At least half the men on the Glomar Explorer lit up. The air in the movie theater had been foggy with cigarette smoke. The pipe wranglers and divers seemed to think they weren’t real likely to get old anyway, so what the hell?

  He stared at one picture that had caught his eye before. He’d found a magnifying glass in a drawer—the people who’d outfitted this ship honest to God had done their best to think of everything—and used it to examine the photograph again.

  “Fuck,” he muttered. Even with the magnifier’s help, he couldn’t be sure he was seeing what he thought he was.

  Someone outside stopped at the door and punched in the key code. That was quite audible inside the container … which implied that at least some of what went on inside could be heard outside, too. Jerry knew a certain amount of relief that he hadn’t shouted his obscenity.

  The door opened. In came Steve. Like Jerry, he closed the door behind him, making sure it shut securely. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Not bad. You?”

  “Fine so far.”

  “Cool. Take a look at this for a second, will you?” Jerry held out the photo and the magnifier. “Between the second and third tubes in particular. Any chance we can get an enlargement of that area?”

  “We as in ‘you and me,’ here on the Glomar Explorer? Probability zero.” Stephen Dole shook his head. “It may be possible to get someone who has access to another set of these photos, or to the negatives, to have an enlargement done … wherever those things are kept. I’m not trying to hide that from you; I don’t need to know myself.”

  “Might be worth doing. Have a look and tell me what you think.”

  Look Steve did. When he raised his head from the magnifying glass and the picture, he was frowning. “I don’t know. It may just be some sediment clinging to the spaceship’s outer skin.”

  “Yeah, it may,” Jerry agreed. “But there sure isn’t much clinging to the rest of hull, is there? I was thinking it might be writing, only with the characters too small to show up well on a photo of this size.”

  “What would it say, though?”

  “Some kind of warning, is my guess. You know, the way jet fighters say ‘Don’t stand here or you’ll get sucked into the engine’ in front of the air intake and ‘Keep away from the exhaust if you don’t want to get roasted’ at the tail.”

  The older man smiled. “That makes a lot of sense. You are a science-fiction writer.”

  “If I made a lot of sense all the time, I wouldn’t be able to write sf,” Jerry said. Steve laughed, for all the world as if he were joking. Jerry went on, “Can we get a message back to the mainland, to ask them to check it out themselves?”

  “We can. It isn’t easy or convenient, but we can if it’s urgent enough.” Steve paused, then asked, “Do you know what a one-time pad is?”

  “Sure do. Only shows I’ve read spy stories along with my sf when I should have been studying. You can agree on, for instance, two identical copies of the same book. The guy sending the message goes two one six, one two, four, and the guy getting it goes to page two sixteen, line twelve, word four and sees that it’s uranium. And so on.”

  “Close enough. The way we do it here is, we spell message words out letter by letter inside the text of something that looks innocent. The person writing the message and the one deciphering it both know which letters count and which are just camouflage.”

  Jerry thought about that for a moment. “Those innocent texts must be fun to put together. It’s like Scrabble—you can’t just drop in an X or a Q any old place.”

  “You know who’s very good at it? Dave Schoals, the recovery director. He can write innocent-text poetry.”

  “No shit?” Jerry said, impressed in spite of himself. Steve nodded. Jerry went on, “Boy, talk about a specialized skill!” That made the older man laugh. Jerry was not only impressed but surprised, though he didn’t say so to Steve. In spite of Dave’s longish hair and that god-awful mustache, Jerry would have guessed him too tightly wound to write any kind of poetry, let alone poetry with the constraints innocent text imposed.

  “I’ll talk with him and with Dale. If they think finding out whether that’s writing is important enough, we’ll let people on the mainland know,” Steve said.

  “Why wouldn’t they?” Jerry asked in surprise.

  “Because even if it is writing, we can’t read it or do anything about it right now,” Steve answered. “And because the only way it will matter is if we can bring the spaceship up into the moon pool, and then we’ll be able to see for ourselves.”

