Jerry knew all that. He worried anyway. Though he liked Mad magazine, he wasn’t Alfred E. Neuman. What, me worry? did not apply. He was a Jew. He was a grad student. Of course he worried, even if that made him a walking double stereotype.

  Fog or no fog, the Glomar Explorer’s work went on. The pipe farmers or riggers or whatever the right name for them was had connected the red-painted pipe they called the Dutchman with Clementine. All the other pipes in the hold abaft the moon pool were doubles: two thirty-foot lengths attached to each other. The Dutchman was a single, and thicker than the white sections that would go above it. Since it had hold of the claw’s immense weight, Jerry supposed that was sensible.

  Even with the Dutchman attached, the capture vehicle remained connected to the docking legs at the front and back of the moon pool. Some of the divers kept going into and coming out of the water. They would detach Clementine from the docking legs when the claw made its long plunge to the seafloor. And, by some of the bad language floating out of the moon pool, that wasn’t all they were having trouble with.

  At lunch—corned beef and cabbage—Jerry asked Steve, “Should we be having problems with the sensors on Clementine’s fingers or legs or whatever you call them so soon?”

  Steve sipped from a can of Coke before he answered. “Ideally, we shouldn’t have any trouble at all. Everything should go just the way we planned, and we should start the exploitation phase in a couple of weeks.”

  “Well, hush my mouth,” Jerry mumbled. He was glad his long hair would keep everybody in the messroom from seeing how red his ears were. They felt on fire.

  “In the real world, of course, not everything works the way you expect it to,” the man from RAND went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “If things have to go wrong, I suppose it’s better they go wrong up here, where we can do something about it, not down on the ocean floor.”

  “Yeah.” Jerry made himself nod. But what if the sensors break up here, we replace them, and then the replacement parts fail when we need ’em most? He didn’t ask the question out loud. He could see for himself that that would be doubleplusungood. And he was superstitious enough not to want to jinx anything.

  Precise as usual, Stephen Dole continued, “And I’m not the right man to answer you anyway. Like you, I’m here for what happens after Clementine comes back to us. I didn’t have anything to do with designing it. A good thing, too—I’m not qualified. If you want the details, Dave Schoals is your guy.”

  “Well, maybe not,” Jerry said, reflecting that there were ways things could be worse after all. Putting Dave’s back up again was definitely one of them.

  Steve glanced around. No one was sitting close to them, and nobody seemed to be paying them any special attention. The older man still lowered his voice. “You aren’t in trouble, in case you think you are. Dave understands that your perspective on things is different from his. He understands it’s different from most people’s in his line of work.”

  He understands you’re not a professional spy, Jerry translated. If he’d been saying that to someone else himself, he would have gone, Dave gets where you’re coming from. But, again, he and Steve didn’t always speak the same kind of English.

  All that came with working alongside—working for—people who were older and way more conservative than he was. In a way, he’d understood as much from the moment John P. pushed past him and into his apartment. In another way, every day brought new surprises, few of them pleasant. He looked across the table at Steve. The man from the RAND Corporation was no different from the others, not in any important way. He was just quieter and more polite about what he was.

  As long as the Hughes Glomar Explorer stayed out here in the middle of the North Pacific, none of the frictions mattered much. They all had the same job to do, and they’d work together to do it till the starship down below got hauled up into the moon pool … or till raising it went irretrievably wrong.

  But if they got it aboard the Glomar Explorer, if they knocked on the airlock door and somebody—or something—answered, then what? Jerry realized he’d left one scenario out when he was cooking up his list for Dale. What if the people on the salvage ship started quarreling about what to do next?

  Yeah, what if? Jerry wanted to thump himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand for not thinking of that sooner. Some writer he was, if he didn’t come out with plot twists like that as automatically as he breathed! Then again, Dale wouldn’t have been happy to find that scenario on the list. Maybe not dreaming it up wasn’t so bad.

  Steve chose that exact moment to say, “A penny for your thoughts.”

