“We expect the Glomar Explorer to leave Long Beach harbor on or about June twentieth,” John answered. “There’s only a narrow window in the North Pacific when we hope sea conditions will be calm enough to let us do what we need to do. We want to make sure we can exploit it.”

  “June … twentieth.” Jerry winced. He’d be done with spring quarter. That wasn’t the problem. “Look, I know you guys will have me checked out nine ways from Sunday. And if you’ve checked me out, you’ll know—

  “That you and Miss Anna Elaine McGowan plan to get married on June thirtieth,” John finished for him.

  “No, we didn’t know that at all,” Steve said, and chuckled. Of the three of them, he was, if not the Good Cop, at least the Best Cop.

  “We can’t delay sailing for anyone’s personal considerations. You have to understand that.” John’s tone said he could go to hell if he didn’t understand it—go to hell and not go on the Glomar Explorer.

  “We’ve already made arrangements, though,” Jerry said helplessly. “We’ve spent money. We’ve rented the synagogue. We’ve got the food set up. We’ve booked our honeymoon. We’ve—” He gave up. If he went, Anna wouldn’t want to marry him. She’d want to murder him. He didn’t see how he could blame her, either.

  Steve sidled over to Fred and whispered in his ear. Fred looked like a guy who’d just bit down hard on a lemon. Steve gestured to John. They all put their heads together.

  “We’ll pay all the expenses involved in delaying your wedding,” Fred said. “That includes covering your rent here for as long as you’re away.”

  Jerry didn’t answer right away. They really want me, he realized. The feeling was strange. It went to his head like champagne. Grad students had to be among the most chronically unwanted people in the world.

  After a few seconds, he said, “I still don’t think Anna would be real happy with that.”

  “Understandable. We’re messing up plans you’ve already made. If we give the two of you, ah, two thousand dollars as compensation for the inconvenience, would that make the lady happier? Would it make you happier?” Steve said. “We can call it a wedding present or something.”

  John and Fred both opened their mouths, then closed them again without saying anything. These people have more money than they know what to do with. Literally, Jerry thought. It wasn’t a problem he’d ever needed to worry about before.

  “Can I tell her that that will happen?” he asked.

  “Go ahead.” John didn’t sound happy, but he gave the okay.

  “Call me tomorrow afternoon. I’ll let you know what she says.” Jerry didn’t bother giving his phone number. It was unlisted, but they had to know it anyway.

  There wasn’t much talk after that. The three men left as abruptly as they’d pushed their way in. Jerry watched them go down the stairs and out the door to the foyer. As soon as they disappeared, he started wondering if they’d really been there at all.

  He wrote that down on a three-by-five card and stashed it in the manila folder he called his idea file. Waste not, want not.

  * * *

  Jerry parked his beat-up old Rambler on the street a couple of doors down from Anna’s apartment building. Her place looked just like his: a two-story Spanish-style structure with units surrounding a concrete courtyard centered on a pool. Tenants kept their cars in spaces underneath. A swarm of places like theirs had gone up in Hawthorne over the past five or ten years.

  He climbed the stairs from the foyer to the security door and punched 2–6–4 on the keypad next to it. A moment later, Anna’s voice came tinnily from the speaker above the keypad: “That you, Jerry?”

  “Nobody else, babe,” he answered. The security door buzzed. He grabbed the latch and let himself in before the noise stopped.

  As he climbed the stairs to the second floor, he suddenly wondered how the CIA guys had got into his building. It used the same kind of security setup as this one. Maybe they’d followed somebody else in. That happened. Or maybe they’d talked to the manager, whose apartment was right there. If they claimed to be cops or private eyes or whatever, odds were they’d have badges or papers to back it up. The stuff might not be legit, but it’d look legit. Jerry was sure of that.

  He hurried down the walkway to the door with the tarnished bronze 264 on it at eye level. He was about to knock when the door opened. “Heard you coming,” Anna said, “so I baked a cake.”

