The newsletter the next morning had a breaking bulletin: Ron Ziegler announced that Richard Nixon would make an important statement the following day. The president’s press secretary didn’t say what his boss would be talking about. As far as Jerry was concerned, that was just as well. If Ziegler said the sun was shining, Jerry would have gone outside to check.

Some people called the difference between what politicians and their flunkies said and what was actually true the credibility gap. A gang of L.A. satirists who styled themselves the Credibility Gap poked fun at such politicos, first on AM rock station KRLA and then on KPPC. Free-form FM fitted them better, no doubt.

Having read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” at an impressionable age, Jerry had another name for politicians’ verbal shenanigans. He called them lying.

Slowly, slowly, Humpty Dumpty rose from the ocean toward the moon pool. Along with everyone else, Jerry sweated out the last hours of the lift. If Clementine broke a claw now … That would be too painful to bear. All the way to the top (well, almost all the way) and then all the way down? No.

Please, God, no, went through his mind. It wasn’t exactly a prayer, but it wasn’t exactly not a prayer, either. It came closer than anything he’d tried since he was a little boy and his mother was dying. Petition the Lord with prayer? Years before the Doors sang it, he’d agreed with them that you couldn’t do it. But here he was, out in the middle of the ocean, with Humpty Dumpty nearly close enough to reach out and touch. Nearly. Not quite. Not yet. Please, God.

Lunch was roast beef. Jerry’d enjoyed it the Thursday before. It was probably just as good now; the cooks in the galley knew their stuff. But five minutes after finishing, he had trouble remembering what he’d eaten. He’d gone into the messroom because it was lunchtime. Okay, he’d fueled up. That was what it amounted to.

He wandered forward and peered down into the moon pool. The sun was out, if hazily. A mackerel, three-quarters grown, flashed silver just below the surface, then vanished into deeper water. Jerry’s gaze went deeper still. Was that a pale, smooth curve down there, with darker bands where the black steel claws still gripped? Or was it just his imagination?

“Running away with me,” he sang softly, yielding to the Temptations.