Breakfast was as good and as copious as dinner had been. Jerry washed down two fried eggs, four strips of bacon, and crispy hash browns with two cups of coffee. Steve had his eggs scrambled, and sausages instead of bacon. He remarked, “Not everybody your age drinks coffee.” He was most of the way through his third cup.

  “I didn’t till I started working hard getting ready for my exams, or not much,” Jerry said. “But hey, it’s brain cells in a cup.”

  “There you go.” Steve nodded.

  Neither one of them had much to do after breakfast. Later, when the Glomar Explorer got farther out into the Pacific, Jerry planned to string his hydrophone to a long length of coaxial cable and see what he could get, but they were still way too close to shore for him to bother.

  Just how close they were got emphasized that morning, when the ship stopped and a helicopter thuttered in to land on the platform above the fantail. Ten businesspeople—nine of them men—got out and were escorted to the messroom. Curious, Jerry tagged along behind to see what was going on. Nobody shooed him away, so he went on in.

  It turned out to be a ceremony formally turning ownership of the Hughes Glomar Explorer over from Global Marine to the Summa Corporation, which, he gathered, belonged to Howard Hughes. There were speeches. A photographer immortalized the occasion on film (Jerry suspected he wound up in the background on a couple of shots). The guys in the galley had even baked a cake. It was a good cake, too; Jerry got a piece.

  Then the visiting firemen went back to the helipad, climbed aboard the chopper, and zoomed away again. Before they went to dinner, Jerry asked Steve, “What the devil was that all about? Flying those people out must have cost a ton. Why didn’t they just sign the papers on dry land a week ago or something?”

  Steve smiled a thin smile. “Because Philip Watson is a pain in the … neck.” He seemed the kind of man who didn’t cuss unless badly provoked. Jerry was much looser about it.

  The name rang a vague bell, but Jerry said, “Who?” anyway. Then he said, “Oh,” as he remembered.

  “He’s the county tax assessor,” Steve told him anyway. “He wants to tax the Glomar Explorer. He wants to tax Summa because he knows Howard Hughes has money. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s what it boils down to. He has no idea the ship really belongs to the CIA, and nobody’s gonna tell him. Doing the transfer to Summa in international waters takes it out of his jurisdiction, or we hope it does.”

  Jerry held his head in his hands. “The farther I stay from lawyers, the happier I am.”

  “You sound like a sensible fellow,” Steve said. “Shall we see what’s on the menu tonight?”

  “Let’s do it,” Jerry said, and out they went.

  * * *

  Dinner was crab-stuffed flounder. If it was going to be like this for however long the voyage took … Jerry was sure he’d never eaten so well for as long as that before, and wondered whether he ever would again. Enjoy it while it lasts, he told himself, which seemed a good rule most of the time.

  After he finished—he made himself skip dessert—he thought about finding out which movie the little theater was showing. Before he could separate himself from Steve, though, the older man said, “You want to come with me, see something that might interest you?”

  It sounded like an ordinary question. Jerry realized it was really an order, though; his old man talked that way a lot of the time. He nodded agreeably. “I’m putty in your hands. Silly Putty, probably.”

  Steve let out a small snort. “Whatever else you do, you should stick with your writing. The left-handed way you think, I bet you can make a go of it.”

  “That’d be nice.” A beat later, Jerry added, “Thanks.”

  “I meant it,” Steve said. “C’mon.” He headed off like a man who knew exactly where he was going. All of a sudden, he didn’t seem confused about where things were or need to look at signs. Jerry followed, wondering what else the man from the RAND Corporation was sandbagging about.

  The Glomar Explorer held a couple of dozen of what looked like cargo containers, the kind that went on freighters and then got loaded onto truck trailers to get where they needed to go. They were maybe twenty by eight by eight. The only thing that made them unusual for containers was that each had a door in the front.

