“Okay.” By the way Steve said it, he might have been humoring a nut case. “Go on.”

  “Did something funny happen with your bank account right after you got back to L.A.? Did you get a letter from Dale telling you what a good boy you’d been without saying a word about how or why you’d been a good boy?”

  Steve missed a step. After he caught himself, he answered, “Yes and yes, respectively.” He didn’t sound as if he thought Jerry was crazy anymore.

  “They’re bribing us to keep our mouths shut,” Jerry said.

  “They sure are. As far as I’m concerned, it’s going to work, too. They could be killing us to keep our mouths shut.” Steve said nothing more till they got to the corner across the street from the Penguin Coffee Shop. As he punched the button on the streetlight pole and waited for the Walk signal, he added, “Isn’t this a cheerful thing to talk about on the way to lunch?”

  “Well, yeah,” Jerry said. The light changed. He and Steve crossed the street and walked into the restaurant. It was full; they had to wait ten minutes before they got a table. Jerry ordered two pieces of fried chicken and fries. Steve chose the cheeseburger.

  “Enjoy the money,” the older man said. “That’s all—just enjoy it. It’s a nice piece of change for me, but I’m already doing all right. For you, still in grad school and about to get married, it’ll mean a lot more. What does Anna think about it?”

  “I haven’t told her yet. I’m still trying to work out how. What could I have done to deserve that kind of money when I was just along for window dressing?”

  “Ah. Yes, there is that. I haven’t said anything to Beth, either, to tell you the truth. The less anybody outside knows, the better.”

  “You got that right!” Jerry said, and then, a moment later, “Have you heard anything about what they’re up to out there?”

  “Not a word,” Steve replied. “If we’re out of the program, we’re out of the program. They may be pressing ahead as hard as they can, or they may have decided to be cautious after all. I have no idea.”

  “I just hope we don’t find out the hard way.”

  Before Steve could answer, the waitress came with their lunches. “Remind me who had coffee and who had Coke,” she said.

  “Coke here,” Jerry said. She set the glass in front of him along with the chicken—she knew he got that. Then she gave Steve his food and went off to deal with more hungry people.

  After she’d disappeared, Steve said, “If you hadn’t lost your temper with Dave, we’d probably still be out there.” He took a big bite from his cheeseburger.

  “I’ve thought about that. You think I haven’t?” To keep his temper now, Jerry gnawed on a drumstick. It was good fried chicken—not great, but good. After a moment, he went on, “But you know what? I bet we wouldn’t, not for long. They would have done something else stupid. If I didn’t blow my stack, you would have.”

  “It could be,” Steve admitted. “They were talking in ways that made me nervous, and when they started testing structural integrity.…” He shook his head. “You weren’t wrong. That went way over the line. I might have been more restrained telling them about it, though.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ve thought about that, too. But when I got a look at them going ahead and doing it, I saw red,” Jerry said. He ate some fries. They were top notch. “If you’d talked to them, they might even have listened a little. You aren’t the weird hippie kid, you know? You’re an authority.”

  “The only authority they listen to is the highest one,” Steve said. “People like you and me, we’re just tools to them. They use us as long as they need us, then toss us when they don’t anymore. Now they know how to get inside, so they think they can run with the ball themselves.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jerry thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “If I hadn’t told them how I did it…”

  “You were part of the team then. You thought you’d stay on it longer than you did. Can’t say I blame you. I thought the same thing. The next question they’ll want to make sure of is, are you an honest politician?” Steve cocked his head to one side, plainly wondering whether Jerry knew what he was talking about.

  As a matter of fact, Jerry did. Anybody who’d read as much Heinlein as he had pretty much had to. “‘An honest politician is one who stays bought,’” he quoted.

  Steve smiled. “There you go. You may be the weird hippie kid, but you’ve got an old man’s head on your shoulders.”

  “Nah. I’ve read a lot of stuff and I remember too goddamn much of it, that’s all.”

  “I think we just said the same thing with different words.”

  When the waitress came by again, she said, “You guys sure cleaned that up. Either one of you care for some dessert?”

