Neither Five nor Three [antikvár]

THESISCHAPTER ONETHE DAWN came slowly, cold and clear, thinning out the night sky.It's coming slowly, Paul Haydn thought, because we are running ahead of the sun. Then he smiled at his fancy as he looked down at the floor of clouds below him. He watched them change from blanched shapeless ghosts into a foaming sea of sun-streaked waves, their curling crests held motionless, poised but never spent. A traveler, fifty years from now, hurtling through the skies, would find that dawns came even more slowly for planes flying westwards. Or would he be traveling in a plane, fifty years from now? Then suddenly, Paul Haydn noticed that the clouds were no longer a sea beneath him, hiding the real ocean. We're coming down, he thought, at last we are getting near land, we're getting near America. Yes, there was a stretch of the Atlantic, a dark gray sheet of corrugated iron. He sat up abruptly, stretched his back muscles and his legs.His excitement, controlled as he tried to keep it, woke Brownlee sitting beside him. The other passengers in the planethe two congressmen and their secretaries and the brigadier general who had accompanied them from Berlin, the silent worried sergeant who had joined the plane at Frankfurt, the three E.C.A. officials returning from the Rhinelandwere still slumped in sleep, their faces wiped clean of expression, their troubles, their hopes, their failures, their achievements all forgotten.7