“It is.” Anatoly Dobrynin pursed his lips and blew air out through them. “When I talk to Henry, I will tell him to tell his people that they must leave you alone. This is a precondition, and the Soviet Union will be most displeased if the United States violates it. If you are telling us the truth here, you are doing something most important. As you say, not just for a country but for mankind.”

“If you are telling us the truth,” Major Bronstein echoed.

“Thank you, sir,” Jerry said to Dobrynin, ignoring the assistant attaché. His mind was slightly blown that the ambassador would casually call the U.S. secretary of state by his first name. He went on, “Yeah, that’s about it. If we can figure out how Humpty Dumpty works, we’ve got no one knows how many worlds out there waiting to be found. Worlds! With life on them! Intelligent life, too—that second photo I showed you proves it. Well, so does the ship we found. There’s something for everybody, not just for one country or one way of doing things.”

“Would you like to stay here at the embassy until I have made my telephone call?” Dobrynin asked. “You do not have to. You are not a prisoner. But you may feel safer here than with your own countrymen.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that. Thanks again.” Jerry was sure the ambassador wasn’t offering from the kindness of his heart. He thought Jerry might possibly be useful to the USSR. He wasn’t wrong, either.

Bronstein said something in Russian, too fast for Jerry to follow. Anatoly Dobrynin translated for him: “He says your willingness to remain makes you more deserving of being taken seriously.”

“Sir, take people seriously because of their evidence, that’s all,” Jerry said. Maybe this would turn out all right after all. Maybe, after Henry Kissinger laughed his ass off, Dobrynin would throw him to the wolves. All he could do now was wait.

XVI

They stashed him in a room with a comfortable chair, a bookcase, and yet another portrait of Leonid Brezhnev. They gave him hot tea in a glass: sugar, no milk. Except for the glass, that was how he drank it; his father’s family came out of Byelorussia. They gave him a pastrami on rye, too, obviously ordered from outside. It was good.

He checked out the books the case held: Brezhnev’s collected works, translated into English. Curious, he pulled one out … and quickly found Marxist-Leninist theory wasn’t his thing. He put it back on the shelf before his eyes glazed over.

The volumes were handsome, and plainly expensive—hardbacks with gold leaf edging on the pages and fine white paper that looked as if it would last five hundred years. And if anybody worked his way through even one of them in all that time, Jerry would have been amazed.