The next morning, the ship’s newsletter reported that John Dean had got one to four years for his role in the Watergate coverup. It also said that John Ehrlichman had got twenty months for perjury and conspiracy a few days earlier. The paranoid part of Jerry wondered whether the people who put the newsletter together had held off on mentioning Ehrlichman’s sentence sooner because they hoped it was only an isolated incident. With Nixon having to turn over more and more tapes, that seemed a forlorn hope, but who would be sure of anything in these crazy times?

Slowly but pretty surely, more doubles came off the pipe string. Operations did go better as the weight the system was pulling against shrank. People who didn’t have to be there, though, were strongly discouraged from venturing anywhere near the moon pool.

“What the fuck you think you’re doing, dumbshit?” a rent-a-frog yelled at an engineer who forgot or thought he could ignore those instructions. The guy with the slide rule clipped to his belt retreated in confused dismay.

There but for the grace of common sense go I, Jerry thought, as the red-faced engineer stumbled past him. He looked down at the industrial carpeting under his sneakers so the other man didn’t have to respond to him. That was the only comfort he could give.

He was walking around the helipad the following morning, working off some of his high-calorie breakfast, when he noticed the docking legs had quietly come up forty or fifty feet. He took that for a good sign: the guys who knew about such things had to think the Glomar Explorer was less likely to turn turtle now.

Which left only the Midlothian object to worry about. Only! The spaceship was more than halfway up from the bottom. It hadn’t done anything but lie in Clementine’s claws. It might have been as dead as the K-129.

It might have been, but Jerry didn’t think it was.

All hell broke loose the next day. Not on the ship; pipe kept coming up steadily, if still slower than people whose opinions mattered would have liked. Jerry wasn’t one of those people. As long as Clementine didn’t break and drop the spaceship back into the abyss, he wasn’t complaining.

In Washington, though … Jerry didn’t find out about it till the following morning, but he’d got used to that. There’d been a Doonesbury where one congressman at the Watergate hearings groused to his colleague, “If only he’d knock over a bank or something…”

“By George, we’d have him then!” the second congressman replied.