They had to be images, Jerry realized. The actual Clementine wasn’t on the bottom yet. But the operators seemed as intent on what they were doing and as worried about it as if this were the real thing. Jerry’d hardly talked with them and their buddies on the voyage. They hung together when they ate. When they weren’t in the messroom, they stayed in their cabins or here.

Quietly, so as not to disturb them, Steve said, “They’re simulators, of course. With models of the Midlothian object and Clementine, the computer can simulate the forces involved in the capture. Seems like the genuine article, though, doesn’t it?”

“It sure does!” Jerry whistled, soft and low. “Beats the crap out of Pong, you know? And I’ve blown a lot of quarters on Pong. If you could make a video game with this kind of detail, you’d be a gazillionaire.”

“Not gonna happen,” one of the operators said, without looking away from what he was doing. Jerry thought his name was Paul, but wouldn’t have sworn to it. “These consoles are way too complex and way too expensive for the civilian market.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Jerry said and then, as a new thought struck him, “Is there anything in the simulator that lets you game out what to do in case the, uh, Midlothian object starts acting up when you grab it?”

“You mean, if it does something but doesn’t zap us the way it zapped the K-129?” Paul said.

“Um … That would be good, wouldn’t it?”

“That would be real good if we ever want to draw our Social Security checks, uh-huh,” the operator said. Jerry had heard these guys were from the NSA, which, he gathered, was an intelligence agency even more intelligent or spookier or more secret than the CIA. He was learning all kinds of things on the Glomar Explorer, none of which had anything to do with whale songs. His hydrophone hadn’t picked up anything interesting, either.

The other operator (was he Eric? or was Eric on the other shift?) spoke up: “No, that isn’t in the program. Maybe they couldn’t do it, maybe they didn’t think of it, or maybe they just figured we’ve already got enough to worry about.”

“Not like they’re wrong,” Paul said. A second later, he added, “Shit!” Something on his simulator hadn’t worked the way he wanted it to.

“When you start doing the real thing, will it feel like this?” Jerry asked.

“I think so,” Paul answered as he fiddled with knobs and levers to fix whatever had gone wrong on the screen. “It’s supposed to. These are the views we’ll be getting from the cameras on Clementine. The simulator is even set up to make things get blurry fast when you move farther away from them, the way they do underwater.”