  “Cool,” Jerry said. He had to bend down to kiss her. She was only five two, a foot shorter than he was. She was blond, and carried ten more pounds than she wanted to. In Jerry’s biased opinion, she carried them goddamn well, too. He’d given up trying to persuade her of that. Better not to start fights you couldn’t win.

  When he came up for air, the King of Siam was glowering at him from the hallway that led back to the bathroom and bedroom. Those blue eyes held more ancient evil than a cat had any business knowing.

  “I swear that beast used to belong to Queen Berúthiel,” he said.

  Anna poked him in the ribs. She had long, pointed nails. That wasn’t why he flinched, though; she’d found a ticklish spot. “So why did you want to come over tonight? Besides that, I mean?” She glanced toward the King of Siam and the bedroom beyond him.

  He took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to be easy or fun. “Hon,” he said, “we need to push the wedding back a couple of months, maybe a little longer.”

  She stiffened in his arms. Then he wasn’t holding her anymore. He didn’t know how he wasn’t, but he wasn’t. “And why do we need to do that?” she asked, her voice dripping liquid helium.

  “Because out of the blue this afternoon I got an offer to go on the ocean-mining ship that came into Long Beach last fall, the Glomar Explorer. Remember?”

  “Not really,” she said. He believed her; she paid more attention to people she cared about—and to that damn cat—than to the wider world.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “it sails on June twentieth, and that’s firm. I really want to go.”

  Anna stared up at him. Her eyes were almost as blue as the King of Siam’s. “More than you want to marry me?” She was taking it personally. Of course she was. She took everything personally. Most of the time, Jerry liked that. Every once in a while …

  “Babe, it’ll be really good for my career,” he said. If looks could have killed, he would have been lying there dead next to the chair by the window. Then he told her how much they’d pay him.

  Her face changed. “You’re making that up.”

  “No way, hon. Swear I’m not.” He raised his right hand, as if taking an oath.

  “In that case, you’ve got to have Polaroids of the guy who asked you with a sheep,” she said.

  He laughed and shook his head at the same time. The gibe was funny, but it stung, too. She’d never thought he was ambitious enough. She’d spent a year and a half at Cal State L.A., then bailed for the real world. She’d done well in it, too. She’d said more than once she’d never thought she’d wind up with a guy slogging his way through grad school.

  But here she was. With him. And they had a wedding date. Or they had had one.

  “They’ll pay our expenses for putting things off, too,” he said.

  “They will?” Anna sounded astonished and delighted at the same time. She and Jerry were footing the bill for the wedding themselves. Her folks had supported her through high school. After that, it was “root, hog, or die” as far as they were concerned. She’d worked behind a typewriter or a cash register to pay for as much college as she’d got.

  “That’s what they said. I’ll get it in writing before I go. You bet I will.”

  “You’d better.” Anna cocked her head to one side, examining him the way a malacologist would examine a sea slug that might be a new species. “How come they want you so much?”

  Jerry had been wondering the same thing. “Maybe because I write science fiction. I’m not even lying, or not very much. They mentioned it when they talked with me.”

  Anna snorted. “There must be a reasonable explanation instead.” His tiny beginning of a career didn’t impress her much. The people who published in Journeys flew or sailed all over the world, wrote travel expenses off their taxes, and turned out polished prose about what they’d seen and done and eaten. Next to that, what were a couple of short stories in pulp magazines?

  “I guess. I don’t know what it is, though. I do know they’ll also give me—us—two grand for putting up with the hassles of changing our plans, only they’ll call it a wedding present.”

  “Two grand?” Anna silently mouthed the words. Jerry nodded. Then he was holding her again. He didn’t understand how she’d come back, any more than he’d got how she moved away. Teleportation, maybe. He didn’t have long to worry about it. She tilted her face up. Unlike the kiss when he’d stepped into her place, this one was the real deal and then some. After they finally broke apart, she said, “I don’t know what they think you’ve got. I just hope it isn’t the same thing I think you’ve got.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  Instead of answering, she walked back toward the bedroom. Jerry followed eagerly. He paused for a moment to scritch the King of Siam under his chin and behind his mouth. The cat accepted the adoration as no less than his due, and even deigned to purr.

