But, but, but. Plans didn’t always go perfectly. It was a mistake to get in the habit of thinking of Jones as a superman. Perhaps he’d run short of fuel. Perhaps something had gone wrong en route and forced them to truncate the journey. Both hypotheses were sound. But both brought the NAG into the realm of free-form speculation. Every clever analyst in the CIA and MI6 could probably spend the next year dreaming up scenarios along such lines, none of which could be disproved, all of which were, therefore, equally worthless.