“You knew this job was dangerous when you took it,” Steve retorted.

“Thank you, Super Chicken,” Jerry said. The man from the RAND Corporation looked at him as if he’d started spouting some of his Swahili. Well, it wasn’t as if Jerry’d watched Super Chicken, either; the cartoon first aired after he’d graduated from high school. But he had younger cousins who’d been crazy about it, so he knew the catchphrases. He added, “When I got into this game, remember, I just thought we were going after the K-129. You know—nuclear missiles, nuclear torpedoes. The ordinary kind of shit.”

“We don’t talk about that much, for obvious reasons,” Steve said. “We talk about the other even less, for even more obvious reasons. Too many people would either say we were crazy or start shouting about it when we want to keep it quiet more than anything.”

“I don’t shout. Hell, a lot of the time I hardly even talk,” Jerry replied, remembering how Anna got on his case for not opening up more. “As for the other, I’ve been into science fiction since I found the Miss Pickerell stories and the Mushroom Planet books in the third grade.”

“Science fiction is one thing. When it turns into—well, into the Glomar Explorer, that’s something else.”

“Yeah, this is real, all right.” Jerry drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. He heard the small noise that made. His fingertips felt the nubbly nylon of the chair’s upholstery. He didn’t think any drug could give him such detailed and trivial hallucinations. “The other thing that’s real is, we’re going to try grabbing the … the object in the next few days.”

“Depending on how much it weighs, everything ought to go well,” Steve said. “Everybody in Control is confident we can make the pickup without too much trouble.”

“Ought to be second nature to those guys, with all the simulator practice they’ve had.” Jerry said not a word about frying bacon. If that happened, it happened. Everybody on the Glomar Explorer who knew about the possibility seemed resigned to it, Jerry hardly less than the men who’d lived with it longer.

His writerly part told him he ought to be making notes—at least mental ones—about the feeling. You knew it could happen to you, you hoped like hell it didn’t, and in spite of the shadow you got on as best you could with what you had to do.

But his writerly part hadn’t been working very well since he found out about the Midlothian object. Part of that was learning he’d need to get his stuff vetted from here on out before he submitted it. And part was sheer bogglement. You didn’t, he couldn’t, imagine himself playing a role in anything like this.

Only he was.