“Good,” Hagop Krikorian said, which surprised Jerry. “Even if it didn’t, I wouldn’t like it, not even a little bit. Strip-mining is bad enough on dry land. On the ocean floor, where all the sediment you kick up goes into the water and circulates? You have to be crazy!” He added something in what might have been Armenian.

“Yeah.” Jerry hadn’t really thought about that. He realized he should have. He also realized the professor had less to worry about than he feared, since that wasn’t really a mining machine the pipe string had lowered to the bottom. He couldn’t say anything about what it was, especially over the phone. He did say, “The gadget didn’t work as well as they wanted it to. I’m not supposed to tell anybody much, but I can say that.”

“Breaks my heart,” Krikorian said. “Did you get any decent recordings out of it, at least?”

“Afraid not. Engine noise and machinery noise kind of ruined things. I did get more money than I would have from a year of TAing, though.”

“Grad school is a miserable business. You think it’s bad now…”

To Jerry’s relief, Professor Krikorian didn’t launch into more tales of how rotten things had been in his day. That let the current sufferer say, “Can I bring the hydrophone up to campus today so I don’t have to worry about it in my apartment anymore?”

“Sure. Bring it here. I’ll be in the office till about four.”

“I’ll be there inside an hour. When I come, will you give me the form authorizing eight units of directed study from you?” In something straight out of Catch-22, Jerry had to be an enrolled student to serve as a teaching assistant. That killed more than half a month’s paycheck by itself.

“Yeah, sure. We’ll dot the i’s and cross the t’s.” Krikorian sounded as disgusted with university foolishness as anyone to whom it didn’t apply very well could. Then again, he had his own bureaucratic barbed wire to cut through.

Jerry put the hydrophone in his car and drove up to UCLA. He paid to park on campus, to save himself from having to lug it very far. There were free spots around the university to grab, but you had to show up early and you had to be willing to walk.

He delivered the instrument and collected his form. He was glad his advisor didn’t pump him for details about the Glomar Explorer’s supposed nodule vacuum. He had none, not for a fictitious device.