When the stewardess brought his drink, he forced himself to meet her eyes. She smiled uneasily and hurried on to serve the other passengers. Hook downed half the martini in two quick swallows, hoping the alcohol would help somehow. Out the window the sky was cloudless and crystalline. The sun shone fiercely on the jet’s wings. Miles below, the earth looked cold and serene, a patchwork of tan and white and gray without a sign of life.

Coming in over Los Angeles, Hook was surprised at how clear it looked from above, and then he remembered that the winter desert winds had that effect upon the city, blowing the smog out to sea. He was not prepared for the size of the place either, its sheer sprawling immensity, beginning way out in the Mojave Desert and stretching to the ocean and as far down the coast as he could see from the jet, which circled wide out over the water in a holding pattern for ten or fifteen minutes before finally getting clearance to land.

On the ground, checking his watch, Hook realized that it was only two-thirty Pacific time, which meant he had an hour-and-a-half layover before the United flight departed for Santa Barbara. He decided to kill the time in an airport bar, and ducked into the first one he came to, a crowded T-shaped affair with a floor-to-ceiling window running the length of the room, and faced by a long low counter at which a score of travelers sat drinking and talking as they watched the jets coming in and taking off. The decor was sleazy modern, small plastic-topped tables with plastic bucket chairs on tubular legs. Hook found a corner table and ordered another martini, his third that afternoon. He did not particularly like the drink, but since that was what he had started with on the jet he wanted to stay with them now; his stomach felt queasy enough without his mixing drinks. Smoking, trying not to think, he finished the martini, still feeling nothing except the leaden weight of his fear. Near him, at the counter table, a gaudy old married couple on their way home from Hawaii were hurriedly sharing their lives’ secrets with a young couple with a baby. In the time it took for Hook’s fourth martini to be served he learned that the old woman hated Los Angeles and hippies, loved San Diego, had been married three times, urinated almost constantly in flight, and had had her left breast removed two years before, which made “this old bastard next to me here” love the remaining one twice as much. In return, the young couple revealed that in six years of marriage they had lived in five different cities in four states, that the husband was thinking of leaving his present job in Denver, and that they had almost ten thousand dollars in the bank.