Airport (44 page)

As Gwen left the flight deck, Demerest–still chuckling–changed radio channels and reported back himself to the Cleveland dispatcher.

Anson Harris, who had his pipe alight, looked up from adjusting the auto-pilot and said drily, “I didn’t think you were much of a one for the old ladies.” He emphasized the “old.”

Demerest grinned, “I prefer younger ones.”

“So I’d heard.”

The stowaway report, and his reply, had put Demerest in a thoroughly good humor. More relaxed than earlier, he added, “Opportunities change. Pretty soon you and I will have to settle for the not-so-young ones.”

“I already have.” Harris puffed at his pipe. “For quite some time.”

Both pilots had one earpiece of their radio headsets pushed upward. They could converse normally, yet hear radio calls if any came in. The noise level of the flight deck–persistent but not overwhelming–was sufficient to give the two of them privacy.

“You’ve always played it straight down the line, haven’t you?” Demerest said. “With your wife, I mean. No mucking around; on layovers I’ve seen you reading books.”

This time Harris grinned. “Sometimes I go to a movie.”

“Any special reason?”

“My wife was a stewardess–on DC-4s; that was how we met. She knew what went on: the sleeping around, pregnancies, abortions, all that stuff. Later, she got to be a supervisor and had to deal with a lot of it in her job. Anyway, when we were married I made her a promise–the obvious one. I’ve always kept it.”

“I guess all those kids you had helped.”

“Maybe.”

Harris made another minute adjustment to the autopilot. As they talked, the eyes of both pilots, out of training and habit, swept the illuminated banks of instruments in front of them, as well as those to each side and above. An incorrect instrument reading would show at once if anything in the aircraft was malfunctioning. Nothing was.

Demerest said, “How many children is it? Six?”

“Seven.” Harris smiled. “Four we planned, three we didn’t. But it all worked out.”

“The ones you didn’t plan–did you ever consider doing anything about them? Before they were born.”

Harris glanced sharply sideways. “Abortion?”

Vernon Demerest had asked the question on impulse. Now he wondered why. Obviously, his two conversations earlier with Gwen had begun the train of thought about children generally. But it was uncharacteristic of him to be doing so much thinking about something–like an abortion for Gwen–which was essentially simple and straightforward. Just the same, he was curious about Harris’s reaction.

“Yes,” Demerest said. “That’s what I meant.”

Anson Harris said curtly, “The answer’s no.” Less sharply, he added, “It happens to be something I have strong views about.”

“Because of religion?”

Harris shook his head negatively. “I’m an agnostic.”

“What kind of views, then?”

“You sure you want to hear?”

“It’s a long night,” Demerest said. “Why not?”

On radio they listened to an exchange between air route control and a TWA flight, Paris-bound, which had taken off shortly after Trans America Flight Two. The TWA jet was ten miles behind, and several thousand feet lower. As Flight two continued to climb, so would TWA.

Most alert pilots, as a result of listening to other aircraft transmissions, maintained a partial picture of nearby tralfic in their minds. Demerest and Harris both added this latest item to others already noted. When the ground-to-air exchange ended, Demerest urged Anson Harris, “Go ahead.”

Harris checked their course and altitude, then began refilling his pipe.

“I’ve studied a lot of history. I got interested in college and followed through after. Maybe you’ve done the same.”

“No,” Demerest said. “Never more than I had to.”

“Well, if you go through it all–history, that is—one thing stands out. Every bit of human progress has happened for a single, simple reason: the elevation of the status of the individual. Each time civilization has stumbled into another age that’s a little better, a bit more enlightened, than the one before it, it’s because people cared more about other people and respected them as individuals. When they haven’t cared, those have been the times of slipping backward. Even a short world history–if you read one–will prove it’s true.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“You don’t have to. There are plenty of examples. We abolished slavery because we respected individual human life. For the same reason we stopped hanging children, and around the same time we invented habeas corpus, and now we’ve created justice for all, or the closest we can come to it. More recently, most people who think and reason are against capital punishment, not so much because of those to be executed, but for what taking a human life–any human life–does to society, which is all of us.”

