Dave looked at him. “Aqua Lube isn’t anybody’s friend,” he said. That meant he didn’t listen to Jethro Tull. Jerry only wished he were more surprised.

The ship’s newsletter reported that, on an 8–0 vote, the Supreme Court had ordered Richard Nixon to turn over the tapes of his two talks with H. R. Haldeman the day after the Watergate burglars got caught. Jerry worried that Nixon would defy the court. He’d already covered up so much—what was a little more? Wasn’t doing whatever you wanted the whole point of the imperial presidency?

But Nixon did cough up the tapes. As soon as he did, everybody saw why he’d held on to them so long and so hard. People who’d supported him through everything up till now started saying he had to be impeached, convicted, and removed. It wasn’t a question of if anymore. It was a question of when.

“I’m more relieved than I know how to tell you,” Jerry said to Steve, back in their cabin after dinner, when the news broke.

“For the sake of the country, you mean?” Steve asked.

Jerry still wasn’t sure how the older man felt about the president. All the same, he answered, “Partly that. But partly this, too. I mean, suppose we haul the Midlothian object up into the moon pool. Suppose we knock on the airlock door, or whatever it is. And suppose the aliens open up and say, ‘Take us to your leader.’ Do you really want to introduce them to Richard Nixon?”

“His name is on the moon—he was president when people first went there,” Steve said. “He went along with this whole project, too. We’ve spent something like half a billion dollars running that pipe string with Clementine on the end of it down toward the … the object. Not everybody would have done that. Don’t you think he deserves some credit for it?”

“Um…” Jerry didn’t want to give Nixon credit for anything. “Do you really want somebody like that running the government, though? He said, ‘I am not a crook!’ But he was. He was all along!”

Stephen Dole sighed. “That … seems to be true. It’s a shame, and it looks like he’ll pay for it. But one of the things it does is show you that people are more complicated than the movies and TV make them out to be.”

The part of Jerry that wrote responded to that. He knew he couldn’t convincingly create a character as gifted, as complex, and as flawed as Richard Nixon. He wasn’t good enough yet. He wondered if he ever would be.