Strap in Jerry did. The harness was more elaborate than an airliner seat belt or even the seat-and-shoulder belts new cars used (Jerry’s beat-up Rambler boasted no belts at all). The petty officer climbed in right behind the passengers. He stowed the little staircase and secured the door, then sat up front with the pilot.

  Being crewmen, they wore helmets. Jerry envied them as soon as the engine started up again. If being near a chopper was loud, being in one was.… For a few seconds, Jerry couldn’t think of what it was like. Then he decided he knew now what the butter in a blender heard when a cook turned it up to high.

  Up went the helicopter, just like that. Jerry craned his neck to keep the Glomar Explorer in sight as long as he could, but the ship soon disappeared behind the whirlybird. Part of his life was disappearing with it—a brief part, a strange part, but an important part. How important? He doubted he’d know the answer to that for years and years. Even when he did know, he doubted he’d be able to tell anybody.

  Talking in the cabin was impossible. So was thinking, or nearly. The last time Jerry’d sat through so much noise, he and Anna were seeing Jethro Tull at the Forum. He’d enjoyed that more.

  The flight back to Midway took about an hour. The island was actually two sandy islets, neither poking more than a few feet up out of the ocean. The eastern island was just sand, sand and gooney birds. Along with more gooney birds, the western island held the naval air station: a couple of runways, a few planes and copters, Quonset huts, and a more substantial building with a radar dish spinning on top of it.

  Jerry had been at sea for a couple of months. Stepping down onto a surface that didn’t move felt as strange and unnatural as the Hornblower books suggested. Without ever consciously noticing, he’d acquired reflexes he didn’t know he had. His friend Tim drove a stick shift. Tim didn’t have to think about that, either. He just did it. Jerry’d tried it a couple of times, but never enough to get smooth.

  A young Navy lieutenant in tropical whites strode up to the helicopter. “If you gentlemen will come with me, we’ll get you quartered, we’ll provide you with transportation home, and you’ll each be able to make two three-minute calls to the mainland to arrange for pickup and such. Any questions?… No? Follow me, then.”

  Quarters were half a dozen military cots in a Quonset hut. The noisy air conditioner that tried to cool the inside was fighting out of its weight. Jerry claimed a cot by plopping the hydrophone and his suitcase down on top of it. The other men marked their territory the same way. Once they had, the officer led them to the building with the radar set.

  There, he played travel agent. Jerry and Steve were fourth and fifth in line, so they had a while to wait. In due course, Jerry’s turn came. “You can probably take the two of us at once,” he said. “We’re both going to Los Angeles.”

  “You would be…?”

  “Jerry Steinberg and Steve Dahlgren.” By now, Jerry was easy with his alias.

  “Right,” the lieutenant said after a glance down at his clipboard. “We’ll have a flight for Honolulu departing at oh six hundred tomorrow. It’s around eleven hundred miles—you should arrive before noon, Honolulu time. We’re an hour behind that here.”

  “Five hours for eleven hundred miles?” Steve said plaintively. Jerry was thinking the same thing. Shouldn’t it be more like two?

  But the lieutenant—his name badge said FISKE—answered, “I’m afraid so. Not jetliners here. We use our recon planes: prop jobs. Not fast, not fancy, but they’ll get you there. Los Angeles for the two of you…? Yes, we can do that. There’s a flight going out of Honolulu at sixteen thirty local time. Should get you there just before midnight Pacific time. Late, but not too late.”

  Tomorrow would be … Jerry had to think about it. Thursday. Days at sea melted into one another. Anna wouldn’t be thrilled. She had to work Friday. So did Jerry’s father. Sometimes you got stuck.

  “We can make calls, you said?” he asked.

  “Yes, that’s right. We have a line to Hawaii that goes on through to the mainland. Connections are usually pretty good, but it isn’t cheap, which is why we want you to keep it short,” Fiske said.

  “Gotcha.” Jerry looked at his watch. It was a quarter after eleven. “Los Angeles would be … three hours ahead of us?”

  “No, four. Midway doesn’t use daylight savings time. Neither does Hawaii,” the Navy man said. Jerry nodded. Anna would be in the middle of her afternoon when he called. That was good.

