No more than half a second slower than he should have, he said, “Too much work. Not enough time. Not enough money—the time on the Glomar Explorer helped there, anyhow.”

  “Good. You should have a little something socked away before you get married,” his father said. He’d been ten years old when the market crashed in 1929. He’d worked on and off from the following summer on, and studied in scraps of time he’d carved out somehow. The Depression scarred him for life. As much as anyone could be, he was a self-made man, and sometimes thought Jerry’s generation soft and spoiled. He might not be religious, but he passionately believed in suspenders and belt.

  “I do my best, Dad, honest.” Young man and older went their separate ways.

  XII

  Monday morning, Jerry called Professor Krikorian. “So you’re back, are you?” his advisor rumbled. “Now you can tell me about how we’re going to get all our metal from manganese nodules from now on, right?”

  “Not exactly,” Jerry said. “The machinery still has some kinks in it.”

  “Good,” Hagop Krikorian said, which surprised Jerry. “Even if it didn’t, I wouldn’t like it, not even a little bit. Strip-mining is bad enough on dry land. On the ocean floor, where all the sediment you kick up goes into the water and circulates? You have to be crazy!” He added something in what might have been Armenian.

  “Yeah.” Jerry hadn’t really thought about that. He realized he should have. He also realized the professor had less to worry about than he feared, since that wasn’t really a mining machine the pipe string had lowered to the bottom. He couldn’t say anything about what it was, especially over the phone. He did say, “The gadget didn’t work as well as they wanted it to. I’m not supposed to tell anybody much, but I can say that.”

  “Breaks my heart,” Krikorian said. “Did you get any decent recordings out of it, at least?”

  “Afraid not. Engine noise and machinery noise kind of ruined things. I did get more money than I would have from a year of TAing, though.”

  “Grad school is a miserable business. You think it’s bad now…”

  To Jerry’s relief, Professor Krikorian didn’t launch into more tales of how rotten things had been in his day. That let the current sufferer say, “Can I bring the hydrophone up to campus today so I don’t have to worry about it in my apartment anymore?”

  “Sure. Bring it here. I’ll be in the office till about four.”

  “I’ll be there inside an hour. When I come, will you give me the form authorizing eight units of directed study from you?” In something straight out of Catch-22, Jerry had to be an enrolled student to serve as a teaching assistant. That killed more than half a month’s paycheck by itself.

  “Yeah, sure. We’ll dot the i’s and cross the t’s.” Krikorian sounded as disgusted with university foolishness as anyone to whom it didn’t apply very well could. Then again, he had his own bureaucratic barbed wire to cut through.

  Jerry put the hydrophone in his car and drove up to UCLA. He paid to park on campus, to save himself from having to lug it very far. There were free spots around the university to grab, but you had to show up early and you had to be willing to walk.

  He delivered the instrument and collected his form. He was glad his advisor didn’t pump him for details about the Glomar Explorer’s supposed nodule vacuum. He had none, not for a fictitious device.

  Escaping Professor Krikorian let him go over to Murphy Hall, the building that ran the university. He turned in the form. He paid the fee that went with it. He didn’t need to worry about his check bouncing, the way he had at the start of a couple of anxious quarters. He’d never actually had one come back, but those escapes came too close for comfort.

  Missions accomplished, he went home. He enjoyed driving the San Diego Freeway when it wasn’t rush hour. To him, it was what driving should have been all the time. You were here, you needed to get there, and you did. Not much traffic to worry about, only the new and ever more ignored fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit.

  After he pulled into his parking space, he went to the lobby to see what the mailman had wrought. There were ads for local restaurants and an auto-parts place, plus a bank statement: it was the second of the month. He set a hand on his heart to hold in the excited palpitations, then climbed the stairs to his place.

  Most of the mail went straight into the trash. He almost tossed the statement, too. It wasn’t as if he’d written any checks in August except the one settling his overdue phone bill, and that wouldn’t have cleared yet. But he was trying to get back into the regular swing of things, so he opened it.

