Fired with enthusiasm, he made the changes that afternoon. Two days later, he needed to go up to UCLA. He took the revised story along and fed nickels into a xerox machine in the Biomedical Library. The copy went into a manila envelope addressed to that PO box in Schenectady. He wanted to send it straight back to Analog, but he wasn’t going to make the CIA pay attention to him when he didn’t have to.

  On the way home, he stopped at the post office on the corner of El Segundo and Hawthorne Boulevard. A friend of his, a guy named Alex Wilkins, worked there, though not at the windows.

  “First class, please,” he told the clerk. He paid the freight and collected a receipt. When you wrote for money, things like postage were deductible. The clerk tossed the envelope into a plastic tub.

  Jerry left. Somebody else brought a package to the window. The exciting, romantic life of a writer, he thought. As he left the post-office parking lot, he got an idea that might make the story about the skeleton in seaboots come to life … if a story about a skeleton could do that.

  The piece intended for Ben Bova came back to his apartment in eight days. Whoever’d read it in Schenectady had stuck a three-by-five under the paper clip. No security issues. Typo at the top of page 5, he or she had written. Jerry fixed the mistake and put the story in the mail for New York City.

  Then he forgot about writing for a while, because classes started at UCLA. He was TAing two sections of Introduction to Oceanography, a class whose enrollment outdid some minor league teams’ average daily attendance. Most of the people in the course didn’t give a damn about oceanography, of course. All they cared about was four units of credit, preferably with a B or better.

  “My office hours are Tuesdays from nine to eleven,” he informed both sections at their first meetings. “I can tell you right now that I won’t be there on the twenty-sixth of November.”

  Naturally, someone in each section asked, “Why not?”

  “Because I’m getting married on the twenty-fourth,” he answered.

  That shut them up, except for one class-clown type who exclaimed, “You mean you’d rather go on your honeymoon than hold office hours?” Everybody laughed, including Jerry.

  He fiddled with the story about the skeleton in boots. He fiddled with his dissertation, too. He knew he should be working harder on it, but he didn’t feel the drive he had before John P. knocked on his door and changed his life forever.

  He wondered what they were doing on the Glomar Explorer. It gnawed at him, the way his father said a tooth did when it was starting to tell you it needed a root canal. He’d never had one of those. He’d never even had a permanent tooth pulled; his wisdom teeth came in straight, which made his dentist call him a lucky son of a gun.

  He also wondered how the man he figured was his replacement was doing on the ship. He’d read some of Jerry Pournelle’s stories, mostly in Analog. He’d heard him talk, too, at signings at A Change of Hobbit. Pournelle was way to the right of him politically; as far as that went, he’d get on fine with the CIA guys. But he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He could be—he often was—loud and sarcastic. Jerry Stieglitz wondered what the fellow who shared his first name would have to say about trying to scrape bits off Humpty Dumpty’s shell. Something anyone in the way of it would remember a long time, he suspected.

  No, Dale and Dave and Jack might not have much fun with Pournelle. They wouldn’t have to listen to him. They were in charge, and he wasn’t. But they’d have to hear him whether they listened or not. When he got going, the whole ship would hear him. So would the gooney birds for a couple of miles around.

  Along with everything else that was going on, Jerry started moving stuff out of his apartment and into Anna’s. Her place was bigger and her building allowed cats, two reasons the move was going in that direction. He’d known for a while he would be doing that. Putting boxes in the trunk, driving over, and carrying them inside, though …

  “This is really gonna happen,” he said as he set another box of paperbacks down on the living-room floor.

  “Yeah.” Anna sounded as doubtful as he did. He supposed all the twos on the verge of becoming one felt that way. She went on, “It’ll take a while before everything all gets blended together and it’s not you and me anymore but just us.”

  “Tim and Cheryl are making it work.” Jerry’s friend and the lady he’d married were his type specimens for how to do it right. He tried to put the reason why into words: “They don’t get on each other’s nerves, you know?”

  Anna sniffed. “I’m not sure they have any nerves.”

