Pizza or go hungry? Pizza won. He walked over, and walked in while they were still opening up. The guy behind the counter gave him the stink eye when he ordered a large with the works, but twenty minutes later he had it. He took it back to the apartment, wolfed down three slices, and stowed the rest in the refrigerator for dinner.

He also made coffee, of a sort: he had Folger’s instant, sugar, and Cremora. It tasted like hot mud, but it was hot, caffeinated mud. That was what he needed.

Once fed and energized, he went through the mail Anna’d brought in. He threw a lot of it in the trash—junk was junk, and junk two months old even junkier. There was a letter from the phone company saying they’d cut off service if he didn’t pay his bill. Like any other human institution, the CIA failed to think of everything. Tomorrow, he told himself. After I get my wheels back.

The rejected story had come back from Analog. It was a near miss; the letter with it offered encouragement and suggested a couple of tweaks that didn’t seem too horrible. Ben Bova didn’t promise he’d look at it again if Jerry made the tweaks, but he wouldn’t have written that kind of letter if he didn’t want to … would he?

Bank statements showed he had money in his savings account, more than he was used to. It came from the Summa Corporation. Jerry needed a moment to remember that was the Hughes subsidiary fronting the Glomar Explorer.

After that? After that it was Friday afternoon. Everybody he knew was still working. Even if someone by chance had got time off, whoever it was would have to come here. Without a car, Jerry couldn’t go anywhere much. They called Los Angeles’ buses the Retarded Transit District for a reason.

What did you do when nothing was going on? Jerry took a nap. Peewee from Have Space Suit would have approved. Peewee was a genius, too. Jerry wished he were. He was plenty smart enough, but knew too well that that wasn’t the same thing. He also knew he was running on fumes. So he slept some more.

He woke up around five. He might have slept longer yet if he hadn’t rolled back into a fresh drool spot on the pillow. He finally felt caught up on sleep, at the price of being out of phase with the rest of the West Coast. That would eventually straighten out. In the meantime …

In the meantime, he turned on the oven so he could heat up the rest of his pizza. Anna had made noises about buying a microwave oven to do that kind of thing in seconds. She hadn’t done it yet; they cost close to five hundred dollars, more than twice what Jerry’d paid for his electric typewriter. One of these days.