Airport. Part 24

Cindy was already making plans. "I shall have custody of Roberta and Libby, of course, though you'll always be able to see them. I'll never be difficult about that."

"I didn't expect you would be."

Yes, Mel mused, it was logical that the girls would go with their mother. He would miss them both, Libby especially. No outside meetings, however frequent, could ever be a subst.i.tute for living in the same house day by day. He remembered his talks with his younger daughter on the telephone tonight; what was it Libby had wanted the first time? A map of February. Well, he had one now; it showed some unexpected detours.

"And I'll have to get a lawyer," Cindy said. "I'll let you know who it is."

He nodded, wondering if all marriages went on to terminate so matter-of-factly once the decision to end them had been made. He supposed it was the civilized way of doing things. At any rate, Cindy seemed to have regained her composure with remarkable speed. Seated in the chair she had been occupying earlier, she was inspecting her face in a compact, repairing her make-up. He even had the impression that her thoughts had moved away from here; at the corners of her mouth there was the hint of a smile. In situations like this, Mel thought, women were supposed to be more emotional than men, but Cindy didn't show any signs of it, yet he himself was close to tears.

He was aware of soundsvoices and people movingin the office outside. There was a knock. Mel called, "Come in."

It was Lieutenant Ordway. He entered, closing the door behind him. When he saw Cindy, he said, "Oh, excuse me, Mrs. Bakersfeld."

Cindy glanced up, then away, without atmosphere, stood hesitantly. "Perhaps I should come back."

Mel asked, "What is it, Ned?"

"It's the anti-noise demonstration; those Meadowood people. There are a couple of hundred in the main concourse; more coming in. They all wanted to see you, but I've talked them into sending a delegation, the way you suggested. They selected half a dozen, and there are three newspaper reporters; I said the reporters could come too." The policeman nodded toward the anteroom. "They're all waiting outside."

He would have to see the delegation, Mel knew. He had never felt less like talking to anyone.

"Cindy," he pleaded, "this won't take long. Will you wait?" When she didn't answer, he added, "Please!"

She continued to ignore them both.

"Look," Ordway said, "if this is a bad time, I'll tell these people they'll have to come back some other day."

Mel shook his head. The commitment had been made; it was his own suggestion. "You'd better bring them in." As the policeman turned away, Mel added, "Oh, I haven't talked to that woman... I've forgotten her name."

"Guerrero," Ordway said. "And you don't have to. She looked as if she was leaving when I came in."

A few moments later the half dozen people from Meadowoodfour men and two womenbegan filing in. The press trio followed. One of the reporters was from the Tribunean alert, youngish man named Tomlinson who usually covered the airport and general aviation beat for his paper; Mel knew him well and respected his accuracy and fairness. Tomlinson's by-line also appeared occasionally in national magazines, The other two reporters were also known slightly to Melone a young man from the Sun-Times, the other an older woman from a local weekly.

Through the open doorway, Mel could see Lieutenant Ordway talking to the woman outside, Mrs. Guerrero, who was standing, fastening her coat.

Cindy remained where she was.

"Good evening." Mel introduced himself, then motioned to settees and chairs around his office. "Please sit down."

"Okay, we will," one of the men in the delegation said. He was expensively welldressed, with precisely combed, gray-streaked hair, and seemed to be the group's leader. "But I'll tell you we're not here to get cozy. We've some plain, blunt things to say and we expect the same kind of answers, not a lot of double-talk."

"I'll try not to give you that. Will you tell me who you are?"

"My name is Elliott Freemantle. I'm a lawyer. I represent these people, and all the others down below."

"All right, Mr. Freemantle," Mel said. "Why don't you begin?"

The door to the anteroom was still open. The woman who had been outside, Mel noticed, had gone. Now, Ned Ordway came in, closing the office door.

3.

TRANS AMERICA Airlines Flight Two was twenty minutes out of Lincoln International, and in a steady climb which would continue until reaching thirty-three thousand feet near Detroit, in eleven more minutes. Already the flight was on its airway and great circle course for Rome. For the past several minutes the aircraft had been in smooth air, the storm clouds and accompanying turbulence now far below. A three-quarter moon hung above and ahead like a lopsided lantern; all around, the stars were sharp and clear.

On the flight deck, initial pressures were over. Captain Harris had made a progress announcement to the pa.s.sengers over the p.a. system. The three pilots were settling down to routines of their long flight.

