He breathed a sigh of relief to find that his envelope of cash hadn’t walked with Jesus. That would have messed him up but good. Should have thought of it last night, he scolded himself. He took the envelope back to his room and checked it there to make sure the Agency hadn’t substituted cut-up newspapers or something. Nope—still Federal Reserve notes.

Then he turned on the TV. He skated from station to station, the way he had during the Watergate hearings. Commentators were speculating as hard as they could. Better to specu late than never, Jerry thought vaguely. Of course, these might be the last days of the late, great Planet Earth for real.

He put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. He didn’t go down for lunch. Breakfast would keep him running till dinner, and the fewer people he saw, the better off he figured he was. In the middle of the afternoon, somebody handed John Chancellor a note. Chancellor glanced down at it, then eyed the camera again. “We’ve just learned that President Ford will address the nation at nine tonight—six Pacific time.”

Being a California guy, Jerry was used to important speeches at six. Nine seemed late to him. It did give him time to eat, though, and to take a shower. He turned on the TV a little before nine. In California, Anna would be driving home from work. He wondered if she’d be listening on the radio.

At nine on the dot, there was Gerald Ford. In spite of pardoning Nixon, he looked like a decent man. Was it LBJ who’d said Ford had played too much football without a helmet? Jerry thought so.

“Good evening, my fellow Americans. I have spent most of the day conferring with Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev over the Washington–Moscow hotline,” Ford said. “What you’ve heard and read about over the past few days is true. The United States has raised from the bottom of the Pacific a spaceship from another planet circling another sun, built by intelligent creatures who are not human beings.”

The TV showed photos of Humpty Dumpty in the Glomar Explorer’s moon pool, photos of the spaceship’s interior, and photos of the centaurowls in their protective units. Jerry wondered if he’d taken any of them. He thought so.

“The United States discovered this spacecraft. We brought it up. But General Secretary Brezhnev is concerned that, if we alone learn its secrets, we will gain an unfair advantage over the rest of mankind. I did my best to convince him that we would never act in that way. Unfortunately, he was not altogether reassured.