Harris stopped. Straining forward against his seat harness, he looked outward from the darkened cockpit to the night surrounding them. In bright moonlight he could see a swirl of darkened cloudtops far below. With a forecast of unbroken cloud along the whole of their route until mid-Atlantic, there would be no glimpses tonight of lights on the ground. Several thousand feet above, the lights of another aircraft, traveling in an opposite direction, flashed by and were gone.

From his seat behind the other two pilots, Second Officer Cy Jordan reached forward, adjusting the throttle settings to compensate for Flight Two’s increased altitude.

Demerest waited until Jordan had finished, then protested to Anson Harris, “Capital punishment is a long way from abortion.”

“Not really,” Harris said. “Not when you think about it. It all relates to respect for individual human life; to the way civilization’s come, the way it’s going. The strange thing is, you hear people argue for abolition of capital punishment, then for legalized abortion in the same breath. What they don’t see is the anomaly of raising the value of human life on one hand, and lowering it on the other.”

Demerest remembered what he had said to Gwen this evening. He repeated it now. “An unborn child doesn’t have life–not an individual life. It’s a fetus; it isn’t a person.”

“Let me ask you something,” Harris said. “Did you ever see an aborted child? Afterward, I mean.”

“No.”

“I did once. A doctor I know showed it to me. It was in a glass jar, in formaldehyde; my friend kept it in a cupboard. I don’t know where he got it, but he told me that if the baby had lived–not been aborted–it would have been a normal child, a boy. It was a fetus, all right, just the way you said, except it had been a human being, too. It was all there; everything perfectly formed; a good-looking face, hands, feet, toes, even a little penis. You know what I felt when I saw it? I felt ashamed; I wondered where the hell was I; where were all other decent-minded, sensitive people when this kid, who couldn’t defend himself, was being murdered? Because that’s what happened; even though, most times, we’re afraid to use the word.”

“Hell! I’m not saying a baby should be taken out when it’s that far along.”

“You know something?” Harris said. “Eight weeks after conception, everything’s present in a fetus that’s in a full-term baby. In the third month the fetus
looks
like a baby. So where do you draw the line?”

Demerest grumbled, “You should have been a lawyer, not a pilot.” Just the same, he found himself wondering how far Gwen was along, then reasoned: if she conceived in San Francisco, as she assured him, it must be eight or nine weeks ago. Therefore, assuming Harris’s statements to be true, there was almost a shaped baby now.

It was time for another report to air route control. Vernon Demerest made it. They were at thirty-two thousand feet, near the top of their climb, and in a moment or two would cross the Canadian border and be over southern Ontario. Detroit and Windsor, the twin cities straddling the border, were ordinarily a bright splash of light, visible for miles ahead. Tonight there was only darkness, the cities shrouded and somewhere down below to starboard. Demerest remembered that Detroit Metropolitan Airport had closed shortly before their own takeoff. Both cities, by now, would be taking the full brunt of the storm, which was moving east.

Back in the passenger cabins, Demerest knew, Gwen Meighen and the other stewardesses would be serving a second round of drinks and, in first class, hot hors d’oeuvres on exclusive Rosenthal china.

“I warned you I had strong feelings,” Anson Harris said. “You don’t need a religion, to believe in human ethics.”

Demerest growled, “Or to have screwball ideas. Anyway, people who think like you are on the losing side. The trend is to make abortion easier; eventually, maybe, wide open and legal.”

“If it happens,” Harris said, “we’ll be a backward step nearer the Auschwitz ovens.”

“Nuts!” Demerest glanced up from the flight log, where he was recording their position, just reported. His irritability, seldom far below the surface, was beginning to show. “There are plenty of good arguments in favor of easy abortion–unwanted children who’ll be born to poverty and never get a chance; then the special cases–rape, incest, the mother’s health.”

“There are always special cases. It’s like saying, ‘okay, we’ll permit just a little murder, providing you make out a convincing argument.’ ” Harris shook his head, dissenting. “Then you talked about unwanted children. Well, they can be stopped by birth control. Nowadays everyone gets that opportunity, at every economic level. But if we slip up on that, and a human life starts growing, that’s a new human being, and we’ve no moral right to condemn it to death. As to what we’re born into, that’s a chance we all take without knowing it; but once we have life, good or bad, we’re entitled to keep it, and not many, however bad it is, would give it up. The answer to poverty isn’t to kill unborn babies, but to improve society.”

