“I found out what was up with the people who were asking about me,” Jerry said.

“Oh, yeah?” Krikorian leaned forward. His thick, bristly beard, black with just a little gray, always reminded Jerry of steel wool—and reminded him his own whiskers were still on the wispy side.

“Yeah. They’re from the Hughes Glomar Explorer. They want me on it when it goes out toward the end of June. I may get some good stuff if I can trail a hydrophone far enough behind the ship to mute most of the engine noise. I may need a leave of absence fall quarter—I don’t know just when I’ll be getting back.”

“Huh.” Krikorian scratched his cheek. His whiskers rasped like wire under his fingernails, too. “You want to go, do you?”

“You bet I do. Good chance for fieldwork. The money’s decent, too. Better than decent, in fact, and I can use some better than decent now.”

“That’s right. You’re getting married soon. What does—” The professor paused.

“Anna,” Jerry supplied.

“Thanks. What does Anna think of all this?”

“She’s not thrilled about putting things off, but she sees what a chance this is for me. What do you think, boss?”

Krikorian scratched at his beard again. After a few seconds, he said, “I don’t know whether to be jealous or to tell you you’re out of your mind. The whole sea-mining story sounds like the world’s biggest boondoggle to me.”

You don’t know the half of it, Jerry thought, and wasn’t that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me, Perry Mason? With a shrug, he answered, “Howard Hughes has money the way Carter has Little Liver Pills. If he wants to give me some, I’m sure not gonna complain.”

“Nope. In your shoes, I wouldn’t, either,” his advisor said. “You think grad students have it bad now, you should have seen things twenty years ago. They used to take better care of the lab animals than they did with us.”

And they don’t now? Jerry almost said that out loud. He swallowed it at the last moment, though. He could joke with Professor Krikorian up to a point, but only up to a point.

When he kept quiet, Krikorian went on, “Do what you need to do. If you have to take that leave of absence, I’ll help arrange it. I hope you bring back some good data. Any which way, you’ll have a story you can tell over cocktails at conferences for the rest of your life.”