Marie moved beside Dana. "How about the blue skirt?"

    Dana slipped the skirt off the hanger and then threw it down on the carpet. "Damn! I sent the matching blouse to the cleaners."

    "If you're not careful, you'll start foaming at the mouth."

    "I can't help it," Dana said. "Nothing seems to go right lately."

    "Since you walked out on your husband, you mean."

    "The last thing I need now is a sermon."

    "Settle down, sweetie. If you want to take out your wrath on somebody, then stand in front of a mirror."

    Dana stood, tense as a toy doll whose spring has been wound too tightly. Marie could see an emotional crying jag coming on and beat a strategic retreat.

    "Relax. Take your time. I'll go down and warm up the car.

    Dana waited until Marie's footsteps died before she went into the bathroom and downed two Librium capsules. As soon as the tranquilizer began to take effect, she calmly slipped on a turquoise linen dress, straightened her hair, pulled on a pair of flat-heeled shoes, and headed downstairs.

    On the way to NUMA headquarters, Dana sat bright and perky while tapping her foot to the music from the car radio.

    "One pill or two?" Marie said casually.

    "Umm?"

    "I said, one pill or two. It's a safe bet that when you instantly transform from a bitch into a Miss Goody Two-Shoes, you've been popping pills."

    "I meant it about the sermon."

    "Okay, but a warning, old roommate. If I find you flaked out on the floor some dark night from an overdose, I'm going to quietly fold my tent and silently steal off into the night. I can't stand traumatic death scenes."

    "You're exaggerating."

    Marie looked at her. "Am I? You've been hitting that stuff like a health nut gobbles vitamins."

    "I'm all right," Dana said defiantly.

    "Like hell you are. You're a classic case of an emotionally depressed and frustrated female. The worst kind, I might add."

    "It takes time for the ragged edges to dull."

    "Ragged edges, my ass. You mean it dulls your guilt."

    "I won't delude myself into believing I did the best thing by leaving Gene. But I'm convinced I did the right thing."

    "Don't you think he needs you?"

    "I used to hope he would reach out to me, yet every time we're together, we fight like alley cats. He's closed me out, Marie. It's the same old tired story. When a man like Gene becomes a slave to the demands of his work, he throws up a wall that can't be breached. And the stupid reason, the incredibly stupid reason, is because he imagines that sharing his problems automatically throws me on the firing line, too. A man accepts the thankless burden of responsibility. We women do not. To us, life is a game we play one day at a time. We never plan ahead like men." Her face became sad and drawn. "I can only wait and come back after Gene falls wounded in his private battle. Then, and only then, am I certain he'll welcome a return of my company."

    "It may be too late," Marie said. "From your description of him, Gene sounds like a prime candidate for a mental breakdown or a massive coronary. If you had an ounce of guts, you'd stick it out with him."

    Dana shook her head. "I can't cope with rejection. Until we can get together peacefully again, I'm going to make another life."

    "Does that include other men?"

    "Platonic love only." Dana forced a smile. "I'm not about to play the liberated female and jump onto every penis that wanders across my path."

    Marie grinned slyly. "It's one thing to be picky and pay lip service to high standards, sweetie, but quite another matter in actual practice. You forget, this is Washington, D.C. We outnumber the men eight to one. They're the lucky ones who can afford to be choosy."

    "If something happens, then something happens. I'm not going out and look for an affair. Besides, I'm out of practice. I've forgotten how to flirt.''

    "Seducing a man is like riding a bicycle," Marie said, laughing. "Once learned, never forgotten."

    She parked in the vast open lot of the NUMA headquarters building. They walked up the steps into the lobby, where they joined the stream of other staff members who were hurrying down the halls and up the elevators to their offices.

    "How about meeting me for lunch?" Marie said.

    "Fine."

    "I'll bring a couple of male friends for you to exercise your latent charms on."

    Before Dana could protest, Marie had melted into the crowd. As she stood in the elevator, Dana noted with a curious sense of detached pleasure that her heart was thumping.

35

    Sandecker pulled his car into the parking lot of the Alexandria College of Oceanography, climbed out from under the wheel, and walked over to a man standing beside an electric golf cart.

    "Admiral Sandecker?"

    "Yes."

    "Dr. Murray Silverstein." The round, balding little man stuck out his hand. "Glad you could come, Admiral. I think we've got something that will prove helpful."

    Sandecker settled into the cart. "We're grateful for every scrap of useful data you can give us."

    Silverstein took the tiller and guided them down an asphalt lane. "We've run an extensive series of tests since last night. I can't promise anything mathematically exact, mind you, but the results are interesting, to say the least."

    "Any problems?"

    "A few. The main snag that throws our projections from the precise side of the scale to the approximate is a lack of solid facts. For instance, the direction of the Titanic's bow when she went down was never established. This unknown factor alone could add four square miles to the search area."

    "I don't understand. Wouldn't a forty-five-thousand-ton steel ship sink in a straight line?"

    "Not necessarily. The Titanic corkscrewed and slid under the water at a depressed angle of roughly seventy-eight degrees, and, as she sank, the weight of the sea filling her forward compartments pulled her into a headway of between four and five knots. Next, we have to consider the momentum caused by her tremendous mass and the fact that she had to travel two and a half miles before she struck bottom. No, I'm afraid she landed on a horizontal line a fair distance from her original starting point on the surface."

    Sandecker stared at the oceanographer. "How could you possibly know the precise angle of descent when the Titanic sank? The survivors' descriptions were on the whole unreliable."

    Silverstein pointed to a huge concrete tower off to his right. "The answers are in there, Admiral." He stopped the cart at the front entrance of the building. "Come along and I'll give you a practical demonstration of what I'm talking about."

    Sandecker followed him through a short hallway and into a room with a large acrylic plastic window at one end. Silverstein motioned for the admiral to move closer. A diver wearing scuba equipment waved from the other side of the window. Sandecker waved back.

    "A deep-water tank," Silverstein said matter-of-factly. "The interior walls are made of steel and rise two hundred feet high with a diameter of thirty feet. There is a main pressure chamber for entering and exiting the bottom level and five air locks stationed at intervals along the side to enable us to observe our experiments at different depths."