Chatterton ignored my input. “Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully, “they might have used harmonics in their building. We’ll see,” he joyfully added, “we’ll see.”

Abdul looked down at the darkness rising from the earth. In the empty seat next to him were Gorelik’s mud-colored cigarettes, his fipple flute, and the poems of Yevtushenko in the original Russian.

Gorelik on the aisle bent over a plastic tray, pushed the last crumb of chocolate pie from his plate into his mouth; after his years at Chatterton’s table, airplane fare must have tasted like ambrosia. He put down his fork, explored a molar with the tip of his tongue, and lit a cigarette.

“Is it not true,” he asked Abdul, “that we must approach your father on our knees?”

“Absolutely not,” Abdul said. “It is customary only to bow a little and avert one’s eyes.”

“Don’t you find that sort of thing obsolete?”

Abdul smiled. “What I find isn’t the issue. It’s what my father wants. And while his wants are few, what he wants, like that girl in the old song, he gets.”

Night invaded the cabin. The jets knifed through the black air, their drone at once subdued and urgent, the black ocean gliding past. I felt a kind of stupefactive excitement, propelled by an unnatural and (to me) unfathomable force, a risky business. Was it possible that none of my fellow aerialists felt it, each in his own cocoon, each secure with his own sense of mission? Chatterton slept, Grady read. Daphne and Derek talked in undertones. Abdul and Gorelik, glaze-eyed and self-absorbed, had stopped bickering out of sheer exhaustion about a thousand miles back. Grady’s scientists and engineers were bored, accepting the monotony of the flight with the stunned acquiescence of a rootless, itinerant tribe that plied its trade resourcefully, humorlessly, in any country for any cause, men who could deliver anything except a joke.

Carefully I lowered myself down in the seat next to Val.

Her mouth was slightly ajar, a piquant bubble of saliva at a corner. Her soft breath wafted a buoyant tuft of hair that hung over her face. I smiled sentimentally in the darkness, feeling warm all over. Daphne and Derek ran by and locked themselves in the aft toilet.

The airplane bounced across the virgin runway, newly completed by an advanced corps of Grady’s engineers. It stopped with a mechanical sigh, and was immediately attacked by a squadron of angry mosquitoes as large as bats.