  “Let me have a slice of cherry pie, please,” Jerry said.

  “Peach for me,” Steve added.

  “Coming up.” She took their plates and hurried off.

  When she brought back the slices of pie, she also set the check on the table. “I’ve got it,” Steve said.

  “Thanks,” Jerry answered. He wasn’t broke. He was further from broke than he’d ever been in his life, in fact. All the same, he didn’t argue. Steve had made it clear he’d been a long way from broke for a long time. Buying lunch at a coffee shop wouldn’t mean he’d miss paying the rent.

  They headed back toward the RAND Corporation headquarters. When Jerry started to peel off to go to his car, Steve set a hand on his arm. “Remember the honest politician,” the older man said earnestly. “I mean it. You have no idea how much out of your weight you’d be fighting. Don’t do anything silly. You won’t regret it later—you won’t have a later.”

  “Believe me, man, I get it,” Jerry said. Stephen Dole didn’t know he’d lifted those two photos. But his having them didn’t make Steve wrong. If the CIA could rub him out before he got to use them, or could make sure everybody thought they were hoaxes, the Agency still won and he still lost.

  With a sigh and a shrug, Steve went off to the entrance. Jerry walked to the Rambler. There was only one of him, and a hell of a lot of CIA. If he ever did decide not to stay bought, he couldn’t afford any mistakes. Assuming, of course, that deciding not to stay bought wasn’t the first, inevitably fatal, mistake.

  * * *

  On Saturday night, he and Anna saw Blazing Saddles for a second time at the Crenshaw, a movie house that specialized in showing yesterday’s hits tomorrow. He had no idea how the place stayed in business, but it had sat at the corner of Crenshaw and Compton Boulevard for as long as he could remember, and no doubt longer than that.

  He still didn’t say anything to her about the two years’ bonus. For one thing, he had yet to come up with a way to make it sound plausible. For another, he didn’t want to touch the money unless he absolutely had to. Having it felt wrong, as if by taking it he remained complicit in whatever the CIA wound up doing. And the less Anna knew about all that stuff, the better—for her.

  Then, on Sunday, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. Jerry watched and listened with his mouth hanging open while the new president let the old president off the hook. If any flies had been buzzing around inside his apartment, they could have flown right on in. He didn’t believe what he was hearing. No, that wasn’t right. He didn’t want to believe what he was hearing.

  After Ford vanished from his small black-and-white screen, commentators came on to explain what the pardon meant. Jerry turned off the TV. He knew too well what the pardon meant. “Fuck a duck!” he said. “The fix is in! Is it ever!”

  Not two minutes later, the phone rang. It was his father. “Hell of a country we’ve got here, isn’t it?” Hyman Stieglitz sounded as disgusted as Jerry felt.

  “Sure is, Dad,” Jerry said. They’d quarreled plenty over politics. His father had thought Vietnam was worth fighting about a lot longer than Jerry had—Jerry’s unkind guess was, because his dad wouldn’t have to carry a rifle this time. But they’d never argued about Richard Nixon. His father’d thought Nixon was a bastard longer than Jerry’d been alive.

  “Let this be a lesson for you,” Dad said. “See if you can wind up rich and famous. A guy like that, he’ll get away with anything. His rich, famous friends, they’ll make goddamn sure he doesn’t have to pay for it. Disgusting, that’s the only word I can think of.”

  “Dad, you oughta go on TV!” Jerry exclaimed.

  “On TV? How come?” His father sounded suspicious, and well he might have. Jerry’d zinged him often enough, or maybe too often.

  Not this time, though. “Because you were reading my mind, that’s why. If you can do it with everybody, you’ll be one of those rich, famous people yourself.”

  “Ha! Fat chance! Besides, you ever take a good look at your old man? If anybody’s got a punim meant for radio, you’re talking with him right now.”

  “Everybody says I look like you,” Jerry said, realizing too late he’d given his dad the chance to zing him this time.

  And his dad did, though not so hard as he might have: “I figured that was why you grew the face fungus, to keep people from noticing.”

