“Who? Us?” Porter was unflappable, as a good security man should have been. “We’re mining manganese nodules, of course. Hey, it’s the next big thing. Lots of minerals there at the bottom of the ocean, just waiting to get vacuumed up. Howard Hughes thinks so, and he spent a ton of money building this ship to prove it. He’s got Manfred and other people at ocean mining conferences spreading the word, so it must be true.”

  “We’ve got Manfred, you mean,” Jerry said. You’ve got Manfred. The CIA has Manfred. And did Manfred know about the spaceship, or only—only!—about the K-129? Jerry didn’t ask. Jack might not have the need to know. Even if he did, he wouldn’t blab. He was a good security man.

  The SB-10 kept hanging around. The Russian crewmen didn’t even bother to pretend they weren’t photographing the American ship. Men on the Glomar Explorer watched the tug, too, to make sure it didn’t slam into their ship—and because it had those women aboard.

  One of them was a dishwater blonde, the other a brunette. So some of the pipe farmers and divers swore; Jerry was never sure there actually were two of them. “Oh, hell, yes!” a rent-a-frog said, when he questioned that. “They swap dresses back and forth, too. Ain’t you noticed?”

  “No,” Jerry admitted, wondering how they could swap dresses if there was only one of them.

  “Pay attention, for Chrissake!” By the way the diver said it, anyone who didn’t pay women microscopically close attention was probably a queer and certainly not to be trusted. Jerry wondered how he was with women he actually knew. That might prove a different story.

  Jerry had never seen the women on the SB-10 taking pictures of the Glomar Explorer. They didn’t seem to do a lot on deck, but nobody on the tug seemed to do a lot on deck. The men went around in dungarees, and often left their shirts off. The foggy middle of the North Pacific didn’t seem like a great place to grab a tan. Then again, next to Petropavlovsk or Vladivostok it probably felt like Palm Springs.

  He knew something about the two Russian cities because they were both ports. Anything that had to do with the ocean bumped up against what he’d been studying till this mad venture turned his life upside down and inside out. He knew Petropavlovsk lay on the Kamchatka Peninsula because that was a peninsula … and because Kamchatka was an important province to hold when you played Risk. About what went on fifty miles inland from Vladivostok he had no idea.

  He’d never figured he would need to worry about it, either. But that was before John P. banged on his door one afternoon. Now … Now everything was different.

  * * *

  This container was another one with a keypad next to the door. The sign above the latch said CONTROL. Every time Jerry saw it, he wanted to giggle. It made him flash on Get Smart, which he’d watched religiously when he was in high school.

  If they had Barbara Feldon in there … That would be far out, as a matter of fact. She’d seriously carbonated his hormones back in the day.

  Steve’s voice returned him to the here-and-now: “Depending on what happens when Clementine grabs, you may have business in here.” He didn’t say what Clementine would be grabbing, not where anyone else might hear him. He did punch a code into the keypad. “I’ll give you this string when we’re back in our cabin. It’s another one you need to memorize.”

  “I can do that,” Jerry said, as Steve opened the door. People dealing with the Midlothian object put as little in writing as they could. What did get written down was often intentionally misleading, like the date on the tape cassette that recorded the K-129’s last moments.

  Inside, the Control container had a lot more electronics than the one called Special Measurements. Two guys sat hunched in front of computer monitors, each tensely maneuvering an image of Clementine toward an image of the sunken spaceship. Or were they images? They looked as realistic as anything you were likely to see on a TV screen.

  They had to be images, Jerry realized. The actual Clementine wasn’t on the bottom yet. But the operators seemed as intent on what they were doing and as worried about it as if this were the real thing. Jerry’d hardly talked with them and their buddies on the voyage. They hung together when they ate. When they weren’t in the messroom, they stayed in their cabins or here.

  Quietly, so as not to disturb them, Steve said, “They’re simulators, of course. With models of the Midlothian object and Clementine, the computer can simulate the forces involved in the capture. Seems like the genuine article, though, doesn’t it?”

