Then the PA system came to life again. “Mister Steinberg to the forward bridge!” it shouted. “Mister Steinberg to the forward bridge on the double!”

  Jerry needed that repetition to remind himself that he was Mr. Steinberg here. He hurried forward and then up to the bridge from which Tom Gresham controlled the ship. “I’m Jerry Steinberg,” he said. “What do you need, uh, sir?”

  “We have the Chazhma on the radio. Took some work, but we do,” Gresham answered. “I’m told you speak Russian. Can you talk to them, tell them we’re a private seafloor mining vessel operating in international waters?”

  “I’m not real fluent, sir, but I’ll try.”

  “Okay. Give it your best shot. They don’t admit to having anybody who savvies much English,” Gresham said.

  Jerry soon found himself at a radio set. The regular radioman showed him how to use it.

  “This Hughes Glomar Explorer. You hear, Chazhma?”

  “I read you loud and clear,” a Russian voice answered in his headphones.

  “Talk slow, pozhaluista. My Russian nye khorosho.”

  “I understand.” The Chazhma’s radioman or skipper laughed. “Tell me what your ship is doing here.” Jack did his best to translate what Captain Gresham had said. The Russian asked, “How long will you stay here?”

  After Jerry relayed the question, Gresham answered, “Two or three weeks—maybe a month.” Jerry passed that on to the Chazhma.

  “Good luck with your work,” said the Russian on the other end of the circuit. A few minutes later, the Chazhma moved off to the northwest, toward Vladivostok or maybe Petropavlovsk.

  “Nice job, kid,” Captain Gresham said.

  “Thanks.” Jerry let out a long sigh of relief.

  * * *

  Dave said the Glomar Explorer was designed to work once. If it worked twice, everyone would be amazed. Over the few days after the Chazhma sailed away, Jerry began to wonder whether all the complex systems the Explorer carried would work even once. They had trouble separating Clementine from the docking legs, and more trouble with the pipe-handling system.

  “It’s supposed to be automated, dammit,” Dave grumbled. “We can sort of make it go, but we’ve got to have somebody keeping an eye on everything all the goddamn time. That gets wearing, you know?”

  The pipe-farm guys and divers worked regular shifts, twelve hours on, twelve hours off. The engineers and CIA men were on call around the clock. They ate and slept when they weren’t trying to smooth out problems.

  And, just to make matters more delightful, another Russian snoop showed up to keep an eye on the putative seafloor mining ship. This one was a lot less prepossessing than the Chazhma: she was an oceangoing tug, maybe 150 feet long, with “SB-10” painted in fading Cyrillic letters on either side of the bow.

  Jack Porter, the CIA man in charge of security, scratched at his beard—which was thicker than Jerry’s, though not in the same league as Professor Krikorian’s—as he scowled at the tug. “SB is right,” he said. “The Russian use those bastards to spy all over the damn world.”

  “Not exactly hiding what they’re up to, are they?” Jerry asked.

  Porter’s smile was thin to the point of starvation. “Now that you mention it, no.”

  The SB-10 had hung back at first, though its crew had to know radar would have picked it out. Now, though, it was making circuits of the Glomar Explorer at a distance of no more than a hundred yards. Crewmen pointed cameras and binoculars at the bigger vessel.

  Jerry didn’t need long to notice that not all the crewmen were. “They’ve got a woman aboard!” he exclaimed.

  “Two, I think,” Jack answered. “They do that sometimes. You ask me, it causes more problems than it solves.”

  Jerry hardly heard him. Except on the screen, he hadn’t seen anyone of the female persuasion for more the month. Till he did, he hadn’t realized how acutely he felt the lack. The SB-10 was too far away for him to get a good look at the women she carried, but they were bound to be the two most beautiful girls for a thousand miles in any direction.

  He and the security director weren’t the only ones to notice the SB-10’s coed crew. Divers, pipe wranglers, stewards, and even some of the contractors and CIA people who mostly lived in their containers lined the rail to check things out. They whistled. They whooped. They yelled invitations Jerry hoped the Russian women didn’t understand.

