But if they got it aboard the Glomar Explorer, if they knocked on the airlock door and somebody—or something—answered, then what? Jerry realized he’d left one scenario out when he was cooking up his list for Dale. What if the people on the salvage ship started quarreling about what to do next?

Yeah, what if? Jerry wanted to thump himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand for not thinking of that sooner. Some writer he was, if he didn’t come out with plot twists like that as automatically as he breathed! Then again, Dale wouldn’t have been happy to find that scenario on the list. Maybe not dreaming it up wasn’t so bad.

Steve chose that exact moment to say, “A penny for your thoughts.”

“Thoughts? I’m supposed to have thoughts? Man, are you overpaying!” Jerry said, looking as impressively blank as he could. Steve laughed, so he must have been impressive enough. And some clowning defused a moment that could have been awkward or even dangerous. Once more, Jerry contemplated the uses of hypocrisy.

They got Clementine down to about a hundred feet below the Glomar Explorer’s hull and thought about uncoupling the capture vehicle from the docking legs. Before they could, the weather went south on them again. Wind and waves picked up, and everything had to stop. Jerry’d never seen a literal tempest in a teapot, but he sure saw one in the moon pool. Waves beat on its steel walls with a fury he’d never dreamt of in such a confined space. He hoped the designers foresaw that kind of battering. They must have; the ship didn’t break up.

Every lost hour made the CIA people and their contract engineers fidget and twitch. They had a schedule and wanted to stick with it. The Global Marine roughnecks, veterans of offshore oil-drilling platforms, took it all in stride. “It’s the ocean, for Chrissake. It’s bigger’n we are an’ stronger’n we are, so what the fuck you gonna do?” one of them said.

“Sing it, Leroy!” a friend of his said. Leroy just grinned, the way anybody would who’d just said something too obvious to need saying.

One of the engineers working with Clementine went into the sick bay. The Glomar Explorer had a doctor and a couple of paramedics aboard, along with equipment that wouldn’t have shamed a small hospital on dry land. If anyone broke his arm or needed his appendix yanked, the medical staff could handle it.

Word soon got out that the engineer had had a heart attack. The onboard doc described it as mild. “I don’t know about that, man,” Jerry said to Steve when he got the news. “Isn’t a mild heart attack a heart attack that happens to somebody else? Sounds like being a little bit pregnant.”