  “Oh.” Jerry felt foolish. He hated not thinking things through, but he could see he hadn’t this time. “Yeah. You’re right.”

  “Accidents do happen,” Steve said. Jerry probably laughed more than the joke deserved, but he was glad his boss could make cracks like that and didn’t come down on him for messing up. He’d known a lot more examples of the other kind of boss.

  * * *

  Every couple of days, Jerry would put on his Blue Tips and go back to the helipad for a little exercise. A circuit of the landing platform was about a hundred yards, so seventeen or eighteen made a mile. Fifty or sixty circuits made him sweaty and virtuous.

  He wasn’t the only guy aboard the Glomar Explorer to put in some work there, but he liked it best when he didn’t have any company as he went around and around. Sometimes he came out onto the helipad after dark, too. He was almost always alone there then. He didn’t understand why. When he turned his back on the ship’s lights, he could see a million stars, so many that he wished he’d brought along binoculars. City lights dimmed natural ones in Los Angeles.

  Now, though, he was the sole person back there under watery sunshine. He was, anyhow, till some of the sailors who made the Glomar Explorer go came there with their arms full of wooden crates and metal drums. They dumped them at random on the helipad and turned around, probably to get more.

  Before they disappeared again, Jerry called, “Hey, what’s happening?”

  One of the Glomar men stopped and turned back to him. “Well, we’re almost where we’re going,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  “Yeah.” Jerry nodded. He knew that. A little more than two weeks out of Long Beach, they were indeed close to where the K-129 had gone down—been brought down. But … “What’s that got to do with anything, Tony?”

  For a smart guy, you sure are dumb. Tony didn’t say it, but his face said it for him. He did say, “When we get there, waddaya wanna bet we have Russian company? If they fly a chopper off their ship, we sure as hell don’t wanna make it easy for ’em to land on ours. Am I right or am I right?”

  “You’re right,” Jerry answered, because Tony was right. A helicopter full of Russian sailors—or would they be marines?—carrying AK-47s was the last thing the Glomar Explorer needed.

  “Damn right, I’m right,” Tony agreed with himself. “Cap’n Gresham, he don’t miss a trick. Not one.”

  Jerry didn’t say anything more. Tony went off to get more junk to obstruct Russian helicopters. Captain Gresham might have John Birch Society politics, but he did try his best to keep the Glomar Explorer safe. That counted more, at least while he was conning the ship.

  When Jerry told Stephen Dole about what was happening on the helipad, the man from the RAND Corporation just nodded. “Makes sense,” he said. “When the Glomar II was out here a few years ago, the Russians harassed her like nobody’s business. I wasn’t along on that one. Dave Schoals was—ask him, if you want the gory details. The Russians don’t know exactly where they lost their sub, but they don’t want us anywhere close.”

  No one had told Jerry another American ship—let alone another Global Marine ship—had publicly poked around a few years before. He wondered what all else no one had told him, either because people figured he already knew or because they didn’t think he needed to know. He also wondered whether some of what he didn’t know would rear up and bite him in the ass.

  Rather resentfully, he thought that a character in a well-written story wouldn’t try to do something so important while being so ignorant. Then he remembered Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. So much for that! In The Lord of the Rings, though, at least people on Frodo’s side hadn’t lied to him about what was going on.

  He couldn’t even bitch about that. It was part of the way these people played the game. He did ask, “What kind of cover story did the, uh, Glomar II use for being in the neighborhood?”

  “Our outer one: that she was prospecting for manganese nodules,” Steve said. “She didn’t just stop here—that would have made the Russians suspicious.”

  “Made them more suspicious, you mean.”

  “Made them more suspicious, yes,” the man from the RAND Corporation agreed. “So she made several stops here and there in the North Pacific. And she actually did bring up some manganese nodules. Manfred would pass them out at ocean mining conferences—there are such things. That’s why it makes a good cover story.”

  “Who’s Manfred?”

