“Really.” He went over to a bookcase and plucked the manganese nodule from it. “This no-shit came up from seventeen thousand feet in the middle of the Pacific.” The nodule no-shit came from half that depth off the California coast, but he was into it now. He went on, “I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition as soon as you came in.”

“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Anna exclaimed, and some of the tightness eased from his spine. If she was doing Monty Python shtick with him, she couldn’t be too mad or too sure he was lying. They’d both fallen crazy in love with the Flying Circus when KCET, the L.A. PBS station, started running it, about the time Jerry got back to the mainland.

“The soft chair! The comfy cushions!” Jerry said. Yeah, he’d got away with it.

Unless he hadn’t. At dinner, Anna said, “If that ship did that kind of stuff, probably half the people on it worked for the CIA.”

All the people on it worked for the CIA. Including me, Jerry thought. Aloud, he answered, “Nobody said so. Nobody tried to recruit me. Nobody had horns or kept tucking a spiked tail down his pants leg or anything. They were just … guys. You met that Steve Dole.”

“Who knows what he does when I’m not meeting him?” Anna said darkly. Jerry told himself to put Habitable Planets for Man someplace where she wouldn’t see it. If she noticed Steve’s name on the spine, she was liable to wonder why a guy who wrote about life on other planets was out in the middle of the Pacific scouring the seafloor for manganese nodules.

After he did the dishes, he started nuzzling her neck and nibbling at her ear. “Cut that out!” she said, brushing him away like an annoying bug.

“What? You don’t think it’s an ear-ogenous zone?”

She made a horrible face. “Cut that out, too! Seriously, wait till morning. I’m tired. If you’re not tired, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

He didn’t feel like waiting till morning; he felt like it right then. But fighting about sex could get even uglier than fighting about in-laws. He nodded and said, “Okay.” There was a certain luxury in slowly and lazily fooling around on a Saturday morning. And if he felt he compromised more often than she did, he would have bet she thought the opposite.

What he mostly did that night was wonder how the CIA would handle the leak. He knew it hadn’t come from him. They might not be so sure. If they’d ever noticed that their run of photos didn’t exactly match their run of negatives … So far, they didn’t seem to have. He had to hope seeming matched reality.