The Vanishing Point

“When you gaze up a railroad track,” said Varensky, “there's always a point in the infinite distance where, just before they vanish, the parallel rails seem, to join. If a train were ever to reach that point it would mean death. “Life's like that—a track along which we travel on the parallel rails of possibility and desire. The lure of the idealist is to overtake the illusion, where possibility and desire seem to merge, and the safety of the journey ends.”


PRINCE ROGOVICH! Prince Rogovich!”
Staring up at the clammy wall of the liner, blanched by searchlights, against which the little tug bumped and jostled, Philip Hindwood could hear the Prince's name being shouted in staterooms, along decks and passageways.
It had been midnight when they had drifted like a gallivanting hotel, all portholes ablaze, into the starlit vagueness of Plymouth Harbor. The Ryndam did not dock there; she only halted long enough to put off the English passengers and to drop the English mail. There had been three passengers to land, of whom Hindwood had been the first; the rest were disembarking at Boulogne or Rotterdam. They had been met just outside the harbor by the tug, and the transshipping of the mail had immediately commenced. The last bag had been tossed over the side; the immigration officials had completed their inspection. Santa Gorlof, the second passenger for England, radiantly smiling above her sables, had come down the gangplank. It was for the third passenger that the liner delayed and the tug still waited.
“Prince Rogovich! Prince Rogovich!”
The cries were becoming more insistent and impatient. They broke on the stillness with the monotony of despair. To judge by the sound, every soul aboard the liner had taken up the search, from the firemen in the stoke-hole to the Marconi men on the top deck. Even the thud of the engines seemed ominous, like the pounding of a heart stifled with foreboding. Across the velvety expanse of water, as though they had a secret they were trying to communicate, shore lights winked and twinkled. They seemed to be signaling the information that, no matter how long the search was maintained, Prince Rogovich would not be found that night.