She nodded. “Uh-huh. A couple-three years ago, not long after we got together. I told him to stick it up his ass. My boss was pissed the magazine didn’t get the ad buy.”

“You never said anything about that before.”

“Well, now I have. I don’t come out with everything that’s on my mind, unlike some people I could name.”

She means me, Jerry realized. He almost started laughing, but didn’t for fear of not being able to stop. If she knew some of what he knew … the CIA was liable to rub her out, too. So she could think he blabbed all the time if she wanted to.

Of course, the other reason she didn’t come out with everything that was on her mind was, she expected him to know without being told. So it seemed to him, anyhow. If he had to ask her what she wanted, she stopped wanting it. It wasn’t even slightly an accident she was a cat person.

He did wonder every now and then if their match was made in heaven. Then again, he wondered if anybody’s was. If you both worked and plugged away at things, couldn’t you patch up the cracks before they got too bad? He hoped so.

If you both worked and plugged away at things, sure. But what if one of you, or maybe two of you, didn’t feel like it anymore? One question he never asked her was, Hey, how do you think the marriage is going? He was afraid she might tell him, and she was relentlessly honest.

She didn’t ask him any questions like that, either. She might have thought everything was fine. Or, like him, she might have thought not looking right at things was better than examining them too closely. She might have been right, too.

He kept making feckless lunges at his thesis. At the end of January, he gave Professor Krikorian a chapter … and a week later his advisor admitted he’d misfiled it. “You have a carbon or a xerox, don’t you?” Krikorian asked.

“Um, no,” Jerry said unhappily, vowing never to make that mistake again as long as he lived. Writing the damn chapter once had been hard enough. Twice? He didn’t want to think about twice.

“It’ll turn up,” Professor Krikorian said. Jerry had to hope he was right.

Some people got drunk when things like that happened. Jerry went up to the student union to check out the new sf in the bookstore. He bought a Niven story collection that would keep him from worrying about the AWOL chapter or his own fiction for a few hours.

It was a Friday afternoon. He should have hurried back to his car so he could beat some of the rush. Instead, he paused at the newspapers outside the doors. One of the Times headlines above the fold was US REPORTED AFTER RUSS SUB.