  He waited for the three people in front of him to finish their calls. Then it was his turn. He knew Anna’s work number as well as he knew the one for her apartment. Luckily, a card taped to the desk in front of the phone reminded him USE AREA CODE WHEN CALLING. So he dialed 213 first.

  Some hisses and pops followed, the way they often did on long-distance calls. Then the phone rang, once, twice. Someone picked it up. “Travel and Tourism, Anna McGowan.” She didn’t quite sound in the next room, but he understood her just fine.

  “Anna, honey, it’s me, Jerry.”

  “Jerry!” she squeaked. “Oh, my God! Where are you?”

  “Right now, I’m on Midway.”

  “Where the hell is that?”

  “In the middle of the Pacific. The ship had some trouble, and they’re fixing it here. But my thing is done. They’ll fly me to Honolulu tomorrow, and I’ll be back in L.A. like midnight tomorrow night. It’s Hawaiian Airlines flight, uh,”—he had to check—“three six one. Can you pick me up?”

  “I … guess so,” she said. Her voice firmed. “Yeah, I can do it. If I run on coffee and fumes Friday, then I do, that’s all. How are you?”

  “I’m okay. I miss you. Have the Hughes people kept their promises?”

  “Yes, they’ve been great.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Jerry meant that. “Listen, babe, I gotta go—they don’t want us talking long. I’ll see you tomorrow night. Don’t forget to bring my keys, right? Love you!”

  “Love you, too. I’ll remember. ’Bye.”

  “’Bye.” He hung up.

  Then he called his father. Hyman Stieglitz was an accountant, which meant he got very busy in the couple of months leading up to April 15, after which a lot of the air went out of his business. He answered the office phone right away: “Stieglitz Accounting and Tax Preparation.”

  “Hey, Dad. It’s me. I’ll be back in town Friday.”

  “Okay,” his father said, as if he’d driven down to San Diego for a couple of days. “Do I need to pick you up or anything?”

  “No, it’s okay. Anna’s gonna do it.”

  “All right.” His dad accepted that as casually as he said it. “Want to have dinner Saturday night?”

  “How about Sunday? Let me have a little chance to sleep and get caught up on things.” Let me have a chance to screw myself silly.

  He didn’t say it. Hyman Stieglitz heard it anyway. Even across several thousand miles of bad phone lines, he sounded amused as he answered, “However you want. Call me Sunday morning and we’ll figure out where. Did you get in enough work to make the trip worthwhile?”

  “Dad, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Jerry gave back the exact and literal truth.

  “That’s good. And the money was pretty decent. So all right, then—I’ll see you Sunday.” His father might have been talking with a client, not a son. Well, they could have been bellowing at each other, old bull and young banging heads, the way they had when Jerry was seventeen. Polite near-indifference seemed more peaceable, if not exactly better.

  “’Bye,” Jerry said with some polite near-indifference of his own. He walked out of the room with the phone connected to the mainland and nodded at Steve. “Your turn. If you live near where you work, you won’t have a long trip home from the airport, either.”

  “I’m not real far away, no.” Steve went into the telephone room, shutting the door behind him.

  After that, there was lunch, and after that there was dinner. Both were Navy chow: plain vittles cooked even more plainly. After two months eating high on the hog on the Glomar Explorer, that kind of eating seemed like a war crime.

  No TV after dinner. There hadn’t been any before dinner, either. The Quonset hut didn’t hold a set. A shortwave radio sat on a shelf near one end of the prefab building. That seemed to be Midway’s main connection to the outside world. Jerry wasn’t desperate enough for noise to want to listen to the BBC or Voice of America or even Radio Moscow. Neither was anyone else.

  Everybody hit the sack early. If the flight took off at 0600, people would need to be up before sunrise for coffee and, with luck, breakfast. Jerry’s mattress was thin and lumpy. He fell asleep as if coshed anyway.

  * * *

  The coffee was hot and fresh. Breakfast … biscuits and Danishes left over from the day before. It wasn’t a taste treat, but it plastered over the empty places inside. Jerry wished he could have slept for another couple of hours, but he figured he’d make it through the long day ahead.