  “Hey, be nice.” There were times when Jerry wondered whether getting married, or at least getting married to Anna, was the smartest thing he could do. True, he wouldn’t need to worry about where he’d get laid if he did. They could talk to each other, too. And they trusted each other.

  But they both had strong views about how things ought to work, and those views weren’t always the same. She spent money as fast as it came in, for instance, where he socked it away whenever he could. She liked to go out and shop and hang with other people more than he did, too. If they argued about stuff like that now, wouldn’t it get worse after they tied the knot and were together all the time?

  He thought he could have dealt with all that, though. Now … Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / and the act / Falls the Shadow. Old Thomas Stearns had got that one right. Jerry knew the Shadow’s names, too, knew them only too well. Azorian. Midlothian. Humpty Dumpty. Centaurowls.

  All that flashed through his mind in some small fraction of a second, because it was very clear by the time Anna answered, “They’re all right. They’re good people. I’m not interested in a lot of the things they are, that’s all.”

  “Okay.” He knew he wouldn’t get any more out of her. He was surprised he got that much. She was trying to make him happy, the same way he did with her. That had to mean something. If they kept pulling toward each other, wouldn’t they wind up meeting somewhere in the middle? Wouldn’t they?

  * * *

  Ben Bova bought the story for Analog. Jerry threw the check into his savings account. He mailed the story about the skeleton in seaboots to Schenectady. It came back with another note under the paper clip: This is no security risk. It is spooky. Then he sent it to Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed Ferman promptly sent it back. His note read, Creepy, but not up my alley. Good luck with it elsewhere. Jerry sent it off to Fantastic.

  He wished he were putting as much energy into his thesis. He had the data. He had everything organized. He’d lost something that might have been more important, though. He didn’t care any-more. Centaurowls again.

  But days went by, whether he cared or not. Wedding rehearsal. Bachelor party, not that his was especially wild. Tim and Alex took him out for dinner and drinks. Then they went to a strip joint and watched the girls up on stage wiggle.

  “Cheryl know you’re here?” Jerry asked Tim.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “She gonna give you a hard time?”

  “Nah.” His buddy shook his head. “She says it doesn’t matter where I get my appetite as long as I eat at home.”

  “Does she?” Jerry was jealous. Anna looked daggers at him, or sometimes daggered the back of his hand with a fingernail, if she noticed him noticing anyone else.

  “Not gonna catch me getting tied down like that. I just flit from flower to flower like a bee,” Alex said. He’d drunk more than his friends had. Jerry was glad he lived only a few blocks from the strip club.

  Tim said, “Hey, you know the bees that do the flitting are females, don’t you? Sterile females, too.”

  “What? No way!” Alex looked comically dismayed. He turned to Jerry. “Tell him he’s full of it, man.”

  “Sorry. He’s right. Worker bees are females, and they can’t lay eggs.”

  “Well, shit. See if I’m gonna make like a bee, then,” Alex said.

  “But you’re already buzzed,” Jerry observed, and from then on the night of the bachelor party became The Night Alex Got Buzzed.

  Jerry rented a ruffled shirt and a tux. Luckily for him, the black tie that came with the outfit had clips to hold it in place. He could deal with an ordinary necktie, but he’d never tied a bow tie in his life. He discovered the best way to put on a cummerbund was to fasten it in front and then turn it around. Women did that with bras all the time, but men didn’t have to worry about it much.

  The wedding went off fine. Everybody who’d stand at the front showed up at the temple hideously early so the photographer could do his thing. Charlie McGowan, Anna’s father, looked less at home in a yarmulke than Tim Ishihara did. He tried his best to be gracious, though. “I hope you kids are as happy as me and Sally,” he said.

  “Thanks, Mister McGowan,” Jerry said. He didn’t like the way Anna’s folks shouted at each other, but this seemed the wrong time and place to point that out.

  Rabbi Burstein did indeed look like some close relative of the Creator’s. He ran things as if he’d done a million weddings, which of course he had. When Tim put the cloth-covered glass representing the Temple on the platform upside down in front of Jerry, the rabbi unobtrusively knocked it sidewise so Jerry could be sure of breaking it when he stomped it.

