The Russians on the SB-10? Would he want that? Would it matter? Or would the starship fry them, too, to make good and sure not even one survived to tell the tale? Those were all questions he hoped he didn’t have to answer. And he understood his old man and his buddies better than he had before.

Because of what the Glomar Explorer was doing, she had to hold her position above the Midlothian object very precisely. The SB-10 chose that moment to make run after run at and around the bigger ship.

We are maneuvering with difficulty, the Explorer signaled to the tug: another good-sized understatement. The SB-10 paid no attention and gave no sign of understanding. John Porter’s comments had made Jerry imagine the Russians as intelligent aliens. Now the SB-10’s behavior reinforced that.

Because John and Dave and Dale were up to their eyebrows in problems bigger than soothing an anxious grad student, Jerry asked Steve, “Do you think they know what we’re up to right now?”

“They haven’t shown any sign of it,” the older man said. “Best guess is, they’re just making pests of themselves. I’ve heard stories about Cold War ocean games that would curl anybody’s hair.”

Jerry had heard stories like that, too, mostly secondhand from oceanographers who’d got whale song tapes from Navy personnel. He hadn’t known how much to believe. Now he had the feeling the swabbies were playing things down, not puffing them up.

“Let’s hope you’re right,” he said. “Let’s hope they don’t run into us, too, ’cause I bet they don’t have insurance.” He’d got rear-ended like that himself, coming off the San Diego Freeway on his way to campus. The Rambler’s trunk had a smoothed-out, Bondoed-over dent because he’d paid a fly-by-night guy twenty bucks to fix it instead of shelling out plenty more at a body shop.

By the way Steve’s mouth twisted, he’d met at least one uninsured driver himself. “Yes, let’s,” he said, and left it there.

Just to delight everyone on the Glomar Explorer even further, the guys in the Control container decided they needed one final double added to the pipe string, to give Clementine’s breakout legs more play when they rose up and broke whatever suction was holding the spaceship to the seafloor. The trouble was, the pipe wranglers had to disconnect the hydraulics to attach the sixty feet of pipe, then hook things up again once the attachment was made.