She got up as the plane taxied toward distant low buildings, and spent a futile time trying to smooth the wrinkles from her skirt. Finally she gave up and moved forward into the corridor.
There was only a tiny hand-sink in the latrine, so she washed her face and hands at the galley sink and reconstructed her makeup with the aid of the small mirror in her compact. She then looked at her watch, which said seven-thirty. What would that be now, morning or evening? Evening, she thought. Seven-thirty in the evening in Eustace. God alone knew what time it was here, but it had taken nearly six hours to get here.
She went out to the lounge, and Bradford and the brown-uniformed man were sitting across from one another at one of the built-in tables. There were maps spread out on the table. Bradford looked up cheerfully and said, “They’re refueling. We’ll be here about half an hour.”
“Where are we?”
“Prince Rupert, British Columbia. Come take a look.”
She sat down beside him, and he showed her on one of the maps, a Mercator projection of the world. They had started from Iceland, in the North Atlantic, and they had flown over Greenland, over Hudson’s Bay and over all of northern Canada. They had now landed at Prince Rupert, a small city on the Pacific coast of Canada, just south, of the Alaskan border. And from here? There was one last lap of the journey to go, approximately as long as the one they’d just completed; when they took off, thirty minutes from now, they would cross the North Pacific, keeping just south of the Aleutians, would turn to a somewhat more southerly course just before reaching the Kamchatka Peninsula (an extension of the Soviet Union), would cross Hokkaido (the northernmost island of Japan) from northeast to southwest, would fly over the Sea of Japan and a segment of North Korea, and then would have a quick run inland over China to Peking. “We’ll be there in seven hours,” Bradford said. He was smiling from ear to ear. “Perhaps six.”
I’m going to die, Evelyn thought. I am going to scream, and lose my sanity, and die.
“I’m starved,” Bradford said. “Evelyn? Would you mind?”
“Not at all,” she said. She got to her feet and went to the galley and began to look over the available foods.
vi
There was no more sleep. There was no more hope. There was no more anything. The plane traveled through high darkness, nothing to be seen outside the window but her own haggard reflection, and she thought, I’ll maneuver Bradford to the doorway, I’ll get the door open, I’ll put my arms around him and push us both out. But she did nothing.
She could tell when they were over land again at last; occasional lights glittered below. Whether they were so few because it was late at night in China or because there were clouds frequently in the way she couldn’t tell. What time would it be in China now? According to her watch, it was after midnight in Eustace. Unless that was confused, too, unless her watch was trying to tell her that noon had just been passed on the east coast of the United States.
She couldn’t think any more, she didn’t even want to think any more, and when the plane began at last to circle, when she could feel that they were making their landing approach, she felt nothing but the kind of hollowness, despair, that comes on the heels of a total defeat.
Airport lights are the same all over the world, strings of white lights intersected by strings of blue or red or amber, all making a non-representational pattern in the dark.
The pattern rushed suddenly closer, the plane bumped, it hurtled along the runway and gradually slowed.
There were low buildings far away across the strings of lights, but the plane didn’t move in that direction. Nose high, wings cumbersomely spread, it walked the other way instead, toward the outer edge of the pattern of lights, where there was nothing but darkness.
The man in the brown uniform was saying, “You understand, of course, that you’ll have to be under total security for at least the time being. The United States government undoubtedly knows by now that you managed to elude them, and I doubt they’ll waste any time dispatching assassination teams.”
“That’s unfortunately true, I suppose,” Bradford said. He looked momentarily grim, but then brightened. “But we hope to be able to change all that eventually, don’t we?”
“Yes, sir,” the uniformed man said soberly.
“We can put up with a little inconvenience meantime,” Bradford said.
The plane came to a stop. The other man reappeared from the front of the plane, and opened the door. He put the metal steps out, and turned to extend his hand toward Bradford’s and say, “I want you to know I’m proud to have had a part in this, sir.”
“Thank you,” Bradford said, smiling, shaking his hand, while Evelyn thought, Proud? To turn against your own country, your own people?
They stepped down out of the plane, Bradford first, Evelyn behind him, and she was suddenly reminded of that other plane ride at the beginning of all this, when they had flown together to California, when they had arrived at Harrison’s fake little town in a business jet very like this one (but somewhat smaller, and much less elaborately laid out), and Bradford had gone out to sunlight and scattered cheers and his first cerebral attack. A poster-bedecked hansom cab had been waiting for them that time, at the foot of the steps.
This time? A black truck, its windowless rear doors open. And half a dozen uniformed Chinese soldiers, bulky in their quilt like coats, carrying rifles in their hands.
The chill that Evelyn felt had nothing to do with the breeze that came through her cloth coat.
They went out onto the blacktop, and a Chinese officer, an older man with no rifle in his hands, came forward to welcome Bradford, in heavily distorted English, to the People’s Republic. Bradford rose to the formality of the gesture — Evelyn was reminded again of the California trip, and how Bradford then had treated a small scattered disinterested crowd as though it were a mob of thousands — and when the officer apologized for the nature of the transport they were asking him to accept, Bradford assured him he understood the security problems involved in his arrival and would cooperate in every way he could. And then he got into the truck.
Evelyn hung back. She hung back so long that the smiling officer, his hand politely extended to assist her, began to look puzzled. “You are not feeling well?”
They mustn’t know what I really think, she told herself. There will still be something I can do, somewhere, sometime. “I’m fine,” she told the officer, and even managed a smile. “The trip has left me a little groggy, I think.”
“Yes, of course. Very comfortable quarters coming, I promise.”
“Thank you,” she said, and took his hand, and stepped up into the truck.
A kind of sofa was fixed on one side of the interior, so that anyone sitting on it would be facing sideways. There were no windows, but there was a dim light bulb in a fixture in the roof. Evelyn sat down beside Bradford, the door was closed from outside, and a second later the truck jolted forward.
Bradford put a hand on Evelyn’s forearm. “Don’t be nervous. They know we want to be their friends.”
“Yes,” she said.
vii
They hadn’t been told how long the truck ride would take, but it was just an hour by Evelyn’s watch — from one-forty to two-forty, Eustace time — when the truck stopped, backed up, stopped again, and they heard the engine switch off.