Albert gazed at Dinah for a moment. 'Well, she's out now,' he said.
'I see she is, but that is not the point, dear boy. Not the point at all.'
Albert considered telling Mr Jenkins that Ace Kaussner, the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi and the only Texan to survive the Battle of the Alamo, did not much cotton to being called dear boy, and decided to let it pass ... at least for the time being. 'Then what is the point?'
'I was also asleep. Corked off even before the captain - our original captain, I mean - turned off the NO SMOKING light. I've always been that way. Trains, busses, planes - I drift off like a baby the minute they turn on the motors. What about you, dear boy?'
What about me what?'
Were you asleep? You were, weren't you?'
'Well, yeah.'
We were all asleep. The people who disappeared were all awake.'
Albert thought about this. 'Well ... maybe.'
'Nonsense,' Jenkins said almost jovially. 'I write mysteries for a living. Deduction is my bread and butter, you might say. Don't you think that if someone had been awake when all those people were eliminated, that person would have screamed bloody murder, waking the rest of us?'
'I guess so,' Albert agreed thoughtfully. 'Except maybe for that guy all the way in the back. I don't think an air-raid siren would wake that guy up.'
'All right; your exception is duly noted. But no one screamed, did they? And no one has offered to tell the rest of us what happened. So I deduce that only waking passengers were subtracted. Along with the flight crew, of course.'
'Yeah. Maybe so.'
'You look troubled, dear boy. Your expression says that, despite its charms, the idea does not scan perfectly for you. May I ask why not? Have I missed something?' Jenkins's expression said he didn't believe that was possible, but that his mother had raised him to be polite.
'I don't know,' Albert said honestly. 'How many of us are there? Eleven?'
'Yes. Counting the fellow in the back - the one who is comatose - we number eleven.'
'If you're right, shouldn't there be more of us?'
'Why?'
But Albert fell silent, struck by a sudden, vivid image from his childhood. He had been raised in a theological twilight zone by parents who were not Orthodox but who were not agnostics, either. He and his brothers had grown up observing most of the dietary traditions (or laws, or whatever they were), they had had their Bar Mitzvalis, and they had been raised to know who they were, where they came from, and what that was supposed to mean. And the story Albert remembered most clearly from his childhood visits to temple was the story of the final plague which had been visited on Pharaoh - the gruesome tribute exacted by God's dark angel of the morning.
In his mind's eye he now saw that angel moving not over Egypt but through Flight 29, gathering most of the passengers to its terrible breast ... not because they had neglected to daub their lintels (or their seatbacks, perhaps) with the blood of a lamb, but because ...
Why? Because why?
Albert didn't know, but he shivered just the same. And wished that creepy old story had never occurred to him. Let my Frequent Fliers go, he thought. Except it wasn't funny.
'Albert?' Mr Jenkins's voice seemed to come from a long way off. 'Albert, are you all right?'
'Yes. just thinking.' He cleared his throat. 'If all the sleeping passengers were, you know, passed over, there'd be at least sixty of us. Maybe more. I mean, this is the red-eye.'
'Dear boy, have you ever -'
'Could you call me Albert, Mr Jenkins? That's my name.'
Jenkins patted Albert's shoulder. 'I'm sorry. Really. I don't mean to be patronizing. I'm upset, and when I'm upset, I have a tendency to retreat ... like a turtle pulling his head back into his shell. Only what I retreat into is fiction. I believe I was playing Philo Vance. He's a detective - a great detective - created by the late S. S. Van Dyne. I suppose you've never read him. Hardly anyone does these days, which is a pity. At any rate, I apologize.'
'It's okay,' Albert said uncomfortably.
'Albert you are and Albert you shall be from now on,' Robert Jenkins promised. 'I started to ask if you've ever taken the red-eye before.'
'No. I've never even flown across the country before.'
'Well, I have. Many times. On a few occasions I have even gone against my natural inclination and stayed awake for awhile. Mostly when I was a younger man and the flights were noisier. Having said that much, I may as well date myself outrageously by admitting that my first coast-to-coast trip was on a TWA prop-job that made two stops ... to refuel.'
'My observation is that very few people go to sleep on such flights during the first hour or so ... and then just about everyone goes to sleep. During that first hour, people occupy themselves with looking at the scenery, talking with their spouses or their travelling companions, having a drink or two -'
'Settling in, you mean,' Albert suggested. What Mr Jenkins was saying made perfect sense to him, although he had done precious little settling in himself; he had been so excited about his coming journey and the new life which would be waiting for him that he had hardly slept at all during the last couple of nights. As a result, he had gone out like a light almost as soon as the 767 left the ground.
'Making little nests for themselves,' Jenkins agreed. 'Did you happen to notice the drinks trolley outside the cockpit, dea - Albert?'
'I saw it was there,' Albert agreed.
Jenkins's eyes shone. 'Yes indeed - it was either see it or fall over it. But did you really notice it?'
'I guess not, if you saw something I didn't.'
'It's not the eye that notices, but the mind, Albert. The trained deductive mind. I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I did notice that it had just been taken out of the small closet in which it is stored, and that the used glasses from the pre-flight service were still stacked on the bottom shelf. From this I deduce the following: the plane took off uneventfully, it climbed toward its cruising altitude, and the autopilot device was fortunately engaged. Then the captain turned off the seatbelt light. This would all be about thirty minutes into the flight, if I'm reading the signs correctly - about 1:00 A.M., PDT.
When the seatbelt light was turned out, the stewardesses arose and began their first task - cocktails for about one hundred and fifty at about 24,000 feet and rising. The pilot, meanwhile, has programmed the autopilot to level the plane off at 36,000 feet and fly east on heading thus-and-such. A few passengers - eleven of us, in fact - have fallen asleep. Of the rest, some are dozing, perhaps (but not deeply enough to save them from whatever happened), and the rest are all wide awake.'
'Building their nests,' Albert said.
'Exactly! Building their nests!' Jenkins paused and then added, not without some melodrama: 'And then it happened!'
'What happened, Mr Jenkins?' Albert asked. 'Do you have any ideas about that?'