Steve’s eyes twinkled behind his bifocals. “They’re here for the same reason you are. They helped pick you to come along on what’s liable to be the most important thing for humanity since Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil.”

Jerry didn’t think of Eve. He thought of Anna. More to the point, he worried about Anna. Yes, she’d come around on putting off the wedding. She still wasn’t real happy about it, though. Part of why he thought she wasn’t was related to the reason he was hinky about the CIA folks. She had trouble taking him seriously, too.

“The time may come when they need to listen to me, if I’m supposed to be the expert on aliens,” Jerry said—he wasn’t going to lay his fretting over Anna on Steve. “Will they do that when the heat is on, or will they just go ahead with what they want to do instead?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Steve didn’t pretend there was no problem. Jerry liked him better for that. He went on, “I would, but I’ve seen you have a head on your shoulders. If you let them see that, too, before push comes to shove, you’ll stand a better chance.”

“How? Till we get where we’re going, till we get the spaceship up into the moon pool and start knocking on the door—if that is a door—I really am just along for the ride. I haven’t even picked up any whale songs,” Jerry said. It wasn’t so much that he would rather have been writing his dissertation: as far as he could tell, no one liked writing a dissertation. But he didn’t like feeling useless, either.

Thoughtfully, Steve said, “Why don’t you make a list of all the things that might happen when we do get the spaceship into the moon pool, and all the things we can do in case those things happen? Show it to Dale.”

“Won’t he already have a list like that? I mean, I don’t know that much about soldiers and spies, but aren’t they, like, heavily into contingency plans?”

“Now that you mention it”—Steve sounded amused, which he didn’t do all that often—“yes. But I’ll bet you a double sawbuck that you come up with some things nobody in the CIA thought of. That’s what you’re here for.”

Terrific. I’m the designated weirdo, Jerry thought, riffing on the experiment the American League had begun the year before. It hadn’t helped his Angels a bit. They stayed lousy even with the DH. He vaguely knew a double sawbuck was a twenty-dollar bill. He never would have called a twenty that himself, but Steve’s slang came out of World War II.