He took some of his things out of boxes and put them into drawers, when there were drawers, or on high shelves that Anna couldn’t reach, when there weren’t. He’d shoehorned most of his bookcases into the place Anna and he now shared. His sf, fantasy, and references were here. The rest of his books lay in other boxes in his dad’s garage.

  He went through his file cards, trying to pick up where he’d been on his dissertation and where he wanted to go with it. In fact, he had a good idea about both. That wasn’t the problem. He wanted to be back on the Glomar Explorer, either keeping the CIA from going crazy and doing too much with Humpty Dumpty or, alternatively, trying to talk with the centaurowls if he couldn’t keep the spooks from going crazy … and if the aliens lived through revival.

  Sooner or later, Professor Krikorian would want to see what he’d been up to lately. A story about a skeleton in seaboots wouldn’t thrill him. He’d want data, and charts, and analysis. Before John P. banged on his door, Jerry would have been eager to give them to him. He just couldn’t get excited about it now.

  He had breaded pork chops and a diced onion going in a pan on top of the stove when Anna came in. The range here was electric. He liked gas better, but he could manage with what the apartment had. He wasn’t a great cook. Neither was Anna, though they could both cope. Since he’d been home and she hadn’t …

  “I could get used to this,” she said, after an appreciative sniff.

  “I’m supposed to spoil you, right?” he said.

  “Works for me.” She came over for a kiss, so she meant it.

  He did the dishes after dinner, too. She wouldn’t till the pile filled the sink. He might eventually get her to change her ways. Or she might get him to change his. Or he might wind up doing a lot of dishes because she wouldn’t.

  “Waste of time,” she said now.

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “That’s drying. Washing’s okay. You can see you’re making progress. And my mind kind of goes blank to the sound of running water. I’ve had story ideas while I wash. In the shower, too.”

  On Tuesday, he got up with her for his nine o’clock office hours. The earlier he made it to UCLA, the better his street-parking chances. When he checked his mail slot in the department office for anything that might have come in while he was away, the secretaries fussed over him and made him show off his ring. It was a plain gold band, but he did anyway.

  That night, Anna put up a Christmas tree. It was just a little one, plastic, that sat on the end table between the couch and the wall. She hung a few ornaments on the branches and mounted a plastic gold star on top. “No tinsel?” Jerry asked.

  “No way,” she answered. “The cat thinks aluminum foil is a food group.” Jerry glanced over at the King of Siam. As far as he could tell, the Siamese thought everything was a food group.

  Jerry’d never lived in a place with a Christmas tree before. It made him feel stranger than he’d thought it would. He dug in his boxes till he unearthed the menorah the temple had given him for his bar mitzvah. He found candles at the local Alpha Beta and lit the first one on the night of Sunday, the eighth. He hadn’t bothered while he lived alone. Now he felt the need to remind himself he was Jewish.

  And he gave Anna Bridge of Sighs, the latest Robin Trower album. “Happy Chanukah!” he said.

  She looked flustered, not an expression she wore very often. “Thanks, but I don’t have anything for you yet,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You do your holiday, I’ll do mine, and we’ll all be happy.”

  “Mrp,” she said, but she seemed more happy than not.

  The next Sunday was the last night of Chanukah. Jerry and Anna got his dad a big bottle of Chivas Regal. Then they took him to Helen Yee’s. “You guys didn’t have to do any of this,” Hyman Stieglitz said. His present for Jerry was a herringbone tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, so he could look like the professor he was less and less interested in becoming. He’d got a cashmere sweater for Anna.

  “We didn’t do it because we had to,” Jerry said.

  “We did it because we wanted to,” Anna finished for him. “And the sweater is beautiful. So soft!” It was a brighter green than she usually wore. Jerry thought she looked nice in it. He wasn’t so sure she agreed. But she was polite at the restaurant, which was all that mattered.

  “I never shopped for a daughter-in-law before,” Jerry’s father said. Jerry hadn’t thought of it that way, but his old man was right.