  “Thanks. I love you, too,” Jerry said.

  “I’m sure,” Hyman Stieglitz said dryly. “Anyway, I just wanted somebody to vent my spleen with for a few minutes. I’ll let you get back to what you were doing.”

  “I was cussing at the TV, and it isn’t even on. I killed it right after Ford finished saying what a swell old boy Nixon was.”

  “Swell old boy, huh? Well, you got that right, anyhow. So long, kid.” His father hung up.

  Jerry wanted somebody to vent his spleen with, too, so he called Anna. She’d been reading instead of watching the boob tube; she didn’t know what President Ford had done till he told her. “That’s terrible!” she said. “I always thought Ford was honest. Not too smart, but honest.”

  “Not too smart, is right.” Jerry wished she’d sounded more outraged, but knew he ought to count his blessings. Her father was a construction worker; he and his wife were both rock-ribbed (rock-headed, Jerry thought) Republicans. He was lucky she didn’t go with them.

  “What can we do about any of it, though? It’s back in Washington, and it’s not like Ford’ll do anything different with taxes or with the Russians because he gave Nixon the Get Out of Jail Free card.” Anna proved she thought in Monopoly, too.

  “I guess,” Jerry said. Would Ford do anything different with Humpty Dumpty because he’d pardoned Nixon? Nixon knew about the spaceship, of course. Whether he knew about explorations inside it, Jerry couldn’t have said. He’d already left office by then. Would Ford and Kissinger have kept him in the loop? They might have. Being stupid wasn’t Nixon’s problem; being crooked was.

  “We’ll see who the Democrats nominate in seventy-six and we’ll worry about it then,” Anna said.

  “Yeah.” Jerry didn’t want to argue with her, not when she wasn’t wrong. And thinking about the election in 1976 made him think about the Bicentennial in 1976. Less than two years away now. People had already been talking about it for a while: mostly people who hoped to make money off it.

  It was pretty special, though. How many democracies lasted two hundred years? He knew a lot less history than oceanography, but you didn’t need to know much to realize the answer was damn few.

  “Blazing Saddles was funny.” Anna changed the subject with a lurch. “I don’t know if it was funnier than The Producers, but it was funny.”

  “You don’t see a comedy twice if it isn’t funny,” Jerry said. If she’d had enough politics, okay, she had. And it let him avoid admitting he hadn’t seen The Producers in a theater, only in chopped-up bits and pieces on TV. Movies weren’t the same that way. Better than nothing, but not the same.

  “Especially not at the Crenshaw. Mom and Dad would take me there for cartoons and for dinosaur movies. A million screaming kids, and the smell of buttered popcorn as thick as cigarette smoke is other places,” Anna said. Her parents smoked, too.

  “I was there for some of those, too,” Jerry said.

  “I wonder if we were ever there for the same ones.”

  “Probably.” They were only a year apart. They’d grown up in the same suburb. It would have been more surprising if they hadn’t been in the same place at the same time every once in a while.

  Jerry thought so, anyhow. Anna said, “A Sign It Was Meant To Be.” He could hear the capital letters thumping into place.

  He answered, “I’m glad it was.” He might not have been the most socially adept human being in captivity, but he didn’t miss the right response there.

  Anna let out a squeak. “The dumb cat just knocked something over in the kitchen. I’ll call you back. ’Bye.” She hung up without waiting for a good-bye in return.

  The phone did ring again a minute later. Jerry grabbed it. “Hi, sweetie.”

  “Well, hello, beautiful.” It wasn’t Anna. It was Tim Ishihara. Laughing, he went on, “I didn’t know you cared.”

  “Believe me, I don’t.” Jerry’s ears felt like a forest fire.

  “That’s what you say. Hey, I know I’m irresistible.” Naturally, his friend didn’t want to let him off the hook, not when he’d hooked himself. Then Tim asked, “Were you watching TV just now?”

  “Afraid I was.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it sucks. How about you?”

  “The same, man. The same. Other thing I think is, if you’re a fat cat it doesn’t matter what you do. They threw Nixon out of the White House? Big fucking deal. He’ll write a book full of bullshit about how it wasn’t his fault, and then he’ll laugh all the way to the bank. Wanna bet?”

