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others for fear it would get dirty or crushed. No skycap was in sight. If Gus were to have a little heart attack…? The dear soul had been warned by his specialist against lifting anything heavier than a shopping bag of groceries. If he were to try to carry that bag himself, which would be like him, it could not do him any serious damage. But a few palpitations, enough to rule out the trip for both of them—no question but that Frank would have to take the patient home…?
    The crazy thoughts that came to you in stress situations, as if planted in your mind by the devil! It made a modern man wonder whether it was not a mistake to doubt Satan’s real existence. But of course, thanks to good habits, the “Get thee behind me” followed in a flash; he had hardly felt the brush of temptation before he took the bag firmly from the old man’s grasp and set it back on the pile. They had a few minutes, he admonished, before check-in. A porter would surely come. Or he would find one of those carts, like the ones they had in the supermarket. But now a new dastardly thought came to tantalize him. If the flight were to be canceled? They did that quite often these days, on account of the fuel crisis, if the plane was not full. He was certain somebody had told him that. Frank shook his head. It would be only a reprieve. His apple-cheeked old friend had his timepiece out again. “The others ought to be here, Frankie. Should I go in and have a look?”
    Frank was slow to reply. If the rabbi was not there, or the Senator, if nobody on this blamed committee was there, then they would be free to go home. It would be God’s will. The prayer he had not let himself pray would be answered. But if he sent Gus inside to reconnoiter and any one of the promised four was there, there could be no turning back. This was something, Frank decided, that he did not yet want to know. As long as he did not know, he could still hope.
    “Never mind, Gus. I see a porter.” In fact a skycap was wheeling a cart down the walk toward them. Preceded by their baggage, Frank and Gus went through the door. At the Air France counter for Economy class, Sadegh was waiting, alone.
    To his astonishment and moral relief, Frank’s instantaneous reaction was anger: faced with the fact that the committee to all appearances consisted of Gus and himself, he could not contain the oath of disappointment that sprang to his lips. “God damn it, Sadegh, you promised !” How little the human heart knew itself! He had sinned in mistrusting his own willingness, nay, eagerness, to fight this good fight. Now that their fine, broad-based crusade was dissolving into thin air before his disbelieving eyes, he could have wept for the pity of it. There was a lesson there of some kind: to use a homely comparison, it was like tossing a coin to decide whether to go hiking or take out the canoe; often you only learned that it was heads you really wanted when the other side, tails, showed its face.

Two
    “ B ON VOL ,” AILEEN SIMMONS wrote on one of the green-printed cards distributed by the hostess; upon reflection, she added “Service aimable.” On the line Effectuez-vous ce voyage pour Affaires □ Tourisme □ Autres motifs____ ? she had placed a check after Autres motifs, without becoming more specific. Her occupation she had given simply as “ Educatrice .” “ Recteur d’université ” sounded a bit pompous for the president of a women’s college, and the presence of the other kind of rector, across the aisle, made her hesitate to assume the title. She would have liked to see how those men of God described themselves and what they would put next to “Other” as their reason for taking the flight—like good monolingual Americans, they would use the verso, obviously, provided for English-speakers. Aileen’s bump of curiosity was well developed, and it interested her, as a one-time social historian, to note how other people responded to polls and questionnaires, which for