Airport (82 page)

Gwen regarded her companion curiously. “Tell me one thing. How is it you know so much about all this?”

“I told you, I’m a union officer…”

“You’re part of the ALPA’s for pilots. You don’t have anything to do with stewardesses–not in that way, anyhow.”

“Maybe not directly.”

“Vernon, this has happened to you before… getting a stewardess pregnant… Vernon, hasn’t it?”

He nodded reluctantly. “Yes.”

“It must come pretty easily to you, knocking up stewardesses–those gullible country girls you were talking about. Or were they mostly from ‘modest city homes’?” Gwen’s voice was bitter. “How many have there been altogether? Two dozen, a dozen? Just give me an idea in round figures”

He sighed. “One; only one.”

He had been incredibly lucky, of course. It could have been many more, but his answer was the truth. Well… almost the truth; there was that other time, and the miscarriage, but that shouldn’t count.

Outside the car, traffic density was increasing as they neared the airport, now less than a quarter mile away. The bright lights of the great terminal, though dimmed tonight by snow, still filled the sky.

Gwen said, “The other girl who got pregnant. I don’t want to know her name…”

“I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Did she use the thingummy–tbe three-point program?”

“Yes.”

“Did you help her?”

He answered impatiently, “I said earlier–wbat kind of a man do you think I am? Of course I helped her. If you must know, the company made deductions from my pay checks. That’s how I knew about the way it’s done.”

Gwen smiled. ” ‘Personal misc.?’ “

“Yes.”

“Did your wife ever know?”

He hesitated before answering. “No.”

“What happened to the baby?”

“It was adopted.”

“What was it?”

“Just a baby.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. Was it a boy or a girl?”

“A girl, I think.”

“You
think.
”

“I know. It was a girl.”

Gwen’s questioning made him vaguely uncomfortable. It revived memories he would as soon forget.

They were silent as Vernon Demerest swung the Mercedes into the airport’s wide and imposing main entry. High above the entry, soaring and floodlighted, were the futuristic parabolic arches–acclaimed achievement of a world-wide design contest–symbolizing, so it was said, the noble dreams of aviation. Ahead was an impressive, serpentine complex of roads, interchanges, flyovers, and tunnels, designed to keep the airport’s unceasing vehicular traffic flowing at high speed, though tonight the effects of the three-day storm were making progress slower than usual. Great mounds of snow were occupying normally usable road space. Snowplows and dump trucks, trying to keep remaining areas open, were adding their own confusion.

After several brief hold-ups, Demerest turned onto the service road which would bring them to the Trans America main hangar area, where they would leave the car and take a crew bus to the terminal.

Gwen stirred beside him. “Vernon.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for being honest with me.” She reached out touching his nearer hand on the steering wheel. “I’ll be all right. I expect it was just a bit much, all at once. And I
do
want to go with you to Naples.”

He nodded and smiled, then took his hand off the wheel and clasped Gwen’s tightly. “We’ll have a great time, and I promise we’ll both remember it.”

He would do his best, he decided, to ensure the promise came true. For himself, it would not be difficult. He had been more attracted to Gwen, had felt more loving in her company, and closer in spirit, than with anyone else he remembered. If it were not for his marriage… He wondered, not for the first time, about breaking with Sarah, and marrying Gwen. Then he pushed the thought away. He had known too many others of his profession who had suffered upheaval–pilots who forsook wives of many years, for younger women. More often than not, all the men had in the end were shattered hopes and heavy alimony.

Sometime during their trip, though, either in Rome or Naples, he must have another serious discussion with Gwen. Their talk, so far, had not gone exactly as he would have liked, nor had the question of an abortion yet been raised.

Meanwhile–the thought of Rome reminded him–there was the more immediate matter of his command of Trans America Flight Two.

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T
HE KEY
was to room 224 of the O’Hagan Inn.

