Jerry Oltion is the most prolific writer of short stories in the history of Analog Magazine. No one even comes close. And he still regularly publishes stories there.

This really short, short story shows that Jerry can make masterful fun of the most amazing things. Because, you just never know.

Besides continuing his regular science fiction writing, Jerry is also a major amateur astronomer and does a regular column for Sky and Telescope.

From her window seat, Maria watched the man in the aisle seat fidget with his shoes. The airplane hadn’t even taken off yet and already he was loosening them, making ready to remove them. To ignite, perhaps, and blow up the plane? Or simply to take them off during the long flight? He would bear watching.

In the middle seat, beside Maria, sat a man who had shaven off his beard just today. His skin was brown and swarthy, but not quite so swarthy around his chin and lower cheeks. That part hadn’t seen sunlight in a long while. Muslim, perhaps? Shaving to look like a Westerner so he would draw less suspicion? Or was he just a normally bearded man flying home to attend a wedding or a funeral? Perhaps he would reveal more clues in time.

The woman in the seat across the aisle from the shoe bomber carried an oversized handbag bulging with secrets. Some of the lumps looked like the ends of bottles. Much larger bottles than the regulation 100ml or less. Hypergolic liquids that would explode on contact if she crushed two bottles together? Or merely water bottles that she had bought after passing through security? Maria would have to keep an eye on that bag, and anything that came out of it.

Maria strained to look beyond the woman, but the person in the middle seat was hidden and all she could see of the man in the window seat was a white turban wrapped around his head. Turbans were never good on an airplane. You could hide anything in there, from plastic explosives to knives to biological agents. TSA inspectors knew that, but nobody wanted to fish around in someone else’s hair so they often let them go if they didn’t set off the metal detector. One thing was certain: anyone wearing a turban in public these days was a religious fanatic, and religious fanatics were not to be trusted.

Nobody was to be trusted, really. Maria had had that drilled into her again and again for the last couple of decades. Suspect everyone, fear everyone, fear everything. We are under attack, at all times, from all sides. Even a little old lady traveling alone with her knitting could have sharpened the needle points to make them lethal weapons. She could have brought poisoned brownies in her bag to take out shoe bombers and beard shavers and hypergolic liquid smugglers before they could act. She could have a gun barrel disguised as a piccolo, the frame disguised as an ornate hair ornament, and ammunition in a pill bottle marked “For emergency use only—do not expose to air.” A little old lady could get away with that.

She wished she could see the other passengers better. The high seat backs prevented her from viewing the people in the row in front of her, but with four potential assassins and an unknown in her own row, the odds were high that more than one of them were plotting something, too. And in the seats ahead of them, and ahead of them. Not to mention the people sitting in the back. Bombers loved the back seats. They could blow off the entire tail of the airplane from there.

It was a wonder that any airplanes made it anywhere, given the type of people they allowed on board. Not to mention the luggage. Good lord, the luggage. You could pack practically anything in there. You didn’t even need to make a bomb powerful enough to blow up the airplane; something to start a fire would be good enough. A couple of lithium-ion batteries set to short out near a pile of underwear made of guncotton, for instance. Anybody could turn regular cotton into guncotton with the right combination of acid baths. Even a little old lady could do it. She could pack it around a cell phone that would set it off when she dialed its number on the other cell phone she carried in her pocket. It would be a last-ditch thing, of course, taking the little old lady down with the airplane, but if it took out a planeload of would-be terrorists, then the sacrifice would be worth it. If every little old lady who flew was prepared to make that kind of sacrifice, the world would run out of terrorists pretty quickly.

A flight attendant worked her way down the aisle, checking to make sure everyone’s seat belts were buckled for takeoff. Maria buckled hers, but left the straps loose. You never knew when you might have to act quickly.