  “He really is an ocean mining engineer. Our public face, I guess you’d say. Nice guy. Interesting guy. Immigrant from Germany. He served in U-boats during the war. He and his family went to Chile first, then came to America.”

  “How about that?” Jerry said: a pretty safe response to almost anything. He’d had a high school friend whose father had got the family out of East Germany in the early 1950s. Before that, his father had fought on the Eastern Front till he lost half his left foot. They might have sent him back into action even after he did; he limped, but he still got around pretty well. The war ended before they could, though.

  These days, his friend’s father was a liberal Democrat. Jerry’d never had the nerve to ask what his politics were like under the Third Reich. He didn’t suppose he would if he ever met this Manfred, either. The world had changed. Jerry hoped like hell it had, anyway. Some of the guys on the Glomar Explorer now might not care just how ex an ex-Nazi was.

  Then Steve said, “Whatever Manfred did in the German Navy, he doesn’t go around wishing his side won.”

  “Okay. Good, even.” Jerry cocked his head to one side and sent the older man a quizzical stare. “You’re reading my mind, you know.”

  “It’s a question that does crop up. The Nazis did so many horrible things, people almost automatically wonder about anybody who was an adult in Germany before 1945.”

  “I guess so,” Jerry said. “They did so many horrible things, we squashed fascism flat and we’ll never have to worry about it again. So there’s that.”

  “Good point.” Steve nodded. “There is that.”

  IV

  The Hughes Glomar Explorer got where she was going: an invisible spot on the North Pacific very close to where today turned into tomorrow or yesterday, depending on which way you were heading. She got there and she stayed there and nowhere else. Her engines, electrically powered side thrusters at her bow and stern, and some fancy navigational aids no one wanted to go into detail about with Jerry held her exactly in place, or close enough for sending down pipe and, with luck, raising a sunken spaceship.

  They got there, they positioned themselves, and they proceeded to do nothing for the next several days. The Glomar Explorer had an elaborate system to keep the pipe-laying derrick steady even when the ship rolled and pitched. It featured enormous hydraulic cylinders and what somebody said were the biggest bearings ever manufactured.

  And the system worked as advertised … in moderate seas. When the waves grew too large, even the best of mankind’s ingenuity was fighting out of its weight. Everyone got antsy waiting for the waters to calm down.

  “If they calm down,” Jerry said to Steve. “Storms from the north and the south get a running start at us here.”

  “True,” Steve replied. “It would have been a lot more convenient if the starship had landed in the middle of Times Square, wouldn’t it?”

  Jerry shut up. You played the cards you got dealt, not the laydown grand slam you wished you had.

  They had a narrow window in which to do what they needed to do. What would happen if wind, waves, and weather didn’t cooperate? Would they keep at it even if things got risky? Or would they give up and try again next year?

  He asked Dave Schoals about that. The recovery director gnawed on his mustache before answering. (Jerry did the same thing when he was thinking hard.) At last, Schoals said, “I don’t know what kind of chance we have for the ocean mining cover story to hold up that long. The Russians would be unhappy enough finding out we were going after their submarine. This other thing…” He didn’t go on. They might have been within earshot for people who weren’t authorized to hear the word Midlothian.

  “Yeah.” Jerry nodded. “Can we talk about that?”

  Dave thought for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. C’mon back to my cabin.”

  Like Dale, he was important enough in the grand scheme of things to have one to himself. He put on an Everly Brothers cassette so no one walking down the passageway would overhear.

  Jerry said, “Suppose we do have to come back here next year. Maybe we should let the Russians know all the reasons we’re here. I mean, this isn’t only about us and them. It’s about the whole world.”

  Schoals frowned. “I don’t make policy. I don’t get to change policy, either. That happens at a level way over my head. Probably at the very highest level. Till it gets changed—if it gets changed—we keep going with what we have. I want to be real clear about that. I want to make sure you’re clear about it, too.”