  “Jerks,” Jack Porter aid.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Jerry replied. “I mean, looking is great, but this.… It’s like construction workers when a pretty girl walks by.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized a fair number of these guys might have worked construction at one time or another.

  Porter eyed him. “You’ve got a fiancée back in California, don’t you?”

  “That’s right.” Jerry tried not to crack up at the don’t you? Jack Porter probably knew Anna’s home and work phone numbers, what size jeans she wore, and how much she’d spent on groceries at the local Alpha Beta last week. Or if he didn’t know offhand, he could dig out a file card back in his cabin and find out.

  But all the security director said was, “You must miss her.”

  “Oh, maybe a little.”

  One of Porter’s eyebrows jumped. Then it lay down again as he recognized irony. “Hard to be a young man away from your special girl.”

  “Yeah.” Jerry nodded. “But I knew I wouldn’t get another chance like this, and that was before I found out about.…” Midlothian was itself a code word, but he didn’t say it. Too many people who might overhear weren’t cleared for it. It wouldn’t mean anything to them, not yet, but they might wonder about it.

  Jack set a hand on his arm for a moment. “You’re learning the ropes, aren’t you?”

  “I guess maybe I am. It’s kind of sink or swim—or maybe more like baptism by total immersion.”

  “Heh!” Porter said, more appreciatively than not. “Total immersion isn’t required—or my church doesn’t think it is, anyhow. I’m Catholic.”

  “Sure isn’t required for a nice Jewish boy,” Jerry said: one more thing Jack was bound to know already. He went on, “But ever since John P. knocked on my door, that’s what this has felt like. I just hope I get to come up for air one of these days.”

  “Believe me, we all feel that way,” Jack said. “And John can be mighty persuasive, can’t he?”

  “There’s one word. Overwhelming is another one.” Jerry could think of some more words, too. Most of them would have made the smut the crewmen were yelling at the Russian women sound like love poetry by comparison.

  “It will work out all right.” Jack sounded as sure of himself as the Jesus freaks who annoyed people at UCLA by going around and asking if they were saved.

  “I sure hope so,” Jerry said. “But even if it does, I’ll never be able to tell anybody I had anything to do with it, will I?”

  “Doesn’t look that way right now. But never is a long time, so who knows for sure?”

  Jerry suspected that was the security director’s way of keeping him on the reservation. He asked, “What happens if I want to write a story that’s sort of about this but I change things around so it isn’t exactly?”

  “You’ll need to send it to us so we can make sure it doesn’t violate national security before you submit it to an editor. You’ll need to do that with anything you write for publication from now on, in fact. We won’t be unreasonable—we’ve dealt with this situation before—but we may suggest changes to help keep secrets.” Porter answered as if he’d been waiting for the question. Odds were he had.

  “Happy days!” Jerry said. As if dealing with one editor wasn’t hard enough, now he’d have two on every story. He did remember something about this in the nondisclosure agreements he’d signed, but he hadn’t worried about it then. He wondered how big a mistake that was.

  V

  Over the next few days, the pipe string began to descend in earnest. Things still weren’t going so smoothly as Dave wished they would, but they were going. And they were going right under the SB-10’s nose, and the Russians didn’t know they were. That made everyone on the Glomar Explorer grin.

  Sometimes the Soviet tug would sniff around the Explorer like a puppy hopping around a grazing cow. Sometimes it would back off and hold station southeast of the much bigger ship.

  That puzzled Jack and Dave and Dale and Steve, but only for a little while. The Glomar Explorer disposed of garbage by putting it into trash bags and chucking them into the vastness of the Pacific. The bags didn’t sink right away. Wind and waves mostly carried them … southeast.

  The Russians captured as many of the floating trash bags as they could and brought them aboard the SB-10 to paw through them. As soon as people on the Glomar Explorer realized that, an order went out: make goddamn sure you don’t throw anything classified in the trash.