  No, no canceled checks in the envelope. There was the record of the payment for his second month on the Glomar Explorer. And, below that, there was a listing for another deposit to his savings account, this one in the amount of $57,211.92. It had gone into the account about when he was waking up Friday.

  His eyes popped. He jerked straight upright, as if somebody’d jabbed him in the ass with a hat pin. Adrenaline iced him down, the way it had right after he got rear-ended. He felt as if he’d just picked up the BANK ERROR IN YOUR FAVOR—COLLECT $200 card in a Monopoly game.

  But not $200. $57,211.92. “Bullshit,” he muttered as he came back to earth. That kind of money didn’t fall from the sky. Even with inflation going crazy and gas up around sixty cents a gallon, you could live for three years on that kind of money, and live pretty decently, too. Maybe even four.

  You could if they let you keep it, that is. Fat chance! He’d watched computers in action out in the Pacific, and seen the future brought to life. Here, he had to be back in the all-too-fallible present. Some electronic “brain” somewhere must have screwed up.

  He went into the bedroom, ready to call Bank of America and give them a piece of his mind. But he stopped before he picked up the phone. Some things needed to be done in person. He wouldn’t get the runaround that way. He wouldn’t get so much of it, anyhow.

  Down to the car, bank statement in hand. The branch he used was on Gardena Boulevard, closer to the house where he’d grown up than to where he lived now. It was his folks’ bank, too. He’d had his own account there since before his mother died; his father hoped to get him used to saving money. That had worked out the way Dad wanted, sure enough.

  Fifteen minutes later, he stood in line at the bank. Five minutes after that, he walked up to a teller. “Yes, sir? How can I help you today?” the Japanese-American woman asked. She was maybe five years older than he was, so he hadn’t gone to school with her, but he would have bet she came out of Gardena High, too.

  He showed her the statement, pointing out the insane item. “This can’t be right,” he said. “What do I have to do to get it fixed?”

  A vertical line appeared between her eyes as she frowned. “That is … a lot of money,” she said carefully. “Let me check it for you, okay?” She took the statement and disappeared with it. Jerry imagined alarm bells ringing and cops aiming pistols at him.

  She came back a few minutes later. “This seems to be correct, Mr. Stieglitz. We received a certified check from the Summa Corporation for deposit to your account, the same way we did with the two smaller payments before. You are familiar with the Summa Corporation?”

  “I am, yeah.” Jerry knew he sounded dazed. Summa meant Howard Hughes meant CIA front. But why the hell had the CIA suddenly dropped a not-so-small fortune into his lap?

  The teller said, “If somebody paid me that much money, I bet I’d look happier than you do right now.”

  “I’m still kind of getting used to the idea,” Jerry said. She slid the bank statement across the counter at him. He took it, looked at it one more time to make sure those numbers were still there, and walked out of the bank building.

  A secondhand bookstore with a good sf section was only a few doors down from the B of A. Jerry usually went in when he found himself here. Today, he just got in the car and headed back to his apartment. His head buzzed like an out-of-control electric motor all the way there.

  What had Dale said while he was canning him? Something to the effect that Jerry wouldn’t hurt for money because he’d got involved with Azorian and Midlothian. He didn’t remember the exact words, but that was what it amounted to.

  He put the Rambler in park, turned off the engine, and pulled the hand brake. Not hurting for money was one thing. This, this right here, was something else again. Throwing a stack of greenbacks like that at him?

  “Why, in God’s name?” he said as he got out and locked the car.

  As soon as he asked the question that way, he saw the likely answer. What did they think they were buying with so much money out of the blue? What could it be but his silence? We’ll make you happy, they had to be saying. Now you keep your mouth shut and make us happy, too.

  He looked around the quiet parking garage before he headed for the stairs. No hit man lurking behind a Ford Pinto. Wouldn’t rubbing him out have been cheaper than bribing him? Maybe not. Always the risk that the cops might uncover more than the Agency wanted them to, or even that the gunman would wonder why he’d plugged a harmless grad student and start poking around. Money would do the job as long as Jerry played along.