  Steve stopped in front of one with SPECIAL MEASUREMENTS stenciled on to the door. Jerry eyed that. It might have meant anything or nothing … which, he suspected, was exactly the point. Unlike most of the others, the door also had a keypad next to it that reminded him of the ones at his apartment building and Anna’s.

  But the code Steve punched in was longer than three digits. The latch clicked instead of buzzing. As Steve opened the door, he said, “I’ll teach you the entry number. What’s in here is a big part of why you’re along. Memorize the number. Don’t write it down, not anywhere.”

  “However you say. I can do that.” Jerry followed Steve into the Special Measurements container.

  “It’s important.” Steve flicked a switch. Bluish ceiling-mounted fluorescent tubes came to life, buzzing faintly. Only after the door closed did the older man say, “I mean it. We’ve got this whole story to keep the Russians from figuring out we’re raising their submarine.”

  “I know,” Jerry said. “I signed all those papers that promised I’d go to Leavenworth if I ever opened my mouth about that. Hell, you were there.”

  “That’s right. I signed those papers, too. But that’s nothing—I mean nothing—next to what’s in here. It’s a cover story under the cover story.” Steve pointed to a chair identical to the ones in Jerry’s TA office. “Have a seat. This will take a little while.”

  Jerry parked his behind on the chair. Steve set a tape player with headphones already attached on the Formica work surface in front of him. Then he went over to a safe in the corner of the container. Its door soon swung open. He took out a sheaf of papers and a cassette tape, then closed the safe again.

  “You have to sign these before you can hear the tape,” he said, handing Jerry the papers.

  “What? Everything I signed back in my apartment wasn’t good enough?” Jerry said.

  “That just had to do with the Russian sub,” Steve answered. “That was serious. This is serious.”

  Jerry skimmed the new paperwork. The man from the RAND Corporation wasn’t kidding. A phrase jumped out at him: “Sanctions for violations of this confidentiality and nondisclosure agreement may include measures up to and including termination with extreme prejudice.” He pointed at it. “What’s this supposed to mean?”

  Steve pointed at the typewritten sheet. “Oh. That.” His laugh held nothing like mirth. “Funny you should spot that. I asked John the same thing. It means that if you talk, they’ll kill you. And they’ll probably kill whoever you talk to, just to stay on the safe side.”

  You’re joking. Jerry didn’t say it. Steve sounded, well, dead serious. Jerry did say, “What the hell have I got myself into?”

  “You’ll find out, and be part of the team, as soon as you sign that,” Steve said. “You’d find out after we do what we do, of course—if it works. But you wouldn’t be involved in any way. And I think you’d regret that the rest of your life.”

  “Fuck,” Jerry muttered. “I’ve come this far.…” He signed the agreement.

  “Okay.” Steve handed him the cassette. “Now you can listen to this—with the headphones on. Always with the headphones on.”

  Before sticking the tape into the player, Jerry read the label out loud: “‘Midlothian Pipe Band, Chicago concert, March 1966’?” He stared at Steve. “What the—”

  “‘Midlothian’ is the code name for the operation inside Project Azorian, the sub-raising operation inside the seafloor-mining operation,” the older man said patiently. “And dates inside Midlothian are shifted back two years to avoid any congruence with the time period in which the K-129 was lost.”

  “So it does still have something to do with the submarine,” Jerry said.

  Steve didn’t answer. Shaking his head, Jerry fed in the tape, put on the headphones, and hit Play. He hadn’t thought he’d hear Scottish pipers skirling away, and he didn’t. He heard next to nothing, only a faint, rhythmic sound like a faraway washing-machine agitator, barely above the limit of what his ears could pick up. He knew what that was: the noise from a submarine’s prop in the distance. He’d run into it before, on recordings mostly involved with whale songs.

  No whale songs here. The noise went on, pretty much unchanged, for five or six minutes. Then, without warning, it sounded as if someone were frying the world’s biggest pan of bacon right in his ears. After that, he heard what could only be the K-129 going down and collapsing in on itself as relentless water pressure crushed the boat’s hull. Silence followed.

