Autumn 1973 to the fifth of June, 1974: the machinery proved, the crew manifested, and the single documented forgery of the author's career, which the recovered papers happen to preserve. The reader who knows what the last date in this number means knows the subject of the next. —Ed.
The largest secret of the century was assembled twenty minutes from my driveway, and I want the comedy of that entered before the fear, because the fear gets the better scenes. While the ship herself fitted out at Long Beach, the thing she existed to carry was being built inside a barge at Redwood City, on the mudflats I had driven past for ten years on my way to everywhere: a submersible barge with a humped roof like an aircraft hangar, sitting at a Lockheed pier in plain sight of the commute traffic, big enough to swallow a five-story building.1 Inside it, out of any possible sight, the engineers were assembling the claw. They called her Clementine, machinists being sentimental in inverse proportion to what they build, and I saw her once that winter from a catwalk: acres of steel fingers and hydraulic knuckle, lit like an operating theater, with men crawling her the way ants crawl a dead bird. I drove home afterward past the supermarkets and the Christmas lots and said nothing to anybody, and I will confess the sensation was not fear at all but a landlord's satisfaction. Three miles of ocean on one end of the pipe, my own zip code on the other.
In the early spring they married the pieces, and the marriage was the prettiest tradecraft I ever witnessed. The barge was towed south to Catalina Island and sunk, by appointment, in the quiet water of Isthmus Cove; the ship stood in over her and moored; and the claw passed from the one to the other underwater, below the sight line of every living soul, while the weekend fleet out of Newport and Marina del Rey, dentists in captain's hats, tacked past a fat mining ship swinging dully at anchor, doing nothing at all that Sunday but being boring.2 A man in a blazer sailed by close aboard and waved up at the rail, and got waves back, and if his wife had asked him what he had seen he would have said, correctly, nothing; and under his keel, in eighty feet of green water, the century was changing hands. I was on the beach at the Isthmus with field glasses and a picnic basket, dressed as the kind of retired money that watches boats, which took no acting to speak of.
Then in April they took her out for the deep-water rehearsals, and Guthrie's manifest took me with her, and the sea and I renewed an acquaintance that has never prospered.
I had a good berth, mining-relations being a gentleman's billet, and for two days I strolled the decks of my own stage set admiring the scale of what belief had bought. The derrick stood over the ship like a cathedral crossing; the pipe lay racked in its thousands of feet; the moon pool, the flooded chamber at her middle through which the claw and everything else went down and, with luck, came up, sat in the hull like a lake in a hotel. On the third day they ran pipe, sixty-foot doubles going down the string hour after hour, the handling machinery swinging steel over the pool in a rhythm you stopped hearing after a while, the way you stop hearing a heart.
I was on the derrick deck with a clipboard I had no use for when the rhythm broke. I have asked twice what actually happened and been told two different things, a swage let go or a die slipped — I was past collecting detail by then — and what I knew at the time was one sound, a crack like a bridge member parting, and then several tons of steel coming down through the handling gear into the deck with a violence that you did not hear so much as stand inside of. A man went sideways off the pipe rack; another sat down where he stood; a length of something went into the pool and the pool took it with a gulp that I hear yet. And I, the reader will want to know what the celebrated survivor of burning buildings did, and here it is: nothing. My knees went out of the account first, then my hands; I stood holding the rail with the clipboard gone somewhere and my whole mind, the mind they gave doctorates to, fastened like a barnacle on a gull that was riding the derrick crosstrees, and I watched that gull with total attention while men shouted around me, because the gull was the one thing in view that could leave. Nobody died; the Navy would say the casualty was to material. When my legs came back I went below without arranging my face, and on the crew launch two days later, in a swell off San Pedro, I was sick over the side in front of witnesses, at fifty-one, in a necktie, and I did not care, which frightened me in a way the pipe had not.
Because here is where the arithmetic stood, and I did it in the launch with the taste still in my mouth: the rehearsal was the gentle version. The voyage would be five weeks minimum on the open Pacific, over the grave, with five thousand tons swinging on the string day and night, and every man aboard subject to whatever the sea decided to teach next, and my name was on the mission manifest, typed, in a column, where names stay. I had spent thirty years keeping my name off lists that could kill me at one remove. This list was direct.
