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“It’s a publicity party to promote the costume ball which is being given next month for the Archidona Children’s Fund. The press is here. They’ll be taking photographs.”

Now Mel knew why Cindy wanted him to hurry. With him there, she stood a better chance of being in the photographs—and on tomorrow’s newspaper social pages.

“Did you say the Archidona Fund? Which Archidona? There are two. One’s in Ecuador, the other in Spain.”

For the first time, Cindy hesitated. “What does it matter?”

Mel wanted to laugh out loud. Cindy didn’t know. As usual, she had chosen to work for a charity because of who was involved, rather than what.

“How many letters do you expect to get from this one?”

To be considered for listing in The Social Register, a new aspirant needed eight sponsoring letters from people whose names already appeared there. At the last count Mel had heard, Cindy had collected four.

Cindy asserted, savagely, “Listen to me! You’d better get here tonight, and soon. If you don’t come, or if you do come and embarrass me by saying anything of what you did just now, it’ll be the end.”

She hung up.

When seated at his desk, Mel shivered as earlier. Then, abruptly in the silent office, a telephone bell jangled. For a moment he ignored it. It rang again, and he realized it was the red alarm system telephone on a stand beside the desk.

“Bakersfeld here.”

He heard clicks and more acknowledgments as others came on the line.

“This is Air Traffic Control,” the tower chief’s voice announced. “We have an airborne emergency, category three.

Keith Bakersfeld, Mel’s brother, was a third of the way through his eight-hour duty watch in the air traffic control radar room.

In radar control, tonight’s storm was having a profound effect, though not a directly physical one. To a spectator, Keith thought, it might have seemed that the storm, raging immediately outside, was a thousand miles away. The radar room had no windows. Day and night, at Lincoln International, ten radar controllers and supervisors labored in perpetual semidarkness under dim moonglow lights. Around them, tightly packed equipment—radarscopes, controls, radio communications panels—lined all four walls.