  “Thoughts? I’m supposed to have thoughts? Man, are you overpaying!” Jerry said, looking as impressively blank as he could. Steve laughed, so he must have been impressive enough. And some clowning defused a moment that could have been awkward or even dangerous. Once more, Jerry contemplated the uses of hypocrisy.

  * * *

  They got Clementine down to about a hundred feet below the Glomar Explorer’s hull and thought about uncoupling the capture vehicle from the docking legs. Before they could, the weather went south on them again. Wind and waves picked up, and everything had to stop. Jerry’d never seen a literal tempest in a teapot, but he sure saw one in the moon pool. Waves beat on its steel walls with a fury he’d never dreamt of in such a confined space. He hoped the designers foresaw that kind of battering. They must have; the ship didn’t break up.

  Every lost hour made the CIA people and their contract engineers fidget and twitch. They had a schedule and wanted to stick with it. The Global Marine roughnecks, veterans of offshore oil-drilling platforms, took it all in stride. “It’s the ocean, for Chrissake. It’s bigger’n we are an’ stronger’n we are, so what the fuck you gonna do?” one of them said.

  “Sing it, Leroy!” a friend of his said. Leroy just grinned, the way anybody would who’d just said something too obvious to need saying.

  One of the engineers working with Clementine went into the sick bay. The Glomar Explorer had a doctor and a couple of paramedics aboard, along with equipment that wouldn’t have shamed a small hospital on dry land. If anyone broke his arm or needed his appendix yanked, the medical staff could handle it.

  Word soon got out that the engineer had had a heart attack. The onboard doc described it as mild. “I don’t know about that, man,” Jerry said to Steve when he got the news. “Isn’t a mild heart attack a heart attack that happens to somebody else? Sounds like being a little bit pregnant.”

  “Oh, there is a difference,” Steve answered. “If you have a bad heart attack, they bury you at sea.”

  “Mrmp.” Jerry thought that over, then nodded. “Yeah, guess you’re right.”

  Steve surprised him by smiling widely enough to show a gold crown on one back tooth. “I like it when people tell me that,” he said. “Not because it makes me feel smart or anything. Because it means I’m dealing with somebody reasonable, somebody who doesn’t have to think he’s right no matter what the evidence says.”

  “You don’t get far in the sciences with that attitude. When new evidence comes along, it’ll falsify a hypothesis no matter how much you like it.” Jerry paused for a moment. “Some people are stubborn anyway, though, aren’t they? The evidence for plate tectonics and continental drift looks pretty damn good, but some of the older oceanographers and geologists don’t want to see it.”

  “I was going to say that, in case you didn’t,” Steve replied. “I would have used the fight about evolution in the nineteenth century, but your example’s a good one, too. Scientists aren’t just scientists. They’re human beings, and they do all the dumb things human beings do.”

  * * *

  Two days later, Jerry came out of the messroom after lunch (some of the best veal cutlets he’d ever had) to find the ship in an uproar. He ran into Dave Schoals in a passageway—almost but not quite literally. Dave was wearing a plastic hard hat and a worried expression. “Everybody’s running every which way. What’s going on?” Jerry asked.

  “We got a distress call from a British freighter heading to L.A. from Yokohama,” Schoals answered. “One of their people has a history of heart trouble. They think he’s had another coronary, and they don’t have a doctor on board. They want to know if we can check him over for them.”

  “Oy!” Jerry said. “What did we tell them?”

  “It’s a man’s life. Have to say yes to something like that.” Dave looked as if he wished the Glomar Explorer could have answered no. “We’ll send Doc Borden over to their ship to see what’s up. If we have to, we’ll bring their guy back here. It’s not something we want to do from the security point of view, but refusing would blow our cover from here to Moscow.”

  “The ocean’s acting all nice and friendly, too,” Jerry remarked.

  “Right,” Dave said tightly. Waves were running at eight or ten feet, keeping things too rough to let the pipe farmers lower Clementine any farther. The bad weather was supposed to be coming from a tropical storm named Gilda. Wherever it was coming from, it was driving the technical types bananas.