  From then on, the crew had fun with the snoops. They put worthless computer printouts or even Playboys in trash bags and gave the bags a shot of acetylene gas, which made them float better and scud along before the wind like Portuguese men o’ war. The tug would hurry this way and that to make sure it caught everything.

  But the printouts and the centerfolds were liberally smeared with Aqua Lube. Jerry had already had the misfortune of meeting up with the green goop. If it wasn’t the slipperiest stuff in the world, he couldn’t imagine what would be: it greased pipe connections deep underwater. And when you touched it, it wouldn’t wash off for days. It ruined clothes, too.

  “Aqua Lube, my friend!” he sang, as another bag of gooped papers went into the sea.

  Dave looked at him. “Aqua Lube isn’t anybody’s friend,” he said. That meant he didn’t listen to Jethro Tull. Jerry only wished he were more surprised.

  The ship’s newsletter reported that, on an 8–0 vote, the Supreme Court had ordered Richard Nixon to turn over the tapes of his two talks with H. R. Haldeman the day after the Watergate burglars got caught. Jerry worried that Nixon would defy the court. He’d already covered up so much—what was a little more? Wasn’t doing whatever you wanted the whole point of the imperial presidency?

  But Nixon did cough up the tapes. As soon as he did, everybody saw why he’d held on to them so long and so hard. People who’d supported him through everything up till now started saying he had to be impeached, convicted, and removed. It wasn’t a question of if anymore. It was a question of when.

  “I’m more relieved than I know how to tell you,” Jerry said to Steve, back in their cabin after dinner, when the news broke.

  “For the sake of the country, you mean?” Steve asked.

  Jerry still wasn’t sure how the older man felt about the president. All the same, he answered, “Partly that. But partly this, too. I mean, suppose we haul the Midlothian object up into the moon pool. Suppose we knock on the airlock door, or whatever it is. And suppose the aliens open up and say, ‘Take us to your leader.’ Do you really want to introduce them to Richard Nixon?”

  “His name is on the moon—he was president when people first went there,” Steve said. “He went along with this whole project, too. We’ve spent something like half a billion dollars running that pipe string with Clementine on the end of it down toward the … the object. Not everybody would have done that. Don’t you think he deserves some credit for it?”

  “Um…” Jerry didn’t want to give Nixon credit for anything. “Do you really want somebody like that running the government, though? He said, ‘I am not a crook!’ But he was. He was all along!”

  Stephen Dole sighed. “That … seems to be true. It’s a shame, and it looks like he’ll pay for it. But one of the things it does is show you that people are more complicated than the movies and TV make them out to be.”

  The part of Jerry that wrote responded to that. He knew he couldn’t convincingly create a character as gifted, as complex, and as flawed as Richard Nixon. He wasn’t good enough yet. He wondered if he ever would be.

  But he’d despised Nixon as long as he could remember. He’d got it from his folks, who’d despised Nixon longer than he’d been alive. His father still did. Jerry and Hyman Stieglitz had banged heads over plenty of things while Jerry was growing up, but never about that.

  “All we can do here is our jobs, and do them as well as we can,” Steve added. “What happens back in Washington happens, that’s all. It doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re up to—unless, like you say, we have to introduce the little green men inside the object to Gerald Ford.”

  “Wouldn’t that be trippy?” Jerry said. Steve laughed and nodded. They both seemed to think that was a good place to leave it, so they did. They’d got out of it without screaming at each other or trying to slug each other. The cabin wasn’t very big. If they couldn’t get along …

  But Jerry wasn’t so sure the man from the RAND Corporation had it all straight. They weren’t just doing their jobs. They were doing them for the CIA, and for the U.S. government of which it was a part. To say that the CIA and the government as a whole were morally compromised would do for an understatement till a bigger one roared down the freeway. So it looked to Jerry, anyway.

  On the other hand, what was the alternative? Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR? Jerry wasn’t one of those people who thought, because the United States wasn’t so great, Russia had to be. The Iron Curtain that ran down the middle of Europe was there for a reason. The reason wasn’t to keep swarms of Austrians, West Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians from rushing into East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. It was to keep the people in the Russian satellites from getting the hell out.

