Deeper and deeper sank Clementine, on the end of a string of pipes made of the same kind of steel that went into naval gun barrels. When the claw got about 13,000 feet down, a sonar mounted on it detected the seafloor. Dave Schoals didn’t seem surprised about that—“It’s doing what it’s designed to do,” he told anyone who’d listen—but he did seem pleased.

Extending the pipe string came with adventures, some small, some larger. One of the larger ones was a cable snapping and a thirty-ton counterweight crashing to—luckily, not through—the Glomar Explorer’s deck. Even more luckily, no one happened to be standing under it when it did. While the crew made repairs, Clementine sank no deeper.

“Never a dull moment, is there?” Jerry said to Dave Schoals.

The recovery director looked at him—looked through him, really. “We want them all to stay dull,” he said. “Most of them do. We try to keep the exciting ones from getting too far out of hand.”

“Right,” Jerry said, and quickly went off to look for something, anything, to do somewhere else. When people talked about the pipe string, they talked about thousands of tons. Well, thousands of tons were millions of pounds, and Dave acted as if he were carrying all of them on his shoulders.

Atlas of the CIA, Jerry thought. But it wasn’t funny, or not for long. Dave had been busting his ass on this project for years. He wasn’t a smart-mouthed Johnny-come-lately, the way Jerry was. He’d helped design something that could bring up a starship from three miles underwater: the kind of thing any sensible human being would call impossible. Impossible or not, the Glomar Explorer was getting close to doing it. No wonder Dave was under a little bit of pressure right now. Yeah, no wonder at all.

Assume Clementine didn’t break with the starship halfway to the surface. Assume the starship didn’t decide it wouldn’t let itself be brought up, and that it didn’t do unto the Glomar Explorer as it had done to the K-129. Assume it actually lay in the moon pool, with the gates closed under it.

Then and only then would Jerry and Steve become possibly useful members of the crew. Till then, the most they could do was stay out of the way and try not to act like too big a jerk or an asshole. Steve had worked that out a lot sooner than Jerry had.

True, he’d been with the project longer. True, he was older and more practiced at getting along with people than Jerry was. Most of the human race fell into that latter category, as Jerry was uneasily aware. Another of the reasons he loved Anna so much was that she put up with him when he did something stupid without meaning to.