  By the time Jerry made it to the bedroom, Anna had most of her clothes off. He shut the door behind him. When they were in bed together, the King of Siam liked to jump up there and help. Jerry didn’t think he improved things. There, Anna agreed with him.

  It wasn’t always great with them. Anna seemed more complicated than any other woman Jerry had ever known; the challenge was part of what drew him to her. So they had their ups and downs with their ups and downs. But when it was good, it was spectacular. Tonight …

  Afterward, he mimed putting the top of his head on again. “Wow,” he said, and leaned over to kiss her one more time.

  “Yeah.” She nodded lazily. “Wow.”

  She got out of bed and opened the door. The King of Siam meowed irately as he paraded into the bedroom—what had the humans been up to that didn’t require a cat? Since he’d been fixed, he couldn’t even imagine. You poor bastard, Jerry thought, and petted the top of the cat’s head.

  The King of Siam scratched his hand.

  * * *

  Jerry stuck his head into Professor Krikorian’s office. His advisor was explaining something to an undergrad in words of one syllable. By the blank look on the guy’s face, even words of one syllable might have been too hard. Krikorian nodded to Jerry without breaking his own train of thought. Jerry ducked back into the hallway and leaned against the wall to wait.

  A couple of chattering girls sashayed by, one in jeans, the other in shorts. Jerry’s eyes followed them. He was attached, but he wasn’t blind. And if UCLA didn’t lead the world in pretty girls, he couldn’t think of any other place that would.

  Out came the undergrad. He was scratching his head, with luck in wisdom. Jerry went inside. “What’s going on?” Hagop Krikorian asked. He waved Jerry to the chair the undergrad had just warmed.

  “I found out what was up with the people who were asking about me,” Jerry said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Krikorian leaned forward. His thick, bristly beard, black with just a little gray, always reminded Jerry of steel wool—and reminded him his own whiskers were still on the wispy side.

  “Yeah. They’re from the Hughes Glomar Explorer. They want me on it when it goes out toward the end of June. I may get some good stuff if I can trail a hydrophone far enough behind the ship to mute most of the engine noise. I may need a leave of absence fall quarter—I don’t know just when I’ll be getting back.”

  “Huh.” Krikorian scratched his cheek. His whiskers rasped like wire under his fingernails, too. “You want to go, do you?”

  “You bet I do. Good chance for fieldwork. The money’s decent, too. Better than decent, in fact, and I can use some better than decent now.”

  “That’s right. You’re getting married soon. What does—” The professor paused.

  “Anna,” Jerry supplied.

  “Thanks. What does Anna think of all this?”

  “She’s not thrilled about putting things off, but she sees what a chance this is for me. What do you think, boss?”

  Krikorian scratched at his beard again. After a few seconds, he said, “I don’t know whether to be jealous or to tell you you’re out of your mind. The whole sea-mining story sounds like the world’s biggest boondoggle to me.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Jerry thought, and wasn’t that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me, Perry Mason? With a shrug, he answered, “Howard Hughes has money the way Carter has Little Liver Pills. If he wants to give me some, I’m sure not gonna complain.”

  “Nope. In your shoes, I wouldn’t, either,” his advisor said. “You think grad students have it bad now, you should have seen things twenty years ago. They used to take better care of the lab animals than they did with us.”

  And they don’t now? Jerry almost said that out loud. He swallowed it at the last moment, though. He could joke with Professor Krikorian up to a point, but only up to a point.

  When he kept quiet, Krikorian went on, “Do what you need to do. If you have to take that leave of absence, I’ll help arrange it. I hope you bring back some good data. Any which way, you’ll have a story you can tell over cocktails at conferences for the rest of your life.”

