There it was, the rational world rising up to kick Jerry in the teeth. He said, “Steve Dole is dead because the CIA didn’t want you guys to get any word of this. Only reason I’m in one piece is dumb luck. If you don’t want to get dealt in to whatever people can learn from that spaceship, go ahead. Laugh at me. And yob tvoyu mat’.”

  His Russian TAs and profs had all warned him never to say that: telling somebody Fuck your mother! was a good way to start a fight. Bronstein looked comically amazed. As he did, Jerry realized he reminded him of Danny Kaye. Ambassador Dobrynin said, “You say you were on this ship that was a CIA project?”

  “That’s right.” Jerry nodded.

  “They would have checked you politically. You would have passed. You were not a sympathizer with the Soviet Union.”

  “That’s right, too.”

  “Why are you here, then?”

  “Because some things are too big for one country to grab hold of all by itself. Here, take a look at this.” He took the other photograph, the one of the centaurowl in its suspended-animation apparatus, out of the envelope and passed it over to the Russians. “This is one of the, the beings that crewed the Humpty Dumpty. It’s … I don’t know, maybe frozen. Not dead, anyhow. I’m not sure whether I took this picture or Steve Dole did. Maybe it’s still there this way. Maybe the people on the Glomar Explorer have tried to wake it up since I left. Maybe they’ve managed to. Maybe they’ve killed it instead. I have no idea.”

  Anatoly Dobrynin and Major Bronstein examined the second photo. Slowly, Bronstein said, “This could be a movie special effect. Trick photography.”

  “Yeah, it could be,” Jerry said. “But if I were making this shit up—excuse me—wouldn’t I invent something a lot less crazy than aliens from outer space?” He took out his account of his time on the Glomar Explorer and gave it to Bronstein. “This is what happened, or as much as I could remember when I was writing it.”

  The major read it. As soon as he finished a page, he passed it to the ambassador. They needed twenty minutes or so to finish. Then Dobrynin said, “I have a question. This Humpty Dumpty, you say it destroyed a Soviet submarine cruising five kilometers above it, a submarine that had no idea it was there. Yet it let you Americans seize it and bring it up to the surface. Why would it do this?”

  “I don’t know. Obviously. But I’ve thought about it a lot,” Jerry said. “My best guess—and that’s all it is—is that it could sense the K-129 had nuclear weapons aboard, and it didn’t like that. The Glomar Explorer is just a ship. No proof, only a possibility.”

  Dobrynin and Bronstein glanced at each other. Almost at the same time, they both shrugged. Major Bronstein tapped the photo of Humpty Dumpty with his index finger. “You say this is what you were concealing from Soviet reconnaissance?”

  “Uh-huh. We knew when your spy satellites would be coming over. We made sure you couldn’t spot this. You’ll probably have pictures of the moon pool from before we brought up the spaceship, but not from afterward. This is why.”

  “He’s right about that,” Dobrynin said to Bronstein in quick Russian.

  “They would have covered it for a sub, too, or however much of it they brought up,” the assistant military attaché answered in the same language. Jerry was more sure he wasn’t supposed to understand than that he really had.

  Dobrynin set a thick-fingered hand down on the photographs and on Jerry’s account. “We may keep these? I may possibly need to refer to them when I speak to people in authority in the United States.”

  “Yes, you can do that.” A certain pang accompanied Jerry’s nod. Without the photos and what he’d written, would he really believe he’d ever seen and done these things? Pictures and writing made memory concrete.

  “You mentioned Doctor Dole’s death. We knew of this, but did not connect it to anything involving the Hughes Glomar Explorer,” Major Bronstein said. “Do you think you are in danger yourself?”

  “Probably,” Jerry said. “He got killed right after Jack Anderson talked about the Glomar Explorer. They took us both off the ship when we showed we weren’t happy about how they were trying to get specimens from Humpty Dumpty’s hull. As soon as I heard he was dead, I came east. I didn’t stick around waiting to be a target.”

  “How did you cross the country safely?” Bronstein asked with what sounded like professional curiosity.

