  “Bathroom is through there,” Steve went on, pointing to a door in the side wall. “Shower, two sinks, toilet. Pretty plain, but it’ll do. We share it with the guys in the next cabin over.”

  “Okay.” Again, Jerry hoped it would be.

  “Anyway, I’m glad they put us together. Nice to be with somebody I’ve at least met before,” Steve said.

  Jerry nodded once more. “I was thinking the same thing.” He hesitated, then asked, “Do you mind telling me your real last name?”

  “I shouldn’t.” Steve hesitated, too. “But I already know yours, and fair is fair. Who will you blab to? I’m Stephen Dole—Stephen with a PH. On the papers I have here, I’m Steven with a V. What do you want to bet I screw up signing my name at least once before I get home?”

  Jerry hardly heard the last bit. He was gaping at the man with whom he shared a cabin. “You’re Stephen Dole from RAND? The Stephen Dole from RAND? The guy who wrote Habitable Planets for Man? I’ve read that book three times. You can’t beat it for world-building ideas.”

  “I’m that Stephen Dole, yes,” his roommate said. “Thanks. I didn’t expect you to recognize my name.”

  Jerry burbled on regardless: “This is crazy, man! I’d rather meet you than Becker and Fagen, even.”

  “Than who?” Steve plainly drew a blank.

  “The lead guys for Steely Dan.”

  Steve went right on drawing a blank. He and Jerry eyed each other in perfect mutual incomprehension. He’s thirty years older than you are, maybe more, Jerry reminded himself. It’d be scarier if he did know who they were. Steve would have been in his thirties by the time rock ’n’ roll came along. Poor guy was what went through Jerry’s head: the heartlessness of youth.

  Then something else occurred to him: “If you write about worlds where we might live or where aliens might come from, what are you doing on a ship going after a Russian sub?”

  “That’s not all I do. If it were, I’d write science fiction myself,” Steve said easily. “My job title at RAND is director of communications. If we bring up any of the submarine’s codebooks, I go to work. No, when we bring them up. John P. wants everybody confident.”

  “He … knows how to get what he wants, doesn’t he?” Jerry said.

  “From everything I’ve seen, yes.” Steve swung off the bunk and got to his feet. “Do you know where the messroom is? I just came straight here and threw some stuff in my locker, but it’s getting on toward dinnertime, isn’t it?”

  Jerry looked at his watch. Sure enough, it was almost half past six. “Getting there and then some,” he agreed. “I did the same thing. No, I don’t know where it is, but I bet we can find it pretty easy. They’ve got this ship organized.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Steve said, which was bound to be true.

  When they went out into the passageway, they quickly came to a sign informing them the messroom lay one level down. The steel stairway was narrow and steep. “Gotta watch it,” Jerry said. “You can break your ankle here if you aren’t careful.”

  “Or your neck,” Steve agreed.

  Eight or ten men were eating in the messroom when Jerry and Steve walked in. Several of them nodded to Steve. They eyed Jerry with more speculation. He understood that. He was the youngest guy there, and the one with the longest hair—most of them looked pretty buttoned-down. He sighed to himself. He’d hoped he was done with that first-day-of-high-school feeling forever. What you hoped for wasn’t always what you got, though.

  The food was great. He ordered a rare sirloin, with mashed potatoes and string beans. Steve had his medium, and got french fries and a salad on the side. They both demolished their dinners. Halfway through, Steve said, “A beer would go great with this.”

  “Man, would it ever!” Jerry said. “But they told me they’d clap me in irons or something if I brought any alcohol aboard.”

  “They told me the same thing.” Steve winked. “Once we get hooked into the grapevine, I bet we can find some anyway. The crew is big enough, somebody will find a way.”

  “I guess,” Jerry said, and then, “How big is the crew?”

  “I heard about a hundred and eighty, counting everybody.” Steve eyed Jerry. “They didn’t tell you much, did they?”

  Jerry shook his head. “Close but not quite. They didn’t tell me anything.” He wondered if that was because he was a longhair. He would have guessed most of the men in the galley were on the other side of the argument about whether Richard Nixon needed to be impeached. People who worried about national security first and democracy later mostly liked Mad Milhous.

  But John P. and Fred and Steve would have known beforehand where he stood. He didn’t make a secret of it or anything. They’d taken him on even so. That counted for something.

  He had cherry pie for dessert. Steve ate vanilla ice cream. As they went back up to their level, Jerry remarked, “Gonna have to find some way to exercise or I’ll get too wide to fit in this stairwell.”

  “You? You’re young enough to burn it off,” Steve said. “I only wish I were. There’s a helipad behind the stern bridge. Maybe we can walk or jog on that.”

  “Yeah, I saw it. I don’t know why we have it, though,” Jerry said. Steve shrugged. Either he also didn’t know or he wasn’t talking.

  Signs said there was a movie theater on this deck. Jerry thought about visiting it, but it wasn’t going anywhere. He had The Queen of Air and Darkness, Poul Anderson’s latest collection, to read till he got sleepy. On the first night aboard, he’d keep things simple.

  Steve slept in plain blue cotton pajamas. Jerry wore sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt. Odds were that left them both about equally comfortable. Jerry scrambled up into the top bunk. The mattress was better than he’d expected. Goldilocks would have approved. It wasn’t too hard or too soft, but just right. However many millions the CIA had spent on the Glomar Explorer, some of the money must have gone into keeping the crew happy.

  He turned off his reading lamp a little before eleven. Steve’s stayed on. It didn’t bother Jerry. He fell asleep right away.

  * * *

  He woke with a jerk after what didn’t seem very long. The rumble of the ship’s engines had got louder. And her motion had changed—she felt like a ship on the ocean, not one peaceably tied up to a pier. They were moving! They were on their way … to a spot in the middle of the North Pacific. To a Russian sub. To bringing up a Russian sub, if everything worked the way it was supposed to.

  Steve’s reading light was still on. Jerry grabbed his watch off the little steel shelf by his head. The dim light from below was enough to tell him it was a quarter to one.

  “You awake up there?” Steve asked quietly. The thrash must have tipped him off.

  “Nah, I’m still asleep,” Jerry said.

  After a few seconds digesting that, Steve chuckled. “Okay. We’re heading out now to take advantage of the high tide. We draw a lot of water. When the tide’s low, we might not make it over the sandbars.”

  “That’d be embarrassing.” Jerry imagined a swarm of tugboats trying to pull the grounded Glomar Explorer free.

  “Maybe a little, yeah. Anyway, that’s what’s going on,” Steve said. “But since you’re still asleep, you don’t need to worry about it. G’night.” He turned off his lamp and plunged the cabin into darkness.

  So there, Jerry thought. Pretty soon, Steve started to snore. He wasn’t loud, but he was noticeable. Jerry noticed. He didn’t mind Anna snoring when she lay next to him, but this seemed different. He couldn’t have said how or why, but it did.

  Having been startled out of deep sleep, he took a while to find it again. Just when he thought he never would, he did. He woke one more time when Steve went to the side door and used the head, but returned to sleep before his roommate came back. They both got up at eight o’clock.