Under the second officer's table, behind Captain Harris and Demerest, a chime sounded loudly. At the same instant, on a radio panel forward of the throttles, an amber light winked on. Both chime and light indicated a radio call on Selcal radio system through which most airliners could be called individually, as if by private telephone. Each aircraft, of Trans America and other major airlines, had its own separate call code, transmitted and received automatically. The signals which had just been actuated for aircraft N-731-TA would be seen or heard on no other flight.

Anson Harris switched from the radio to which he bad been listening on air route control frequency, and acknowledged, "This is Trans America Two."

"Flight Two, this is Trans America dispatcher, Cleveland. I have a message for the captain from D.T.M., LIA. Advise when ready to copy."

Vernon Demerest, Harris observed, had also changed radio frequencies. Now Demerest pulled a notepad toward him and nodded.

Harris instructed, "We're ready, Cleveland. Go ahead."

The message was that which Tanya Livingston had written concerning Flight Two's stowaway, Mrs. Ada Quonsett. As it progressed, with the description of the little old lady from San Diego, both captains began smiling. The message ended by asking confirmation that Mrs. Quonsett was aboard.

"We will check and advise," Harris acknowledged. When the transmission ended, he clicked the radio controls back to air route control frequency.

Vernon Demerest, and Second Officer Jordan who had heard the message from an overhead speaker near his seat, were laughing aloud.

The second officer declared, "I don't believe it!"

"I believe it." Demerest chuckled. "All those b.o.o.bs on the ground, and some ancient old duck fooled them all!" He pushed the call b.u.t.ton for the forward galley phone. "Hey!" he said, when one of the stewardesses answered. "Tell Gwen we want her in the office."

He was still chuckling when the flight deck door opened. Gwen Meighen came in.

Demerest read Gwen the Selcal message with Mrs. Quonsett's description. "Have you seen her?"

Gwen shook her head. "I've hardly been back in tourist yet."

"Go back," Demerest told her, "and see if the old woman's there. She shouldn't be hard to spot."

"If she is, what do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. Just come back and report."

Gwen was gone only a few minutes. When she returned, she was laughing like the others.

Demerest swung around in his seat. "Is she there?"

Gwen nodded. "Yes, in seat fourteen-B. She's just the way the message said, only more so."

The second officer asked, "How old?"

"At least seventy-five; probably nearer eighty. And she looks like something out of d.i.c.kens."

Over his shoulder, Anson Harris said, "More likely a.r.s.enic and Old Lace."

"Is she really a stowaway, Captain?"

Harris shrugged. "On the ground they say so. And I guess it explains why your head count was wrong."

"We can easily find out for sure," Gwen volunteered. "All I have to do is go back again and ask to see her ticket counterfoil."

"No," Vernon Demerest said. "Let's not do that."

As best they could in the darkened c.o.c.kpit, the others regarded him curiously. After a second or so, Harris returned his eyes to the flight instruments; Second Officer Jordan swung back to his fuel charts.

"Hold on," Demerest told Gwen. While she waited, he made a check point report on company radio.

"All we were told to do," Demerest said when he had finished the report, "was to see if the old lady's aboard. Okay, she is; and that's what I'll tell Flight Dispatch. I guess they'll have someone waiting for her at Rome; we can't do anything about that, even if we wanted to. But if the old girl's made it this far, and since we're not turning back, why make her next eight hours miserable? So leave her alone. Maybe, just before we get to Rome, we'll let her know she's been found out; then it won't be a whole big shock. But for the time being, let her enjoy her flight. Give Grandma some dinner, and she can watch the movie in peace."

"You know," Gwen said; she was watching him thoughtfully. "There are times when I quite like you."

As Gwen left the flight deck, Demereststill chucklingchanged radio channels and reported back himself to the Cleveland dispatcher.

Anson Harris, who had his pipe alight, looked up from adjusting the auto-pilot and said drily, "I didn't think you were much of a one for the old ladies." He emphasized the "old."

Demerest grinned, "I prefer younger ones."

"So I'd heard."

The stowaway report, and his reply, had put Demerest in a thoroughly good humor. More relaxed than earlier, he added, "Opportunities change. Pretty soon you and I will have to settle for the not-so-young ones."

"I already have." Harris puffed at his pipe. "For quite some time."

