But the plane crash—there had been no thought of it until after the fact. By the time the crash came into the public eye, the dime was down, and what had happened on that mountain peak had already happened, and all the hopes and prayers offered for the safety of the passengers were, actually, retroactive in the face of the enormous probability that all had perished.
Please, let the dog escape. Tonight.
Let the little girl get well. Soon. Let my long shot come in. Next week.
Let the passengers be alive. Since yesterday.
Somehow the plane crash worried Charley most of all.
THEN, to everyone's surprise, and with no logic whatsoever, the Iranian situation cleared up, just when it began to look as if it might be another Korea.
A few days later Britain announced, proudly that it had weathered its monetary storm, that all was well with the sterling bloc, and London would need no further loans.
It took a while for Charley to tie these two stories up with the plane-girl-Derby-hound-dog sequence. But then he saw that they belonged and that was when he remembered something else that might—well, not tie-in, exactly—but might have something to do with this extraordinary run of impossibilities.
After work, he went down to the Associated Press office and had an office boy haul out the files, stapled books of carboned flimsies—white flimsies for the A wire, blue flimsies for the B wire, yellow for the sports wire and pink for the market wire. He knew what he was looking for hadn't come over either the market or the sports wire, so he passed them up and went through the A and B wire sheets story by story.
He couldn't remember the exact date the story had come over, but he knew it had been since Memorial Day, so he started with the day after Memorial Day and worked forward.