“Pay attention, for Chrissake!” By the way the diver said it, anyone who didn’t pay women microscopically close attention was probably a queer and certainly not to be trusted. Jerry wondered how he was with women he actually knew. That might prove a different story.

Jerry had never seen the women on the SB-10 taking pictures of the Glomar Explorer. They didn’t seem to do a lot on deck, but nobody on the tug seemed to do a lot on deck. The men went around in dungarees, and often left their shirts off. The foggy middle of the North Pacific didn’t seem like a great place to grab a tan. Then again, next to Petropavlovsk or Vladivostok it probably felt like Palm Springs.

He knew something about the two Russian cities because they were both ports. Anything that had to do with the ocean bumped up against what he’d been studying till this mad venture turned his life upside down and inside out. He knew Petropavlovsk lay on the Kamchatka Peninsula because that was a peninsula … and because Kamchatka was an important province to hold when you played Risk. About what went on fifty miles inland from Vladivostok he had no idea.

He’d never figured he would need to worry about it, either. But that was before John P. banged on his door one afternoon. Now … Now everything was different.

This container was another one with a keypad next to the door. The sign above the latch said CONTROL. Every time Jerry saw it, he wanted to giggle. It made him flash on Get Smart, which he’d watched religiously when he was in high school.

If they had Barbara Feldon in there … That would be far out, as a matter of fact. She’d seriously carbonated his hormones back in the day.

Steve’s voice returned him to the here-and-now: “Depending on what happens when Clementine grabs, you may have business in here.” He didn’t say what Clementine would be grabbing, not where anyone else might hear him. He did punch a code into the keypad. “I’ll give you this string when we’re back in our cabin. It’s another one you need to memorize.”

“I can do that,” Jerry said, as Steve opened the door. People dealing with the Midlothian object put as little in writing as they could. What did get written down was often intentionally misleading, like the date on the tape cassette that recorded the K-129’s last moments.

Inside, the Control container had a lot more electronics than the one called Special Measurements. Two guys sat hunched in front of computer monitors, each tensely maneuvering an image of Clementine toward an image of the sunken spaceship. Or were they images? They looked as realistic as anything you were likely to see on a TV screen.