  After the reception, the new Mr. and Mrs. Stieglitz drove to the Hilton near the airport. They’d leave for Hawaii the next morning. Meanwhile …

  Anna let out a little squeal when Jerry picked her up and carried her into the room. A dozen roses in a vase on the nightstand and a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket near the bed awaited them. Jerry read the card by the flowers. “Tim did it,” he said.

  “That was sweet!” Anna exclaimed. “Shall we drink some?”

  “What are you talking about, some?” Jerry paused. “Well, maybe some at first. Can’t get too smashed to make things official.”

  “I don’t know what you could mean,” Anna said.

  They drank some bubbly. The bed was wide and inviting. They became officially man and wife. They finished the bottle. Jerry always got happy when he drank enough champagne to feel it. Tonight was no exception. It didn’t seem to hurt his performance, either.

  “You brute,” Anna said after the second round.

  “Oh, at least,” he answered lazily. “This is what a honeymoon is for, right?”

  “That’s what the men say.” She walked into the bathroom. Jerry decided keeping his mouth shut might be a good idea. They both fell asleep in short order, so that took care of itself.

  Next morning, the first course of breakfast was two aspirins. Coffee in the hotel restaurant also helped. They drove down Century to the airport. Everything there went as smoothly as Jerry could have hoped. So did the flight to Honolulu.

  As they were touching down, Anna said, “Won’t you be glad to see more of this place than just the airport?”

  “I guess,” he answered. “But the inside of one hotel room is pretty much like the inside of another one, right?… Hey!” She’d poked him in the ribs.

  Greeters called “Aloha!” as passengers got off the plane. They hung leis around people’s necks. Jerry imagined he was supposed to feel Hawaiian. He felt more like a tourist who was supposed to feel Hawaiian.

  Then he exclaimed, “I got lei’d in Honolulu!”

  “Not yet, you haven’t, Buster,” Anna said. “And if you keep doing things like that, you won’t, either.” She poked him again.

  They took a cab to their hotel: another Hilton, a big glass-and-steel box rising near the beach. Honolulu wasn’t Los Angeles, but it was a good-sized city. And the weather! In the L.A. area, the South Bay, with its sea breezes, had the best climate, not too hot in summer, not too chilly in winter. Along with Santa Barbara and San Diego, it was about as good as you could get on the mainland. Next to Honolulu’s perfect mildness, it took a back seat.

  Their room was on the fifteenth floor. Jerry could see the beach and the blue Pacific (not the gray-green Pacific you’d see from a Los Angeles beachside hotel). When he looked way to the left, there was Diamond Head. Anna snapped pictures with an Instamatic just like the one he’d used inside Humpty Dumpty.

  To keep from thinking about that, he grabbed her. “We just got here!” she said.

  “What else are we gonna do right now?” he asked—reasonably, he thought. So they did that before they went down to dinner.

  They did other things, too, though. They spent some time on the beach—not a whole lot, because Anna was fair enough to burn fast. They walked into the ocean. Seawater that wasn’t cold freaked them both out: Angelenos weren’t used to it. They took a tour bus around Honolulu and Pearl Harbor. They saw the old royal palace and went out on a boat to the Arizona memorial.

  That sobered Jerry. Looking down at the water there, he could see a shimmering rainbow oil sheen on the surface. It still came up from the battleship the Japanese had sunk almost seven years before he was born. He wondered if Humpty Dumpty’d been down on the bottom of the Pacific by then. He wondered if he’d ever know.

  And they took another tour bus to give them a look at more of Oahu. Once you got away from the city, the place was even more preposterously gorgeous. The bus stopped at the Mormons’ Polynesian Cultural Center. The Mormons claimed the Hawaiians and other Polynesians were close kin to American Indians. Jerry thought that was utter nonsense, but the exhibits and shows were interesting anyhow.

