No bugs, Albert thought, but wait till you see the balls. You’re going to love those.

“Buckle yourself in, mate,” Nick said, “and shut u—”

He broke off, staring down incredulously at the airport ... or where the airport had been. The main buildings were gone, and the National Guard base at the west end was going. Flight 29 overflew a growing abyss of darkness, an eternal cistern that seemed to have no end.

“Oh dear Jesus, Nick,” Laurel said unsteadily, and suddenly put her hands over her eyes.

As they overflew Runway 33 at 1,500 feet, Nick saw sixty or a hundred parallel lines racing up the concrete, cutting the runway into long strips that sank into emptiness. The strips reminded him of Craig Toomy:

On the other side of the aisle, Bethany pulled down the windowshade beside Albert’s seat with a bang.

“Don’t you dare open that!” she told him in a scolding, hysterical voice.

“Don’t worry,” Albert said, and suddenly remembered that he had left his violin down there. Well . . . it was undoubtedly gone now. He abruptly put his hands over his own face.

This is what it must be like to fly in outer space, he thought, and he felt his rationality slip a cog, as it had on the trip east. He held onto himself desperately and made himself concentrate on flying the plane.

He brought them up quickly, wanting to be in the clouds, wanting that hellish vision to be blotted out. Then Flight 29 was pointed west again. In the moments before they entered the clouds, he saw the hills and woods and lakes which stretched to the west of the city, saw them being cut ruthlessly apart by thousands of black spiderweb lines. He saw huge swatches of reality go sliding soundlessly into the growing mouth of the abyss, and Brian did something he had never done before while in the cockpit of an airplane.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were in the clouds.

“We’re up,” he said simply. “You all know what happens now: we go back exactly the way we came, and hope that whatever doorway we came through is still there. If it is, we’ll try going through.”

He paused for a moment, then resumed.

“Our return flight is going to take somewhere between four and a half and six hours. I’d like to be more exact, but I can’t. Under ordinary circumstances, the flight west usually takes longer than the flight east, because of prevailing wind conditions, but so far as I can tell from my cockpit instruments, there is no wind.” Brian paused for a moment and then added, “There’s nothing moving up here but us.” For a moment the intercom stayed on, as if Brian meant to add something else, and then it clicked off.

Albert looked at him for a moment and then said, “I don’t think you want to know.”

“Am I in the hospital again?” The man with the black beard blinked at Albert fearfully, and Albert felt sudden sympathy for him.

“Well, why don’t you believe you are, if it will help?”

The man with the black beard continued to stare at him for a moment in dreadful fascination and then announced, “I’m going back to sleep. Right now.” He reclined his seat and closed his eyes. In less than a minute his chest was moving up and down with deep regularity and he was snoring under his breath.

Albert envied him.

Laurel shook her head and pointed across the aisle at Dinah. “I’ll stay with her.”

“There’s nothing you can do, you know,” Nick said. “It’s in God’s hands now, I’m afraid.”

“I do know that,” she said, “but I want to stay.”

“All right, Laurel.” He brushed at her hair gently with the palm of his hand. “It’s such a pretty name. You deserve it.”

She glanced up at him and smiled. “Thank you.”

“We have a dinner date—you haven’t forgotten, have you?”

“No,” she said, still smiling. “I haven’t and I won’t.”

He bent down and brushed a kiss lightly across her mouth. “Good, he said. ”Neither will I.”

He went forward and she pressed her fingers lightly against her mouth, as if to hold his kiss there, where it belonged. Dinner with Nick Hopewett—a dark, mysterious stranger. Maybe with candles and a good bottle of wine. More kisses afterward—real kisses. It all seemed like something which might happen in one of the Harlequin romances she sometimes read. So what? They were pleasant stories, full of sweet and harmless dreams. It didn’t hurt to dream a little, did it?

Of course not. But why did she feel the dream was so unlikely to come true?

She unbuckled her own seatbelt, crossed the aisle, and put her hand on the girl’s forehead. The hectic heat she had felt before was gone; Dinah’s skin was now waxy-cool.

I think she’s going, Rudy had said shortly before they started their headlong take-off charge. Now the words recurred to Laurel and rang in her head with sickening validity. Dinah was taking air in shallow sips, her chest barely rising and falling beneath the strap which cinched the tablecloth pad tight over her wound.

Laurel brushed the girl’s hair off her forehead with infinite tenderness and thought of that strange moment in the restaurant, when Dinah had reached out and grasped the cuff of Nick’s jeans. Don’t you kill him . . . we need him.

She thought that perhaps something like that had happened ... and reflected that, if it was true, this little girl, blind and badly wounded, had made a dreadful decision inside her darkness.

She leaned forward and kissed each of Dinah’s cool, closed lids. “Hold on,” she whispered. “Please hold on, Dinah.”

Albert looked at her seriously and kindly. “You know the answer to that, Bethany.”

“You can call me Beth, if you want.”

“Okay.”