In the semidarkened locker area adjoining the air traffic control radar room, Keith Bakersfeld realized he had been staring at the key and its identifying plastic tag for several minutes. Or had it been seconds only? It might have been. Just lately, like so much else, the passage of time seemed inconstant and disoriented. Sometimes at home recently, Natalie had found him standing quite still, looking into nothingness. And when she had asked, with concern,
Why are you there?
, only then had he become awakened to where he was, and had resumed movement and conscious thinking.

What had happened, he supposed–then and a moment ago–was that his worn, weary mind had switched itself off. Somewhere inside the brain’s intricacies–of blood vessels, sinew, stored thought, and emotion–was a tiny switch, a self-defense mechanism like a thermal cutout in an electric motor, which worked when the motor was running too hot and needed to be saved from burning itself out. The difference, though, between a motor and a human brain, was that a motor stayed out of action if it needed to.

A brain would not.

The floodlights outside, on the face of the control tower, still reflected enough light inward through the locker room’s single window for Keith to see. Not that he needed to see. Seated on one of the wooden benches, the sandwiches Natalie had made, untouched, beside him, he was doing nothing more than holding the O’Hagan Inn key and thinking, reflecting on the paradox of the human brain.

A human brain could achieve soaring imagery, conceive poetry and radarscopes, create the Sistine Chapel and a supersonic Concordé. Yet a brain, too—holding memory and conscience–could be compelling, self-tormenting, never resting; so that only death could end its persecution.

Death… with oblivion, forgetfulness; with rest at last.

It was the reason that Keith Bakersfeld had decided on suicide tonight.

He must go back soon to the radar room. There were still several hours of his shift remaining, and he had made a pact with himself to finish his air traffic control duty for tonight. He was not sure why, except that it seemed the right thing to do, and he had always tried to do the right thing, conscientiously. Perhaps being conscientious was a family trait; he and his brother Mel always seemed to have that much in common.

Anyway, when the duty was done–his final obligation finished–he would be free to go to the O’Hagan Inn, where he had registered late this afternoon. Once there, without wasting time, he would take the forty Nembutal capsules–sixty grains in all–which were in a drugstore pillbox in his pocket. He had husbanded the capsules, a few at a time, over recent months. They bad been prescribed to give him sleep, and from each prescription which Natalie’s druggist had delivered, he had carefully extracted half and hidden it. A few days ago he had gone to a library, checking a reference book on clinical toxicology to assure himself that the quantity of Nembutal he had was well in excess of a fatal dose.

His present duty shift would end at midnight. Soon after, when he had taken the capsules, sleep would come quickly and with finality.

He looked at his watch, holding its face toward the light from outside. It was almost nine o’clock. Should he return to the radar room now? No–stay a few minutes longer. When he went, he wanted to be calm, his nerves steady for whatever these last few hours of duty might contain.

Keith Bakersfeld fingered the O’Hagan Inn key again. Room 224.

It was strange about the coincidence of figures; that his room number tonight, allocated by chance, should have in it a “24.” There were people who believed in that kind of thing–numerology; the occult significance of numbers. Keith didn’t, though if he did, those third and last figures, prefaced by a “2,” could be taken to mean 24 for the second time.

The first 24 had been a date, a year and a half ago. Keith’s eyes misted, as they had so many times before, when he remembered. The date was seared–with self-reproach and anguish–in his memory. It was the wellspring of his darksome spirit, his utter desolation. It was the reason he would end his life tonight.

A summer’s day; morning. Thursday, June the twenty-fourth.

IT WAS A DAY for poets, lovers, and color photographers; the kind of day which people stored up in their minds, to open like a scrapbook when they wanted to remember, years later, all that was best of any time and place. In Leesburg, Virginia, not far from historic Harpers Ferry, the sky was clear at dawn–CAVU, the weather reports said, which is aviation shorthand for “ceiling and visibility unlimited”; and conditions stayed that way, except for a few cotton-wool tufts of scattered cumulus by afternoon. The sun was warm, but not oppressive. A gentle breeze from the Blue Ridge Mountains carried the scent of honeysuckle.

