“Laurel, that’s a flower, isn’t it?” Dinah asked. She spoke with feverish vivacity.

“Uh-huh,” Laurel said.

“Pardon me,” the man with the horn-rimmed glasses and the British accent said. “I’m going forward to join our friend.”

“I’ll come along,” the older man in the red shirt said.

“I want to know what’s going on here!” the man in the crew-neck jersey exclaimed abruptly. His face was dead pale except for two spots of color, as bright as rouge, on his cheeks. “I want to know what’s going on right now.”

“Nor am I a bit surprised,” the Brit said, and then began walking forward. The man in the red shirt trailed after him. The teenaged girl with the dopey look drifted along behind them for awhile and then stopped at the partition between the main cabin and the business section, as if unsure of where she was.

The elderly gent in the fraying sport-coat went to a portside window, leaned over, and peered out.

“What do you see?” Laurel Stevenson asked.

“Darkness and mountains,” the man in the sport-coat said.

“The Rockies?” Albert asked.

The man in the frayed sport-coat nodded. “I believe so, young man.”

Albert decided to go forward himself. He was seventeen, fiercely bright, and this evening’s Bonus Mystery Question had also occurred to him: who was flying the plane?

Then he decided it didn’t matter... at least for the moment. They were moving smoothly along, so presumably someone was, and even if someone turned out to be something — the autopilot, in other words — there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. As Albert Kaussner he was a talented violinist — not quite a prodigy — on his way to study at The Berklee College of Music. As Ace Kaussner he was (in his dreams, at least) the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi, a bounty hunter who took it easy on Saturdays, was careful to keep his shoes off the bed, and always kept one eye out for the main chance and the other for a good kosher cafe somewhere along the dusty trail.