4

It was almost an hour since Tanya Livingston had left Mel Bakersfeld in the central lobby of the main terminal. Even now, though other incidents had intervened, she remembered the way their hands touched at the elevator, the tone he used when he had said, "It'll give me a reason to see you again tonight."
Tanya hoped very much that Mel remembered too, and-though she was aware he had to go downtownthat he would find time to stop by first.
The "reason" Mel referred to-as if he needed one -was his curiosity about the message received by Tanya while in the coffee shop. "There's a stowaway on night 80," a Trans America agent had told her. "They're calling for you," and "the way I hear it, this one's a dilly."
The agent had already been proved right.
Tanya was once more in the small, private lounge behind the Trans America check-in counters where earlier this evening she had comforted the distraught young ticket agent, Patsy Smith. But now, instead of Patsy, Tanya faced the tittle old lady from San Diego.
"You've done this before," Tanya said. "Haven't you?"

"Oh yes, my dear. Quite a few times."
The little old lady sat comfortably relaxed, hands folded daintily in her lap, a wisp of lace handkerchief showing between them. She was dressed primly in black, with an old-fashioned high-necked blouse, and might have been somebody's great-grandmother on her way to church. Instead she had been caught riding illegally, without a ticket, between Los Angeles and New York.
There had been stowaways, Tanya recalled reading somewhere, as long ago as 700 B.C., on ships of the Phoenicians which plied the eastern Mediterranean. At that time, the penalty for those who were caught was excruciating death-disembowelment of adult stowaways, while children were burned alive on sacrificial stones.
Since then, penalties had abated, but stowaways had not.
Tanya wondered if anyone, outside a limited circle of airline employees, realized how much of a stowaway epidemic there had been since jet airplanes increased the tempo and pressures of passenger aviation.