“Yeah.” Jerry did, too. But were they enough worse to be kept away from Humpty Dumpty and whatever it could teach mankind? Was America so much better that it alone deserved to control so much power? He still worried about that.

XIII

You can’t trust any of those assholes. After Tim said the words, Jerry thought they’d be engraved on his soul forever. It didn’t work like that. Life kept getting in the way.

Instead of writing to see whether Ben Bova would look at a revision of the story that had come back while he was out in the Pacific, he took his courage in both hands and called the Condé Nast offices in New York. Before long, he found himself connected with the editor of Analog. After introducing himself, he said, “Excuse me, but if I make those changes you suggested, would you consider it again?”

“Of course I would! Why do you think I wrote you that letter?” Across 2,500 miles of phone line, Jerry could hear the editor smile; he must have asked the right question. Bova added, “No guarantees, of course. I have to see what you do with it.”

“Oh, sure. I understand that,” Jerry said quickly.

“It’s good to hear from you,” the editor said. “I was kind of disappointed when I didn’t for so long.”

“I’ve been on a research project out in the Pacific. I couldn’t get my mail for a while,” Jerry said.

“Is that what it was? I should have realized. You wrote me before that you were doing studies on whale songs. That must be fascinating!”

“It is,” Jerry answered, amazed that Bova remembered the cover letter from the story he’d sold the year before. He wondered what the editor of Analog would think if he told him about the spaceship and the aliens.

John W. Campbell probably would have believed him. Of course, Campbell had believed in Dianetics, too, and in the reactionless Dean Drive, and the allegedly psionic Hieronymus Machine, and using astrology in weather forecasting. By everything Jerry could see, Ben Bova’s head was screwed on a lot tighter. Which wouldn’t be an asset, of course, when the truth was so bizarre.

Whatever psionics the current Analog editor had weren’t enough to let him pluck secrets from Jerry’s mind. He said, “Make the changes and let me have another look. If I don’t buy it, I bet somebody else will.”

“Okay. Thanks again.” Jerry said his good-byes and got off the phone. A bit slower than he might have, he realized Bova’d given him another good piece of advice. You started with the top markets, sure. But if you didn’t sell there, you sent your brainchildren to magazines with less prestige and less money. Getting paid at all beat getting zilch for what you did.