  Jerry shrugged. “I got my hair cut and my beard shaved. I used cash. No phone calls—my wife will be going nuts. And I had a car they didn’t know I had.”

  “Ah.” Bronstein eyed him. “You may be an amateur, but this is sound tradecraft. I think that is the English word, tradecraft.”

  “It is.” Anatoly Dobrynin pursed his lips and blew air out through them. “When I talk to Henry, I will tell him to tell his people that they must leave you alone. This is a precondition, and the Soviet Union will be most displeased if the United States violates it. If you are telling us the truth here, you are doing something most important. As you say, not just for a country but for mankind.”

  “If you are telling us the truth,” Major Bronstein echoed.

  “Thank you, sir,” Jerry said to Dobrynin, ignoring the assistant attaché. His mind was slightly blown that the ambassador would casually call the U.S. secretary of state by his first name. He went on, “Yeah, that’s about it. If we can figure out how Humpty Dumpty works, we’ve got no one knows how many worlds out there waiting to be found. Worlds! With life on them! Intelligent life, too—that second photo I showed you proves it. Well, so does the ship we found. There’s something for everybody, not just for one country or one way of doing things.”

  “Would you like to stay here at the embassy until I have made my telephone call?” Dobrynin asked. “You do not have to. You are not a prisoner. But you may feel safer here than with your own countrymen.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that. Thanks again.” Jerry was sure the ambassador wasn’t offering from the kindness of his heart. He thought Jerry might possibly be useful to the USSR. He wasn’t wrong, either.

  Bronstein said something in Russian, too fast for Jerry to follow. Anatoly Dobrynin translated for him: “He says your willingness to remain makes you more deserving of being taken seriously.”

  “Sir, take people seriously because of their evidence, that’s all,” Jerry said. Maybe this would turn out all right after all. Maybe, after Henry Kissinger laughed his ass off, Dobrynin would throw him to the wolves. All he could do now was wait.

  XVI

  They stashed him in a room with a comfortable chair, a bookcase, and yet another portrait of Leonid Brezhnev. They gave him hot tea in a glass: sugar, no milk. Except for the glass, that was how he drank it; his father’s family came out of Byelorussia. They gave him a pastrami on rye, too, obviously ordered from outside. It was good.

  He checked out the books the case held: Brezhnev’s collected works, translated into English. Curious, he pulled one out … and quickly found Marxist-Leninist theory wasn’t his thing. He put it back on the shelf before his eyes glazed over.

  The volumes were handsome, and plainly expensive—hardbacks with gold leaf edging on the pages and fine white paper that looked as if it would last five hundred years. And if anybody worked his way through even one of them in all that time, Jerry would have been amazed.

  He stuck his head outside, and was not astonished to find Major Bronstein standing in the hallway. If RAND didn’t let unescorted strangers wander its corridors, the Soviet embassy wouldn’t. Sheepishly, Jerry said, “Can you take me to the men’s room, please?”

  Bronstein smiled. “Of course. Come with me.” Jerry did what he needed to do. When he came out, the assistant military attaché escorted him back. Bronstein didn’t ask any questions. Jerry would have liked it better if he had. The Russians were playing it cool. If Henry Kissinger convinced Dobrynin that Jerry was spouting nonsense, they’d throw him out on his ear and forget about him. If the secretary of state couldn’t do that …

  After a while, Jerry looked at his watch. Three hours had gone by. It only seemed like seventeen years. Time flew when you were having fun.

  He wondered if the chair was comfortable enough to sleep in. When all this ended, he wanted to sleep for a year. Of course, he’d sleep forever if it ended badly.

  Then Major Bronstein walked in. “The ambassador wishes to speak with you,” he said.

  Jerry got up. “Okay.” And either it was or it wasn’t.

  Bronstein led him back to Anatoly Dobrynin’s office and stood aside to let him go in first. Even as Jerry was wondering what that meant, Dobrynin looked up at him and said, “Henry does not like you very much.”

  “No? I mean, he doesn’t?”

