“I don’t think that’s been decided yet,” Dave said carefully. “You’re right—we’d still be here. It might be technically feasible. But the thing is, this ship is doing an engineering job like nothing anybody’s ever tried before. It’s designed to do that once. If everything goes right, I think it can do that. A lot of smart people have put a lot of time and effort and skull sweat into giving it a decent chance. You with me so far?”

“Oh, yeah,” Jerry said. Dave would have been one of the people who put in that skull sweat. A slide rule in a battered leather case lay on his steel desk. It would have seen hard use while he tried to work out how to bring a giant egg up from three miles underwater.

“Good deal. What you need to understand is, we’re playing with humongous forces here. The pipe string itself weighs something like four thousand tons. It’s lowering Clementine to the bottom, and Clementine adds another two thousand tons. All that weight means the pipes will stretch something like forty feet by the time everything gets put together.”

“Whoa!” Jerry said.

“Yeah. Whoa!” Dave agreed. “Then there’s the Midlothian object to worry about. As long as it isn’t any heavier than Clementine, we should be okay. But if the pipe string breaks anywhere…”

When he didn’t go on, Jerry asked the morbidly curious question: “What happens then? Do I want to know?”

“If that happens, the recoil force may break the ship in half. We made damn sure we have good, watertight compartmentalization fore and aft. That may keep the pieces afloat long enough for people to get into the lifeboats. It may.”

“Oh,” Jerry said, and then, “I’m not sure I did want to know.”

Dave Schoals’s smile was distinctly lopsided. “You aren’t the only one who feels that way, believe me. So my guess is, we may just leave the sub down there even if we do have a weather window. We might get lucky once. It’s a lot less obvious we can get lucky twice.”

“Gotcha.” Jerry said his good-byes and left. He was as sure as he could be without seeing it with his own eyes that Dave was writing on a file card or a sheet of notebook paper. Steinberg. Will need special surveillance after mission completed. Spoke in favor of information sharing with USSR. Suspicion of political unreliability.