Fired with enthusiasm, he made the changes that afternoon. Two days later, he needed to go up to UCLA. He took the revised story along and fed nickels into a xerox machine in the Biomedical Library. The copy went into a manila envelope addressed to that PO box in Schenectady. He wanted to send it straight back to Analog, but he wasn’t going to make the CIA pay attention to him when he didn’t have to.

On the way home, he stopped at the post office on the corner of El Segundo and Hawthorne Boulevard. A friend of his, a guy named Alex Wilkins, worked there, though not at the windows.

“First class, please,” he told the clerk. He paid the freight and collected a receipt. When you wrote for money, things like postage were deductible. The clerk tossed the envelope into a plastic tub.

Jerry left. Somebody else brought a package to the window. The exciting, romantic life of a writer, he thought. As he left the post-office parking lot, he got an idea that might make the story about the skeleton in seaboots come to life … if a story about a skeleton could do that.

The piece intended for Ben Bova came back to his apartment in eight days. Whoever’d read it in Schenectady had stuck a three-by-five under the paper clip. No security issues. Typo at the top of page 5, he or she had written. Jerry fixed the mistake and put the story in the mail for New York City.

Then he forgot about writing for a while, because classes started at UCLA. He was TAing two sections of Introduction to Oceanography, a class whose enrollment outdid some minor league teams’ average daily attendance. Most of the people in the course didn’t give a damn about oceanography, of course. All they cared about was four units of credit, preferably with a B or better.

“My office hours are Tuesdays from nine to eleven,” he informed both sections at their first meetings. “I can tell you right now that I won’t be there on the twenty-sixth of November.”

Naturally, someone in each section asked, “Why not?”

“Because I’m getting married on the twenty-fourth,” he answered.

That shut them up, except for one class-clown type who exclaimed, “You mean you’d rather go on your honeymoon than hold office hours?” Everybody laughed, including Jerry.

He fiddled with the story about the skeleton in boots. He fiddled with his dissertation, too. He knew he should be working harder on it, but he didn’t feel the drive he had before John P. knocked on his door and changed his life forever.