I nodded at her. It made sense. Tom thought so, too.

"That would do it," he said. "But from an Operations standpoint, he's not part of the crew and his impulse should have been to do what the crew told him to do, not take off on his own initiative. He should have waited for orders from Crain."

"Crain was pretty busy to be bothered with suggestions."

It was batted around some more, until I called it off.

"Turn it back on."

This one went on a little longer than the other had. It was worse, in a way. You could tell that Gil really thought he had it. He reported his altimeter readings and they were looking better. His angle of attack was improving. He had his co-pilot calling around, asking about places they might ditch, wondering if they could reach the shallows of the Bay or the Sacramento River or something, they were talking about fields and country roads ... and suddenly his ground avoidance alarm started to shout at him. And there was the mountain.

It would have been hard to miss even with a rudder. He tried everything he had, all his control surfaces, spoilers, ailerons, flaps, elevators, trying to wrestle the big beast into a turn.

The talk in the cockpit became even more rapid, but still ordered, as Grain and his crew worked on it.

He decided to get the nose up, flaps down, pull back on the engines, and try to stall into the ground, pancake it on that hillside and hope it wouldn't slide too far. By then he was out of good options and seemed to be thinking in terms of minimizing the violence.

Then we heard a most surprising sound. Someone was screaming in the cockpit. I was pretty sure it was a man, and he sounded hysterical.

The words were tumbling out almost too fast to be understood. I found myself on the edge of my seat, my eyes squeezed shut, in an effort to hear what the voice was saying. I had by then identified it as DeLisle. He'd come back.

But why? And what was he saying? That's when the tape stopped abruptly and something heavy bumped into my side. I jerked in surprise and opened my eyes and looked down at my lap. There was a Styrofoam coffee cup there, on its side. "Warm brown liquid was soaking into my pants.

"I'm so sorry, oh my goodness, here, let me help you with that. I'm such a klutz, no wonder they didn't want me for a stewardess."

She went on like that for a while, crouching at my side and dabbing my lap with a tiny handkerchief.

For a while there I was at a loss. I had been jerked away from total concentration on those dead guys in the cockpit, and then all this fell, literally, into my lap: She was inches away from me, looking up at my face with a strange expression, and she was stroking my thighs with a wet handkerchief. All I could do was stare at her.

"It's okay," I said, finally. "Accidents will happen."

"But always to me," she said, plaintively.

It had been quite an accident, really.

She had tripped over the power cord on the floor, which is why the tape machine went off. Her tray of coffee cups went one way and she, holding a cup in her hand, had gone the other. She'd ended up on the floor beside me, and the tray had ended up all over the tape machine.

I went over to assess the damage.

"I'll have to get another machine," the operator said. "Goddam stupid bitch. This is a five-

thousand-dollar set-up here, and coffee's not going to -- "

"How about the tape?" I'd had a chilling thought. Once, I played the original CVR tape before sending it on to the Washington lab. I was damn lucky this was only a copy. Nobody at the Board would be too amused if a tape came through a crash and then got ruined by spilled coffee.

"It ought to be okay. I'll put it on a reel and dry it by hand: He glanced at his watch. "Give me half an hour."

I nodded at him and turned to go find the girl, but she was gone.

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

I got a taste of what the Council must lave felt. I had told those nine pitiful geniuses that my mission was vital to the success of the Gate project, and they had fallen over like ninepins.

Now Sherman was doing the same thing to me. I suspected his authority was as spurious as mine had been, but didn't dare say it, and ... he could have been right. I felt the same superstitious dread of disobeying a message from the future.

At that, I had healthy self-interest -- one might call it fear -- pushing me to argue against the proposal. Lawrence and Martin didn't even have that. It was fine with them if, assuming anyone had to go back at all, I lead a commando raid into that fateful hangar on that fateful night. They could sit safely uptime and have the great pleasure of second-guessing me when I came back with another failure.

I had a very unscientific, very primitive premonition. I was going to fail again. I think Sherman knew it.

It went off very quickly. There were details to iron out.

Lawrence was horrified to learn how far he had deposited me from my goal. He set his teams to work on the problem, and shortly was able to assure me that he could get me to within ten inches of my intended destination. I didn't believe it, but why tell him that? The practical details, on my end, were a lot less complicated. It would be a commando raid. I picked a team of my three best operatives to go back with me: Mandy Djakarta, Tony Louisville, and Minoru Hanoi. There would be no masquerade this time. We'd go back as thieves in the night. Our objective would be to get into that hangar, find the stunner, and get out without being seen.

I put Tony in charge of equipment selection and planning.

I guess Tony had been subjected to the same data-dump I had. At least he'd seen the same films. The uniforms he picked for us to wear wouldn't have been out of place in a World War Two movie. We were dressed all in black, with gloves and soft black shoes, and he even had soot for us to smear on our faces -- except for Mandy, who didn't need any.

We had equipment belts, but all we wore on them was detection gear that we hoped would help us locate the stunner. No weapons on this trip. Stunning someone would only magnify our problems.

Martin Coventry hovered over us like a nervous stage mother as we stood in line waiting for Gate congruency. He was full of last-minute bits of advice.

"You'll be there from eleven to midnight," he was saying. "We show Smith arriving at 11:30 and leaving an hour later. So for half an hour you'll be there in the hangar with him, and -- "

"We'll walk on tippy-toe," Minoru finished for him. "We've been through this, Martin.

You want to come along and hold our hands?"

"It never hurts to go over these things."

"We have, Martin," I assured him. "It's a big hangar. There's a million places for us to hide, and it won't be lit very well: "I'm more worried about your end," Tony said. "If we're going to get out of there while he's snooping around, you'd better ease that Gate in real slow and real quiet."

"I don't like it," Mandy said. "Why don't we put the Gate outside the hangar and break in?"

Martin looked pained. "Because there were guards around it that night."

"I don't like that," Tony said, darkly.

"It can't be helped. You just trust us. Lawrence and I will have all the suppressors operating. The Gate will show where we planned, and it will come in without any noise."

Be that as it may, the Gate didn't arrive all that quietly.

I could hear echoes reverberating in the empty hangar as we stepped out. I wasn't worried, because we knew we were alone in there and the noise wasn't loud enough to carry outside the building. But I remember thinking Lawrence had better do a better job on the pick-up.