He checked out before six. As he walked out of the lobby, he grabbed a road map of Arizona from a case full of brochures for tourist attractions. He took it into the Denny’s with him and studied it while he ate bacon and eggs.

  The I-10 went south to Tucson and then southeast. The I-17 went north to Flagstaff, where it met the eastbound I-40, which would take him to Albuquerque. Flagstaff was up in the mountains. It might be snowy. He didn’t want to drive in snow if he could help it. The I-10 it would be. He’d go as long as he could.

  Away he went. He stopped for gas in Tucson, and bought a cheap little road atlas of the United States so he’d have at least some idea of what the hell he was doing. “Where you headed?” asked the man in the small building next to the pumps.

  “Just driving. Kinda like Easy Rider, only without the drugs and the motorcycles.” Jerry looked out at his Corvair and laughed self-consciously.

  “Still fun. Wish I could come along.” The gas station guy sounded wistful.

  That it might be fun hadn’t occurred to Jerry. All he’d thought about was staying in one piece. He drove away with a new attitude. It lasted half an hour, maybe even forty-five minutes. After that, the drive turned back into work.

  Lordsburg, New Mexico, made a lunch stop. He ate at a Burger King, where he knew exactly what he’d be getting. He stopped again for gas and the bathroom, then kept going till he came to El Paso. He found a motel near the interstate and had dinner at a Mexican place across the street. Mexican food in El Paso wasn’t the same as Mexican food in Los Angeles, but it was good. And the Dos Equis he washed it down with was heavenly.

  As he had the night before, he crashed early and woke early. The Mexican restaurant wasn’t open yet, so he got scrambled eggs and sausage from the Golden Arches down the street. Then he hit the road again.

  Texas was miles and miles of miles and miles, even more so than the I-5 boogie through California’s Central Valley. No one, locals or out-of-staters, paid any attention to the energy-saving speed limit. Jerry stayed in the slow lane on the I-10 and then the I-20. If people wanted to pass him, they could pass him. He passed trucks going even slower than he was. There were some.

  Despite hurrying less than most people, he made Fort Worth before quitting for the day. That was around six hundred miles, not too bad if you were a lone driver. When he got to his motel room, the nightstand clock told him he’d traded mountain time for central somewhere east of El Paso.

  He bought a steak for dinner, and enjoyed it. As he went back to the hotel, he realized he didn’t have to stay in cheap joints like this. He had plenty of bread for nice hotels. After one more step, he shook his head. He was willing to spend money to do what he had to do. He wasn’t willing to spend more than he had to.

  “Well, shit,” he said out loud—no one was close enough to hear him. “I really am my father’s son.” It had been true all along, of course. He’d never realized it so intensely before, though.

  Back in the room, he sent the telephone by the clock a longing stare. He wanted so much to call Anna and let her know he was okay. Even more, he wanted to hear her voice. He shook his head. He’d figured his phone was tapped back at the place he’d had by himself. The CIA wouldn’t have suddenly lost track of him when he moved in with Anna after they married.

  The most he could hope for was that they kept on not knowing where he was. If they had the note he’d left, they’d be looking in the wrong area. But if they traced a call, he was toast.

  You can’t make any mistakes. Not even one. Calling home is a mistake, he told himself firmly. Calling Tim or Alex or his dad was also a mistake. Professor Krikorian, too. The CIA guys had talked to his advisor before they ever met him.

  That left … nobody. He wasn’t an outgoing person, which put it mildly. He didn’t have a whole swarm of friends. Even if he did, the Agency might monitor all of them. Not only could he not make mistakes, he couldn’t take chances.

  His back gave a reproachful creak when he got into the Corvair the next morning. The car wasn’t as comfortable as the Rambler—either that or he’d spent too goddamn much time in it lately.

  Away he went, heading east and a little north. The country changed. This wasn’t the Southwest anymore; this was the South. It was greener and wetter than he was used to. It wasn’t the jungle paradise of Hawaii, but it wasn’t desert, either. Somewhere near Hot Springs, Arkansas, he tried out the Corvair’s windshield wipers for the first time.

