“Sure. What else would we be doing way the devil out here?” As far as a veteran CIA man could, Jack radiated innocence.

And, while all that was going on, the pipe string started coming back into the ship. Things went slowly. The pipe-handling system was at maximum stress. Lowering the string had been easier, since gravity worked with the pipe crew then. Hauling the pipe up again, plus Clementine, plus whatever the Midlothian object weighed, took everything the system had.

Engineers and ordinary sailors prowled through the Glomar Explorer, making sure all watertight doors stayed shut unless someone was actually going through them. Opening steel doors and dogging them shut behind him every few yards annoyed Jerry. The idea that such precautions were important alarmed him.

“When we started doing this, I figured it would take a week—six days if everything went lickety-split.” Dave laughed a self-mocking laugh. “Shows what I knew, doesn’t it?”

“Welcome to Murphy’s Law,” Jerry said.

Dave laughed again, this time on a sour note. “Murphy was a goddamn optimist.”

Jerry laughed, too, not least at himself. If the starship didn’t come to life and sink the Glomar Explorer, and if the overstrained ship didn’t break in half and sink herself, he was happy enough to have smaller things go wrong. The longer he stayed on the CIA’s payroll, the better his savings account liked it.

“How much pipe have we brought up?” he asked Dave.

“About three thousand feet so far,” the recovery director answered. “Doesn’t sound like much for two days’ work, I know, but we’ve been taking it real easy while we’re near max weight. If everything goes right, we’ll pick up steam from now on.”

In lieu of knocking wood, Jerry rapped his knuckles on his own forehead. “And every double we bring in takes off more weight.”

“You got it—something like twenty tons every time,” Dave said. “Of course, when you have thousands of tons on the string, that doesn’t seem like so much.”

“Everett Dirksen said something like that, didn’t he? A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money,” Jerry said.

“He was a piece of work, Everett Dirksen was,” Dave said. Jerry nodded. They could agree on that, even if they might not agree on what kind of piece of work the flamboyant Republican senator had been.