They would already have investigated him. They’d know he’d demonstrated against the Vietnam War. They’d know he’d worked for Gene McCarthy in 1968, even though he’d been too young to vote. They’d know he’d circulated petitions calling for Nixon’s impeachment, and that he’d got a thank-you letter from Jerome Waldie, a California Congressman who’d helped lead the charge. Hell, they might even know he’d had a DON’T BLAME ME—I VOTED FOR McGOVERN bumper sticker on his car till somebody—probably an irate Republican—tore it off.

They knew all that stuff. They’d hired him anyway. Now they were stuck with him, and they might regret it. In which case, maybe he had more to worry about than the Glomar Explorer breaking in half and sinking.

The fog came in, and not on little cat feet, either. Jogging on the helipad felt like breathing soup. Visibility shrank to less than half a mile. Jerry knew the ship’s radar could still see clearly, and see farther than the Mark One eyeball could even under perfect conditions. Any other ship out here in the middle of the biggest ocean in the world would carry a radar set, too. They wouldn’t collide, the way the Titanic did with that iceberg.

Jerry knew all that. He worried anyway. Though he liked Mad magazine, he wasn’t Alfred E. Neuman. What, me worry? did not apply. He was a Jew. He was a grad student. Of course he worried, even if that made him a walking double stereotype.

Fog or no fog, the Glomar Explorer’s work went on. The pipe farmers or riggers or whatever the right name for them was had connected the red-painted pipe they called the Dutchman with Clementine. All the other pipes in the hold abaft the moon pool were doubles: two thirty-foot lengths attached to each other. The Dutchman was a single, and thicker than the white sections that would go above it. Since it had hold of the claw’s immense weight, Jerry supposed that was sensible.

Even with the Dutchman attached, the capture vehicle remained connected to the docking legs at the front and back of the moon pool. Some of the divers kept going into and coming out of the water. They would detach Clementine from the docking legs when the claw made its long plunge to the seafloor. And, by some of the bad language floating out of the moon pool, that wasn’t all they were having trouble with.

At lunch—corned beef and cabbage—Jerry asked Steve, “Should we be having problems with the sensors on Clementine’s fingers or legs or whatever you call them so soon?”

Steve sipped from a can of Coke before he answered. “Ideally, we shouldn’t have any trouble at all. Everything should go just the way we planned, and we should start the exploitation phase in a couple of weeks.”