It didn’t sound like much. Quite a few of the things Steve said didn’t sound like much when you first heard them. When you thought for a second, though … Jerry felt warmed, as if by the summer sun that was having trouble getting through the ocean mist here. He couldn’t remember getting a higher compliment from anybody who wasn’t in love with him.

“Hey, man,” he said. “Hey.”

“You just may do,” Steve repeated. “I’ll tell you something else, too. Fifty years from now, I’ll be long gone.”

“Your book won’t. That’s the kind of thing I was talking about.”

“Thanks. Your thinking so means a lot to me. But let me get where I was going. I’ll be long gone, but there’s a decent chance you’ll be an emeritus somewhere, still teaching a class every now and then and maybe with a grad student or two. And you’ll show them some of the old dogs can still learn new tricks.”

Jerry had trouble imagining himself in his thirties, much less his seventies. What would 2024 look like? The politics would have to be better than today’s. They couldn’t very well be any worse!

“Or,” Steve went on in a low voice, “fifty years from now, you may find yourself the ambassador to Alpha Centauri A-IV. How would that be?”

“Insane,” Jerry answered, from the bottom of his heart.

The big question, the one for which the men on the Glomar Explorer had no good answer, was how much the starship weighed. If it was too much heavier than the K-129, something disastrous would happen when the Americans tried to take it off the seafloor.

Maybe one or more of Clementine’s claws would break, letting the spaceship fall back to the bottom. Or maybe the pipe string would snap, and the recoil would break the Explorer’s back. Jerry thought of a breaking rubber band biting his hand. But the forces here were unimaginably bigger. All those millions of pounds hanging from the derrick …

They’d never put anywhere near this much weight on the system when they tested it off the California coast. Even with nothing going wrong, it was straining the Glomar Explorer to the limit, or somewhere close. Some of the ship’s welds—her seams, if you were a landlubber—sprang leaks. The crew watched them warily. Everybody said this was nothing serious. Jerry hoped like hell that was the straight skinny.

When he worried out loud, Steve said, “Worry about why the Russian sub is on the bottom, why don’t you? Worry about why the Midlothian object decided to do that to it. Worry about whether it’ll decide to do that to us. Don’t worry about what we can do if it decides that way, because we can’t do anything.”

“You really know how to cheer a guy up, don’t you?” Jerry said.