“Oh, there is a difference,” Steve answered. “If you have a bad heart attack, they bury you at sea.”

“Mrmp.” Jerry thought that over, then nodded. “Yeah, guess you’re right.”

Steve surprised him by smiling widely enough to show a gold crown on one back tooth. “I like it when people tell me that,” he said. “Not because it makes me feel smart or anything. Because it means I’m dealing with somebody reasonable, somebody who doesn’t have to think he’s right no matter what the evidence says.”

“You don’t get far in the sciences with that attitude. When new evidence comes along, it’ll falsify a hypothesis no matter how much you like it.” Jerry paused for a moment. “Some people are stubborn anyway, though, aren’t they? The evidence for plate tectonics and continental drift looks pretty damn good, but some of the older oceanographers and geologists don’t want to see it.”

“I was going to say that, in case you didn’t,” Steve replied. “I would have used the fight about evolution in the nineteenth century, but your example’s a good one, too. Scientists aren’t just scientists. They’re human beings, and they do all the dumb things human beings do.”

Two days later, Jerry came out of the messroom after lunch (some of the best veal cutlets he’d ever had) to find the ship in an uproar. He ran into Dave Schoals in a passageway—almost but not quite literally. Dave was wearing a plastic hard hat and a worried expression. “Everybody’s running every which way. What’s going on?” Jerry asked.

“We got a distress call from a British freighter heading to L.A. from Yokohama,” Schoals answered. “One of their people has a history of heart trouble. They think he’s had another coronary, and they don’t have a doctor on board. They want to know if we can check him over for them.”

“Oy!” Jerry said. “What did we tell them?”

“It’s a man’s life. Have to say yes to something like that.” Dave looked as if he wished the Glomar Explorer could have answered no. “We’ll send Doc Borden over to their ship to see what’s up. If we have to, we’ll bring their guy back here. It’s not something we want to do from the security point of view, but refusing would blow our cover from here to Moscow.”

“The ocean’s acting all nice and friendly, too,” Jerry remarked.

“Right,” Dave said tightly. Waves were running at eight or ten feet, keeping things too rough to let the pipe farmers lower Clementine any farther. The bad weather was supposed to be coming from a tropical storm named Gilda. Wherever it was coming from, it was driving the technical types bananas.