Ballroom of the Skies by John D. MacDonald Page A

thanks for everything.”
    “But you haven’t seen Miguel! He doesn’t know you’re going.”
    “I just said good-bye to him, Karen.”
    She half turned away from him. There was an odd expression on her face, as though she were listening for a sound that was just beyond his hearing range. Her face changed then, screwed up like the face of a child about to cry.
    “Good-bye, Dake.” She held her hand out. He took it.
    “Good-bye, Karen.”
    When he was outside the door he glanced back. She stood inside, watching him through the glass. She was not standing in the casual, slumped, hoyden posture of Karen Voss. She stood slim and straight, with a sort of forlorn dignity on her face. He walked to the corner, turning once to wave. She did not respond. A charcoal-burning cab picked him up and clattered its desolate way toward the CIJ terminal. He had a twenty-minute wait for the next Philadelphia shuttle jet. The newspapers arrived barely in time. He bought two copies and took them onto the aircraft with him. Aside from two typos, the articlewas exactly as he had written it. And they had bannered it SECRET DEALS REVEALED , with the sub-head BRANSON ’ S DEPUTY IN FOUR - POWER AGREEMENT CLAIMS IRANIAN DOUBLE - CROSS SHAPING UP .
    The coin was up in the air, he thought. It could land heads or tails. Heads would be a new agreement, a lessening of international tension. Tails would merely quicken the war which more than half of the world now called “inevitable.”
    He read it through twice, quickly, and then glanced at the rest of the news. Massacre in a religious encampment in Iowa. Fire razes abandoned plant of Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Gurkha Airforce takes long-term lease on Drew Field in Florida, in conjunction with the missile launching stations at Cocoa. Maharani kidnap attempt foiled. Skyrocketing murder statistics blamed on prono addiction, yet growers’ lobby thwarts legislative control. Bigamy legalized in California after Supreme Court review. Tridi starlet found dead in bed. New North China conscription planned. Brazil develops deadly virus mutation. New soil deficiency isolated at Kansas lab. Texas again threatens secession. Enfield KeyWesting.
    Dake frowned as he read the last item. With the publication of his article, he would be poison to anyone except Enfield himself, and perhaps with him too, but at least it was a chance. There were a few more minutes of the flight left. During the last two days he had come to avoid all introspective moments, to busy his mind with activity—any kind of activity—just so it kept him from thinking.
    Stream of thought was like a swift river that ran smoothly down a channel and then broke suddenly against a rock. That rock was the flaw he had seen in Branson, and the manner of his “death.” After striking the rock, the current boiled into an eddy, circling aimlessly. A thousand times he had tried to dismiss it by telling himself that he was mistaken. Auto-hypnosis. A tiny flaw in the mind, a wrinkle resulting from strain. For the first time in many days he thought consciously of his wife. The dull feeling of loss lingered always in his subconscious, ready to be brought to the surface. A quiet,bright-eyed girl who had loved him. There had been for a long time an inability to believe that she was dead. He would meet her around the next corner. Maybe the strain had started when he had at last faced the fact that she was utterly and incredibly gone. Wife and father—and both, somehow, killed by different aspects of the same thing. Father killed by a small corruption, and wife by a vaster one—yet the difference was only in degree.
    These, he thought, were poor years for a constructive idealist. The dream was always the same. Do a little bit, to the limit of your strength, and it will become a better world, after you have gone. If each man does a little bit … Maybe, back in the eighteen hundreds that dream had a little validity. Men could believe, back there, that the