On his way to work that morning–driving to the Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center at Leesburg–Keith Bakersfeld had seen wild roses blooming. He thought of a line from Keats which he had learned in high school–
“For Summer has o’erbrimmed
…” It seemed appropriate to such a day.

He had driven, as usual, across the Virginia border–from Adamstown, Maryland, where he and Natalie, with their two boys shared a pleasant rented home. The top of the Volkswagen convertible was down; he had traveled without haste, enjoying the benevolence of air and sun, and when the familiar low, modern buildings of the Air Route Center came in sight, he had felt less tense than usual. Afterward, he wondered if that, in itself, had been a cause of the events which followed.

Even inside the Operations Wing–thick-walled and windowless, where daylight never penetrated–Keith had an impression that the glory of the summer’s day outside had somehow percolated inward. Among the seventy or more shirtsleeved controllers on duty there seemed a sense of lightness, in contrast to the pressure-driven earnestness with which work proceeded on most days of the year. One reason, perhaps, was that the traffic load was less than usual, due to the exceptionally clear weather. Many non-commercial flights–private, military, even a few airliners–were operating on VFR–“visual flight rules,” or the see-and-be-seen method by which aircraft pilots kept track of their own progress through the air, without need to report by radio to ATC air route controllers.

The Washington Air Route Center at Leesburg was a key control point. From its main operations room all air traffic on airways over six eastern seaboard states was observed and directed. Added up, the control area came to more than a hundred thousand square miles. Within that area, whenever an aircraft which had filed an instrument flight plan left an airport, it came under Leesburg observation and control. It remained under that control either until its journey was complete or it passed out of the area. Aircraft coming into the area were handed over from other control centers, of which there were twenty across the continental United States. The Leesburg center was among the nation’s busiest. It included the southern end of the “northeast corridor” which daily accommodated the world’s heaviest concentration of air traffic.

Oddly, Leesburg was distant from any airport, and forty miles from Washington, D.C., from which the Air Route Center took its name. The center itself was in Virginia countryside–a cluster of low, modem buildings with a parking lot–and was surrounded on three sides by rolling farmland. Nearby was a small stream named Bull Run–its fame enshrined forever by two battles of the Civil War. Keith Bakersfeld had once gone to Bull Run after duty, reflecting on the strange and diametric contrast between Leesburg’s past and present.

This morning, despite awareness of the summer’s day outside, everything in the spacious, cathedral-like main control room was operating as usual. The entire control area–larger than a football field–was, as always, dimly lighted to allow proper viewing of the several dozen radar screens, arranged in tiers and rows under overhanging canopies. The control room noise level was what any newcomer noticed first. From a flight data area, with great banks of computers, assorted electronic gear and automatic teletypes, arose the continuous whir and chatter of machinery. Nearby, from dozens of positions where controllers sat, directing aerial traffic, came a ceaseless hum of voice radio exchanges on a host of frequencies. The machinery and human voices merged, producing a constant noise level which was all-pervading, yet strangely muted by acoustic, sound-absorbent walls and ceilings.

Above the working level of the control room was an observation bridge, running the room’s full width, where occasional visitors were brought to watch proceedings below. The control room activity looked, from this eyrie, not unlike that of a stock exchange. Controllers rarely glanced up at the bridge, being trained to ignore anything which might diminish concentration on their work, and since only a few especially privileged visitors ever made it to the control room floor, controllers and outsiders rarely met. Thus the work was not only high pressure, but also monastic–the last condition added to by the total absence of women.

In an annex to the control room Keith slipped off his jacket, and came in wearing the crisp white shirt which was like a uniform for air traffic controllers. No one knew why controllers wore white shirts on duty; there was no rule about it, but most of them did. As he passed other control positions while heading for his own, a few colleagues wished him a friendly “good morning,” and that was unusual too. Normally, the immediate sense of pressure on entering the control area made it customary to give a hurried nod or a brief “Hi!”–sometimes not even that.