  “Sit. Sit,” the ambassador said quickly, and Jerry sank into the chair he’d used before—sure enough, his legs didn’t want to hold him up. Dobrynin waited till he’d settled himself, then went on, “No, he does not. He thought that, in spite of the damaging stories from Jack Anderson and Seymour Hersh, his people had succeeded in keeping the Midlothian object a secret.”

  “Seymour Hersh?” Jerry echoed.

  “His piece ran in The Washington Post the morning after Anderson spoke on the radio.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know about it. Sorry. That was the morning I hit the road.”

  “He admits, because he cannot very well deny any longer, that the United States has this alien spaceship, this Midlothian object, this Humpty Dumpty,” Dobrynin said. “He says he is sorry for concealing it. I say he is sorry the way a robber is sorry for getting caught. I told him so. He laughed. To him, it was funny.”

  “But we’re going to share what we learn from Humpty Dumpty with you? We’re going to let you help investigate?” Jerry wanted the movie to have a happy ending.

  He didn’t get one. He discovered the movie wasn’t over yet, because the Soviet ambassador somberly shook his head. “He told me we were entitled to nothing from the Midlothian object, nothing at all. He said the United States salvaged it from international waters, and under international law had the right to keep for itself what it found. Under international law, as I understand it, this position may possibly be justified.”

  “So you’re going to let him, Russia’s going to let him, get away with that?” Jerry couldn’t believe his ears.

  But Dobrynin held up a hand like a cop halting traffic. “I did not say so, young man. It is more complicated than that. Also, it is more dangerous. In 1945, your country used two atomic bombs against Japan. You had this new, very strong weapon. You had it. The Soviet Union did not. You could have used the threat of it, or the thing itself, to force concessions from my country. I was just entering the diplomatic service at that time. The concern was very great.”

  “We didn’t do anything like that, though,” Jerry said.

  “You did not. That is to your credit. Still, you could have, and we would have been powerless to resist. Comrade Stalin understood this very clearly.” Anatoly Dobrynin held up that meaty hand again. “I have not many good things to say for Stalin. He was harsh and brutal. But he had proper care for the security of the USSR. We used a maximum project to create our own nuclear bomb. By 1949, we succeeded. My country could speak again to yours as an equal on the world stage. We did not have to let ourselves be dictated to or bullied. Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes, sir.” Jerry hoped so, anyhow.

  “Good. I do not know how much of the history you take in, but that does not matter. You see what is important is the balance of power, or you would not have done what you did. From 1945 to 1949, the balance of power was tilted. The USSR stayed free and independent only because the USA let it stay that way. After 1949, my country stood on its own two feet once more. We will not exist on American sufferance again. The Midlothian object gives you the potential to claim such power over us. This is intolerable. We will not permit it.”

  Jerry liked the sound of that not even a little bit. In his mind’s ear, he heard alarm bells ringing. He heard civil-defense sirens wailing. He heard fifty thousand high school teachers yelling “Drop!” In his mind’s eye, he saw a million high school kids diving under their desks and kissing their asses good-bye.

  “What will you do, then?” he asked.

  “I do not make policy. I carry out policy made by the general secretary and the Politburo. I have sent my government a report on the news you brought, and on my conversation with the American secretary of state,” Dobrynin said. “I have informed them of how important and how urgent I think this is. I hope a peaceful solution will be possible.”

  “You … hope?” Jerry realized his mind’s ear and eye had known what they were imagining. He wondered if he would go down in history as the guy who started World War III. He didn’t think it was likely. If World War III started, nobody’d be left afterward to write history.

  “That is correct. We will not let ourselves be surpassed. We are content with a share of whatever may be learned from the Midlothian object. America deserves credit for finding and raising it. But your view of things is the correct one, Mister Stieglitz. The Midlothian object is too important to be the sole property of one nation.”

  Would you say the same thing if Russia had it? Jerry wondered. He doubted it. In that case, Dobrynin would be playing the Henry Kissinger role, with Kissinger doing his impression of the Soviet envoy. People were people.

