As he stood in the hallway waiting for the elevator, he was surrounded by the smells of the aging building. The mold and rot seemed stronger with each passing day. Thirty-five years at the same stand was a long time, he mused, too long.

His thoughts were interrupted by the clatter of the elevator door.

An operator who looked to be in his seventies gave him a yellow-toothed grin. "Callin' it quits for the night?" he asked.

"No, I'm taking the red-eye flight to Washington."

"New case?"

"An old one."

There were no more questions and they rode the rest of the way in silence. As he stepped into the lobby he nodded at the operator.

"See you in a couple of days, Joe."

Then he passed through the main door and melted into the night.

TO MOST, HIS NAME WAS HIRAM YAEGER. To a select few he was known as Pinocchio because he could stick his nose into a vast number of computer networks and sift over their software. His playground was the tenth-floor communications and information network of NUMA.

Sandecker hired him to collect and store every scrap of data ever written on the oceans, scientific or historical, fact or theory.

Yaeger tackled the job with a fierce dedication, and within five years had accumulated a huge computer library of knowledge about the sea.

Yaeger worked erratic hours, sometimes coming in with the morning sun and working straight through until the following dawn. He seldom showed up for departmental meetings, but Sandecker left him alone because there was none better, and because Yaeger had an uncanny ability to pry out secret access codes to a great number of worldwine computer networks.

Always dressed in Levi's jacket and pants, he wore his long blond hair in a bun. A scraggly heard combined with his probing eyes gave him the appearance of a desert prospector peering over the next hill for Eldorado.

He sat at a computer terminal stuck away in a far corner of NUMA's electronic maze. Pitt stood off to one side watching with interest the green block letters on a display screen.

"That's all we're going to comb from the Maritime Administration's mass storage system."

"Nothing new there," Pitt agreed.

What now?"

Can you tap the Coast Guard headquarters documents?"

Yaeger gave a wolfish grin. "Can Aunt jemima make pancakes?"

He consulted a thick black notebook for a minute, found the insertion he was looking for and punched the number into a pushbbutton telephone connected to a modern link. The Coast Guard computer system answered and accepted Yaeger's access code, and the green block letters swept across the display: "PLEASE STATE YOUR REQUEST."

Yaeger gave Pitt a questioning look.

"Ask for an abstract of title on the Pilottown," Pitt ordered.