I was aware that I was surely the only person in New York that day who was enjoying the air, but that made it even better. Suffer, you healthy bastards!

I deliberately arrived as late as I safely could. When I got there, the other flight attendants were boarding. I was able to keep the chatter to a minimum; since some of the others knew Sondergard I had to be careful. I pleaded a hangover, and that went over well. Apparently it wasn't out of character.

For the early part of the flight I kept away from the others by working my tail off, keeping too busy tending to passengers to spend time jawing with the rest of the crew. That got me some odd looks -- I was realizing Sondergard had not exactly been the Pride of Pan Am -- but it didn't matter. As the flight went on I replaced the stews one by one as the Gate appeared and then vanished in the mid-ship lavatories.

That's an easy trick. There's an indicator on my wristwatch. It senses the presence of the Gate. When my wrist tingled I'd simply go to the lavatory, open the door, and call for one of the flight attendants.

"Look at this," I'd say, with a disgusted expression. They were invariably eager to see what new atrocity the passengers had worked on their domain. (Flight attendants are almost as contemptuous of the goats as I am.) When she was in position I'd plant my boot on her fanny and she'd be through before she could draw a breath. Her replacement would arrive almost as quickly.

We started the old thinning gambit when the dinner trays had been cleared.

There are many ways to go about a snatch. Thinning them first is something we do when we can. The in-flight movies often help with that. While the cabin is darkened people don't notice as much as they would otherwise. We could take this one or that one and, in most cases, they never would be missed. From the moment the last stew was replaced there was a team member stationed at all times in the lavatory corridor in the center of the 747. When circumstances permitted we'd see to it that a passenger who got up to piss didn't actually get to do it for fifty thousand years.

Each snatch is unique, each presents different problems.

On this one we were clearing two jumbo jets simultaneously. That's good -- numbers usually are -- and bad, since the Gate can appear at only one location during any moment of time. That meant it had to be shuttled back and forth between the two planes.

Both these flights were transcontinental. That sounds like an advantage, but it usually isn't. We can't take the people out during the first hour and let the plane fly empty across the country, hoping the pilot never leaves the cockpit.

In this case, the 747 was going to remain marginally airworthy after the collision. That meant the real pilot had to stay with it to the end. It was just too dicey to take him and replace him with one of our people -- even a kamikaze. There was too much chance the plane would come down in a place history had already shown us it would not come down.

With the DC-10 we had a lot more leeway. If it came to it, we could take the cockpit crew and simply follow instructions from Air Traffic Control, since that's what was going to cause this crash.

The thinning was going well. We still had two hours to fly, and we'd taken forty or fifty out of the 747. The plane had departed with almost every seat full. One would think people would begin to notice empty seats, but the fact is it takes them a long time to realize what's happening. Part of that is because we pick the candidates for thinning very carefully. We would not take a child without its mother, for instance. Mommy would come looking. But taking a mother and her crying infant is perfect. The other passengers may notice on some level that the crying has stopped, but they never try to find out why. That's the sort of good fortune you just don't question.

In the same way, we were alert for people most dissatisfied with the sardine-can seating arrangements, such as anybody sitting next to a tall person, or three unrelated men sitting in a row, especially if they were trying to work. If that middle fellow got up to get a drink or visit the rest room he was unlikely to come back. I'd never heard anybody complain about that, either.

But the biggest thing we had working in our favor was the unimaginable nature of what we were doing. I'd see someone looking troubled, walking the aisles. Maybe he'd noticed all the seats were filled when we took off, and now there were all these gaps. What gives? But logic is on our side. The guy knows nobody has stepped outside for a smoke. Thus, logic proves everyone is still aboard; ergo, they must be in some other part of the plane. Nobody ever gets farther than that, not even if we take half the passengers.

I concluded things were going smoothly and decided to take a look at the other plane, the DC-10. So the next time the Gate appeared I ... stepped through into the future, changed into a United uniform while Operations shifted its focus to the other plane, and ... stepped onto United Flight 35.

Another advantage to jumbo jets: nobody notices a new flight attendant.

Since the hazard was less on this flight, the team was being even more aggressive. They were summoning passengers to the rear o f the plane on one pretext or another, never to return I surveyed the situation with approval, and signalled to Ralph Boston. He followed me into the galley.

"How's it going?" I asked him.

"Easy. We plan to start the final operation in another couple minutes."

"What's the local time?"

"There's twenty minutes left."

That can be disconcerting. When I'd left the 747 it still had three hours to o, which meant it was somewhere over the midwest. This pane was already in California, two and a half hours later. It's enough to give you a headache.

But why not work it that way? Why, for instance, should the people uptime wait twenty-

four hours while I watch the Carson show in a New York motel room? They had not, of course. As soon as the Gate vanished in my motel room Operations had reset it for the lavatory of the 747 the next day. What had happened, from Lawrence's viewpoint, is that I'd stepped through, Sondergard had come out, the Gate had flickered, and out came the first flight attendant I pushed into the lavatory the next day.

It takes some getting used to.

"Something wrong?" Ralph asked. I glanced at him. Ralph was not impersonating a male flight attendant this trip. His skinsuit made him a perfect copy of a very black, very female person whose name he probably did not even know. Ralph is small, and has been with my teams a long time. Over a year.

"No. We might as well get going. Should I stay here, or Bo back to the other plane?"

"Lilly's alone in first-class. You could help her out up there."

So I did. Technically, of course, I'm in command, but Ralph was the DC- 10 leader, and Cristabel was in charge on the 747. On a snatch like this one I find it best to let my team leaders lead.

The first-class operation went smoothly. We used the standard "coffee-tea-or-milk" gambit, relying on our speed and their inertia. I leaned over the first two seats on the left, smiling big.

"Are you enjoying your flight?"

Pop, pop. Two squeezes on the trigger, close to the head and out of sight of the rest of the goats.

Next row.

"Hi, folks. I'm Louise. Fly me."

Pop, pop.

We were close to the rear of the cabin before anybody tumbled to anything. Finally, a few people were standing up and looking at us curiously. I glanced at Lilly, she nodded, and we plugged the rest of them rapid-fire. All of the first-class cabin was now peacefully asleep, which meant none of them could help us pull sleepers through the Gate. It's completely unfair, but there's no solution for it. Another benefit of your first-class ticket, air travelers!