Something else occurred to Jerry. “The things those other folks built”—yes, he was staying as oblique as he could for as long as he could—“aren’t perfect all the time, either, or what was the object doing on the bottom of the Pacific for however long it was down there?”

“That’s a good point,” Stephen Dole replied. “An important point, I think. We look at all the things the builders can do that we can’t, and sometimes we feel they have to be gods.”

“Chariots of the Gods?” Jerry rolled his eyes. “I read it. All it made me think was, von Däniken didn’t have any real ideas himself, so he didn’t believe ancient people could have had any, either. But what do I know? He’s laughing all the way to the bank.”

“Did you see the movie?” Steve asked.

“No, thank God.”

“It’s worse than the book.”

“They said it couldn’t be done!”

“Oh, it was.” Steve’s smile was lopsided. “It got nominated for a Best Documentary Academy Award, too. Didn’t win, so there’s a little justice in the world. Not enough, but a little.”

“I didn’t know that. I wish I still didn’t. I mean, it’s good that it didn’t win, but it should have got laughed at, not nominated. Hell, it shouldn’t even have got made.”

“‘No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.’ H. L. Mencken was a nasty man in a good many ways, but you’d have a devil of a time persuading me he was wrong about that,” Steve said.

“I heard it ‘of the American people,’” Jerry said.

“I heard it that way, too. I used it in an article that way without checking, and my editor called me on it,” Steve said. “Now I quote it the way Mencken wrote it.”

“Good for you. Good for your editor.” Jerry enjoyed being edited no more than any other halfway sane person did. When you were wrong, though, all you could do was tip your cap and thank the fellow who’d kept you from committing stupidity in public.

After lunch, some of the divers went into the Pacific to secure Clementine—and what Clementine held in its claws—to the Glomar Explorer’s docking legs. Jealousy stabbed at Jerry as they swam down to the moon pool. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to be the one who first saw the Midlothian object for real.