  He’d thought about the Bank Error card before. To the CIA, that was what fifty-seven grand and change added up to: Monopoly money. They might not print it themselves, but they sure knew the people who did.

  “Crazy. Fucking crazy,” he said, and went on up to his place.

  * * *

  The next day, he got a letter in a Summa Corporation envelope. It had been postmarked the Saturday before in Honolulu. That gave him a running start at guessing who’d actually written it.

  When he opened the envelope, the letter inside also proved to be on Summa Corporation letterhead. It was handwritten, though, which he couldn’t imagine any real corporation big shot doing. He had no trouble reading Dale Neuwirth’s script.

  Dear Jerry, the mission director wrote,

  As I told you when you were leaving the project, everyone here was delighted with your cleverness and resourcefulness, which played a vital role in our successes up to this point. Talk is cheap, though, and sometimes a more material show of appreciation can be welcome. Accordingly, it was my pleasure to award you a bonus equivalent to two years’ salary. This amount, minus deductions for federal and state taxes, should have been deposited in your bank account by now. You’ve earned it, believe me. And, as I also told you before, you have only to ask if I can be of any further assistance. Sincerely—

  Dale’s signature followed. He wrote Neuwirth, though that surely wasn’t his real last name. Jerry wondered what that name was in fact, and also wondered whether he’d ever learn it. He had his doubts.

  He did abstractly admire the letter. No one who read it could have any idea what kind of project he’d been working on or what he’d done that the boss man so appreciated. The most even Sherlock Holmes would deduce was that it was something special, to have earned such a generous bonus.

  He wondered if they’d bribed Steve the same way. It occurred to him that he could call the older man at the RAND Corporation and ask him. Half a second later, it also occurred to him that that wouldn’t be Phi Beta Kappa. Bonus or no bonus, from now on he had to figure the CIA was keeping tabs on him. Talking about Azorian on the phone, even with someone else who’d worked on it, might be dangerous. Talking about Midlothian or Humpty Dumpty might be worse than dangerous.

  Up to the apartment he went, letter in hand. He stopped halfway up the stairs to the second level. “Huh!” he said thoughtfully. That hesitancy—hell, that fear—about talking too much on the phone must already have taken root in his mind. Otherwise, why hadn’t he told Anna about the money when he talked to her last night?

  He started up the stairs again. When she came over, or when he went to her place … He shook his head. If they could bug his phone, they could bug his apartment, too. And hers.

  “Christ,” he said as he unlocked his door. If he went on thinking this way, he’d end up as paranoid as Richard Nixon. Understanding fear of persecution from the inside out might prove useful to him as a writer. Any new experience might. All the same, he could have done without this one.

  On Thursday, he went up to UCLA again to put in an interlibrary-loan request for a Japanese journal with a study of humpback migration patterns. The article was in Japanese, but it had a summary in English that would give him the gist. And maps showed the same oceans, regardless of language.

  Interlibrary loans all went through the Research Library at the north end of campus. It would have been nice if he could have done this through the Biomedical Llibrary in his preferred part of the sprawling university, but no such luck.

  At UCLA, science, engineering, and mathematical types mostly hung out in the southern part of the campus. The north was for English majors, would-be historians, students of foreign languages, and others even less likely than marine biologists to land jobs after graduating. There were more girls up there, but that was only of theoretical interest to him these days.

  He walked past Bunche Hall on his way to the library. Everyone called the building the Waffle. The red-brown granite on the south-facing side was punctuated by a grid of square, dark windows. It had been the Social Sciences Building when he got to UCLA in 1966. They rechristened it for the diplomat two years later and put his bust, his name, and, below it, 1904– near the elevators. Bunche’s birth year was set asymmetrically under the name. That had pissed Jerry off: it was as if they were waiting for Bunche to die. When he did, near the end of 1971, symmetry was restored.

