d to stop over in Paris on my way back from Moscow,
and I'd secured her promise to let me see her. She was different, I tell
you; she was nothing like the calculating Whimsy White, and still less
like the dancing, simpering, giddy youngsters one meets around at social
affairs. She was just Joanna, cool and humorous, yet sympathetic and
serious, and as pretty as a Majolica figurine.

We could scarcely realize it when the steward passed along to take
orders for luncheon. Four hours out? It seemed like forty minutes. And
we had a pleasant feeling of intimacy in the discovery that both of us
liked lobster salad and detested oysters. It was another bond; I told
her whimsically that it was an omen, nor did she object to considering
it so.

Afterwards we walked along the narrow aisle to the glassed-in
observation room up forward. It was almost too crowded for entry, but we
didn't mind that at all, as it forced us to sit very close together. We
stayed long after both of us had begun to notice the stuffiness of the
air.

It was just after we had returned to our seats that the catastrophe
occurred. There was no warning save a sudden lurch, the result, I
suppose, of the pilot's futile last-minute attempt to swerve--just that
and then a grinding crash and a terrible sensation of spinning, and
after that a chorus of shrieks that were like the sounds of battle.

It _was_ battle. Five hundred people were picking themselves up from the
floor, were trampling each other, milling around, being cast helplessly
down as the great rocket-plane, its left wing but a broken stub, circled
downward toward the Atlantic.

The shouts of officers sounded and a loudspeaker blared. "Be calm," it
kept repeating, and then, "There has been a collision. We have contacted
a surface ship. There is no danger-- There is no danger--"

I struggled up from the debris of shattered seats. Joanna was gone; just
as I found her crumpled between the rows, the ship struck the water with
a jar that set everything crashing again. The speaker blared, "Put on
the cork belts under the seats. The life-belts are under the seats."

I dragged a belt loose and snapped it around Joanna, then donned one
myself. The crowd was surging forward now, and the tail end of the ship
began to drop. There was water behind us, sloshing in the darkness as
the lights went out. An officer came sliding by, stooped, and fastened a
belt about an unconscious woman ahead of us. "You all right?"