Steve had said something; Jerry realized he had no idea what. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling foolish. “Try that again. I was lost inside my own head.”

“I said, we’re lucky in a way to be raising the Midlothian object and not the submarine. The K-129 is on its side on the bottom. We’d have to dig into the sediments under it to break suction and lift. And we don’t know how sticky or how hard the seafloor there is. The Glomar II was supposed to find out, but that experiment failed.”

“Damn!” Jerry said—he was paying attention now.

“Uh-huh.” Steve nodded. “But it matters less with the spaceship. Because of its shape, the front and back or top and bottom or whatever they are are raised off the bottom. The outer claws can get under them without worrying about the mud or rock. Only the middle one has to take the sediment into account, and it’s thicker than the others.”

“They thought of everything when they designed Clementine!” Jerry said admiringly. He broke into off-key song: “In a canyon, in a cavern / Excavating for a mine!” He wanted to change musical styles, à la Tom Lehrer, but consideration for Steve’s eardrums persuaded him not to try it.

“We’ll know what we’ll know pretty soon, all right,” Steve said. “Until we do, everything feels like anticlimax.”

“It sure does, here and in Washington,” Jerry said. The House Rules Committee had passed three articles of impeachment, while turning down two others. Next stage was votes on the passed articles by the whole House. Barring a miracle or a resignation, Richard Nixon would become only the second president to be formally impeached. If he was, the Senate would try him, and looked almost sure to convict him and remove him from office.

“Never a dull moment,” Steve said. “Whoever the president is, though, he’ll have to deal with what we do after we take the Midlothian object on board … or with what it does to us if it decides it doesn’t feel like getting taken on board.”

“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Or that.”

So the worry worm wiggled in Steve’s mind, too, did it? The man from the RAND Corporation held his cards very close to his chest. Finding out that he did worry about what the sunken spaceship might do when the Hughes Glomar Explorer tried to grab hold of it made Jerry’s own thumping heart and sour stomach oddly easier for him to handle.

Suppose it sinks us, he thought. What does the United States do then? He wasn’t sure the USA would do anything. The Glomar Explorer had tried to hassle a ship not of American registry in, or under, international waters, when the ship hadn’t done anything to America. Pretending the whole thing never happened might be the smartest thing to do.