“I guess,” Jerry said. Would Ford do anything different with Humpty Dumpty because he’d pardoned Nixon? Nixon knew about the spaceship, of course. Whether he knew about explorations inside it, Jerry couldn’t have said. He’d already left office by then. Would Ford and Kissinger have kept him in the loop? They might have. Being stupid wasn’t Nixon’s problem; being crooked was.

“We’ll see who the Democrats nominate in seventy-six and we’ll worry about it then,” Anna said.

“Yeah.” Jerry didn’t want to argue with her, not when she wasn’t wrong. And thinking about the election in 1976 made him think about the Bicentennial in 1976. Less than two years away now. People had already been talking about it for a while: mostly people who hoped to make money off it.

It was pretty special, though. How many democracies lasted two hundred years? He knew a lot less history than oceanography, but you didn’t need to know much to realize the answer was damn few.

“Blazing Saddles was funny.” Anna changed the subject with a lurch. “I don’t know if it was funnier than The Producers, but it was funny.”

“You don’t see a comedy twice if it isn’t funny,” Jerry said. If she’d had enough politics, okay, she had. And it let him avoid admitting he hadn’t seen The Producers in a theater, only in chopped-up bits and pieces on TV. Movies weren’t the same that way. Better than nothing, but not the same.

“Especially not at the Crenshaw. Mom and Dad would take me there for cartoons and for dinosaur movies. A million screaming kids, and the smell of buttered popcorn as thick as cigarette smoke is other places,” Anna said. Her parents smoked, too.

“I was there for some of those, too,” Jerry said.

“I wonder if we were ever there for the same ones.”

“Probably.” They were only a year apart. They’d grown up in the same suburb. It would have been more surprising if they hadn’t been in the same place at the same time every once in a while.

Jerry thought so, anyhow. Anna said, “A Sign It Was Meant To Be.” He could hear the capital letters thumping into place.

He answered, “I’m glad it was.” He might not have been the most socially adept human being in captivity, but he didn’t miss the right response there.

Anna let out a squeak. “The dumb cat just knocked something over in the kitchen. I’ll call you back. ’Bye.” She hung up without waiting for a good-bye in return.

The phone did ring again a minute later. Jerry grabbed it. “Hi, sweetie.”

“Well, hello, beautiful.” It wasn’t Anna. It was Tim Ishihara. Laughing, he went on, “I didn’t know you cared.”

“Believe me, I don’t.” Jerry’s ears felt like a forest fire.