  “You really think I’m that dumb?”

  “Since you’re asking…” Tim said. They both laughed this time. Sometimes you had to. If you didn’t, you’d pound your head on a table or against the wall till your forehead bled or your brain fell out through your nose. Tim added, “Don’t we live in a great country?”

  “Oh, at least,” Jerry said. “It’s better than most other places, but it sure isn’t as good as it ought to be.”

  He wondered what the centaurowls would think of the United States of America. How long had they lain at the bottom of the Pacific? Since 1964? 1954? 1554? 1554 BC? He had no way to know. He also had no way to know whether Dave or one of the other CIA guys had pushed one of those big yellow buttons. Maybe they were trying to talk with an alien right now.

  If they were trying to wake the centaurowls, they’d be smart to rouse only one of them and keep the other as hostage for good behavior. Jerry was sure they didn’t need him to tell them that. All the spy games they’d played since the end of World War II would have taught them those lessons.

  “We’re trying to get better, but there sure as hell are times I wish we’d try harder,” Tim said.

  “You and me both. I think everybody our age does,” Jerry said. And no matter how hard we try, we’ll still look like savages to those things inside Humpty Dumpty. Dangerous savages, maybe, but savages.

  “You think we’ll be any better when we’re old enough to run things? I don’t. The guys who get in power, they get in power ’cause they make you think you can trust ’em, but you can’t trust any of those assholes. Not a fuckin’ one.” Tim spoke with great conviction.

  Jerry’d thought he was cynical about politics. Tim left him in the dust. “You do defense work, too,” he said.

  “The Russians aren’t better’n we are. They’re even worse. You know that.”

  “Yeah.” Jerry did, too. But were they enough worse to be kept away from Humpty Dumpty and whatever it could teach mankind? Was America so much better that it alone deserved to control so much power? He still worried about that.

  XIII

  You can’t trust any of those assholes. After Tim said the words, Jerry thought they’d be engraved on his soul forever. It didn’t work like that. Life kept getting in the way.

  Instead of writing to see whether Ben Bova would look at a revision of the story that had come back while he was out in the Pacific, he took his courage in both hands and called the Condé Nast offices in New York. Before long, he found himself connected with the editor of Analog. After introducing himself, he said, “Excuse me, but if I make those changes you suggested, would you consider it again?”

  “Of course I would! Why do you think I wrote you that letter?” Across 2,500 miles of phone line, Jerry could hear the editor smile; he must have asked the right question. Bova added, “No guarantees, of course. I have to see what you do with it.”

  “Oh, sure. I understand that,” Jerry said quickly.

  “It’s good to hear from you,” the editor said. “I was kind of disappointed when I didn’t for so long.”

  “I’ve been on a research project out in the Pacific. I couldn’t get my mail for a while,” Jerry said.

  “Is that what it was? I should have realized. You wrote me before that you were doing studies on whale songs. That must be fascinating!”

  “It is,” Jerry answered, amazed that Bova remembered the cover letter from the story he’d sold the year before. He wondered what the editor of Analog would think if he told him about the spaceship and the aliens.

  John W. Campbell probably would have believed him. Of course, Campbell had believed in Dianetics, too, and in the reactionless Dean Drive, and the allegedly psionic Hieronymus Machine, and using astrology in weather forecasting. By everything Jerry could see, Ben Bova’s head was screwed on a lot tighter. Which wouldn’t be an asset, of course, when the truth was so bizarre.

  Whatever psionics the current Analog editor had weren’t enough to let him pluck secrets from Jerry’s mind. He said, “Make the changes and let me have another look. If I don’t buy it, I bet somebody else will.”

  “Okay. Thanks again.” Jerry said his good-byes and got off the phone. A bit slower than he might have, he realized Bova’d given him another good piece of advice. You started with the top markets, sure. But if you didn’t sell there, you sent your brainchildren to magazines with less prestige and less money. Getting paid at all beat getting zilch for what you did.