"Damned shame we can't get out and walk around," Gunn said as he stepped back. "No telling what we might find out there."

    "Same thing you'd find in the middle of the Mojave Desert," Giordino grunted. "Absolutely zilch." He reached up and tapped a gauge. "Colder temperature though. I read a rousing thirty-four-point-eight degrees Fahrenheit."

    "A great place to visit," Woodson said, "but you wouldn't want to spend your golden years there."

    "Anything show on sonar?" Gunn asked.

    Giordino nodded at a large green screen in the middle of the panel. The reflected pattern of the terrain was flat. "Nothing ahead or to the sides. The profile hasn't wavered for several hours."

    Gunn wearily removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Okay, gentlemen, our mission is as good as ended. We'll give it another ten hours, then we surface." Almost as a reflex action, he looked up at the overhead panel. "Is Mother still with us?"

    Giordino nodded. "Mother is hanging in there."

    He needed only to glance at the fluctuating needle on the transducer instrument to know that the mother ship, a surface support tender, was continuously tracking the Sappho I on sonar.

    "Make contact," Gunn said, "and signal Mother that we'll begin our ascent at oh-nine hundred hours. That should leave them plenty of time to load us aboard and take the Sappho I in tow before sunset."

    "I've almost forgotten what a sunset looks like," Woodson murmured. "It's off to the beach to recapture a suntan and ogle all those gorgeous bikini-clad honeys for Papa Woodson. No more of these deep-sea funny farms for me."

    "Thank God, the end is in sight," Giordino said. "Another week cooped up in this overgrown wiener and I'll start talking to the potted plants."

    Woodson looked at him. "We don't have any potted plants."

    "You get the picture."

    Gunn smiled. "Everybody deserves a good rest. You men have put on a fine show. The data we've compiled should keep the lab boys busy for a long time."

    Giordino turned to Gunn, gave him a long look, and spoke slowly "This has been one hell of a weird mission, Rudi."

    "I don't get your meaning," Gunn said.

    "A poorly cast drama is what I mean. Take a good look at your crew." He gestured to the four men working in the aft section of the submersible-Ben Drummer, a lanky Southerner with a deep Alabama drawl; Rick Spencer, a short, blond-haired Californian who whistled constantly through clenched teeth; Sam Merker, as cosmopolitan and citified as a Wall Street broker; and Henry Munk, a quiet, droopy-eyed wit who clearly wished he were anywhere but on the Sappho I "Those clowns aft, you, Woodson, and myself; we're all engineers, nuts-and-bolts mechanics. There isn't a Ph.D. in the lot."

    "The first men on the moon weren't intellectuals, either," Gunn countered. "It takes the nuts-and-bolts mechanics to perfect the equipment. You guys have proven the Sappho I; you've demonstrated her capabilities. Let the next ride go to the oceanographers. As for us, this mission will go down in the books as a great scientific achievement."

    "I am not," Giordino declared pontifically, "cut out to be a hero."

    "Neither am I, pal," Woodson added. "But you've got to admit it beats hell out of selling life insurance."

    "The drama of it all escapes him," Gunn said. "Think of the stories you can tell your girl friends. Think of the enraptured looks on their pretty faces when you tell them how you unerringly piloted the greatest undersea probe of the century."

    "Unerringly?" Giordino said. "Then suppose you tell me why I'm running this scientific marvel around in circles five hundred miles off our scheduled course?"

    Gunn shrugged. "Orders."

    Giordino stared at him. "We're supposed to be under the Labrador Sea. Instead, Admiral Sandecker changes our course at the last minute and makes us chase all over the abyssal plains below the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. It doesn't make sense."

    Gunn smiled a sphinx-like smile. For several moments none of the men spoke, but Gunn didn't require a concentrated dose of ESP to know the questions that were running through their minds. They were, he was certain, thinking what he was thinking. Like himself, they were three months back in time and two thousand miles in distance at the headquarters of the National Underwater and Marine Agency in Washington, D.C., where Admiral James Sandecker, chief director of the agency, was describing the most incredible undersea operation of the decade.

    "God damn," Admiral Sandecker had thundered. "I'd give up a year's salary if I could join you men."

    A figure of speech, Giordino reflected. Next to Sandecker, Ebenezer Scrooge spent money like a drunken sailor. Giordino relaxed in a deep leather sofa and tuned into the admiral's briefing, while idly blowing smoke rings between puffs on a giant cigar, lifted from a box on Sandecker's immense desk when everyone's attention was focused on a wall map of the Atlantic Ocean.

    "Well, there she is." Sandecker rapped the pointer loudly on the map for the second time. "The Lorelei Current. She's born off the western tip of Africa, follows the mid-Atlantic ridge north, then curves easterly between Baffin Island and Greenland, and then dies in the Labrador Sea."

    Giordino said "I don't hold a degree in oceanography, Admiral, but it would seem that the Lorelei converges with the Gulf Stream."

    "Not hardly. The Gulf Stream is surface water. The Lorelei is the coldest, heaviest water in the world's oceans, averaging fourteen thousand feet in depth."

    "Then the Lorelei crosses under the Gulf Stream," Spencer said softly. It was the first time in the briefing he had spoken.

    "That seems reasonable." Sandecker paused, smiled benevolently, then continued "The ocean is basically made up of two layers-a surface or upper layer, heated by the sun and thoroughly churned by winds, and a cold, very dense layer consisting of intermediate, deep and bottom water. And the two never mix."

    "Sounds very dull and forbidding," Munk said. "The mere fact that some character with a black sense of humor named the current after a Rhine nymph who lured sailors onto the rocks makes it the last place I'd want to visit."

    A grim smile crawled slowly over Sandecker's griffin face. "Get used to the name, gentlemen, because deep in the Lorelei's gut is where we're going to spend fifty days. Where you're going to spend fifty days."

    "Doing what?" Woodson asked defiantly.

    "The Lorelei Current Drift Expedition is exactly what it sounds like. You men will descend in a deepwater submersible five hundred miles northwest of the coast of Dakar and begin a submerged cruise in the current. Your main job will be to monitor and test the sub and its equipment. If there are no malfunctions that would necessitate cutting short the mission, you should surface around the middle of September in the approximate center of the Labrador Sea."

    Merker cleared his throat softly. "No submersible has stayed that long that deep."

    "You want to back out, Sam?"

    "Well . . . no."

    "This is a volunteer expedition. Nobody is twisting your arm to go."

    "Why us, Admiral?" Ben Drummer uncoiled his lean frame from the floor where he had been comfortably stretched. "Ah'm a marine engineer. Spencer here is an equipment engineer. And Merker is a systems expert. Ah can't see where we fit in."