  He bought gas in Hot Springs. He bought new wiper blades, too. He’d forgotten to check them when he bought the car from Rodolfo. “These here, they’re shot t’hell an’ gone,” said the attendant who put on the new pair.

  “Yeah, I found that out,” Jerry said. The man gave him an odd look, but didn’t ask any questions.

  With wipers that actually did something about the rain, Jerry drove on. In Southern California, every rain seemed a separate natural disaster. People didn’t know how to drive in wet weather. They went too fast and they tailgated. Here, they were used to water falling from the sky. They spread out, took their time, and got where they were going.

  Jerry made another stop just before crossing from Arkansas to Tennessee. Memphis was where he was going. But he bought an umbrella before he got there. “Bet y’wish you hadn’t left yours at home,” said the fellow who sold it to him.

  “Bet you’re right,” Jerry answered. It was still coming down pretty hard.

  Crossing the Mississippi amazed him. A river half a mile wide? The one they had in Los Angeles was dry eight or nine months a year, and encased in a concrete straitjacket so it wouldn’t make trouble. So much fresh water flowing freely or lying around in lakes and ponds freaked Jerry out.

  He found a motel on the outskirts of Memphis, just off the I-40. The only way he could be sure what town he was in was by the phone book in the nightstand drawer. All the places where he’d stayed the past few days blurred together in his mind. Motels by the highway were America at its most homogenized.

  The barbecued pork sandwich he got at the joint next to the motel, like the Mexican food in El Paso, showed restaurants varied from place to place. It was good, but the sauce wasn’t what he thought of as barbecue sauce. When he said so, the waitress answered, “Where you from? Not around here, not by how you talk.”

  “San Francisco.” He lied without hesitation.

  “California? Really?” She looked and sounded jealous. She was short and blond and pretty, which made him think of Anna. “What’re you doin’ here, then?”

  “Passing through.” That was honest enough.

  “I believe it. If you’re from there, you wouldn’t want to stay here, even if you like the barbecue. California? That’d be somethin’.” She studied him. “You stayin’ at Stanley’s place next door?”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’m off my shift in another hour, if you want to talk or somethin’.”

  She didn’t mean talk. Jerry’d never run into a come-on so direct. Was she a pro, or just hoping some of that exotic California stardust would rub off on her? If he’d been single, he thought he would have found out. He was tempted anyway, tempted enough to wish he had less common sense. After a second, though, he held up his left hand so she couldn’t miss the ring. “I better not,” he said.

  “Doesn’t worry plenty o’ guys any,” she said. When he just shrugged, she turned away. “You’ll never know what you’re missin’.” She put enough hip action into her walk to give him a hint.

  Feeling squelched, he squelched back to the motel. Knowing he might have had company made the plain room seem even lonelier than it would have anyway. He took care of biological pressure the way he had on the Glomar Explorer, but Heinlein had been dead right in Time Enough for Love: that was lonely, too.

  He was glad the blond waitress wasn’t on yet when he had breakfast at the place next door. He ate, checked out of the motel, and got on the interstate again. The Corvair kept running. He wondered whether the Rambler would have done the same. He’d never know now. But he would have bet there was an APB out for that car.

  California was long from top to bottom, narrow from side to side. Tennessee was the other way around. He drove more than five hundred miles to get from the southwest corner of the state to its northeastern tip. Bristol City wasn’t much of a town, but it had the usual assortment of places to stay and places to eat when you pulled off the highway.

  He got a room. He went to the closest place and ate a pork chop and mashed potatoes. The food wasn’t nearly so interesting as it had been the night before. Neither was the waitress. That might have been just as well.

  Out of Tennessee and into Virginia. The farther east he went, the more traffic there was. He’d crossed the country in six days. He knew he might have pushed harder, but he didn’t care. He might have killed the car. He also might have got busted, which was the last thing he needed.