  Jerry had a couple of weeks off between quarters. Christmas and New Year’s fell on Wednesdays. Anna’s company, in its infinite generosity, didn’t even give the people who worked there Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve. She called down curses on the CEO’s head that would have made Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep blanch but didn’t faze the businessman one bit.

  Christmas Day was at Anna’s folks. They had a big real tree, which to Jerry smelled like an overgrown pine air freshener. They also had two large dogs, who sniffed him even more suspiciously than usual. Maybe they could smell that he was Jewish, and didn’t like it. Or maybe they noticed he had cat hair on his clothes … although Anna did, too, and they fawned all over her.

  Charlie McGowan handed Jerry a Miller. He dutifully drank it, even if it tasted thin and sour to him. They all exchanged presents. Everyone exclaimed and made the right thank-you noises. Jerry suspected at least as much hypocrisy as gratitude was on display. He didn’t say anything about it. Little by little, as he got older, he was learning to stick his foot in his mouth less often, anyhow. He knew what Christmas spirit was supposed to be.

  He didn’t say much on the ride back to the apartment, either. “You didn’t have a good time,” Anna said when they were almost there.

  “Did you?”

  That made her pause. She prided herself on being relentlessly honest. At last, she answered, “They were trying their hardest.”

  “I know they were.” That was part of the problem; the older McGowans’ best wasn’t real good. There was one more thing Jerry didn’t say.

  Anna sighed. “They’re my parents. They love me the best way they know how. I love them, too, or I try. They’re just…”

  He was driving. He took his right hand off the wheel for a moment to set it on her shoulder. Then he gave his full attention back to the road. All in the Family bubbled up in his mind, as it often did when he spent time with Anna’s folks. It was the most popular show in the country, but he and Anna hardly ever watched it. They didn’t need to. They lived it.

  * * *

  And it came to pass that 1974 gave way to 1975, and fall quarter to winter quarter: world without end, amen. Fantastic bought Jerry’s story about the skeleton in seaboots. “That’s four sales now!” he said when the acceptance letter came instead of the manila envelope. “Maybe I really can make this work!”

  “All put together, how much have you got paid for them?” she asked.

  He did some mental arithmetic. “Uh, a little more than eight hundred dollars.”

  “That’s probably not enough to live on,” she said, which was, for her, diplomatic. She wasn’t wrong, either.

  “You don’t write short stories to live on. You write them to get better at writing, or because the idea isn’t big enough for a novel. Novels, you can make a living writing novels. There are people who do.”

  “How many?”

  “Not a whole lot. Most writers keep their day jobs. Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, de Camp, Andre Norton … You can do it.”

  “Make damn sure you’re one of those people before you quit your day job,” Anna said.

  “I will. I would anyway.” Of course, Jerry was sitting on a different kind of bestseller, not science fiction but nonfiction. If the CIA didn’t murder him before he published. If they didn’t murder his editor or his publisher to keep their secrets secret. If … all kinds of interesting things.

  He and Anna got more used to living with each other, and to putting up with each other. Or sometimes not. She complained that he squeezed too much toothpaste from the middle of the tube. “Do you have to?” she asked.

  “I don’t even notice I’m doing it,” he said, feeling like a character in a Tom Lehrer song. “Is the world gonna end if I screw up once in a while?”

  “No,” she said, in a way that could only mean yes. So he tried to remember not to commit that particular sin. And sometimes he did, and sometimes not so much.

  He had gripes of his own. Sure enough, he found himself doing the dishes almost all the time. Yes, he hated dirty dishes much more than she did. Yes, he was home more than she was. He still muttered to himself when she kicked back while he cleaned up.

  One of his winter quarter sections had a couple of very pretty girls in it. He would have been delighted if they’d been as smart as they were good-looking; he liked smart women. But they both bombed quiz after quiz and lived down to every stereotype about blondes.

  They were friends. They hung out together—the blind leading the blind, he thought. In his mind, he tagged them the Bobbsey Twins.

