“That’s right. I mean, I was till all this happened.”

“You’ve got an excuse in that case. Doing doctoral work’ll drive anybody halfway round the bend. More than halfway. Finishing my dissertation isn’t the smallest reason I’m single again.”

“Yeah?” Jerry said. Schoals nodded. That wasn’t the kind of thing Jerry wanted to hear. Anna was much less enthusiastic about the academic life than he was. He hoped that would work out in time (he also hoped that making at least as much money as she did would give him more clout, or anyway more talking points, in the relationship than he had now).

Maybe his flinch was visible. Dave got back to the matter at hand: “I don’t think they can find out too much. That we’re using a lot of heavy-duty hydraulic stuff, sure. But not what we’re using it for, even the K-129.” He waited a beat, the way a stand-up comedian would have. “I hope.”

“Okay. I’m glad,” Jerry said. These guys did have veins of humanity streaking the hard, dutiful, secret rock of their souls. They had them, but the stuff could be goddamn rough to extract.

On the morning of July thirtieth, Clementine hung about a hundred feet above the Midlothian object. The Glomar Explorer maneuvered ever so slightly to position the claw just where the men in the Control container wanted it to be. Then those guys would do what they did, and things would either work or they wouldn’t.

Lunch that day was a choice of lamb chops or sirloin tips. Jerry was working meat off the bone of a lamb chop when Dale Neuwirth stood up and clinked his fork against his glass till the crowded messroom quieted. Everybody eyed the mission director, for more reasons than one. Dale didn’t usually act that way; he tried to be one of the guys. Not now. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out something was up.

He looked around the messroom. “Some of you will have a notion of what I’m going to tell you now. Most of you won’t,” he said. “When we bring Clementine back up into the moon pool—and yes, that’s when, not if—she won’t have a big chunk of a Russian submarine in her claws. She’ll be holding something else. Yes, the sub is down there. Yes, it’s important. But if everything works the way we want it to, what we bring up will make the submarine hardly matter at all.