  He sighed, changed into his nightclothes, and climbed into his bunk to read for a while before he went to sleep. This anthology had Damon Knight’s “Cabin Boy” in it. He hadn’t read that one for a long time. People didn’t know it the way they knew Knight’s “To Serve Man”; it hadn’t been a Twilight Zone episode. To Jerry, though, it was a better story. And it was probably where he’d got the idea of a grown spaceship rather than a manufactured one.

  He smiled his way through it. Yeah, that was first contact done right! But it was only a story, even if it was a good one. Here he lay, in the middle of the North Pacific, on a ship dedicated to the proposition that stories might turn real. And wouldn’t that be trippy?

  * * *

  Deeper and deeper sank Clementine, on the end of a string of pipes made of the same kind of steel that went into naval gun barrels. When the claw got about 13,000 feet down, a sonar mounted on it detected the seafloor. Dave Schoals didn’t seem surprised about that—“It’s doing what it’s designed to do,” he told anyone who’d listen—but he did seem pleased.

  Extending the pipe string came with adventures, some small, some larger. One of the larger ones was a cable snapping and a thirty-ton counterweight crashing to—luckily, not through—the Glomar Explorer’s deck. Even more luckily, no one happened to be standing under it when it did. While the crew made repairs, Clementine sank no deeper.

  “Never a dull moment, is there?” Jerry said to Dave Schoals.

  The recovery director looked at him—looked through him, really. “We want them all to stay dull,” he said. “Most of them do. We try to keep the exciting ones from getting too far out of hand.”

  “Right,” Jerry said, and quickly went off to look for something, anything, to do somewhere else. When people talked about the pipe string, they talked about thousands of tons. Well, thousands of tons were millions of pounds, and Dave acted as if he were carrying all of them on his shoulders.

  Atlas of the CIA, Jerry thought. But it wasn’t funny, or not for long. Dave had been busting his ass on this project for years. He wasn’t a smart-mouthed Johnny-come-lately, the way Jerry was. He’d helped design something that could bring up a starship from three miles underwater: the kind of thing any sensible human being would call impossible. Impossible or not, the Glomar Explorer was getting close to doing it. No wonder Dave was under a little bit of pressure right now. Yeah, no wonder at all.

  Assume Clementine didn’t break with the starship halfway to the surface. Assume the starship didn’t decide it wouldn’t let itself be brought up, and that it didn’t do unto the Glomar Explorer as it had done to the K-129. Assume it actually lay in the moon pool, with the gates closed under it.

  Then and only then would Jerry and Steve become possibly useful members of the crew. Till then, the most they could do was stay out of the way and try not to act like too big a jerk or an asshole. Steve had worked that out a lot sooner than Jerry had.

  True, he’d been with the project longer. True, he was older and more practiced at getting along with people than Jerry was. Most of the human race fell into that latter category, as Jerry was uneasily aware. Another of the reasons he loved Anna so much was that she put up with him when he did something stupid without meaning to.

  When the SB-10 sailed off as the Chazhma had done, everybody on the Glomar Explorer hoped the tug was gone for good. But the pesky little ship came back a few days later, as bothersome as ever. Some of its lunges brought it within a hundred yards of the Explorer. Its skipper reminded Jerry of a teenager playing chicken.

  Jerry asked Jack Porter, “Why did it go away and then come back?”

  “Asking why Russians do what they do is a mug’s game. That skipper wouldn’t keep trying to ram us if what they did made sense all the time.” Porter might have been talking about John Campbell–style aliens, who thought as well as men but not like them. He went on, “My best guess is, they needed something from a submarine, and didn’t want us to watch them making contact.”

  “Ah.” Jerry considered, then nodded. “Sure seems more likely than anything I came up with on my own.”

  “It’s still only a guess. Just because it seems likely doesn’t make it true,” Jack said. “The Russians do all kinds of unlikely shit.”

  “You mean we don’t? What’s the Glomar Explorer doing way the hell out here in that case?”