  He came into Washington, DC, just in time for rush hour. It wasn’t as bad as getting stuck on the San Diego Freeway when a wreck closed three lanes, but it wasn’t much fun, either. And he knew where he was going on the San Diego. Here, he groped his way along.

  No motels by the off-ramps now. No swarm of not-too-fancy places to eat. This was a real city. He drove along, looking for a hotel of the plainer sort. It took him a while to find one; this part of town seemed pretty fancy. You didn’t plop a green space as big as Rock Creek Park down in the middle of a ghetto.

  At last, he saw a place that might do. All the parking was by valet. He grabbed his suitcase and cash and gave the black guy in the maroon uniform a buck to stow his car, then went in to register. Even a plain hotel here cost more than he’d expected it to. He booked his room for three nights, adding, “I may stay longer. It depends on how my business goes.”

  “That’s fine, sir,” said the black woman at the registration desk. The staff looked to be mostly black. The guests walking through the lobby were all white. That saddened Jerry without surprising him.

  He looked around for the case that would hold brochures and maps. There it was, on the wall by the concierge’s stand. He plucked a city map from it before going up to his room. The room was nicer than the ones he’d used on his cross-country journey, but of the same kind.

  He got the hotel’s address from a notepad on the dresser. A moment later, he found it on the map. He used the pen that had lain next to the pad to make a dot in the right place. Then he looked to see where he’d be going in the morning.

  1125 Sixteenth Street NW. He’d memorized that after finding it on one of his visits to the UCLA Research Library. The map told him the address lay between M and N Streets. It wasn’t very far away, either; he hadn’t come to this part of town by accident.

  Down to the restaurant for a steak and a Michelob, which was the best beer they had. Then back to the room again. He sprawled out on the bed. “Damn!” he told the ceiling. “I made it!” He figured he’d earned the right to be surprised. The Corvair had run like a champ. The CIA hadn’t caught up with him.

  Tomorrow … Tomorrow, in Roger Zelazny’s immortal words from Lord of Light, the fit would hit the Shan.

  * * *

  He dressed for the occasion, as best he could with what he’d quickly thrown into the suitcase. He had a blue dress shirt. He had a pair of brown cords. They weren’t dress slacks, but they weren’t jeans, either. He had shoes that weren’t Blue Tips and socks that weren’t white. And he had the tweed jacket his father had got him for Chanukah. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he had trouble recognizing the serious-seeming young man who looked back.

  “Good,” he said, and went downstairs.

  He had both manila envelopes with him. After the valet brought his car, he put one on the front seat and the other with the spare tire in the trunk, where the engine should have been. He hoped his cash would be safer in the car than in his room, where the cleaning lady might snoop through his stuff while he was gone.

  He also had the city map. He’d memorized his route, but he wanted to be able to work out where he was if he had to detour because of an accident or construction or something. He thought of it as being a suspenders-and-belt man. His father probably would have said it sounded familiar.

  “There it is!” he said, when he got where he was going. The building was four stories tall, and looked to date from the early years of the century.

  Finding it was one thing. Finding somewhere to park was something else again. When he finally did, he had almost a ten-minute walk back. A fence made of black steel spears, each taller than a man, protected the grounds. Bushes beginning to flower grew in front of it.

  But the gate was open. Jerry paused, took a deep breath, and walked in. A bronze plaque by the entrance said EMBASSY OF THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS and, below that, the same thing in Russian. A red flag with a gold hammer and sickle in the top left corner flew from a pole mounted on the roof.

  Jerry went up the stairs and into the embassy. An attractive young woman sat behind a reception desk. On the wall in back of her hung a big portrait of Leonid Brezhnev, all jowls and scowl and bushy eyebrows. The portrait had to be meant to flatter, but it still made the Soviet boss look like one tough bruiser.

  The receptionist, by contrast, was good-looking enough for Jerry to notice no matter how nervous he was. “Yes, sir? What can I do for you?” she asked. She had a slight Slavic accent. Being pretty didn’t mean she wasn’t with the KGB. Probably the opposite, in fact.