What I did about it is the blackest neat little thing in this bundle, and I will not dress it. I have never forged paper. The reader who has been with me since Pasadena may laugh at that sentence, but the plates were drawings and the rest of my life's work was spoken; the religion held that paper is the enemy, and you do not manufacture enemy ordnance. In May of 1974 I broke the religion once, for its founder. At the Stanford medical library I read cardiology for two afternoons until I could talk it, which for me is ten minutes ahead of any examiner alive. At a job printer's in San Jose I bought, for cash, fifty sheets of letterhead for a cardiologist I had invented entire: a plausible name, an address in a Los Angeles medical building with a fast-moving directory, a telephone exchange that rang at an answering service I hired for ninety days, also cash. And on that letterhead I produced, dated the tenth of May, a two-paragraph letter reporting that his patient Mr. J. Klipspringer exhibited a grade II systolic ejection murmur with findings consistent with aortic-valve disease, and that the patient was medically unsuited to extended sea duty, exertion at height, and remote stations; signed it with a doctor's signature I practiced eleven times on a hotel blotter; and burned the blotter, the eleven rehearsals, and the spare letterhead in a motel sink, an operation I had performed once before in a better cause.3
Guthrie took the letter into custody the way a sexton takes a coffin. It was, I believe, the first original document I had ever handed him, and something moved behind the mild eyes; he logged it, receipted it to me, had a girl make the copies, and struck me off the mission manifest by return memorandum.4 There is a species of irony I have spent this whole memoir farming, and here is its prize bloom: the one paper in fifty years that bears my name, certifies my body, and saved my skin is a forgery, and it entered the record through the most scrupulous custodian I ever met, who receipted it, and by receipting it made it true. The murmur has since appeared in two biographies as early evidence of the heart trouble I do not have. I am told there are cardiologists who cite it.
The spring had its consolations ashore. Long Beach meant Fay, who would come down on the Friday train, and we kept our arrangement in its fourth year exactly as it had begun: two professionals off duty, no questions in either direction. She had not asked in four years what a mining consultant did on a mining ship, not once, not even socially, and I had gone from finding that restful to finding it, in the small hours of one particular Sunday, professional; and I looked at the ceiling for a while with the word in my head; and I declined to finish the thought, the way you decline the third drink when you can feel the evening turning. It is the only thought in this bundle I put down unfinished on purpose, and the Editor may do with that what he does.
At Woodside, meanwhile, my own household was running a lesson in the limits of tradecraft, at my expense, as usual. Bunny had acquired a Tuesday doubles partner at the club, a retired commodore, seventy if he was a day, all jaw and blazer buttons, with that carrying quarterdeck laugh, and I took against him from the first handshake. I want it understood that I was at that moment keeping the deepest secret in the Western Hemisphere with perfect composure, and that the sight of my wife lobbing in mixed company undid the composure in an afternoon. I ran the full kit on her, the kit I had run for governments: the odometer read against her stated errands, the club steward sounded over a Christmas bottle, her calendar photographed while she napped, a quiet man of mine idle two Tuesdays in a rented Ford. The take was nothing. It is always nothing. Lunches she had named, mileages that reconciled, one florist's charge that traced to the altar guild. Thirty years of this woman and the instruments have never once returned a reading, and I have never decided whether that is because there is nothing to read or because she was better than the instruments, and at seventy-seven, with the commodore long in Arlington, I still turn it over on bad nights. She came home that Tuesday and said the commodore's knee had locked at the net and asked whether I wanted the lamb. I said the lamb would be fine. Both of those sentences may have been true.
The ship finished her trials in May and came in to load out for the voyage, and the town of Long Beach adopted her as scenery. The last week I was aboard daily, walking my rounds as the mining man, and the mood on her was the mood of a good outfit before a big job, profane and light and tight as rigging, and I moved through it certified unfit and lying to every man who wished me a good voyage ashore. On the evening of the fourth of June I had dinner with Fay, who did not ask, and drove to the Airport Marina, and slept the sleep of the fraudulently exempted.
The telephone went at ten past five in the morning, June the fifth. It was one of Guthrie's people, a voice with the wobble still in it, and what the voice said, in the fifteen days before my ship sailed for the wreck of the century, was that persons unknown had gone into 7000 Romaine Street in the night with a cutting torch, opened the safes, and gone out again, and that among what was gone were four boxes of files.5
The barge was HMB-1, the Hughes Mining Barge, built by Lockheed at Redwood City, California: submersible, roofed, and dimensioned to conceal the capture vehicle entire. The claw's working name among the crews was as the author gives it. Whatever a catwalk pass may have shown a consultant, the assembly is confirmed to have been complete before the barge left the Bay. —Ed.
The transfer is documented: HMB-1 was towed south and submerged at Isthmus Cove, Santa Catalina Island, in the early months of 1974, and the capture vehicle passed underwater into the ship's moon pool while the anchorage went about its weekend. The declassified history regards the evolution with an engineer's pride the author's landlord's satisfaction does not much improve upon. —Ed.
The mission's timing was governed by the weather: the lift required the long calms of the mid-Pacific summer, which fixed the sailing for June and made the spring's rehearsals unpostponable. A pipe-handling casualty during the trials period is consistent with the record, which notes damage to material and none to personnel. —Ed.
The letter survives among the recovered papers, dated 10 May 1974, together with Guthrie's receipt and the amending memorandum striking the author from the mission manifest, which also survives, without him, as does the program's medical file, into which the letter was copied in good faith. The cardiologist whose letterhead it bears appears in no medical directory, no state register, and no telephone book of the period. The two biographies are as the author says. —Ed.
The date was 5 June 1974. The next number concerns what the boxes held. —Ed.