  Jerry yanked off the headphones. What else could you do when you’d just listened to dozens of men dying? “Jesus!” he said. “What happened?”

  Instead of answering directly, Steve stopped the tape and removed it from the player. He went back to the safe with it. “We never leave it out, even inside this container,” he said, working the combination again. “Never. The same goes double for what I’m going to show you.” The door to the safe opened. In went the tape. Out came a full manila envelope of the kind that had traveled in Fred’s briefcase. Steve handed it to Jerry.

  He opened the clasp. The first photograph inside was numbered 1. He went straight to the last. Sure as hell, the number in the upper right corner there was 78. Only then did he actually look at the pictures themselves. He went through them slowly. When he got done, he looked through them again.

  At last, he said, “These can’t be what I think they are.”

  “What do you think they are?” Steve’s voice was gentle, as if he were trying to calm a spooked horse. Jerry was spooked, all right.

  “They look like…” He had to stop and try again: “They look like pictures of a, a spaceship on the bottom of the ocean.”

  “That’s what they look like to everybody who’s seen them, which isn’t very many people,” Steve said, still in that gentle voice. “The camera trailing from the Halibut took them when it was searching for the K-129. This … thing is only about three hundred yards from the wreck of the Russian sub.”

  “It looks like it’s all in one piece. Not a wreck itself, I mean,” Jerry said.

  The older man nodded. “It does, doesn’t it?”

  “Did it sink the K-129?”

  “We don’t know for sure. We don’t know anything for sure. But that’s the assumption we’re making at this point in time.”

  How many people at the Watergate hearings had said at this point in time when they meant now, said it over and over again till the ugly phrase escaped into the language at large? Normally, hearing it would have annoyed Jerry a lot. Now he noticed and then forgot it. He had bigger things to worry about. “How do you sink something from three miles down in the Pacific?” he asked. His mind’s ear replayed that horrible bacon-frying noise.

  “That’s an excellent question, Mr., ah, Steinberg. If there are no other questions, class is dismissed,” Stephen Dole said. “Seriously, we have no idea. We’re going to try to raise the spaceship and find out, though. People who get paid to figure these things out have decided that this takes priority over the K-129. I think they’re right. Don’t you?”

  “I … guess so,” Jerry said slowly. “But what if it doesn’t like that? What if it treats us the way it treated the Russian submarine?”

  “In that case, among other things, our beneficiaries collect on our insurance policies. The effort was deemed more important than the risk.”

  “Who decided that for me?” Jerry asked.

  “This project has approval up to the very highest level. You can be sure of that,” Steve said.

  “You mean the President?”

  “The very highest level,” the man from RAND repeated.

  Considering what Jerry thought of Richard Nixon, that didn’t seem recommendation enough. He asked, “How did you guys pick me, anyway?”

  “You’re an expert on the ocean. You know several human languages. Your mind is loose enough to let you succeed at writing science fiction. Who’s likely to be better qualified to communicate with aliens, if there are aliens inside the object there?” Steve spread his hands. He made it sound natural, even inevitable.

  It didn’t feel that way to Jerry. “My mind is blown, is what my mind is.” He didn’t smoke a lot of grass. He’d steered clear of acid and coke and uppers and downers. His mind was blown anyway. He added, “‘If there are aliens’? You don’t know? We don’t?”

  “No. The … the weapon that sank the K-129 could have been automated. It could have been the last gasp of dying machinery. One other thing we don’t know is how long the object’s lain at the bottom of the Pacific.”

  Jerry looked at some of the photos again. “Not much sediment on it. No more than is on the sub. Maybe even less.”

  “If it can sink a submarine three miles above it in a way we don’t begin to understand, why can’t it keep itself clean?”

  “Because—” Jerry broke off. “You got me. We don’t know anything, do we?”

  “Know anything? Jerry, we don’t even suspect anything. Except that it’s there,” Steve said. Jerry nodded. It was there, all right—and the world would never be the same.