  Along with the other A crew men, he lugged his gear out to the waiting plane. It was, he learned, a Lockheed EC-121 Warning Star, a machine more suited to carrying radar than passengers. With four enormous props, it looked like a leftover from World War II. It also looked as if it had a lot of miles on it.

  Jerry figured it had made a ton of flights like this. It ought to be able to manage one more. He stowed his suitcase and hydrophone and plunked his behind down in a low, uncomfortable seat. The engines thundered to life. Soundproofing inside the fuselage? It was to laugh. The Warning Star made the helicopter quiet by comparison.

  Four- or five-hour flight, too, Jerry reminded himself as the plane lumbered down the runway and, seemingly to its own surprise, hopped into the air. Next to him, Steve said something. Jerry cupped a hand to his ear to show he hadn’t got it.

  This time, Steve shouted: “Takes off like a gooney bird!”

  “It does!” Jerry nodded to make sure the older man knew he’d heard.

  Midway shrank and vanished behind the Warning Star. The ocean was … ocean. Jerry spent the flight being bored and deafened. He tried to doze, but the racket defeated him. Steve did sleep for a little while. Jerry didn’t know how he could, but envied him.

  Jets flew so high, they got above most of the weather. The EC-121 couldn’t, so the journey was bouncy as well as noisy. Once or twice, the bounces made Jerry glad for his seat belt.

  He couldn’t complain about the landing, though. He didn’t think he’d ever felt a smoother one. In the airport, he checked his suitcase at the Hawaiian Air counter after extracting Have Space Suit—Will Travel to re-rereread on the way back to Los Angeles. He carried the hydrophone through the terminal. He’d stow it in the overhead bin; he didn’t want to expose it to the slings and arrows of outrageous baggage handlers.

  A place in the airport sold saimin: Japanese noodle soup with pork and herbs and odd, interesting vegetables. Jerry bought a big Styrofoam cupful. It made an outstanding lunch. He knew they’d feed him dinner on the plane to L.A.

  Steve got a burger and fries, which left Jerry obscurely disappointed. They found the gate where their flight to Los Angeles would leave, then settled down to wait. Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, Jerry suddenly laughed. “What’s funny?” Steve asked.

  “I probably told you, Anna and I are going to Maui for our honeymoon.”

  “Yes, I think you did.”

  “And the Glomar Explorer was gonna go there, too, after it caught Humpty Dumpty. I was all worried about how I’d have to lie to her and make like I’d never seen Maui before. But the Explorer never got there, so I won’t have that on my conscience, anyway.”

  “Good. Lying to people who matter to you chops holes in what you feel about each other. Lying to anybody is bad. Lying to someone who matters to you is worse.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. Don’t have to worry about it now, though.”

  Half an hour before the scheduled boarding time, a woman’s voice came over the PA system: “I’m very sorry, but Hawaiian Flight three six one will experience a small delay. The plane is having some minor mechanical issues, and we want to be absolutely sure everything is all right before we take off. Your safety is our foremost concern. Thank you for your patience.”

  The “small delay” stretched to an hour and a half. As Jerry finally filed on to the airliner, what kept going through his head was Anna will kill me. Picking him up at midnight was bad enough. If he came in at one thirty or two …

  All he could do would be to apologize over and over. That might not cut it. Anna remembered screwups. This one wasn’t his fault, but he’d be the reason she shambled like a zombie tomorrow.

  After the plane took off, the pilot said, “Very sorry we’re late departing Honolulu, folks. We’ll try to make up as much time as we can in the air. Tailwinds will help some. Right now, best guess is we’ll be on the ground in Los Angeles about twenty past one Pacific daylight time. If we can do anything to make that earlier, we will, believe me.”

  A few minutes later, a stewardess added, “We do feel bad about the delay. First drink in coach is free for everyone tonight.”

  So Jerry had a mai tai, complete with paper umbrella, with his vaguely tropical chicken dinner. For airline food, the meal was pretty decent. After dinner, they darkened the plane for the movie. It was Mary Poppins, which wasn’t his speed. He turned on his overhead lamp and looked at Have Space Suit—Will Travel for a while.