  “It sure does!” Jerry whistled, soft and low. “Beats the crap out of Pong, you know? And I’ve blown a lot of quarters on Pong. If you could make a video game with this kind of detail, you’d be a gazillionaire.”

  “Not gonna happen,” one of the operators said, without looking away from what he was doing. Jerry thought his name was Paul, but wouldn’t have sworn to it. “These consoles are way too complex and way too expensive for the civilian market.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Jerry said and then, as a new thought struck him, “Is there anything in the simulator that lets you game out what to do in case the, uh, Midlothian object starts acting up when you grab it?”

  “You mean, if it does something but doesn’t zap us the way it zapped the K-129?” Paul said.

  “Um … That would be good, wouldn’t it?”

  “That would be real good if we ever want to draw our Social Security checks, uh-huh,” the operator said. Jerry had heard these guys were from the NSA, which, he gathered, was an intelligence agency even more intelligent or spookier or more secret than the CIA. He was learning all kinds of things on the Glomar Explorer, none of which had anything to do with whale songs. His hydrophone hadn’t picked up anything interesting, either.

  The other operator (was he Eric? or was Eric on the other shift?) spoke up: “No, that isn’t in the program. Maybe they couldn’t do it, maybe they didn’t think of it, or maybe they just figured we’ve already got enough to worry about.”

  “Not like they’re wrong,” Paul said. A second later, he added, “Shit!” Something on his simulator hadn’t worked the way he wanted it to.

  “When you start doing the real thing, will it feel like this?” Jerry asked.

  “I think so,” Paul answered as he fiddled with knobs and levers to fix whatever had gone wrong on the screen. “It’s supposed to. These are the views we’ll be getting from the cameras on Clementine. The simulator is even set up to make things get blurry fast when you move farther away from them, the way they do underwater.”

  “I saw that. It’s wild,” Jerry said. All the memory in the Honeywell 316s (so the little plaques under the monitors named them) was working flat out.

  If only you could get this kind of detail into a game, it would beat the hell out of Pong. But Paul was bound to be right. How much did a machine like this cost? Twenty grand? Thirty? Somewhere in that ballpark, Jerry thought. You couldn’t stick a fancy computer like that in an arcade. Hell, a row of them would pay for an arcade, with money left over besides.

  It would be amazingly cool, though.

  “Oh, nice grab! So smooth!” Paul said to Eric. Jerry remembered how pumped he was whenever he got to twenty-one before Anna did. It didn’t happen often; her reflexes were quicker than his. But that thrill of victory looked mighty small next to snatching a starship. Okay, it wasn’t a real starship. Yet. But it would be.

  When he got out of the container, he felt as if he were leaving the future and falling back into the mundane world of 1974, where Richard Nixon was still saying he wouldn’t resign and where the Senate was getting ready to throw him out of the White House on his crooked ass in case he meant it. He would have felt the same way if Clementine really were just going after the K-129, not a lost ship from another world. The simulator seemed as much the stuff of science fiction as the spaceship did.

  He said as much to Steve. The older man nodded. “The same thought’s crossed my mind,” he answered. “We’re pushing the state of the art in a lot of areas as far as it’ll go, maybe even a little further. What we’ve learned from doing this would be worthwhile even if we didn’t bring anything up from the bottom. People will be building on it for the next fifty years.”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” Jerry said. “That’s how science works. You couldn’t move forward if not for everything everybody who was working on stuff before did. Sometimes we find out the old guys were wrong, but so what? They were in there swinging. Those people fifty years from now will find stuff we’re wrong about, too.”

  Behind Steve’s bifocals, one of his eyebrows quirked. “What happened to ‘Never trust anybody over thirty’?”

  “That’s politics and society, man. It’s not science,” Jerry said. “Where there’s no real evidence, you can argue till you’re blue in the face—and we do. But either the Sun goes around the Earth or the Earth goes around the Sun, and the evidence tells you which.”

