of Flight Two. Some who heard were more concerned than others. A few, not yet concerned, would be, before the night was done.
More than a hundred and fifty Flight Two passengers heard the announcement. Those who had checked in, but had not reached gate forty-seven, hastened toward it, a few recent arrivals still knocking snow from their clothing as they went.
SENIOR STEWARDESS Gwen Meighen was pre-boarding several families with small children when the announcement echoed down the boarding walkway. She used the flight deck interphone to notify Captain Anson Harris, and prepared herself for an influx of passengers within the next few minutes. Ahead of the passengers, Captain Vernon Demerest ducked aboard and hurried forward, closing the flight deck door behind him.
Anson Harris, working with Second Officer Cy Jordan, had already begun the pre-flight check.
"Okay," Demerest said. He slipped into the first officer's right-hand seat, and took the check list clipboard. Jordan returned to his regular seat behind the other two.
MEL BAKERSFELD, still in the central concourse, heard the announcement and remembered that The Golden Argosy was Vernon Demerest's flight. Mel genuinely regretted that once again an opportunity to end, or even lessen, the hostility between himself and his brotber-in-law had ended in failure. Now, their personal relationship was---if possible---worse than before. Mel wondered how much of the blame was his own; some, certainly, because Vernon seemed to have a knack for probing out the worst in Mel, but Mel honestly believed that most of their quarrel was of Vernon's making. Part of the trouble was that Vernon saw himself as a superior being, and resented it when others didn't. A good many pilots whom Mel knew---especially captains---felt that way about themselves.
Mel still seethed when he remembered Vernon, after the airport commissioners' meeting, asserting that people like Mel were "ground-bound, desk-tied, with penguins' minds." As if flying an airplane, Mel thought, were something so damned extra-special compared with other occupations!
Just the same, Mel wished that tonight for a few hours he was a pilot once again, and was about to leave---as Vernon was leaving---on a flight for Rome. He remembered what Vernon had said about enjoying Italian sunshine tomorrow. Mel could do with a little of that, a little less, at this moment, of aviation's logistics of the ground. Tonight the surly bonds of earth seemed surlier than usual.
POLICE LIEUTENANT Ned Ordway, who had left Mel Bakersfeld a few minutes earlier, heard the announcement of Flight Two through the opened doorway of a small security office just off the main concourse. Ordway was in the office receiving a telephoned report from his desk sergeant at airport police headquarters. According to a radio message from a patrol car, a heavy influx of private automobiles, crammed with people, was coming into the parking lots, which were having difficulty accommodating them. Inquiries had revealed that most of the cars' occupants were from Meadowood community---members of the anti-noise demonstration which Lieutenant Ordway had already heard about. As per the lieutenant's orders, the desk sergeant said, police reinforcements were on their way to the terminal.
A FEW HUNDRED feet from Lieutenant Ordway, in a passenger waiting area, the little old lady from San Diego, Mrs. Ada Quonsett, paused in her conversation with young Peter Coakley of Trans America, while both listened to the announcement of Flight Two.
They were seated, side by side, on one of a series of black, leather padded benches. Mrs. Quonsett had been describing the virtues of her late husband in the same kind of terms which Queen Victoria must have used when speaking of Prince Albert. "Such a dear person, so very wise, and handsome. He came to me in later life, but I imagine, when he was young, he must have been very much like you."
Peter Coakley grinned sheepishly, as he had done many times in the past hour and a half. Since leaving Tanya Livingston, with instructions to remain with the old lady stowaway until the departure of her return flight for Los Angeles, their talk had consisted chiefly of a monologue by Mrs. Quonsett in which Peter Coakley was compared frequently and favorably with the late Herbert Quonsett. lt was a subject of which Peter was becoming decidedly weary. He was unaware that that was what Ada Quonsett astutely intended.
Surreptitiously, Peter Coakley yawned; this was not the kind of work he had expected when he became a Trans America passenger agent. He felt an absolute fool, sitting here in uniform, playing dry nurse to a harmless, garrulous old dame