  III

  Along with the movie theater, the Glomar Explorer boasted a pretty good little library. It had a decent science-fiction section. During the two-week trip out to where the fortieth parallel of north latitude met the International Date Line, Jerry read everything he could find there on dealing with aliens. He wasn’t sure how much that would help, but it couldn’t hurt.

  The library’s history section was much smaller. No surprise, that. It did have a book about the Spanish conquests of the American Indian civilizations, though. He made himself plow through it, even if history had never been his favorite subject. The settlement of the New World seemed about as close to contact with aliens as people had ever really come.

  He spent a lot of time in the Special Measurements container, too. He listened to the tape that ended in the destruction of the K-129 again and again. He kept hoping he wouldn’t hear that frying-bacon noise, but it was there every time. He did his best to imagine what might cause it. His best wasn’t good enough. Nobody’s was.

  And he pored over the photos. The safe held many more than the seventy-eight in that envelope; those were just a representative sample. The ship was egg-shaped, or closer to that than anything else. It was a little smaller than the nearby chunk of Soviet submarine. One end had short tubes sticking out; the other was dimpled like a golf ball. The motor’s exhaust and the weapons system? Possibly, but which was which? Jerry couldn’t tell, any more than could anyone else who’d examined the pictures.

  A circle was scribed in the hull about halfway between the tubes and the dimples. Jerry guessed it was the way into and out of the spaceship. Again, though, he was only guessing. If they raised the ship, he might find out. He wondered whether he truly wanted to.

  “This is so frustrating,” he told Steve. “All I can do is think up ideas I can’t prove or disprove with what we’ve got. I bet all the other people who’ve seen these photos have thought of them, too.”

  “You can bounce things off other people, too,” the older man replied. “I’ve given you the list of men cleared for Midlothian information.”

  “Yeah,” Jerry said with no great enthusiasm. Like John P., Dale and Jack and Dave and Ernie had intelligence officer written all over them. They were polite enough, but Jerry got the feeling they thought he was a hippie college kid (they weren’t altogether wrong, either). All of them except Dave were old enough to be his father. So was Steve, of course, but it somehow mattered less with him. Dave, in his late thirties, wore longish hair and a mustache that looked like something from a porn flick, so he was a little less uptight than his elder colleagues.

  Steve’s eyes twinkled behind his bifocals. “They’re here for the same reason you are. They helped pick you to come along on what’s liable to be the most important thing for humanity since Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil.”

  Jerry didn’t think of Eve. He thought of Anna. More to the point, he worried about Anna. Yes, she’d come around on putting off the wedding. She still wasn’t real happy about it, though. Part of why he thought she wasn’t was related to the reason he was hinky about the CIA folks. She had trouble taking him seriously, too.

  “The time may come when they need to listen to me, if I’m supposed to be the expert on aliens,” Jerry said—he wasn’t going to lay his fretting over Anna on Steve. “Will they do that when the heat is on, or will they just go ahead with what they want to do instead?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” Steve didn’t pretend there was no problem. Jerry liked him better for that. He went on, “I would, but I’ve seen you have a head on your shoulders. If you let them see that, too, before push comes to shove, you’ll stand a better chance.”

  “How? Till we get where we’re going, till we get the spaceship up into the moon pool and start knocking on the door—if that is a door—I really am just along for the ride. I haven’t even picked up any whale songs,” Jerry said. It wasn’t so much that he would rather have been writing his dissertation: as far as he could tell, no one liked writing a dissertation. But he didn’t like feeling useless, either.

  Thoughtfully, Steve said, “Why don’t you make a list of all the things that might happen when we do get the spaceship into the moon pool, and all the things we can do in case those things happen? Show it to Dale.”

  “Won’t he already have a list like that? I mean, I don’t know that much about soldiers and spies, but aren’t they, like, heavily into contingency plans?”

  “Now that you mention it”—Steve sounded amused, which he didn’t do all that often—“yes. But I’ll bet you a double sawbuck that you come up with some things nobody in the CIA thought of. That’s what you’re here for.”