“Oh.” Steve laughed again, on a slightly different note. “Yeah, I heard we had that along, to go with the Westerns and the war movies and the spy films and the sci-fi. How was it?”

Talking about a porno flick with a guy old enough to be his father didn’t stand high on Jerry’s Things I Want to Do list. “I don’t think anybody in it will win a best-acting Oscar,” he said, which was true enough. Then he trotted out a joke he’d heard from one of the TAs who shared the office with him: “They say Nixon watched it about a hundred times at the White House, though.”

“Why did he do that?” Steve asked obligingly.

“He wanted to get it down Pat.”

Steve winced. “That’s—pretty bad.” Now it was his turn to pause. After a moment, he resumed, saying, “You may want to be careful about who you tell that joke to.”

“I noticed that myself, uh-huh,” Jerry replied. Most of the guys who’d been in there watching Linda Lovelace do her thing and several guys’ things were from the pipe-laying crew or divers. The guys who’d send the thick steel pipe string down to the ocean floor were Southern rednecks, and proud of it. By contrast, the divers—rent-a-frogs, they called themselves—were neat and quiet and watchful. Jerry didn’t know they came out of the SEALs or some similar program, but he would have bet that way.

They and the men who worked with the thick steel pipe made no secret about believing Richard Nixon was getting railroaded. Jerry didn’t see how any reasonable human being could think that way, but he did see they were liable to whale the snot out of him if he said so. He hadn’t been in a fight since the sixth grade, and he’d lost that one.

For that matter, the roughnecks and divers seemed downright sane next to the Global Marine officer who skippered the Explorer. In the messroom, Tom Gresham informed anyone who would listen that Henry Kissinger spied for the Russians. Jerry hoped he had better sense about engines and navigation than he did about politics.

He peeled off the clothes he wore during the day and donned his elegant night attire. Steve paid no attention to that, but went back to his book. As Jerry’d seen since the locker room where he changed into and out of gym clothes for junior high PE, guys—straight guys, anyway—didn’t pay much attention to one another’s naked or nearly naked bodies.