Yet memory could adapt---couldn't it?---to time, to circumstance, to the reality of living here and now. The Redferns were dead. The Bible said: Let the dead bury their dead. What had happened, was done.
Keith wondered if... from now on... he could remember the Redferns with sadness, but do his best to make the living---Natalie, his own children---his first concern.
He wasn't sure if it would work. He wasn't sure if he had the moral or the physical strength. It had been a long time since he was sure of anything. But he could try.
He took the tower elevator down.
Outside, on his way to the FAA parking lot, Keith stopped. On sudden impulse, knowing he might regret it later, he took the pillbox from his pocket and emptied its contents into the snow.
PART THREE Chapter Eighteen
FROM HIS CAR, which he bad parked on the nearby taxiway after quitting runway three zero, Mel Bakersfeld could see that the pilots of Trans America Flight Two were wasting no time in taxiing to the terminal. The aircraft's lights, now halfway across the airfield, were still visible, moving fast. On his radio, switched to ground control, Mel could hear other flights being halted at taxiway and runway intersections to let the damaged airliner pass. The injured were still aboard. Flight Two had been instructed to head directly for gate forty-seven where medical help, ambulances, and company staff were waiting.
Mel watched the aircraft's lights diminish, and merge with the galaxy of terminal lights beyond.
Airport emergency vehicles, which had not after all been required, were dispersing from the runway area.
Tanya and the Tribune reporter, Tomlinson, were both on their way back to the terminal. They were driving with Joe Patroni, who had handed over the Aereo-Mexican 707 for someone else to taxi to the hangars.
Tanya wanted to be at gate forty-seven for the disembarking of passengers from Flight Two. It was likely she would be needed.
Before leaving, she had asked Mel quietly, "Are you still coming home?"
"If it isn't too late," he said, "I'd like to."
He watched while Tanya pushed a strand of red hair back from her face. She had looked at him with her direct, clear eyes and smiled. "It's not too late."
They agreed to meet at the main terminal entrance in three quarters of an hour.
Tomlinson's purpose was to interview Joe Patroni, and after that the crew of Trans America Flight Two. The crew---and Patroni, no doubt---would be heroes within a few hours. The dramatic story of the flight's peril and survival, Mel suspected, would eclipse his own pronouncements on the more mundane subject of the airport's problems and deficiencies.
Though not entirely, perhaps. Tomlinson, to whom Mel had entrusted his opinions, was a thoughtful, intelligent reporter who might decide to link present dramatics with the equally serious long-term view.
The Aereo-Mexican 707, Mel saw, was now being moved away. The airplane appeared undamaged, but would undoubtedly be washed down and inspected thoroughly before resuming its interrupted flight to Acapulco.
The assortment of service vehicles which had stayed with the aircraft during its ordeal by mud were following.
There was no reason for Mel not to go himself. He would---in a moment or two; but for the second time tonight he found the airfield's loneliness, its closeness to the elemental part of aviation, a stimulus to thought.
It was here, a few hours ago, Mel remembered, that he had had an instinct, a premonition, of events moving toward some disastrous end. Well, in a way they had. The disaster had happened, though through good fortune it had been neither complete, nor had the airport's facilities---or lack of them---been directly responsible.
But the disaster could have involved the airport; and the airport in turn might have caused complete catastrophe---through inadequacies which Mel had foreseen and had argued, vainly, to correct.
For Lincoln International was obsolescent.
Obsolescent, Mel knew, despite its good management, and gleaming glass and chrome; despite its air traffic density, its record-breaking passenger volume, its Niagara of air freight, its expectations of even more of everything, and its boastful title, "Aviation Crossroads of the World."
The airport was obsolescent because---as had happened so often in the short six decades of modern aviation history---air progress had eclipsed prediction. Once more, expert prognosticators had been wrong, the visionary dreamers right.
And what was true here was true elsewhere.
Nationwide, worldwide, the story was the same. Much was talked about aviation's growth, its needs, coming developments in the air which would provide the lowest cost transportation of people and goods in human history, the chance these