She brought the ship to a stop and turned off the switches, made notes in her log. She unbuckled herself from the seat and bounded to the door. Outside, a couple of men in flight suits stared at her, astounded. “Good afternoon,” she said, in her best Spanish. “I am looking for Señor Mallory.” She made a gesture with her hand, indicating height. “American. Blond hair.”

Both men nodded vigorously. “Señor Mallory! Sí!”

“Do you know where he is?”

Maybe she said it wrong. Irene had studied French in school, and most of her Spanish was learned in bits and pieces as she navigated her way around Los Angeles. The men looked at each other gravely, and back at her.

“He is in the north,” said one of them. “He is in Guernica.”

Irene Foster had never heard of Guernica before that day, the twenty-seventh of April. Not many had, outside of Spain itself, although it was a symbol of Basque independence, where King Ferdinand had stood under the municipal tree in 1476—the famous Tree of Guernica, an oak—and sworn an oath to uphold the rights and laws of the Biscay province, of which Guernica was capital. It was located on the northern coast, right on the edge of the Bay of Biscay, and it had been horrifically bombed by the Luftwaffe the day before, on behalf of the Spanish Nationalists.

All this was explained rapidly to Irene, once she’d identified herself as a friend of Señor Mallory. Too rapidly, because she didn’t quite understand the significance of this episode until later. It was war, after all, and bombs got dropped during wartime and killed people. It was terrible, and Irene felt this as a personal horror because bombing seemed to her a perverse way of using this great scientific achievement that was an airplane, that dropping bombs from airplanes was a betrayal of everything she had strived for. As if your beloved brother had turned out to be a murderer. But when she heard the word Guernica she didn’t feel any particular foreboding. No cold chills down her spine. Why should she? Not yet.

There were many deaths and injuries, said the men, and Irene could tell from their faces that this thing called Guernica was a terrible, wretched affair. Still she did not really understand. Señor Mallory had taken off in one of the larger airplanes late yesterday afternoon, as soon as the news had reached them, and flown north to help evacuate the wounded. One of the other pilots had flown in company with him, a man whose fiancée lived with her family near Guernica. They had heard nothing since from either man.

Nothing at all? Irene asked. They hadn’t returned here with their evacuees?