  People were people, yeah. They were all pretty similar, no matter where they came from. That was why whatever came from Humpty Dumpty deserved to belong to everybody, not just to the USA.

  “Oh. Henry did agree to one thing,” Anatoly Dobrynin said. “He promised me the CIA would not retaliate against you for what you have done.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I do—because I made it very plain how important this was to me,” Dobrynin replied. “You have done all mankind a service. The Soviet Union does not forget.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Jerry said. He had the feeling the diplomat meant the USSR when he said all mankind. Right this minute, that was okay with him.

  “If you do not trust the secretary of state’s assurances, you may stay here at the embassy. No one can reach you here,” Dobrynin said. “I would suggest you stay here for some little while anyhow, to make sure all the people in the Agency learn what Henry has agreed to.”

  “That’s … probably a real good idea. I’ll take you up on it, and thanks one more time,” Jerry said.

  “The least I can do. Now we hope all turns out well. I am not a praying man. If you are, this is a good time to do it.”

  “I’m not, either, Ambassador. From the way you talk, I kinda wish I were.”

  * * *

  Major Bronstein took Jerry back to the room with Leonid Brezhnev’s collected works. As he had before, Jerry tried to read some. And, as he had before, he bogged down. He noticed the beautifully printed books were dusty. No, nobody else cared about them, either.

  After a while, the man in the outdated black suit looked in and asked, “You would like dinner?”

  “Da, Georgi Pavlovich. Bolshoye spasibo,” Jerry answered. He still had no idea of the Russian’s family name. First name and patronymic were plenty for politeness.

  “P’zhalista,” the embassy man said, and then, in English, “You speak good. Well? Well.” He made the right choice.

  “Thanks.” Jerry knew how far from true it was. But even a little was better than nothing.

  His pastrami sandwich had been brought in. Dinner plainly came from the kitchen here: salmon in a creamy dill sauce, boiled potatoes, and cabbage gussied up with tomato sauce and peppers till you almost forgot it was cabbage. It was all good. So was the California Chablis that came with it. Jerry drank a glass, then half a glass more. After that, he stopped.

  Georgi Pavlovich took away his dirty dishes. Jerry wondered how you said Flunky, first class in Russian.

  After the man left, there he was, alone again with Leonid Brezhnev’s literary output. He could have gone out into the hall and talked with Major Bronstein, but he didn’t. Talking with the major would have been interrogation, not conversation. Like the CIA pros on the Glomar Explorer, Bronstein struck Jerry as a man who couldn’t not do his job.

  So he sat there and got bored instead. A little before nine o’clock, Bronstein came in and said, “The ambassador tells me to assure you that your safety outside the embassy has been guaranteed. Everyone who needs to know of the American secretary of state’s promise to Anatoly Fyodorovich is informed and has assented.”

  “Thanks very much. I’ll go back to the hotel, I guess.” Jerry stood up and stretched. Then, not quite idly, he asked, “Nu, vus makht a Yid?”

  That wasn’t Russian, but Major Bronstein understood it anyway. From his looks and name, Jerry’d thought he would. “Being a Jew is interesting, the same as it is most places,” Bronstein answered, luckily, in English. Jerry had only fragments of Yiddish. His folks had used the mamaloshen when they didn’t want him to know what they were talking about. That gave him a great incentive to learn, of course, but his father spoke the old-country lingo much less after his mother died.

  Out into the cool Washington night he went. He tried to look every which way at once while walking to the Corvair. The CIA might have promised to leave him alone, but the local muggers probably weren’t in on the deal.

  Unmugged, he got the car, drove back to the hotel, and went up to his room. Okay, Henry Kissinger said the CIA wouldn’t murder him. If you couldn’t believe Henry Kissinger, you … were like a large part of the world. But Jerry figured Kissinger wouldn’t waste much time or effort lying about anything as trivial as he was.

  Which meant he could (probably) let other people know where he was. He picked up the phone and called home. It was getting on toward half past six on the West Coast. Anna ought to be back from work.

  “Hello?” she answered after the fourth ring. Chances were, that meant he’d caught her either fixing her dinner or eating it.