How many people at the Watergate hearings had said at this point in time when they meant now, said it over and over again till the ugly phrase escaped into the language at large? Normally, hearing it would have annoyed Jerry a lot. Now he noticed and then forgot it. He had bigger things to worry about. “How do you sink something from three miles down in the Pacific?” he asked. His mind’s ear replayed that horrible bacon-frying noise.

“That’s an excellent question, Mr., ah, Steinberg. If there are no other questions, class is dismissed,” Stephen Dole said. “Seriously, we have no idea. We’re going to try to raise the spaceship and find out, though. People who get paid to figure these things out have decided that this takes priority over the K-129. I think they’re right. Don’t you?”

“I … guess so,” Jerry said slowly. “But what if it doesn’t like that? What if it treats us the way it treated the Russian submarine?”

“In that case, among other things, our beneficiaries collect on our insurance policies. The effort was deemed more important than the risk.”

“Who decided that for me?” Jerry asked.

“This project has approval up to the very highest level. You can be sure of that,” Steve said.

“You mean the President?”

“The very highest level,” the man from RAND repeated.

Considering what Jerry thought of Richard Nixon, that didn’t seem recommendation enough. He asked, “How did you guys pick me, anyway?”

“You’re an expert on the ocean. You know several human languages. Your mind is loose enough to let you succeed at writing science fiction. Who’s likely to be better qualified to communicate with aliens, if there are aliens inside the object there?” Steve spread his hands. He made it sound natural, even inevitable.

It didn’t feel that way to Jerry. “My mind is blown, is what my mind is.” He didn’t smoke a lot of grass. He’d steered clear of acid and coke and uppers and downers. His mind was blown anyway. He added, “‘If there are aliens’? You don’t know? We don’t?”

“No. The … the weapon that sank the K-129 could have been automated. It could have been the last gasp of dying machinery. One other thing we don’t know is how long the object’s lain at the bottom of the Pacific.”

Jerry looked at some of the photos again. “Not much sediment on it. No more than is on the sub. Maybe even less.”

“If it can sink a submarine three miles above it in a way we don’t begin to understand, why can’t it keep itself clean?”

“Because—” Jerry broke off. “You got me. We don’t know anything, do we?”

“Know anything? Jerry, we don’t even suspect anything. Except that it’s there,” Steve said. Jerry nodded. It was there, all right—and the world would never be the same.

III