The promised five minutes stretched to twenty. Jerry wasn’t surprised. His dad always underestimated how long things would take. In due course, the phone did ring again. “Sorry,” Hyman Stieglitz said. “Chris there was trying to do some strange things on his Schedule C.”

“Okay.” Jerry knew Schedule C was where you noted income and expenses if you were self-employed, but no more. He hoped to be fully initiated into its mysteries one of these days, but he hadn’t been yet.

“How much were you involved in the strange doings on that ship you went on last summer?” his dad asked. “Aliens? That would have been right up your alley.”

“Yeah. That’s why they hired me, only I didn’t know it till I was already on board,” Jerry said.

“You should have been flattered to land such an important slot so young.”

“I was. I am. Looks like I may be going back there again pretty soon. Now that the Russians know about it, things are opening up some.” Jerry didn’t talk about how the Russians knew about it.

“Who’d have thought a spaceship might come so close to starting the great big war? Korea, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam—those you could see, and alevai see your way around them. But this? This came out of the blue!”

“Did you ever think there’d be proof of intelligent life on other planets?” Jerry couldn’t resist the dig.

His father just snorted. “The way things are these days, I’m not so sure there’s intelligent life on this planet.”

“You know what, Dad? You’ve got something.”

“What I’ve got is Joe Yanai coming in in five minutes with a boxful of receipts and statements he wants me to add up for him. I charge him twice as much as I would if he did the preliminary work himself, but it doesn’t stop him. It doesn’t pay me enough for the tsuris, either.”

Jerry said his good-byes. He’d gone to high school with Joe Yanai’s daughter, Faye. She’d been one of the other handful of really smart people in their class. She’d dealt with that better than Jerry, though he hadn’t realized it at the time. There were a lot of things he hadn’t realized at the time. Looking back on his high school self, he’d been kind of a prick.

The Agency still thinks I am, he thought with a certain amount of pride as he went to the kitchen. When he opened the refrigerator, he saw steaks. He grinned. Anna knew he’d be back, so she’d put out something he liked. There were mushrooms in the veggie drawer, too. He sliced them thin and put them on the steaks so they’d broil along with the meat. He was a better cook than she was, but he’d learned that trick from her.