He’s more than just a little bit unstable, she corrected herself grimly, as much as I tried to dismiss it. He shouldn’t have left the hospital. It’s as simple as that.

And then, as she was getting ready to leave the library, she had come across the last study, the one that had proved to be the final stone to tip the scales and send her rushing to the airport. Even now, thinking of it tightened the hand that had seemed to wrap itself around her heart.

It was a lengthy and important study on the combat veterans of the Vietnam War, and concentrated on veterans especially haunted by nightmares and those who had spent periods in mental hospitals. The study found that most of the veterans had gone through periods of intense trauma, usually in prison camps or under heavy enemy fire for long periods of time, and most of them had spent long periods in isolation. Many of the veterans admitted to strong hallucinations, sometimes even “inventing” a friend who provided comfort and strength, and helped them through their ordeal. Often, after the soldiers escaped or were rescued, they were surprised to discover that they had been alone the entire time.

The door to the plane opened, and she saw that someone had wheeled one of those moving platforms of steps across the runway to the plane. The wind through the door was bitterly cold, and she pulled her thin sweater around her shoulders for warmth. She hadn’t packed much, hadn’t been prepared for such weather. That had been foolish, she knew, but she had been busy with other things.

The study had gone on to describe the present state of mind of the veterans, and almost all of them described vivid flashbacks, during which they felt as if they were back in the middle of the war again. Some of them even admitted to having new hallucinations, though in those cases the hallucinations almost always had a trigger that set them off, some sort of catalyst. Many of the veterans who turned to drugs as a possible answer to the constant nightmares simply found another door to more vivid and terrifying horrors. Some of these patients had turned violent.

And none of them, not a single one, had the added burden of an existing paranoid personality.

She waited until most of the other twelve passengers had left, and then grabbed her bag from the overhead shelf. The pilot’s mechanical “Have a good stay,” and “Come fly with us again” went all but unnoticed at the door; the wind cut into her thin outfit and she gasped, ducking her head to descend the steps and get out of the cold as fast as she could. Once at the bottom, she noticed that the sky had gone a deep gray-black, and she hurried across the stretch of tar and concrete to the terminal.