But he’d despised Nixon as long as he could remember. He’d got it from his folks, who’d despised Nixon longer than he’d been alive. His father still did. Jerry and Hyman Stieglitz had banged heads over plenty of things while Jerry was growing up, but never about that.

“All we can do here is our jobs, and do them as well as we can,” Steve added. “What happens back in Washington happens, that’s all. It doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re up to—unless, like you say, we have to introduce the little green men inside the object to Gerald Ford.”

“Wouldn’t that be trippy?” Jerry said. Steve laughed and nodded. They both seemed to think that was a good place to leave it, so they did. They’d got out of it without screaming at each other or trying to slug each other. The cabin wasn’t very big. If they couldn’t get along …

But Jerry wasn’t so sure the man from the RAND Corporation had it all straight. They weren’t just doing their jobs. They were doing them for the CIA, and for the U.S. government of which it was a part. To say that the CIA and the government as a whole were morally compromised would do for an understatement till a bigger one roared down the freeway. So it looked to Jerry, anyway.

On the other hand, what was the alternative? Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR? Jerry wasn’t one of those people who thought, because the United States wasn’t so great, Russia had to be. The Iron Curtain that ran down the middle of Europe was there for a reason. The reason wasn’t to keep swarms of Austrians, West Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians from rushing into East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. It was to keep the people in the Russian satellites from getting the hell out.

He sighed, changed into his nightclothes, and climbed into his bunk to read for a while before he went to sleep. This anthology had Damon Knight’s “Cabin Boy” in it. He hadn’t read that one for a long time. People didn’t know it the way they knew Knight’s “To Serve Man”; it hadn’t been a Twilight Zone episode. To Jerry, though, it was a better story. And it was probably where he’d got the idea of a grown spaceship rather than a manufactured one.

He smiled his way through it. Yeah, that was first contact done right! But it was only a story, even if it was a good one. Here he lay, in the middle of the North Pacific, on a ship dedicated to the proposition that stories might turn real. And wouldn’t that be trippy?