  When Jerry turned in the request form, the woman who took it said, “You understand, it won’t come in right away. Three weeks if you’re lucky, six if you aren’t.”

  “I know,” he answered resignedly. “I’ve done this before. I’m just glad I’ll get my hands on it sooner or later.”

  She nodded. “That’s the right attitude. Interlibrary loan is marvelous, but sometimes people expect too much of it.” Even librarians got excited about what they did.

  Instead of driving straight home after finishing his morning errand, Jerry took the Santa Monica Freeway west from the San Diego. Ten minutes later, he was in Santa Monica and the freeway was ending. Not far from where it did, the RAND Corporation had its headquarters. The curving gray stone walls, the sheer size of the building, and where it was declared that RAND wouldn’t be out begging on the sidewalk with a tin cup and sunglasses any time soon.

  A single entrance channeled visitors to a reception area. “What can I do for you today, sir?” asked a man about Jerry’s age when Jerry came up to his desk.

  “My name is Jerry Stieglitz. I’d like to talk with Doctor Stephen Dole for a few minutes, if that’s possible.”

  “About what?”

  “Some business we were both doing this summer.”

  “Let me check.” The man picked up a phone and punched in a number. He spoke briefly, then hung up and again acknowledged that Jerry was there. “Yes, he’ll see you, Mr. Stieglitz. How do you spell your last name?” When Jerry told him, he typed it on a square of cardboard and put that in a plastic holder. He spoke into the phone again before handing Jerry the badge. “This is your visitor’s display. Please show it as you walk through the hallways. Your escort will be here in a moment.”

  Jerry pinned the badge to his shirt. He wondered whether different days had different-colored holders so you couldn’t use today’s next Tuesday. RAND seemed to take security as seriously as the CIA did.

  The escort was a black woman a couple of years older than he was. She had a badge, too. It bore her photo and the name Angela Simmons. “Come with me, please,” she said, and led Jerry past the receptionists.

  An elevator ride to the third floor, a walk down a corridor that could have belonged to a prosperous corporation anywhere in the world, a stop at a door with Steve’s name and “Director of Communications” on it. Angela Simmons knocked. Steve opened the door. “Hi, Jerry,” he said, and then, to the woman, “Thanks for bringing him up, Angela.”

  “You’re welcome, Doctor Dole,” she said. “I’ll wait here to take him down again.”

  “Okay.” Steve waved Jerry in, then shut the door behind him. The office also could have belonged to any prosperous corporation anywhere. Steve sat down behind his aircraft carrier of a desk, Jerry in front of it. “What can I do for you?” the older man asked.

  “I was up at UCLA turning in a book request. Long as I was close by, I figured I’d stop in and see if you wanted to have lunch. It’s getting close to twelve.” As Jerry spoke, he pointed to corners of the room where walls met ceiling. How did you suggest a place might be bugged without yelling, Hey, this place might be bugged?

  He’d never been great at charades, but Steve got the message. “Sure, we can do that,” he said. “Did you see that place just when you were getting off the freeway?”

  “The one with the penguin outlined in neon on the sign?”

  “That’s it. It’s called the Penguin Coffee Shop.”

  “No kidding? I figured they’d name it the Hyena or something.”

  Steve chuckled. “You haven’t changed, have you?” He and Jerry went out together. Steve told Angela, “We’re going to have lunch together, so you can do whatever else you need to. I’ll get him outside myself.”

  “However you want, Doctor Dole.” She nodded to him, then to Jerry, and went on her way.

  Once they were out in the open air, Jerry shed his badge. So did Steve. The man from the RAND Corporation asked, “Do you really think they’re listening to what goes on inside my office?”

  “I don’t know. I think they could be. It’s harder out here.” Jerry still wondered whether Stephen Dole reported back to the CIA, too. But Dale had fired Steve right after he got Jerry, so that seemed unlikely. And Steve was already in the know; Jerry could talk to him without putting him in more danger than he was in already. He had to talk to somebody.