Not too long after that, I was out.

My pretty little dress was soaked with coffee, but I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Laurel and Hardy couldn't have handled it better. It had been one of the all-time great pratfalls. The tray had gone just where I'd aimed it. Nobody would be listening to that tape for a while.

The good feeling didn't last long, though.

This had been the craziest damn trip of them all. Both rimes before, I'd been hoping to come up with the twonky and get the whole paradox resolved. This time all I'd tried to do was a diversion, and probably a fairly useless one. There were things on that tape we didn't want Mr Smith to brood about. We had figured the later in the day he heard them, the less alert he'd be, and the less likely to attach any importance to them.

It sounded damn thin, even to me. There was even a dunce that my outrageous behavior would draw his attention to DeLisle's words, rather than away.

Once more, my only consolation was that it was all we had. The only thing left was Window C.

And there was something I didn't like about that, too.

I'd felt those strings very strongly there in that room: the strings held by the temporal puppet master, Mister Pre-Destination, Professor Fate, Karma, the Black Magic Woman, or whatever the hell you wanted to call him/her/it. Whoever or whatever it was, I felt like I was being jerked around.

There had been that one moment ...

Squatting there on the floor beside him while he looked down at me in his befuddled way ...

What the hell am I doing here? I had wondered. And why do his eyes look like that? I was being set up. There was no way around it. There was no way to look at this trip except as a preparation for a trip to Window C. Don't fuck him unless you want to. And tell him about the kid. She's just a wimp.

The puppet master was pulling very hard. And his name was Sherman. "

It no longer surprised me to see that Sherman had changed. I came through the Gate and he was waiting for me. His face wasn't cartoon-like any more, though it was still far from human. Pd half-expected he'd look like Bill Smith -- I'd caught the ghost of him in Sherman's earlier incarnation -- but he didn't. He was just an android, but now he looked like one to be taken seriously.

Everybody was treating him as such. They kept out of his way as he led me to a room where we could talk in private.

"How did it go?" he asked.

"Why don't you tell me?"

"Very well. You succeeded in distracting him the first time DeLisle's words came up on the tape. He saw you up dose, and he recognized you. Your face is now firmly fixed in his mind. He is still going to think what DeLisle had to say when he returned to the cockpit was odd, but then it was never very important. It will be easy for him to dismiss it, because everyone else will be helping him out. Tom Stanley will hold out the longest, but eventually he will decide, with the rest, that DeLisle simply went crazy."

"I'm not going to do it, Sherman."

He went on as if I hadn't spoken.

"The new Board Member, Mister Petcher -- or Gordy, as he prefers to be called -- will not make it to California on the night of the twelfth. Much as Bill Smith hates it, he will have to hold a press conference that evening. It will be the usual fruitless exercise: Smith has nothing he can tell them, and they will harry him with speculations. He will spend the evening saying 'No comment.'"

"I won't do it, Sherman."

"At this press conference Smith will get his first glimpse of Mister Arnold Mayer, the mystic physicist, the well-known crackpot. Mayer's questions will seem idiotic to Smith, but his name and face will stick in his mind. It wouldn't hurt if he had another name and another face that impressed him even more that night. We're doing better, Louise, but we're far from out of the woods."

"I won't do it."

He looked at me for a long time, in silence. At last he steepled his fingers in a very human-like gesture, put them to his chin, and rocked back and forth. He sighed, if you can believe that.

"Tell him about the kid, Louise," he said. "She's only a wimp."

I stood up, intending to go over and dismantle him, but I guess standing up was a mistake.

I passed out.

Testimony of Bill Smith

It came out like this: " ... dead! They're all dead, every one of them! They're burnt, Gil, they're dead and burned up and torn to pieces, all dead -- "

Then the plane hit the mountain and Wayne DeLisle had nothing more to say.

It was getting on in the evening when we finally had the tape cleaned up and processed enough to hear those words clearly. When the operator shut off his machine we all just sat there for a while.

I couldn't begin to describe the sheer horror in the man's voice. It came through, though, even with the poor technical quality.

To say we were shocked would be an understatement. None of us had ever heard anything quite like that from a CVR. Fear, tension ... sure. They're not robots, the people who fly these planes. They try to conceal their emotions in a moment like that -- I guess it's a reflex -- but it comes through.

No. It just didn't make sense. I've come to expect heroic behavior, or at least stoicism, when monitoring a CVR tape, but panic would not throw me too much. Pilots are just like the rest of us. They suffer mental problems, drinking problems, marital problems. They go crazy, but hardly ever as the result of an emergency in the air.

They don't have time. Not even passengers go crazy that quickly. Contrary to what you've seen in the Airport movies, in the first few moments after an impact a few people will scream a little and maybe jump up in reaction, but that generally calms down pretty quickly. After that, the dominant reaction is to just sit there in their seats, stunned, for a fairly long time.

They don't know what to do. The common response to that, in a plane, is to do nothing. They become pliant, eager to do what the flight attendants tell them. It's only if the emergency stretches out and they get time to form their own hare-brained ideas that you have to watch out for them.

Wayne DeLisle just shouldn't have gone that nutty that quickly.

In thirty-three seconds he'd gone from a competent pilot, a take-charge guy who was willing to get out of his secure seat and go- moving around in a plane that was bucking and turning like a rock rolling down a hill just so he could try to help the passengers, to a gibbering ... well, coward, crying about how they were all dead. Dead and burned.

We spent some time discussing it.

Jerry: "Maybe they were all dead. There's indications that the fuselage might have been breached. We found some bodies and debris a good ways from the main site." The verdict on that was in pretty soon; even Jerry didn't stick to it long. If there was cabin depressurization it would have blown out the cockpit door and maybe DeLisle with it. Some people would have been sucked out, but the rest would have been all right. They were only at five thousand feet, so decompression was no problem, nor lack of oxygen.

Craig: "He said they were burned, too. Maybe there was a fire in the cabin before it went in."

Eli: "In the first-class lounge? I don't buy it. Everything I saw looks like the fire was restricted to the engines ... maybe the wings, but no further. At least until it hit, when everything went up. I don't see a wing fire spreading that far forward that quickly."