“Well, hush my mouth,” Jerry mumbled. He was glad his long hair would keep everybody in the messroom from seeing how red his ears were. They felt on fire.

“In the real world, of course, not everything works the way you expect it to,” the man from RAND went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “If things have to go wrong, I suppose it’s better they go wrong up here, where we can do something about it, not down on the ocean floor.”

“Yeah.” Jerry made himself nod. But what if the sensors break up here, we replace them, and then the replacement parts fail when we need ’em most? He didn’t ask the question out loud. He could see for himself that that would be doubleplusungood. And he was superstitious enough not to want to jinx anything.

Precise as usual, Stephen Dole continued, “And I’m not the right man to answer you anyway. Like you, I’m here for what happens after Clementine comes back to us. I didn’t have anything to do with designing it. A good thing, too—I’m not qualified. If you want the details, Dave Schoals is your guy.”

“Well, maybe not,” Jerry said, reflecting that there were ways things could be worse after all. Putting Dave’s back up again was definitely one of them.

Steve glanced around. No one was sitting close to them, and nobody seemed to be paying them any special attention. The older man still lowered his voice. “You aren’t in trouble, in case you think you are. Dave understands that your perspective on things is different from his. He understands it’s different from most people’s in his line of work.”

He understands you’re not a professional spy, Jerry translated. If he’d been saying that to someone else himself, he would have gone, Dave gets where you’re coming from. But, again, he and Steve didn’t always speak the same kind of English.

All that came with working alongside—working for—people who were older and way more conservative than he was. In a way, he’d understood as much from the moment John P. pushed past him and into his apartment. In another way, every day brought new surprises, few of them pleasant. He looked across the table at Steve. The man from the RAND Corporation was no different from the others, not in any important way. He was just quieter and more polite about what he was.

As long as the Hughes Glomar Explorer stayed out here in the middle of the North Pacific, none of the frictions mattered much. They all had the same job to do, and they’d work together to do it till the starship down below got hauled up into the moon pool … or till raising it went irretrievably wrong.