  He waited—ominously, Jerry thought. That phrase from the nondisclosure agreement went through his mind again. Sanctions up to and including termination with extreme prejudice. Nobody would invite the Russians to play till it was too late. Anyone who complained about that outside the tiny group who knew what lay on the seafloor near the K-129 was liable to come down with a sudden case of loss of life.

  Jerry paused no longer than half a second before he answered, “Oh, yeah. I understand exactly what you’re saying. I’m not gonna talk out of turn.”

  “Okay.” Dave nodded. He smiled. He didn’t push it. He went on, “With any luck at all, you won’t need to worry about it. The forecast is for better weather soon. We can start lowering Clementine on the end of the pipe string and do the scoop.”

  People on the ship called the claw Clementine, as in “Oh, my darling.” That was one more bit of security. A claw was a claw, no doubt about it. Clementine might be anything, even a tangerine.

  “Suppose everything goes well with the Midlothian object. Suppose we get it fast, even,” Jerry said. “Would we try to raise the wrecked chunk of the K-129, too? I mean, we’re here, after all.”

  “I don’t think that’s been decided yet,” Dave said carefully. “You’re right—we’d still be here. It might be technically feasible. But the thing is, this ship is doing an engineering job like nothing anybody’s ever tried before. It’s designed to do that once. If everything goes right, I think it can do that. A lot of smart people have put a lot of time and effort and skull sweat into giving it a decent chance. You with me so far?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jerry said. Dave would have been one of the people who put in that skull sweat. A slide rule in a battered leather case lay on his steel desk. It would have seen hard use while he tried to work out how to bring a giant egg up from three miles underwater.

  “Good deal. What you need to understand is, we’re playing with humongous forces here. The pipe string itself weighs something like four thousand tons. It’s lowering Clementine to the bottom, and Clementine adds another two thousand tons. All that weight means the pipes will stretch something like forty feet by the time everything gets put together.”

  “Whoa!” Jerry said.

  “Yeah. Whoa!” Dave agreed. “Then there’s the Midlothian object to worry about. As long as it isn’t any heavier than Clementine, we should be okay. But if the pipe string breaks anywhere…”

  When he didn’t go on, Jerry asked the morbidly curious question: “What happens then? Do I want to know?”

  “If that happens, the recoil force may break the ship in half. We made damn sure we have good, watertight compartmentalization fore and aft. That may keep the pieces afloat long enough for people to get into the lifeboats. It may.”

  “Oh,” Jerry said, and then, “I’m not sure I did want to know.”

  Dave Schoals’s smile was distinctly lopsided. “You aren’t the only one who feels that way, believe me. So my guess is, we may just leave the sub down there even if we do have a weather window. We might get lucky once. It’s a lot less obvious we can get lucky twice.”

  “Gotcha.” Jerry said his good-byes and left. He was as sure as he could be without seeing it with his own eyes that Dave was writing on a file card or a sheet of notebook paper. Steinberg. Will need special surveillance after mission completed. Spoke in favor of information sharing with USSR. Suspicion of political unreliability.

  They would already have investigated him. They’d know he’d demonstrated against the Vietnam War. They’d know he’d worked for Gene McCarthy in 1968, even though he’d been too young to vote. They’d know he’d circulated petitions calling for Nixon’s impeachment, and that he’d got a thank-you letter from Jerome Waldie, a California Congressman who’d helped lead the charge. Hell, they might even know he’d had a DON’T BLAME ME—I VOTED FOR McGOVERN bumper sticker on his car till somebody—probably an irate Republican—tore it off.

  They knew all that stuff. They’d hired him anyway. Now they were stuck with him, and they might regret it. In which case, maybe he had more to worry about than the Glomar Explorer breaking in half and sinking.

  * * *

  The fog came in, and not on little cat feet, either. Jogging on the helipad felt like breathing soup. Visibility shrank to less than half a mile. Jerry knew the ship’s radar could still see clearly, and see farther than the Mark One eyeball could even under perfect conditions. Any other ship out here in the middle of the biggest ocean in the world would carry a radar set, too. They wouldn’t collide, the way the Titanic did with that iceberg.