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Show -302- Chapter Twenty-One The Professor sat in an airplane flying over the plains of Nebraska. He did not like to fly. Looking at the earth from this height was impersonal, like peering at a map. tie could see the fields and roads, but could perceive no human life. It was almost as impersonal inside the great machine. Each passenger seemed wrapped in his own cocoon, sleeping, or reading, or simply peering out the window. The hum of the motors was soporific. The drinks he had drunk and the meal he had eaten over parts of Nevada and Utah lay heavy on his stomach. Even so, there was a kind of flutter in his midsection that suggested emptiness. A pad of paper lay before him on the little folding table, and his fingers gripped a ball point pen. His mind was attempting to inreel, to recapture the events as they had transpired since the appointment of the new president in the fall of 1966, concurrent with the election of the movie actor as governor, to the moment last week when the strike had been called. The individual pieces he was attempting to assemble into a coherant and easily comprehended whole. He would be speaking tomorrow at the university in the Midwest where he had gone from Utah to study and earn his doctoral degree, to which he had been invited to return as a professor four years later, and where he had taught for the ten years before he moved to California. He didn't know what |