  Another deep breath. “I’d like to speak with Ambassador Dobrynin for a few minutes, please.” He’d learned the ambassador’s name the same way he’d learned the embassy’s address.

  The receptionist frowned. “What about?”

  “I can’t tell you that. But it’s important. It’s very important,” Jerry said. Then he repeated it in Russian.

  One of her eyebrows lifted. In the same language, she answered, “I can’t send up any stranger off the street, you know.”

  “Da,” he said sadly. Falling back into English, he went on, “Let me have a piece of paper, please.” She tore a sheet off a scratch pad and slid it across the desk. He printed Azorian on it, then Midlothian below it, and, after a moment’s hesitation, Humpty Dumpty below that. “Take this to him, please. If he doesn’t want to see me after he gets it, I’ll leave quietly, promise.” What’ll I do in that case? Cut my throat, I guess.

  She considered. Then she waved him to a chair. “Sit there and wait.” She didn’t take the paper upstairs herself. A young man in a black suit that would have been the height of style in 1963 did. Jerry sat and waited and worried.

  Fifteen minutes later, the man in the black suit came back. He spoke to the receptionist, too quietly for Jerry to make out what he said. The surprise with which she eyed him afterward, though, was unmistakable.

  She sent Jerry a peremptory Come here! gesture. When he did, she said, “Go with Georgi Pavlovich here. He will take you to the ambassador.” To Georgi Pavlovich, she added in Russian, “He speaks our language.”

  “I’ll remember,” the man in the black suit said, also in Russian. He switched to English for Jerry: “You will come with me, please.”

  “Thanks.” Jerry came.

  They went up two flights of stairs. Halfway up the second, the Russian said, “It is unusual for ambassador to see someone who comes in off street.” He nodded to himself, savoring the word. “Unusual, yes.” Jerry didn’t say anything.

  The ambassador’s office struck Jerry as being halfway between a business executive’s and a professor’s at an Ivy League university. Everything on the desk was modern as next week. The bookcases were wooden, though, and many of the books in Russian, English, and French looked old. Another portrait of Brezhnev, smaller than the one downstairs, hung above them.

  Anatoly Dobrynin was about fifty-five, with a wide bald dome, and what was left of his hair curly and gray. Jerry knew he must have seen him on television, but hadn’t remembered what he looked like. Beside him sat a younger, foxy-faced man with reddish hair. The man in the black suit murmured to the ambassador, probably warning that Jerry knew some Russian. Dobrynin nodded. Jerry’s guide disappeared, closing the door behind him.

  After shaking hands, Dobrynin said, “This is Major Bronstein. He is assistant military attaché here.” Studying Jerry, the ambassador went on, “You know some … extraordinary things.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m afraid I do,” Jerry agreed.

  After a glance at his boss for permission, Major Bronstein said, “What we need to hear is. how do you know them?” His English held almost no accent.

  Jerry’s stomach knotted. This is where the treason starts, he thought. But it wasn’t, not really. He’d convinced himself it wasn’t. The CIA would have a different opinion, of course. He said, “I was on the Glomar Explorer when we raised the Midlothian object. The other name for that, the newer name, is Humpty Dumpty.”

  “We have hints of this, but only hints,” Bronstein said. He looked like somebody Jerry knew or had seen, but Jerry couldn’t think of who. He continued, “What is this Midlothian object?”

  “For one thing, it’s what sank your submarine, the K-129, in 1968.” Jerry opened the envelope he’d got back from Tim Ishihara. He took out the photo of Humpty Dumpty in the Glomar Explorer’s moon pool and slid it across the ambassador’s desk to Dobrynin and Bronstein. “For another, it’s this. It’s a spaceship—not a human spaceship—that lay three miles under the Pacific for I have no idea how long, till it came to life when it sank your sub. The United States was looking for the K-129 when we found Humpty Dumpty right next door.”

  The ambassador and his aide (Jerry would have bet the foxy-faced man was KGB, though he might have been GRU) stared at the photo. Major Bronstein asked, “Why should we not think this is disinformation, aimed at making us seem like idiots if we act on it?”