  Dr. Borden, one of the paramedics, and Jack Porter went over to the Bel Hudson in one of her lifeboats. Jack was another veteran CIA guy; his title on the Glomar Explorer was director of security. Jerry supposed he visited the freighter to make sure it really was British and not crawling with Soviet spies.

  The Bel Hudson evidently checked out, because the lifeboat came back with the seaman who was having chest pains. Getting him out of the boat and onto the Glomar Explorer turned out to be another adventure. He couldn’t, or said he couldn’t, climb a rope ladder, so they secured him on a stretcher and swung him aboard with a crane.

  That would have been fine if the crane operator, who wasn’t used to handling such light weights, didn’t slam him into the ship’s metal flank a couple of times before finally landing him. Jerry figured that, if the guy hadn’t had a coronary before, the trip up would have given him one.

  He was white as a sheet when Dr. Borden and the paramedic escorted him to sick bay. The verdict soon spread: he hadn’t had a heart attack, but he did have some banged-up ribs that didn’t come from his exciting arrival. He also had a vague memory—which hadn’t come out before—of getting into a drunken brawl with the Bel Hudson’s skipper in the ship’s lounge.

  “How can you be drunk enough to forget a fight like that?” Jerry asked.

  “Talent. Talent and practice,” Dave Schoals answered.

  When they asked the sailor if he wanted to get swung back into the lifeboat, he climbed down the rope ladder, maybe not so nimbly as a monkey but nimbly enough. The Glomar Explorer sent back a case of frozen steaks with him to liven up the Bel Hudson’s larder.

  Jerry expected that would be the end of it, but the freighter’s lifeboat made a return trip with several bottles of scotch. At dinner that night, everybody on the Glomar Explorer got a finger of golden-amber fluid. Jerry wasn’t much of a whisky drinker. He tried not to cough when he knocked his back.

  “Tastes like medicine,” he said.

  Steve clicked his tongue between his teeth. “The younger generation is ignorant,” he said. “That’s mighty good medicine. Expensive medicine, too.”

  “If you say so.” The last time Jerry’d knocked back neat whisky, he’d been thirteen. It was right after his bar mitzvah, and he’d gone to the synagogue to help make a minyan for a morning service. One of the old men who was a regular at such affairs gave him a little knock in the bottom of a glass—and then laughed liked hell when he choked on it.

  Scotch? Bourbon? Rye? At a distance of almost half a lifetime, he had no idea. All he remembered was, it was fiery and nasty. This stuff seemed no great improvement.

  “I’d say more for me, only I think we’re going through all of it.” Steve sighed.

  “If it were beer, now…” Jerry said.

  The older man made as if to push him away. “Philistine!” They had a good time sassing each other through dinner. Arguing about favorite tipples, they didn’t have to take it seriously. Jerry knew, and knew Steve knew, it might not be like that once Clementine grabbed hold of the starship.

  * * *

  Another distant storm, this one tagged Harriet, roiled the Pacific. The people in charge of the claw had other difficulties, too. They didn’t go into detail, not where Jerry could hear, but Dave ordered Clementine hauled up into the moon pool so the technicians could work on it more conveniently. The Glomar Explorer had held its place above the Midlothian object for almost two weeks now, but the claw was as far away as it had ever been.

  A mimeographed newsletter circulated every day or two, reporting news picked up on the ship’s radio. The latest edition told Jerry that the Senate Watergate Committee had released its final report. That didn’t say whether Nixon should be impeached, which was the House’s responsibility. It did note that at least thirteen companies had illegally contributed almost $800,000 to the president’s reelection campaign. Senator Weicker of Connecticut also noted that some witnesses had probably perjured themselves when they testified before the Senate committee.

  What else do they need? Jerry thought. Stuff like this keeps coming out. Impeach him, convict him, and remove him, for God’s sake.

  Then he saw one of the pipe wranglers crumpling up a newsletter. “Wish this paper wasn’t so pointy and scratchy,” the man told his buddy. “I’d sure as hell wipe my ass with it.”

