"A Mr. Tull? A Mr. Tull at all."

This too was the language of the air, this was airspeak; no one on terra firma would ever talk like that. But to Richard's ears, still papery with blood loss, it seemed well said. A Mr. Tull. A Mr. Tull at all.

He owned up.

The stewardess escorted him down the length of Economy, and then another stewardess escorted him through Business World; he ducked under a curtain, and then another stewardess led him into First. As hemade this journey, this journey within a journey, getting nearer to America, Richard looked to see what everyone was reading, and found that his progress through the plane described a diagonal of shocking decline. In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. As for Business World, it wasn't that the businessmen and businesswomen were immersing themselves in incorrigibly minor or incautiously canonized figures like Thornton Wilder or Dostoevsky, or with lightweight literary middlemen like A. L. Rowse or Lord David Cecil, or yet with teacup-storm philosophers, exploded revisionist historians, stubbornly Steady State cosmologists or pallid poets over whom the finger of sentimentality continued to waver. They were reading trex: outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tublike tinglers: escape from the pressures facing the contemporary entrepreneur. And then he pitched up in the intellectual slum of First Class, among all its drugged tycoons, and the few books lying unregarded on softly swelling stomachs were jacketed with hunting scenes or ripe young couples in mid swirl or swoon. They all lay there flattened out in the digestive torpor of midafternoon, and nobody was reading anything-except for a lone seeker who gazed, with a frown of mature skepticism, at a perfume catalogue. Jesus, what happened on the Concorde? Scouring the troposphere at the limit of life, and given a glimpse of the other side-a glimpse of what the rest of the universe almost exclusively consisted of (unpunctuated vacuum)-the Mach 2 morons would be sitting there, and staring into space. The space within. Not the space without. In the very nib of the airplane sat Gwyn Barry, who was reading his schedule.

"Hi," said Richard.

Gwyn pulled a lever which caused him to surge up from the supine to the sedentary. He pointed to a little bulkhead table. Richard sat on it, next to the vase of tulips. There were posies everywhere, here in First.

"How are you doing?" said Gwyn. And his eyes returned to his schedule: six or seven sheets, with many a box and bullet-punch, and highlit and color-coded-TV, radio, press. "Wow, they've really got me grid-locked in LA," he went on. "It's all the interest leaking down from San Francisco. Look at that. How can I do the Chronicle and then Pete Ellery back to back?" He turned to Richard as if he expected an answer. Then he said, "What have your people got lined up for you?"

"I told you. My editor moved on, They've given me some other

Chuck or Chip." And it was true. Roy Biv, Richard's editor-so full of enthusiasm and ideas-had moved on from Bold Agenda, and every time Richard called he got shuffled around from Chip to Chuck, from Chuckto Chip. "Is Chuck there?" You mean Chip. "Then give me Chip." You ?want Chuck. And they were never there. Richard couldn't decide whether Chuck and Chip were the same person (like Darko and Ranko), who was permanently absent, or whether both Chip and Chuck were the inventions of a third person called something like Chup or Chick. The only editor he ever got through to, these days, was an inoffensive-sounding guy who went by the name of Leslie Evry.

Gwyn said, "So what have they got lined up?"

"I said. I won't know till I get there."

"But this is America, man! You got to get out there. You got to go for it."

Richard waited.

"You got to come on strong. Talk big and kick ass."

"Let's get this straight. Are you trying to be funny, or is it your intention to pretend to be American while we're there?"

Gwyn sank back, and gave his schedule a careless brandish. "You know, you're lucky. This is just show business. While I'm scurrying around out there, you'll have time to absorb everything. Time to think. To ponder. Time to dream. Are you all right, mate? You look a bit pale. But it could be the light."

And the light was coming in sideways, and everything looked combustible or already white-hot, close to burnout or heat-death.

"I had a nosebleed. I haven't seen so much blood since the twins were born. I used up two whole cans' worth of tissues and towels."

"Beautiful flying weather."

"It's always sunny, you know. Above the clouds."

"I got you up here, and it took some doing, so you could see what it's like. For your piece."

Then, for Richard's further benefit, Gwyn cast his gaze round the cabin with an expression that judiciously combined embarrassment and mischief. "Who would have thought it? A boy from the valleys. Flying to America first class."

"Do you mind if I use that line?"

"It's nice, though, isn't it? Dead comfy."

"The sickbags," Richard said dully, "look no better or bigger than the ones in Coach. And they still have turbulence here. And it still takes seven hours. I'll see you on the ground."

He made his way back, past Magenta Rhapsody and Of Kingly Blood, past Cartel and Avarice and The Usurers, and into the multitudinousness of Hard Times, La Peste, Amerika, Despair, The Moonstone, Labyrinths … Two people-a man in Business and some dope in Coach-were reading Amelior: the paperback.

But as Richard shackled himself back into his seat (which itself bore the heavy indentation of The Wouldbegood: A Life of Edith Nesbit), he had other information to process. Gwyn, Gwyn's schedule, Amelior, the unfortunate defection of Roy Biv from Bold Agenda: these swayed like loose harpoons from the nucleus of his soul. But he had other information to process, the kind that only comes when life is turning, the kind you have to be there to get, because no one will ever tell you about it. And if they did-you'd never listen.

On his way back through the plane Richard had seen women crying- three women, four women. And he realized that there always were these women on planes, crying, with makeup in meltdown, folded over in the window seat or candidly hideous in the aisle, clutching Kleenex. Before, if he assumed anything, he assumed they were crying about boyfriends or husbands (partings or sunderings), or crying (who cared?) from toothache or curse pains or fear of flying. But now he was forty, and he knew.

Women on planes are crying because someone they love or loved is dead or dying. Every plane has them. The talent on the short hops, the broads on the wide-bodies, with their clutched hankies. Death can do this; death has the power to do this. Death, which sends women hurrying to the end of the street, to bus stops, which makes them run under the clocks of railway stations, which lifts them five miles high and fires them weeping through the air at the speed of death, all over the world.

While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cigarette. His mouth was plugged with a gum called Nicoteen. And he wore circular nicotine patches, from the same product stable, on his left forearm and right bicep. Richard's blood brownly brewed, like something left overnight in the teapot. He was a cigarette; and he felt like one. And he still felt like a cigarette . .. What he was doing was practicing non-smoking. He knew how Americans treated smokers, people of smoke, people of fire and ash, with their handfuls of dust. He knew he would be asked to do an awful lot of it: non-smoking. So he felt like a cigarette, and he felt like a drink-he felt like a lot of drinks. But he didn't drink and he didn't smoke. All he had was the plastic bottle of mineral water that Gina had made him bring.