Bethany had cast away her almost tasteless cigarette and was halfway up the ladder again when Bob Jenkins shouted: “I think they’re coming out!”

Five minutes later Dinah’s stretcher had been secured in an inclined position to a pair of first-class seats, her head up, her feet down. The rest of the passengers were gathered in a tight little knot around Brian in the first-class serving area.

As they approached the hose cart sitting off to the left of the unoccupied jetway, Laurel realized she could actually see it. “My God,” she said. “It’s coming daylight again already. How long has it been since it got dark?”

Brian appeared in the forward door of the 767 and motioned Bethany and Rudy to roll the ladder over to him. When they did, he stepped onto the platform at the top and pointed to the overlapping wings. As they rolled him in that direction, he listened to the approaching noise and found himself remembering a movie he had seen on the late show a long time ago. In it, Charlton Heston had owned a big plantation in South America. The plantation had been attacked by a vast moving carpet of soldier ants, ants which ate everything in their path—trees, grass, buildings, cows, men. What had that movie been called? Brian couldn’t remember. He only remembered that Charlton had kept trying increasingly desperate tricks to stop the ants, or at least delay them. Had he beaten them in the end? Brian couldn’t remember, but a fragment of his dream suddenly recurred, disturbing in its lack of association to anything: an ominous red sign which read SHOOTING STARS ONLY.

Alone in first class, Dinah Catherine Bellman opened her eyes.

Dinah lay on the stretcher, watching with her blind eyes as Craig Toomy got to one knee, fell over on his side, then began trying to rise once more. Her heart was suffused with a terrible stern pity for this hurt and broken man, this murdering fish that only wanted to explode. On his ruined, bloody face she saw a terrible mixture of emotions: fear, hope, and a kind of merciless determination.

Once the longer of the two hoses was looped under the belly of the 767 and attached to its fuel port, Brian returned to the cockpit, cycled up the APUs, and went to work sucking the 727-400’s fuel tanks dry. As he watched the LED readout on his right tank slowly climb toward 24,000 pounds, he waited tensely for the APUs to start chugging and lugging, trying to eat fuel which would not burn.

Craig finally managed to stand upright. The glowing girl now stood with her feet just above the luggage conveyor belt. She looked at him with a supernatural sweetness and something else ... something he had longed for his whole life. What was it?

They were all back on the plane now, all except Bob and Albert, who were sitting on the stairs and listening to the sound roll toward them in a slow, broken wave.

Craig reached the conveyor belt and fell onto it. A white sheet of agony ripped through his head, his neck, his chest. He tried to remember what had happened to him and couldn’t. He had run down the stalled escalator, he had hidden in a little room, he had sat tearing strips of paper in the dark ... and that was where memory stopped.

To the east of the airport, a large cracking, rending sound filled the freakish morning. Bob and Albert got to their feet, faces pallid and filled with dreadful questions.

“I don’t like to tease, Brian, but how much longer?” Nick’s voice was taut. “There’s a river about four miles east of here—I saw it when we were coming down—and I reckon whatever’s coming is just now on the other side of it.”

Craig crawled slowly through the rubber strips, feeling them slide down his back like limp fingers. He emerged in the white, dead light of a new—and vastly shortened—day. The sound was terrible, overwhelming, the sound of an invading cannibal army. Even the sky seemed to shake with it, and for a moment fear froze him in place.

Dinah had been left alone in first class. Her breathing had become very labored now, and her voice was a strangled choke.

Craig tumbled off the conveyor, struck the concrete with a bone-rattling thump, and flailed to his feet. The pain no longer mattered. The angel had brought them! Of course she had brought them! Angels were like the ghosts in that story about Mr. Scrooge—they could do anything they wanted! The corona around her had begun to dim and she was fading out, but it didn’t matter. She had brought his salvation: a net in which he was finally, blessedly caught.

The LED readout for the left tank began to slow down when it reached 21,000 pounds, and by the time it topped 22,000 it had almost stopped. Brian understood what was happening and quickly flicked two switches, shutting down the hydraulic pumps. The 727-400 had given them what she had to give: a little over 46,000 pounds of jet-fuel. It would have to be enough.

“So you see,” Craig said, approaching the empty chair at the head of the table and standing before the men seated around it, “the brokers with whom I did business were not only unscrupulous ; many of them were actually CIA plants whose job it was to contact and fake out just such bankers as myself—men looking to fill up skinny portfolios in a hurry. As far as they are concerned, the end—keeping communism out of South America—justifies any available means.”

Brian could see them, but could not understand what it was he was seeing. In some strange way they seemed to defy seeing, and he sensed his frantic, overstressed mind trying to change the incoming information, to make the shapes which had begun to appear at the east end of Runway 21 into something it could understand.

You can’t get away from them, his father had said, because of their legs. Their fast little legs.

Scores of the black things had now appeared, and Laurel understood that soon there would be hundreds, thousands, millions, billions. Even with the jet engines screaming through the open forward door as Brian pulled the 767 away from the ladder and the wing of the Delta jet, she could hear their yammering, inhuman cry.

In the cockpit, Brian powered up as fast as he dared, and sent the 767 charging along the taxiway at a suicidal rate of speed. The eastern edge of the airport was now black with the invading balls; the end of Runway 21 had completely disappeared and the world beyond it was going. In that direction the white, unmoving sky now arched down over a world of scrawled black lines and fallen trees.

Overhead compartments burst open when the 767 swerved onto the runway, spraying carry-on luggage across the main cabin in a deadly hail. Bethany, who hadn’t had time to fasten her seatbelt, was hurled into Albert Kaussner’s lap. Albert noticed neither his lapful of warm girl nor the attaché case that caromed off the curved wall three feet in front of his nose. He saw only the dark, speeding shapes rushing across Runway 21 to the left of them, and the glistening dark tracks they left behind. These tracks converged in a giant well of blackness where the luggage-unloading area had been.

Brian saw two of the balls zip across the runway ahead of him, peeling back the surface of reality in a pair of parallel tracks which gleamed like polished ebony. It was too late to stop. The 767 shuddered like a dog with a chill as it raced over the empty places, but he was able to hold it on the runway. He shoved his throttles forward, burying them, and watched his ground-speed indicator rise toward the commit point.

Leaning over Laurel to look out the window, Nick saw the Bangor International terminal sliced, diced, chopped, and channelled. It tottered in its various jigsaw pieces and then began to tumble into loony chasms of darkness.

In the main cabin, a black-bearded man with bloodshot eyes staggered forward, blinking owlishly at his fellow travellers. “Are we almost in Boston yet?” he inquired at large. “I hope so, because I want to go back to bed. I’ve got one bastard of a headache.”