Both pilots had one earpiece of their radio headsets pushed upward. They could converse normally, yet hear radio calls if any came in. The noise level of the flight deckpersistent but not overwhelmingwas sufficient to give the two of them privacy.

"You've always played it straight down the line, haven't you?" Demerest said. "With your wife, I mean. No mucking around; on layovers I've seen you reading books."

This time Harris grinned. "Sometimes I go to a movie."

"Any special reason?"

"My wife was a stewardesson DC-4s; that was how we met. She knew what went on: the sleeping around, pregnancies, abortions, all that stuff. Later, she got to be a supervisor and had to deal with a lot of it in her job. Anyway, when we were married I made her a promisethe obvious one. I've always kept it."

"I guess all those kids you had helped."

"Maybe."

Harris made another minute adjustment to the autopilot. As they talked, the eyes of both pilots, out of training and habit, swept the illuminated banks of instruments in front of them, as well as those to each side and above. An incorrect instrument reading would show at once if anything in the aircraft was malfunctioning. Nothing was.

Demerest said, "How many children is it? Six?"

"Seven." Harris smiled. "Four we planned, three we didn't. But it all worked out." "The ones you didn't plandid you ever consider doing anything about them? Before they were born."

Harris glanced sharply sideways. "Abortion?"

Vernon Demerest had asked the question on impulse. Now he wondered why.

Obviously, his two conversations earlier with Gwen had begun the train of thought about children generally. But it was uncharacteristic of him to be doing so much thinking about somethinglike an abortion for Gwenwhich was essentially simple and straightforward. Just the same, he was curious about Harris's reaction.

"Yes," Demerest said. "That's what I meant."

Anson Harris said curtly, "The answer's no." Less sharply, he added, "It happens to be something I have strong views about."

"Because of religion?"

Harris shook his head negatively. "I'm an agnostic."

"What kind of views, then?"

"You sure you want to hear?"

"It's a long night," Demerest said. "Why not?"

On radio they listened to an exchange between air route control and a TWA flight, Paris-bound, which had taken off shortly after Trans America Flight Two. The TWA jet was ten miles behind, and several thousand feet lower. As Flight two continued to climb, so would TWA.

Most alert pilots, as a result of listening to other aircraft transmissions, maintained a partial picture of nearby tralfic in their minds. Demerest and Harris both added this latest item to others already noted. When the ground-to-air exchange ended, Demerest urged Anson Harris, "Go ahead."

Harris checked their course and alt.i.tude, then began refilling his pipe. "I've studied a lot of history. I got interested in college and followed through after.

Maybe you've done the same."

"No," Demerest said. "Never more than I had to."

"Well, if you go through it allhistory, that is--one thing stands out. Every bit of human progress has happened for a single, simple reason: the elevation of the status of the individual. Each time civilization has stumbled into another age that's a little better, a bit more enlightened, than the one before it, it's because people cared more about other people and respected them as individuals. When they haven't cared, those have been the times of slipping backward. Even a short world historyif you read onewill prove it's true."

"I'll take your word for it."

"You don't have to. There are plenty of examples. We abolished slavery because we respected individual human life. For the same reason we stopped hanging children, and around the same time we invented habeas corpus, and now we've created justice for all, or the closest we can come to it. More recently, most people who think and reason are against capital punishment, not so much because of those to be executed, but for what taking a human lifeany human lifedoes to society, which is all of us."

Harris stopped. Straining forward against his seat harness, he looked outward from the darkened c.o.c.kpit to the night surrounding them. In bright moonlight he could see a swirl of darkened cloudtops far below. With a forecast of unbroken cloud along the whole of their route until mid-Atlantic, there would be no glimpses tonight of lights on the ground. Several thousand feet above, the lights of another aircraft, traveling in an opposite direction, flashed by and were gone.

From his seat behind the other two pilots, Second Officer Cy Jordan reached forward, adjusting the throttle settings to compensate for Flight Two's increased alt.i.tude.

Demerest waited until Jordan had finished, then protested to Anson Harris, "Capital punishment is a long way from abortion."

"Not really," Harris said. "Not when you think about it. It all relates to respect for individual human life; to the way civilization's come, the way it's going. The strange thing is, you hear people argue for abolition of capital punishment, then for legalized abortion in the same breath. What they don't see is the anomaly of raising the value of human life on one hand, and lowering it on the other."