Warren, despite his exhaustion, gaped. Rotterjack seemed puzzled. "What's that have to do with us?" he asked.

"I don't know," Arthur replied.

"Funny damned coincidence," Warren said, shaking his head,

"They're going to hit Venus and Mars?" Rotterjack asked, the implications sinking in slowly.

"Next year," Arthur said.

The presidential science advisor drew his lips together and nodded, staring out the window at passing traffic, light this late hour of the evening. "That can't be coincidence," he said. "What in the name of Christ is going on?"

Chapter 25

25

November 1, Eastern Pacific Time

(November 2, USA)

Wait Samshow moved with a long-accustomed grace on the ladders of the Glomar Discoverer, sliding his hands along the rails as his feet pumped in a blur down the steps, stuffing his chin into his clavicle to remove his leather-brown, freckled, and sun-spotted bald pate from the path of passing bulkheads. Whatever effects of age dogged him on shore vanished; he was more spry at sea than on land. Samshow, a long-legged, narrow-faced bean pole of a man, had spent more than two thirds of his seventy-one years at sea, serving ten years in the Navy from 1942 to 1952, and then moving on to forty years of research in physical oceanography.

Deep in the ship's hold, spaced across an otherwise empty cargo bay, were his present crop of children: three upright, man-high, steel-gray cylindrical gravimeters measuring the gravity gradients of the trench ten thousand meters below. The Discoverer was on its sixth pass over the Ramapo Deep. The sea outside the hull was almost glassy, and the ship moved forward at a steady ten knots, as stable as bedrock, ideal for this kind of work. They could probably get accuracy to within plus or minus two milligals over the average of all six runs.

Samshow descended into the hold, his feet hitting the cork-covered steel deck lightly. His much younger partner, David Sand, smiled at him, face a corpselike green and purple in the glow of the color monitor. Samshow presented the covered aluminum plate he had carried down from the mess.

"What's the bill of fare?" Sand asked. He was half Samshow's age and almost half again his weight, strong and wide-faced, with eyes pale blue, a tiny Scots button of a nose, and a full head of wiry auburn hair. Samshow removed the plate's cover. Deep in the elder oceanographer's thoughts, Sand had become one of many sons; he treated younger assistants with the tough-minded affection he would have bestowed on his own child. Sand knew this, and appreciated it; in his entire career, he would probably have no better teacher, partner, or friend than Walt Samshow.

"Fried sole, spinach pie, and beets," Samshow said. The ship's Filipino cook took pride in his special Western meals, served twice a week.