Harris considered, then went on, “As to economics, there are economic arguments for everything. It makes economic logic to kill mental deficients and mongoloids right after birth; to practice euthanasia on the terminally ill; to weed out old and useless people, the way they do in Africa, by leaving them in the jungle for hyenas to eat. But we don’t do it because we value human life and dignity. What I’m saying, Vernon, is that if we plan to progress we ought to value them a little more.”

The altimeters–one in front of each pilot–touched thirty-three thousand feet. They were at the top of their climb. Anson Harris eased the aircraft into level flight while Second Officer Jordan reached forward again to adjust the throttles.

Demerest said sourly to Harris, “Your trouble is cobwebs in the brain.” He realized he had started the discussion; now, angrily, he wished he hadn’t. To end the subject, he reached for the stewardess call button. “Let’s get some hors d’oeuvres before the first class passengers wolf them all.”

Harris nodded. “Good idea.”

A minute or two later, in response to the telephoned order, Gwen Meighen brought three plates of aromatic hors d’oeuvres, and coffee. On Trans America, as on most airlines, captains got the fastest service.

“Thanks, Gwen,” Vernon Demerest said; then, as she leaned forward to serve Anson Harris, his eyes confirmed what he already knew. Gwen’s waist was as slim as ever, no sign of anything yet; nor would there be, no matter what was going on inside. The heck with Harris and his old woman’s arguments! Of course Gwen would have an abortion–just as soon as they got back.

SOME SIXTY FEET aft of the flight deck, in the tourist cabin, Mrs. Ada Quonsett was engaged in spirited conversation with the passenger on her right, whom she had discovered was an amiable, middle-aged oboe player from the Chicago Symphony. “What a wonderful thing to be a musician, and
so
creative. My late husband loved classical music. He fiddled a little himself, though not professionally, of course.”

Mrs. Quonsett was feeling warmed by a Dry Sack sherry for which her oboist friend had paid, and he had just inquired if she would like another. Mrs. Quonsett beamed, “Well, it’s exceedingly kind of you, and perhaps I shouldn’t, but I really think I will.”

The passenger on her left–the man with the little sandy mustache and scrawny neck–had been less communicative; in fact, disappointing. Mrs. Quonsett’s several attempts at conversation had been rebuffed by monosyllabic answers, barely audible, while the man sat, mostly expressionless, still clasping his attaché case on his knees.

For a while, when they had all ordered drinks, Mrs. Quonsett wondered if the left-seat passenger might unbend. But he hadn’t. He accepted Scotch from the stewardess, paid for it with a lot of small change that he had to count out, then tossed the drink down almost in a gulp. Her own sherry mellowed Mrs. Quonsett immediately, so that she thought: Poor man, perhaps he has problems, and I shouldn’t bother him.

She noticed, however, that the scrawny-necked man came suddenly alert when the captain made his announcement, soon after takeoff, about their speed, course, time of flight and all those other things which Mrs. Quonsett rarely bothered listening to. The man on her left, though, scribbled notes on the back of an envelope and afterward got out one of those
Chart Your Own Position
maps, which the airline supplied, spreading it on top of his attaché case. He was studying the map now, and making pencil marks, in between glances at his watch. It all seemed rather silly and childish to Mrs. Quonsett, who was quite sure that there was a navigator up front, taking care of where the airplane ought to be, and when.

Mrs. Quonsett then returned her attention to the oboist who was explaining that not until recently, when he had been in a public seat during a Bruckner symphony performance, had he realized that at a moment when his section of the orchestra was going “pom-tiddey-pom-pom,” the cellos were sounding “ah-diddley-ah-dah.” He mouthed both passages in tune to illustrate his point.

“Really! How remarkably interesting; I’d never thought of that,” Mrs. Quonsett exclaimed. “My late husband would have so enjoyed meeting you, though of course you are very much younger.”

She was now well into the second sherry and enjoying herself thoroughly. She thought: she had chosen such a nice flight; such a fine airplane and crew, the stewardesses polite and helpful, and with delightful passengers, except for the man on her left, who didn’t really matter. Soon, dinner would be served and later, she had learned, there was to be a movie with Michael Caine, one of her favorite stars. What more could anyone possibly ask?