  After a while, he found he’d read the same paragraph three times. His body didn’t quite know what time it was supposed to be, but did know he’d been up since what felt like forever. He killed the reading light, leaned against the bulkhead, and tried to sleep.

  He didn’t sleep well on planes—who did?—but managed forty minutes’ worth of fitful doze. He wasn’t sure he felt better after waking up. He still didn’t know what time it should have been, and now he was more awake to realize he didn’t know. He wondered if he’d sleep at all once he got back to his place.

  He’d worry about that later. He’d worry about lots of things later. Classes at UCLA started on September 23. Since he was coming home now, he wouldn’t need a fall quarter leave of absence after all. He’d have to let Professor Krikorian know he was back. Monday, he told himself. It can wait till Monday.

  In the aisle seat, Stephen Dole was watching Mary Poppins with every sign of enjoyment. Maybe all his taste was in his mouth. Maybe he was using the movie the way Jerry had used his old, familiar book: to make time go by without thinking very hard. Jerry wasn’t snoopy enough to ask.

  The airliner droned through the night. It was a lot more comfortable than the Warning Star, and a lot quieter. Of course, this plane was made to carry passengers. On the Navy machine, they were only inconvenient freight.

  The movie ended. Except for reading lamps here and there, the plane stayed dark. Somebody a couple of rows behind Jerry snored up a storm. A few people really did manage to sack out at 35,000 feet. Jerry tried to grab a little more shut-eye himself but had no luck.

  After a while, the pilot said, “We’re beginning our descent into Los Angeles, ladies and gentlemen. Local weather is clear—temperature at the airport is sixty-six degrees. We expect to be on the ground half an hour from now, just before one fifteen.” He sounded proud of himself for not being quite so late as he might have been.

  They circled over the South Bay so they could land into the wind. Some of those lights down there came from Jerry’s apartment building, but he had no idea which ones. Coming back west, the plane flew low over the Harbor Freeway, then much lower over the San Diego—so low, he could almost read the green signs.

  A hard bounce, another smaller one, and they were down. Bright lights came on inside the cabin. “Please remain seated with your belts in place and your seats in the fully upright position until we’ve taxied to the terminal,” a stewardess said. California hadn’t tumbled into the sea. Jerry was home.

  * * *

  Out of the plane and into the boarding area he came, hydrophone in one hand, Have Space Suit—Will Travel in the other. Some of the people waiting for their loved ones seemed ready to party, as if they’d gone to Hawaii. Others looked as tired as Jerry felt.

  There was Anna! She looked tired, but threw herself into Jerry’s arms so fast, he barely had time to put down the hydrophone. After they kissed, she looked up into his eyes and murmured, “Midnight, my ass.”

  “I’m sorry, babe. I didn’t know. I couldn’t. They had mechanical trouble in Honolulu.”

  “Yeah, I found that out … after I got here.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. Yes, he’d need to abase himself for a while.

  Maybe ten feet away, Steve was embracing a woman who looked a lot like Jerry’s second-grade teacher. He’d liked Mrs. Simmons, not least because she’d let him stay in the classroom and read instead of going out to the disasters of kickball and sockball at recess.

  Steve and his wife came up for air moments after Jerry and Anna did. Steve nodded to him. “Safe trip home.”

  “You, too,” Jerry said. To Anna, he added, “This is Steve Dole. We worked together on the Glomar Explorer.” To Steve again: “My fiancée, Anna McGowan.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Steve said. They shook hands. He went on, “This is my wife, Beth. Beth, Jerry Stieglitz.” He remembered Jerry’s real last name, which was good. Jerry shook with her. Even her smile was like Mrs. Simmons’s.

  “Baggage claim,” Anna said, in tones that brooked no argument.

  To baggage claim they went. Because they were flying in from Hawaii, there was an agricultural checkpoint to deal with first. “Steve and I just walked through the Honolulu airport,” Jerry told the inspector. “That’s it.”

  “Where were you coming from, then?” the woman said.

  “Midway. We’re off the Hughes Glomar Explorer, the ocean-mining ship.”

  The woman looked dubious. But an older man who was examining a couple of other Hawaiian Air passengers overheard and said, “Pass him through, Grace. I dealt with somebody off that ship three days ago. They’re legit.”