Why Do Birds

CHAPTER 20

At four o'clock, unable to sleep, Jaekel put on a robe and went down the long corridor, through the dining room into the lounge. It was cool there, and dark except for the amber safety bulbs. The plane was droning forward with a barely perceptible motion. He switched on the lamps and ceiling lights, turned up the thermostat, and poured himself a stiff Scotch.

On the way over to his chair he picked up a copy of Time. The holoprint on the cover was a picture of Heinz Rottenstern; how long, he wondered, before it would be Ed Stone?

In some ways Stone was an easier assignment than any political candidate, because he had no track record and no enemies. On the other hand, that was just the problem. Jaekel turned over in his mind all the things that could go wrong, knowing as he did so that it was pointless, because he had done it all before.

Something out of Stone's past might tum up to discredit him. The fact that he had no past was profoundly disturbing. Jaekel rummaged in a drawer until he found a pencil, and wrote on a page of Time, "Relatives?"

Then there was always the chance of a sexual scandal, although most people didn't expect public figures to be anchorites. Stone had exchanged a couple of interested glances with Cindy early in the evening. That was all right, and it was all right that he had a lover in New York, but what if it turned out that he also liked ten-year-old boys, or goats and sheep? He wrote, "Sex?"

Stone was not an educated man, and he had a lot of the attitudes you would expect, but that didn't seem to make any difference; the common people liked him, and so did the intellectuals. So far. It was still possible that he would make some gigantic unforgivable blunder. He wrote, "Foot in mouth?"

On the whole, it was a good thing that Stone was going to a lot of places where he would need translators; they were trained to tum insults into compliments whenever they could. Jaekel tore off the page, folded it and put it in his pocket. He always threw these notes away, but he had to write them.

He felt himself nodding. He finished the Scotch, left the glass on the table, and walked down the long quiet corridor. Commercial airliners were as long as this one, but they were divided into sections, and there was always somebody in the aisles, except at night, when the plane was dark; here you saw the whole length of the passenger compartment, from the lounge at one end to Stone's stateroom at the other.

As he slid open the door of his own stateroom, he turned his head toward a motion glimpsed out of the comer of his eye. At first there was nothing; then, far down the corridor, something dark was rushing soundlessly toward him, smothering the lights as it came. It swallowed him before he could move; he was in darkness for an eyeblink, and then it was gone.

Shocked wide awake, Jaekel returned to the lounge. Everything there was as it should be. Had he fallen asleep standing up for a moment, and had a dream, or a hallucination?

He went back to his stateroom and lay staring at the dark ceiling a long time, while the plane droned through space.