Escaping Professor Krikorian let him go over to Murphy Hall, the building that ran the university. He turned in the form. He paid the fee that went with it. He didn’t need to worry about his check bouncing, the way he had at the start of a couple of anxious quarters. He’d never actually had one come back, but those escapes came too close for comfort.

Missions accomplished, he went home. He enjoyed driving the San Diego Freeway when it wasn’t rush hour. To him, it was what driving should have been all the time. You were here, you needed to get there, and you did. Not much traffic to worry about, only the new and ever more ignored fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit.

After he pulled into his parking space, he went to the lobby to see what the mailman had wrought. There were ads for local restaurants and an auto-parts place, plus a bank statement: it was the second of the month. He set a hand on his heart to hold in the excited palpitations, then climbed the stairs to his place.

Most of the mail went straight into the trash. He almost tossed the statement, too. It wasn’t as if he’d written any checks in August except the one settling his overdue phone bill, and that wouldn’t have cleared yet. But he was trying to get back into the regular swing of things, so he opened it.

No, no canceled checks in the envelope. There was the record of the payment for his second month on the Glomar Explorer. And, below that, there was a listing for another deposit to his savings account, this one in the amount of $57,211.92. It had gone into the account about when he was waking up Friday.

His eyes popped. He jerked straight upright, as if somebody’d jabbed him in the ass with a hat pin. Adrenaline iced him down, the way it had right after he got rear-ended. He felt as if he’d just picked up the BANK ERROR IN YOUR FAVOR—COLLECT $200 card in a Monopoly game.

But not $200. $57,211.92. “Bullshit,” he muttered as he came back to earth. That kind of money didn’t fall from the sky. Even with inflation going crazy and gas up around sixty cents a gallon, you could live for three years on that kind of money, and live pretty decently, too. Maybe even four.

You could if they let you keep it, that is. Fat chance! He’d watched computers in action out in the Pacific, and seen the future brought to life. Here, he had to be back in the all-too-fallible present. Some electronic “brain” somewhere must have screwed up.