  When he told Anna about them, the first thing she asked was, “Will you flunk them if they keep being stupid?”

  “Of course I will,” he said, surprised. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  The look she gave him said there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy. It also said he was still wet behind the ears, which annoyed him—at least until she answered, “Because men are shitheads, that’s why. You never had anybody flash a hundred-dollar bill at you and say he hoped you’d be nice, did you?”

  “Uh, no. You have?”

  She nodded. “Uh-huh. A couple-three years ago, not long after we got together. I told him to stick it up his ass. My boss was pissed the magazine didn’t get the ad buy.”

  “You never said anything about that before.”

  “Well, now I have. I don’t come out with everything that’s on my mind, unlike some people I could name.”

  She means me, Jerry realized. He almost started laughing, but didn’t for fear of not being able to stop. If she knew some of what he knew … the CIA was liable to rub her out, too. So she could think he blabbed all the time if she wanted to.

  Of course, the other reason she didn’t come out with everything that was on her mind was, she expected him to know without being told. So it seemed to him, anyhow. If he had to ask her what she wanted, she stopped wanting it. It wasn’t even slightly an accident she was a cat person.

  He did wonder every now and then if their match was made in heaven. Then again, he wondered if anybody’s was. If you both worked and plugged away at things, couldn’t you patch up the cracks before they got too bad? He hoped so.

  If you both worked and plugged away at things, sure. But what if one of you, or maybe two of you, didn’t feel like it anymore? One question he never asked her was, Hey, how do you think the marriage is going? He was afraid she might tell him, and she was relentlessly honest.

  She didn’t ask him any questions like that, either. She might have thought everything was fine. Or, like him, she might have thought not looking right at things was better than examining them too closely. She might have been right, too.

  He kept making feckless lunges at his thesis. At the end of January, he gave Professor Krikorian a chapter … and a week later his advisor admitted he’d misfiled it. “You have a carbon or a xerox, don’t you?” Krikorian asked.

  “Um, no,” Jerry said unhappily, vowing never to make that mistake again as long as he lived. Writing the damn chapter once had been hard enough. Twice? He didn’t want to think about twice.

  “It’ll turn up,” Professor Krikorian said. Jerry had to hope he was right.

  Some people got drunk when things like that happened. Jerry went up to the student union to check out the new sf in the bookstore. He bought a Niven story collection that would keep him from worrying about the AWOL chapter or his own fiction for a few hours.

  It was a Friday afternoon. He should have hurried back to his car so he could beat some of the rush. Instead, he paused at the newspapers outside the doors. One of the Times headlines above the fold was US REPORTED AFTER RUSS SUB.

  “Oh, fuck me,” Jerry said. A guy going in gave him a funny look. He didn’t care. He dug a dime out of the coin pocket on his jeans and got a paper. Where am I going again? he wondered. And what am I doing in this handbasket?

  XIV

  Jerry sat down on the brickwork supporting a planter and tore through the story. It had holes, bad ones. The reporters thought the lost Russian sub lay at the bottom of the Atlantic, not the Pacific. I saw the Atlantic and the Pacific / And the Pacific wasn’t terrific jangled through Jerry’s head. And both submarines the story identified as possible targets were nuclear powered, which the K-129 wasn’t, and had gone missing after 1970.

  Nor did the photo of the Soviet submarine on the front page look much like the one Humpty Dumpty actually sank. But the photo right next to that one was of the Hughes Glomar Explorer.

  So the guys from the Times had got a lot of things wrong. But they got the most important one right: the Glomar Explorer wasn’t an ocean-mining ship. It was built to raise a sunken sub.

  After a moment, Jerry shook his head. The reporters had missed the most important thing. The story didn’t say a word about spaceships or flying saucers or any of that sci-fi nonsense. Either the men from the Times hadn’t peeled down to that layer of the onion or they had but didn’t believe what they’d found. They might have decided it was bullshit meant to throw them off the sensible, logical Cold War story they’d begun to unravel. And who could blame them if they had?