  Then they flew to Maui. Their hotel, on the outskirts of Lahaina, was on the island’s west coast. Jerry rented a car and they drove along the northern and eastern shoreline to the village of Hana and the seven sacred pools just beyond. Like the trip up Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco, the drive was beautiful and wearing at the same time. Beaches of white sand, gold sand, black sand. Jungle. Waterfalls. A narrow, twisty road where the driver had to pay attention every second. Jerry was sure Anna saw things he didn’t, because he focused on where the next bend was and what might be coming around it.

  The hotel room had a view of the Pacific and, in front of it, a golf course. That was green, but everything on Maui was green. It failed to fill Jerry’s heart with delight. Tim and Alex both played golf. He liked them anyway.

  The hotel room also came with its own geckos: little lizards that scurried around after bugs. Jerry caught two on successive days and turned them loose on the small balcony outside. Watching one scurry straight up the stucco wall told him how they’d made it to the fourth floor.

  When he and Anna walked into Lahaina, he looked the harbor over to see if the Glomar Explorer was there. The ship wasn’t. That didn’t surprise him. No, they wouldn’t want to risk exposing Humpty Dumpty to the world till they were ready. If they were ever ready.

  “I don’t want to visit here,” Anna said, as they got on the plane that would take them back to Honolulu. “I want to live here!”

  “Yeah, well, you could do worse. I don’t know how you could do better, though,” Jerry said. “Only drawback I can see is, everything’s more expensive than it is on the mainland.”

  “Worth it,” she said, and he couldn’t very well disagree.

  At the gate to the flight that would take them back to the mainland, Jerry eyed the passengers who’d board with Anna and him, wondering if any of them were returning from the Glomar Explorer. He didn’t see anybody he recognized. Maybe everyone from the A crew was long since back. Or maybe those people were still out there at Site 126–1 off of Midway, doing whatever they were doing with and to Humpty Dumpty.

  He and Anna landed in Los Angeles a little before midnight. It was in the mid-fifties and cloudy. It wasn’t raining, but it felt as if it might. It felt like the start of December, in other words. In Hawaii, they called the rain “liquid sunshine.” Not here. As they walked to Jerry’s Rambler, Anna said, “Let’s go back!”

  “Would be nice,” Jerry said, but he kept walking. So did she.

  At the apartment, the King of Siam hid from both of them. Anna’s mother had fed and watered him and cleaned the cat box while they were gone. A week away was plenty long enough for him to decide they were invaders from Rigel, not proper humans at all. The invaders, though, knew where the kitty treats were and how to make inviting noises. The road to the King of Siam’s heart ran straight through his stomach. He came forth to claim his reward.

  After some treats, he admitted the apparent strangers might be friends after all. He let Anna fuss over him and even put up with Jerry scratching him under the chin. Chances were he wanted to play, too, but that wouldn’t happen. The humans needed to crash; they went back to the real world in the morning.

  “It’s late,” Anna said—blurrily, because she was brushing her teeth. She spat and rinsed. Then, more clearly, she went on, “Not as late as when I got you in the summertime, but still late.”

  “Everything worked on this plane,” Jerry said. “Let’s go to bed, okay?” That was too obviously a good idea for her to badmouth it. Go to bed they did.

  * * *

  Anna’s alarm clock went off like a bomb at 6:15. It woke Jerry, too; with that hellish racket, he thought he would have had a hard time staying dead. He didn’t need to be up so early, of course. He tried to go back to sleep while she dressed and fixed breakfast and got ready to head out the door.

  Since he couldn’t sleep, he climbed out of bed to kiss her good-bye. He was in the sweatpants he’d worn on the ship, with a different ratty T-shirt. She wore business attire, already ready for the office. She didn’t say anything about that, but he could tell she was thinking pretty loud.

  “Hope the traffic isn’t too bad,” he said: an Angeleno’s prayer to the gods for good fortune. “Love you, Missus Stieglitz.”

  “Love you, too, Mister Stieglitz,” she said, and then she scooted out the door. The King of Siam eyed Jerry. Jerry could read his mind, too. You’re still here. Amuse me, human. So Jerry did.