But Vietnam was gurgling down the drain. Refugees were fleeing from the highlands to the coast, hoping to escape oncoming North Vietnamese forces. The latest North Vietnamese drive seemed aimed at splitting South Vietnam in half. Jerry shook his head. Too many people he knew had done and suffered too much for too little.

Meanwhile, the Socialist Workers Party claimed the FBI was harassing it, which the FBI probably was. And Henry Kissinger and Andrei Gromyko were talking about the Middle East again.

Jerry set another exam on the pile of ones he’d finished. He was more than halfway through them now. He hoped he’d get done by one in the morning, though two seemed more likely. As he reached for the next bluebook, part of him wished Kissinger and Gromyko were meeting to discuss Humpty Dumpty. Kissinger knew about it, of course. But he wouldn’t say anything. Not a chance in the world.

Then the KNX newsman said, “As long as we’re talking about American-Soviet relations, some of you may have heard Jack Anderson’s show on another radio network earlier tonight. Anderson expanded on and corrected reporting in the Los Angeles Times from last month. The Hughes Glomar Explorer, he says, was indeed trying to raise a Russian submarine last summer, but in the North Pacific, not the Atlantic. No submarine was raised. He calls it a ‘boondoggle,’ and says the secrecy surrounding the project was ‘simply the cover-up of a failure—three hundred and fifty million dollars literally went down into the ocean.’”

The newsman coughed and said, “Excuse me”: live radio. He went on, “Anderson added that some rumors about the Hughes Glomar Explorer’s mission were ‘absolutely unbelievable, and had to be intended to deceive.’” He paused. “We’ll be right back, with traffic on the ones, after these messages.”

Jerry turned off the radio. He was awake now, by God! He wondered if he’d ever dare to sleep now. No matter how hard the CIA guys had tried to bury it, word about the Glomar Explorer was out. Word about Humpty Dumpty, too. Jack Anderson didn’t believe that; he was a thoroughly rational man, rooted in the world as he knew it.

Outer space? Flying saucers? Aliens in suspended animation? That was crazy stuff, nothing else but. It was to sensible people like Jack Anderson, anyhow.

What did you do, though, when the crazy stuff turned real? Jerry’s dad had had to deal with that after the United States dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People took A-bombs and even H-bombs for granted now, but in 1945 they would have seemed straight out of science fiction. And in 1945 science fiction had been way more disreputable than it was now.