  Steve took a couple of steps without saying anything. Then, slowly, he remarked, “You know, you just may do.”

  It didn’t sound like much. Quite a few of the things Steve said didn’t sound like much when you first heard them. When you thought for a second, though … Jerry felt warmed, as if by the summer sun that was having trouble getting through the ocean mist here. He couldn’t remember getting a higher compliment from anybody who wasn’t in love with him.

  “Hey, man,” he said. “Hey.”

  “You just may do,” Steve repeated. “I’ll tell you something else, too. Fifty years from now, I’ll be long gone.”

  “Your book won’t. That’s the kind of thing I was talking about.”

  “Thanks. Your thinking so means a lot to me. But let me get where I was going. I’ll be long gone, but there’s a decent chance you’ll be an emeritus somewhere, still teaching a class every now and then and maybe with a grad student or two. And you’ll show them some of the old dogs can still learn new tricks.”

  Jerry had trouble imagining himself in his thirties, much less his seventies. What would 2024 look like? The politics would have to be better than today’s. They couldn’t very well be any worse!

  “Or,” Steve went on in a low voice, “fifty years from now, you may find yourself the ambassador to Alpha Centauri A-IV. How would that be?”

  “Insane,” Jerry answered, from the bottom of his heart.

  * * *

  The big question, the one for which the men on the Glomar Explorer had no good answer, was how much the starship weighed. If it was too much heavier than the K-129, something disastrous would happen when the Americans tried to take it off the seafloor.

  Maybe one or more of Clementine’s claws would break, letting the spaceship fall back to the bottom. Or maybe the pipe string would snap, and the recoil would break the Explorer’s back. Jerry thought of a breaking rubber band biting his hand. But the forces here were unimaginably bigger. All those millions of pounds hanging from the derrick …

  They’d never put anywhere near this much weight on the system when they tested it off the California coast. Even with nothing going wrong, it was straining the Glomar Explorer to the limit, or somewhere close. Some of the ship’s welds—her seams, if you were a landlubber—sprang leaks. The crew watched them warily. Everybody said this was nothing serious. Jerry hoped like hell that was the straight skinny.

  When he worried out loud, Steve said, “Worry about why the Russian sub is on the bottom, why don’t you? Worry about why the Midlothian object decided to do that to it. Worry about whether it’ll decide to do that to us. Don’t worry about what we can do if it decides that way, because we can’t do anything.”

  “You really know how to cheer a guy up, don’t you?” Jerry said.

  “You knew this job was dangerous when you took it,” Steve retorted.

  “Thank you, Super Chicken,” Jerry said. The man from the RAND Corporation looked at him as if he’d started spouting some of his Swahili. Well, it wasn’t as if Jerry’d watched Super Chicken, either; the cartoon first aired after he’d graduated from high school. But he had younger cousins who’d been crazy about it, so he knew the catchphrases. He added, “When I got into this game, remember, I just thought we were going after the K-129. You know—nuclear missiles, nuclear torpedoes. The ordinary kind of shit.”

  “We don’t talk about that much, for obvious reasons,” Steve said. “We talk about the other even less, for even more obvious reasons. Too many people would either say we were crazy or start shouting about it when we want to keep it quiet more than anything.”

  “I don’t shout. Hell, a lot of the time I hardly even talk,” Jerry replied, remembering how Anna got on his case for not opening up more. “As for the other, I’ve been into science fiction since I found the Miss Pickerell stories and the Mushroom Planet books in the third grade.”

  “Science fiction is one thing. When it turns into—well, into the Glomar Explorer, that’s something else.”

  “Yeah, this is real, all right.” Jerry drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. He heard the small noise that made. His fingertips felt the nubbly nylon of the chair’s upholstery. He didn’t think any drug could give him such detailed and trivial hallucinations. “The other thing that’s real is, we’re going to try grabbing the … the object in the next few days.”

  “Depending on how much it weighs, everything ought to go well,” Steve said. “Everybody in Control is confident we can make the pickup without too much trouble.”