  How much did any of that matter, though? Azorian wasn’t a secret anymore. Maybe Midlothian still was … for now. But what if the two men from the Times kept prodding and poking? Even more to the point, how many other people were or would start looking for answers?

  Still almost as much in shock as he had been after Steve showed him the photos of the Midlothian object, Jerry walked to his car. He got on the southbound San Diego Freeway as usual, but instead of staying on it he took the westbound Santa Monica to the city of Santa Monica and RAND Corporation headquarters.

  As before, he asked to speak to Stephen Dole. As before, Steve agreed to see him (his Friday visitor’s badge was purple where the Thursday one had been blue, which confirmed that speculation). And, as before, his escort was Angela Simmons. “Oh, hello,” she said, smiling. “I remember you.”

  “Likewise.” He smiled back.

  “It’s nice you made friends with Doctor Dole while you were working together,” she said, as they walked down the corridor to Steve’s office.

  “I’m glad I was lucky enough to get to know him. He’s a heck of a smart man. He’s got his head on tight, too, if you know what I mean.”

  “I sure do.” She nodded.

  Steve came out of his office while Jerry and Angela were nearing it. “Hey,” Jerry said as they shook hands. “Can I buy you some coffee over at the Penguin place?”

  “Sure,” Steve said, and then, to Angela, “He’s mine from now on.”

  “Okay, Doctor Dole.”

  Jerry and Steve made small talk till they left the building. As soon as they were out in the open air, Jerry asked, “Did you see today’s Times?”

  Steve had been grinning. Instantly, a wary mask fell over his face. “I’m afraid I did.”

  “I’m afraid, too. How long till everything unravels?”

  “I’m the wrong person to ask.” Steve spoke slowly, choosing his words with obvious care. “John P. would have a better idea of how many reporters know anything, and of how much they know. But I can keep an eye on The New York Times and The Washington Post here. Can you do the same?”

  “Yeah, at least some of the time. The UCLA Research Library has a periodicals room where the out-of-town papers are only a day or two old. I’m not on campus every day, but I guess I can arrange to be.”

  They walked into the Penguin Coffee Shop. It wasn’t crowded; the lunch rush was over, while the dinner rush hadn’t started yet. Jerry wondered if he’d sleep tonight after late-afternoon coffee. Then again, he also wondered if he’d sleep tonight any which way.

  “One good thing, anyhow,” he remarked, after the waitress brought them their brew.

  “Tell me. I could use some good news. When things like this start coming out in the open … Well, look what happened to Nixon.”

  “It’s not all out. They didn’t say anything about you-know-what.” Jerry laughed sourly. “Of course, who would believe them if they did?”

  “There is that. There certainly is,” Stephen Dole said. “No one who hasn’t been through some things believes them, no matter how true they may be.”

  “What do we do if everything starts coming out?” Jerry asked: the question uppermost in his mind at the moment.

  Steve paused to sip coffee. Then he said, “The best thing we can do is make sure those people understand it’s not coming out because of us. They wouldn’t be very happy if they thought it was.”

  “I know.” Jerry thought about the photos in the manila envelope he’d passed to Tim Ishihara. In there with them was an account of what he knew about Humpty Dumpty, how it had been found, and how it had been raised. He also thought about termination with extreme prejudice. He’d never believed the CIA was kidding about that. He really didn’t believe it now. “I just wanted to make sure you didn’t go out the door in a hurry or something this morning and miss it.”

  “Thanks. I mean it. Thanks! It’s good to know somebody cares,” Steve said. “And you were right before, I think. Way better not to talk about any of this on the phone or where too many people can listen in.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jerry set money on the table and stood up. “I better get back. If I’m not there when Anna comes in, she’ll wonder why.”

  “Okay.” Steve rose, too. “The fewer people who wonder anything about this, the better.”

  “Amen!” agnostic-leaning-toward-atheist Jerry said, most sincerely.