“Fine.” Steve held on to his patience with both hands. “That still doesn’t explain the hammer, unless we missed it on the Halibut photos.”

They went over them in the Special Measurements container, both separately and together. The hammer hadn’t been there then. It lay so close to the egg-shaped Midlothian object, it might have slid down that smooth curve before hitting the bottom. The photographs from five years before surely would have picked it up. Only they hadn’t.

“Maybe it really was that dead Russian. Maybe I can get a story out of it—if I make the spaceship into a freighter full of gold or something, I mean.” Listening to himself, Jerry liked the idea. He wrote it down. Then he glanced over at Steve with a sly smile. “Or maybe whatever’s inside the spaceship threw it out there.”

“I hear it looks like an ordinary hammer, like the ones you’d buy at a hardware store,” Steve said. “Either the aliens are just like us or there’s a simpler story.”

A little to Jerry’s disappointment, there was. One of the men who worked in the pipe farm remembered that he’d fumbled a hammer over the rail a week or ten days earlier. The roughneck’s comment was, “Who woulda thought it’d go straight down like that?”

“He’s right,” Jerry said when he heard the story. “Who would’ve thought that?”

“I wouldn’t have,” Steve said. “But now we know. No dead Russians involved.”

“That’s ’cause I haven’t written it yet,” Jerry retorted. He got a chuckle—a small one, but a chuckle—out of the man from the RAND Corporation.

The next day, Clementine went all the way down to the bottom and moved toward the sunken spaceship. The people who knew what the claw would be grappling, Jerry among them, went around with optimistic smiles pasted on their faces. They were the ones who also knew exactly what could go wrong, the ones who’d heard the hot-grease noise that doomed the K-129.

Jerry’d never before been in a situation where he knew he might die very soon. His father had fought in Italy during World War II; he had friends who’d come back from Vietnam. One of them had been on a river gunboat that hit a mine. Jerry’d asked him what it was like.

“It wasn’t like anything,” Bill told him. “One second, we were chugging along on routine patrol. Next thing I knew, I was in the goddamn Mekong with my pants full.”

He hadn’t understood that in his belly when he heard it. He did now. It wasn’t something the writer in him wanted to analyze, not anymore. His balls kept trying to crawl up into his belly. Somebody’d fished Bill out of the Mekong. If he went into the North Pacific, who’d rescue him?