  “Ought to be second nature to those guys, with all the simulator practice they’ve had.” Jerry said not a word about frying bacon. If that happened, it happened. Everybody on the Glomar Explorer who knew about the possibility seemed resigned to it, Jerry hardly less than the men who’d lived with it longer.

  His writerly part told him he ought to be making notes—at least mental ones—about the feeling. You knew it could happen to you, you hoped like hell it didn’t, and in spite of the shadow you got on as best you could with what you had to do.

  But his writerly part hadn’t been working very well since he found out about the Midlothian object. Part of that was learning he’d need to get his stuff vetted from here on out before he submitted it. And part was sheer bogglement. You didn’t, he couldn’t, imagine himself playing a role in anything like this.

  Only he was.

  Steve had said something; Jerry realized he had no idea what. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling foolish. “Try that again. I was lost inside my own head.”

  “I said, we’re lucky in a way to be raising the Midlothian object and not the submarine. The K-129 is on its side on the bottom. We’d have to dig into the sediments under it to break suction and lift. And we don’t know how sticky or how hard the seafloor there is. The Glomar II was supposed to find out, but that experiment failed.”

  “Damn!” Jerry said—he was paying attention now.

  “Uh-huh.” Steve nodded. “But it matters less with the spaceship. Because of its shape, the front and back or top and bottom or whatever they are are raised off the bottom. The outer claws can get under them without worrying about the mud or rock. Only the middle one has to take the sediment into account, and it’s thicker than the others.”

  “They thought of everything when they designed Clementine!” Jerry said admiringly. He broke into off-key song: “In a canyon, in a cavern / Excavating for a mine!” He wanted to change musical styles, à la Tom Lehrer, but consideration for Steve’s eardrums persuaded him not to try it.

  “We’ll know what we’ll know pretty soon, all right,” Steve said. “Until we do, everything feels like anticlimax.”

  “It sure does, here and in Washington,” Jerry said. The House Rules Committee had passed three articles of impeachment, while turning down two others. Next stage was votes on the passed articles by the whole House. Barring a miracle or a resignation, Richard Nixon would become only the second president to be formally impeached. If he was, the Senate would try him, and looked almost sure to convict him and remove him from office.

  “Never a dull moment,” Steve said. “Whoever the president is, though, he’ll have to deal with what we do after we take the Midlothian object on board … or with what it does to us if it decides it doesn’t feel like getting taken on board.”

  “Yeah,” Jerry said. “Or that.”

  So the worry worm wiggled in Steve’s mind, too, did it? The man from the RAND Corporation held his cards very close to his chest. Finding out that he did worry about what the sunken spaceship might do when the Hughes Glomar Explorer tried to grab hold of it made Jerry’s own thumping heart and sour stomach oddly easier for him to handle.

  Suppose it sinks us, he thought. What does the United States do then? He wasn’t sure the USA would do anything. The Glomar Explorer had tried to hassle a ship not of American registry in, or under, international waters, when the ship hadn’t done anything to America. Pretending the whole thing never happened might be the smartest thing to do.

  Anna won’t think so, went through Jerry’s mind. Maybe half a minute later, so did, Dad may not, either. They’d split the insurance policy the CIA had issued for him when he joined Azorian and Midlothian. He was positive that would keep his father quiet. He wasn’t so sure about Anna, who often got off on talking back to people.

  Yeah, she’d want answers. Whether John P. and his buddies on dry land could come up with any convincing enough for her was an interesting question.

  Another interesting question was what the USA could do if it didn’t want to take losing the Glomar Explorer lying down. Could they drop an H-bomb on a target three miles underwater? What kind of range did the starship’s bacon-fryer have? Those were the kinds of things you wanted to think about before you started writing an alien-contact story.

  It occurred to Jerry that those were also the kinds of things you wanted to think about before you started living an alien-contact story. Naturally, that occurred to him too late to do any good. I’ll be smarter next time, he told himself. But there wouldn’t be a next time, not like this.