  “You an’ me both, Ray,” the other fellow agreed. “It’s all a bunch of bullshit, every goddamn bit of it.”

  How could you avoid seeing what was right in front of your nose? Too many people seemed to have no trouble at all.

  What would the roughnecks think when, instead of the K-129, Clementine brought up the Midlothian object? What would Richard Nixon think, if he was still president then? If Nixon wasn’t president anymore, what would Gerald Ford think? How about the Democrats? Fear and Midlothian on the campaign trail ran through Jerry’s mind. He feared he was the only person on the Hughes Glomar Explorer who read Hunter Thompson.

  And what would the Russians think when they found out? Find out they would. Jerry was sure of it. Some secrets were too big to keep … weren’t they? The CIA men on the ship would have argued otherwise. They’d managed to keep the spaceship’s existence secret since the Halibut found it. But that would get harder once the Midlothian object wasn’t hiding under three miles of water. Wouldn’t it?

  Little by little, the waves began to ease off. The divers finished fixing things that had gone wrong with Clementine’s video cameras and landing legs. The meteorologist said the seas and winds might soon ease to the point where they could take another stab at lowering the giant steel claw toward the bottom.

  Sure enough, Jerry discovered fog outside a couple of mornings later. That spoiled the view, but it was good news: fog and strong winds didn’t go together. The Glomar Explorer sounded her fog whistle every so often. As far as Jerry was concerned, that would scare any ship close enough to hear it out of a year’s growth.

  And evidently there was a ship close enough to hear it. Some of the sailors who worked for Global Marine said the radar had picked it up. Jerry peered through the swirling vapor, trying to spot it himself.

  It stayed too far away to let him, till a few minutes past nine, when it loomed out of the mist like a ghost manifesting itself. It was lean and looked dangerous, unlike a squat freighter or the even squatter Glomar Explorer. Jerry’s first alarmed thought was Destroyer!

  But he soon realized it wasn’t, or wasn’t exactly, a warship. Instead of guns or missiles, it sported a variety of white radomes. It drew closer to the Glomar Explorer, close enough to let him see a name—Chazhma—stenciled near the bow in Cyrillic characters. As if he’d been in much doubt, that told him whose fleet it belonged to.

  He wondered how its crew knew the Glomar Explorer was in the neighborhood. He doubted like hell coincidence had anything to do with it. Maybe they’d picked up the radio interchange with the Bel Hudson. Or maybe a Soviet spy satellite had spotted the American vessel and sent the Chazhma out for a look-see.

  Like the Glomar Explorer, the Chazhma sported a helipad. Not only that, it also a carried a helicopter: a four-wheeled machine with two big rotors on the main hub and a triple tail instead of a vertical secondary rotor. The outer tail fins sported large red stars. Seeing the chopper, sailors hurriedly carried more barrels and crates to the landing platform. Doing our best to make it an unlanding platform, Jerry thought.

  Before long, the Soviet helicopter hopped into the air. It buzzed around the Glomar Explorer for about fifteen minutes, the guy in the copilot’s seat snapping pictures all the while.

  “Can it spot Clementine?” Jerry asked Dave Schoals, who was taking his own pictures of the helicopter.

  “I don’t think so,” the recovery director answered, more calmly than Jerry had expected. “The decking and the superstructure hide it pretty well.” Eyeing things, Jerry decided he was right.

  Some of the Glomar Explorer’s crewmen flipped off the Russians in the helicopter. Some spun around, dropped their pants, and turned the other cheek to them. Then Captain Gresham’s voice roared out of the PA system like an angry Jehovah’s: “Knock that shit off, you people! You hear me? Knock it off! We don’t want to piss anybody off!”

  “That’d be great, wouldn’t it? Let’s give them an excuse for jumping us,” Dave said, as the sailors sheepishly pulled up their jeans.

  The copter flew back to the Russian ship It made another pass at the Glomar Explorer later in the day. This time, a photographer with a really long lens on his camera took pictures while leaning out of the open doorway on the chopper’s port side. Jerry didn’t think he would have wanted to do that.