  “Sure.” Jerry wondered what would happen if he tried that. Maybe the CIA guys would just lock him up and throw away the key. Or maybe somebody with a scope-sighted rifle on a rooftop across the street would blow his head off as soon as he stepped out of the conference hotel. John P. didn’t seem like somebody who kidded around about secrecy.

  He said his good-byes and went up a flight of stairs to his own office. They crammed half a dozen TAs into a space no bigger than one professor got, separating desks and chairs with three-quarter-height walls made of varnished plywood and frosted glass. If you ever needed to be reminded of your status, academia knew how to do it.

  A couple of other grad students were in there, either waiting for students or doing some work. After the usual greetings and grumblings, Jerry sat down to see whether anyone from his Biology 101C sections would show up. Nobody did. Having wasted an hour of his life, he headed to the parking lot and drove home.

  The southbound San Diego Freeway turned out to be a lot more exciting than his office hour. Some idiot towing a big boat had managed to flip his car and the boat trailer sideways across three lanes of traffic. Along with half the other people in the world, Jerry had to funnel through the single lane that remained open. A good time was had by none.

  He anxiously watched the needle on his temperature gauge creep up. The Rambler didn’t like crawling along. If the radiator boiled over, he’d add one more stuck car to the freeway nightmare.

  But he made it past the clog. After that, he sailed down to El Segundo, where he got off. He headed east, past Inglewood, past Hawthorne Boulevard, past Prairie, till he came to the little street he lived on. Two minutes later, he was parking his car. He affectionately patted the door when he got out. He’d got back again.

  He checked his mailbox in the foyer. The new Fantasy and Science Fiction was there. That would give him something to kill time with tonight. And a bright green flyer told him a Mexican restaurant was opening on Prairie. He tossed it in the trash.

  As soon as he walked into his place, the phone rang. He trotted into the bedroom. “Hello?”

  “Are we on, Stieglitz?” That could only be John P.’s raspy voice.

  “Uh, yeah,” Jerry answered. The CIA guy hung up. More slowly, Jerry did, too. Big Brother really was watching him.

  II

  Jerry had the Thomas Brothers, open to the right page, on the front seat beside him. He checked the road atlas when he stopped at a red light. Yes, the address he was looking for should be in the next block of Ocean Boulevard. The light turned green. He got going more slowly than he might have, but before the guy in the pickup behind him could honk.

  There it was! The Long Beach apartment building was an older cousin to the ones that had sprouted like toadstools in Hawthorne. Instead of adobe-colored stucco and a Spanish-tile roof, it wore white stucco with blue shingles on top. Maybe it was supposed to seem transplanted from a Greek island.

  He found a parking space and, carrying a suitcase he got out of the trunk, walked back to the building. He walked straight inside, too; it didn’t have any kind of security system. His head swung right, then left.

  Apartment 127 was to the left. As he’d been told to do, he knocked twice, then once. It made him feel silly, as if he were in a bad spy movie. But evidently genuine spies did stuff like that, too.

  The door opened. A man who looked as if he’d been a leatherneck not real long before eyed him with no expression. “Yeah?”

  “My name’s Jerry Stieglitz. John sent me.” Jerry felt silly again.

  But the tough-looking fellow stood aside. “C’mon in. Set your suitcase down on the couch. We’ll check it out. Then go over to Vic at the table there. He’ll take care of your paperwork.”

  “Okay.” Jerry followed instructions one more time.

  Another guy who looked as if he could take care of himself started to unlatch the suitcase, then paused. “Anything monogrammed in here? Shirt? Belt? Handkerchiefs, even?”

  “Nope. Not my style,” Jerry said.

  “Awright. We’ll look it over anyway.” The man opened the lid and started inspecting Jerry’s clothes.

  Vic, behind the table, was older than the other two and seemed milder. “Give me your wallet.” Jerry handed it to him. Vic extracted his driver’s license, Mastercard, and Social Security card. Jerry felt a pang. You weren’t really you unless you had the paperwork to prove it. Then Vic pulled a small envelope from what looked like a cash box. “Here you go.”