“What?”
Haversford nodded, beaming. “Yes, indeed, indeed, Reverend,” he shrilled. “Of course, there is a suitable stipend included in the budget. I know it’s quite an imposition—”
“But—but I can’t, Mr. Haversford. I mean, I have obligations to my church—”
“Certainly you do. We all appreciate that. But if you’ll take the word of an old curmudgeon, I think you’ll find that the church can spare you for just this short time. May we vote, please?”
The ‘ayes’ had it, unanimously, all but Hake, who did not collect himself in time to vote. “An old curmudgeon,” indeed! Did he have a choice? If it was the Lo-Wate Bottling Company’s old Curmudgeon, probably not.
“I wasn’t supposed to go to Germany,” he said. But nobody was listening.
IV
There were thirty-one of the kids, and they filled the whole Yellow-Left section of the aircraft, two and four abreast. The Lufthansa stewardesses moved up and down the aisles, checking seat belts and making sure that air-sick bags were in every pouch, and Horny Hake and Alys Brant, his co-leader, followed.
“You’re really good with children,” Alys said admiringly, as he patted two or three of the unfamiliar heads at random. “I wish I could relate to them the way you do.” Then she retreated to her seat at the front of the compartment, leaving Hake to wonder why a woman who didn’t think she could relate to children had maneuvered herself into being his co-leader. By the time he was in his own seat and the jet was airborne he had confronted the fact that this was going to be one sticky trip.
He fell back on a resource of his childhood: counting off the hours till it was over. Nineteen days. That came to 456 hours. Including ground travel time from and to Long Branch, call it 470. He had left the rectory—he checked his watch—nearly five hours before, so now he was a little better than one one-hundredth of the way through the ordeal. In about half an hour it would be one ninetieth. By the time they reached their hotel in Frankfurt as much as a fortieth, maybe more, and by bedtime—
“Father Hake?”
He blinked and turned away from the window. “Mrs. Brant is waving to you, Father,” whispered the stew, her flaxen hair brushing his cheek. “It’s all right, you can get out of your seat for this.”
At the head of the aisle Alys was already standing with one hand on the shoulder of a twelve-year-old, smiling sympathetically toward him. “It’s Jimmy Kenkel,” she said confidentially. “He reached back and punched Martin here in the nose. Probably if you ask the stew she’ll get you some ice.”
Martin’s nose was streaming blood. The regular passengers who had been unlucky enough to be seated in Yellow-Left, dapper tall German businessmen and alert Japanese tourists, were whispering among themselves. Hake whipped out his handkerchief and held it to the boy’s face, bracing himself against the thirty-degree climb of the plane and trying to catch the stew’s eye. By the time he looked around Alys was gone. By the time the stewardess brought ice the bleeding had stopped, and by the time the seat belt sign was off Martin had already revenged himself by pouring the cup of melting ice over Jimmy’s head.
Enough was enough. Hake turned his back on his charges and marched to the midships bar for a drink.
“Two minds with but a single thought, Horny?” asked Alys cheerfully, turning from a conversation with a slim, uniformed man wearing waxed blonde mustaches.
Hake looked at her with displeasure^ “The boy is all right, if you care. God knows what they’ll be doing now they can get up and move around, though.”
“You see, our minds do work alike. I was just asking Heinrich here if they could keep the seat belt sign turned on in just our compartment.”
“Ja, that would be good. But not possible.” The man stuck out his hand. “Heinrich Scholl, Father,” he said. “I am your purser.”
“I’m not a priest, just a Unitarian minister,” Hake said testily, but he accepted a whiskey and water, compliments of the purser. The children had not yet realized they were free, and the stews were moving among them, passing out Cokes and orange juice and packets of in-flight games and puzzles. Hake began to relax. He had flown tens of thousands of miles before he was ten years old, and hardly at all since. It was all new to him, from the back-tapered wing outside the window with its peculiarly feathered tip to the topless bar-stew serving their drinks. The immensity of the aircraft astonished him. He had never fully comprehended the size of the big intercontinental jets, more than a thousand people inside one great steel sausage zapping across the sea. “But I don’t see why we have to have them,” he said. “These jets, I mean. What a waste of energy!”
“Waste?” repeated the purser politely. “But that is not so, Mr. Hake. For the mails alone we must have them, so why not fill them up with passengers?”
“But with energy so short—” he began, thinking of heat-less days in Long Branch and the tons of fossil fuel each of those huge engines on the wing was pouring out.
The purser said kindly, “It is all carefully planned, I assure you, Mr. Hake. Air transport is a vital service. We carry valuable medical supplies, diplomatic pouches, all kinds of strategically vital materials. Why, this very aircraft carried measles vaccine from Koln to New Guinea just, let me see, just last year. Or possibly the year before.”
And since then? Hake asked himself. But all he said was, “Granting that, but why so many of them? I mean, does every pipsqueak little company in the world have to have its own flag line?”
“Pip? Squeak?” repeated the purser, mustache quivering.
“Oh, I don’t mean Lufthansa, of course. I mean all of them. Little countries you never even heard of. I see them coming in to the traffic patterns off Long Branch, African airlines and Latin American airlines and God knows what airlines. Couldn’t America, for instance, use Air France or Aeroflot or whatever, instead of flying its own planes all the time?”
Alys laughed and pushed her glass forward for a refill. “Oh, Horny! And let them do God knows what with our mail all the way across the Atlantic? You are so naive!”
The purser nodded stiffly and said, “It has been most interesting speaking with you, Mr. Hake, but now I must attend to my duties. The flight attendants must now start serving dinner.”
“And maybe you should too, Horny,” said Alys, looking past his shoulder. Ten of the kids were lined up for the toilets, and some of the boys were fighting again. “It’s hard on you,” she commiserated, “but boy-boy fights are a man’s job, aren’t they?”
Boy-girl fights also turned out to be a man’s job, and so, Hake found out, were some of the seamier kinds of what he had always considered pure girl questions. Tiny Brenda came to him and whispered, “Reverend Hake, I’m having my personal hygiene.”
He leaned closer to her, juggling the half-eaten dinner tray. “What?”