She fumbled out her cigarettes, looked up at the NO SMOKING light, and put them away again. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. We crash. End of story. And do you know what?”

He shook his head, smiling a little.

“If we can’t find that hole again, I hope Captain Engle won’t even try to land the plane. I hope he just picks out a nice high mountain and crashes us into the top of it. Did you see what happened to that crazy guy? I don’t want that to happen to me.”

She shuddered, and Albert put an arm around her. She looked up at him frankly. “Would you like to kiss me?”

“Yes,” Albert said.

“Well, you better go ahead, then. The later it gets, the later it gets.”

Albert went ahead. It was only the third time in his life that the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi had kissed a girl, and it was great. He could spend the whole trip back in a lip-lock with this girl and never worry about a thing.

“Thank you,” she said, and put her head on his shoulder. “I needed that.”

“Well, if you need it again, just ask,” Albert said.

She looked up at him, amused. “Do you need me to ask, Albert?”

“I reckon not,” drawled The Arizona Jew, and went back to work.

“Do you think there could be any of those things up here?”

Bob thought it over for a moment. “Judging from what we saw back at Bangor, I would think not. But it’s hard to tell, isn’t it? In a thing like this, all bets are off.”

“Yes. I suppose so. All bets are off.” Nick thought this over for a moment. “What about this time-rip of yours? Would you like to give odds on us finding it again?”

Bob Jenkins slowly shook his head.

Rudy Warwick spoke up from behind them, startling them both. “You didn’t ask me, but I’ll give you my opinion just the same. I put them at one in a thousand.”

Nick thought this over. After a moment a rare, radiant smile burst across his face. “Not bad odds at all,” he said. “Not when you consider the alternative.”

No garden walls up here, but he could see the first ice-chip stars gleaming in the firmament. There was something reassuring and calming about the old constellations appearing, one by one, in their old places. He did not know how they could be the same when so many other things were so badly out of joint, but he was very glad they were.

“It’s going faster, isn’t it?” Nick said from behind him.

Brian turned in his seat to face him. “Yes. It is. After awhile the ‘days’ and ‛nights’ will be passing as fast as a camera shutter can click, I think.”

Nick sighed. “And now we do the hardest thing of all, don’t we? We wait to see what happens. And pray a little bit, I suppose.”

“It couldn’t hurt.” Brian took a long, measuring look at Nick Hopewell. “I was on my way to Boston because my ex-wife died in a stupid fire. Dinah was going because a bunch of doctors promised her a new pair of eyes. Bob was going to a convention, Albert to music school, Laurel on vacation. Why were you going to Boston, Nick? ’Fess up. The hour groweth late.”

Nick looked at him thoughtfully for a long time and then laughed. “Well, why not?” he asked, but Brian was not so foolish as to believe this question was directed at him. “What does a Most Secret classification mean when you’ve just seen a bunch of killer fuzzballs rolling up the world like an old rug?”

He laughed again.

“The United States hasn’t exactly cornered the market on dirty tricks and covert operations,” he told Brian. “We Limeys have forgotten more nasty mischief than you johnnies ever knew. We’ve cut capers in India, South Africa, China, and the part of Palestine which became Israel. We certainly got into a pissing contest with the wrong fellows that time, didn’t we? Nevertheless, we British are great believers in cloak and dagger, and the fabled MI5 isn’t where it ends but only where it begins. I spent eighteen years in the armed services, Brian—the last five of them in Special Operations. Since then I’ve done various odd jobs, some innocuous, some fabulously nasty.”

It was full dark outside now, the stars gleaming like spangles on a woman’s formal evening gown.

“I was in Los Angeles—on vacation, actually—when I was contacted and told to fly to Boston. Extremely short notice, this was, and after four days spent backpacking in the San Gabriels, I was falling-down tired. That’s why I happened to be sound asleep when Mr. Jenkins’s Event happened.

“There’s a man in Boston, you see . . . or was . . . or will be (time-travel plays hell on the old verb tenses, doesn’t it?) ... who is a politician of some note. The sort of fellow who moves and shakes with great vigor behind the scenes. This man—I’ll call him Mr. O’Banion, for the sake of conversation—is very rich, Brian, and he is an enthusiastic supporter of the Irish Republican Army. He has channelled millions of dollars into what some like to call Boston’s favorite charity, and there is a good deal of blood on his hands. Not just British soldiers but children in schoolyards, women in laundrettes, and babies blown out of their prams in pieces. He is an idealist of the most dangerous sort: one who never has to view the carnage at first hand, one who has never had to look at a severed leg lying in the gutter and been forced to reconsider his actions in light of that experience.”

“You were supposed to kill this man O’Banion?”

“Not unless I had to,” Nick said calmly. “He’s very wealthy, but that’s not the only problem. He’s the total politician, you see, and he’s got more fingers than the one he uses to stir the pot in Ireland. He has a great many powerful American friends, and some of his friends are our friends . . . that’s the nature of politics; a cat’s cradle woven by men who for the most part belong in rooms with rubber walls. Killing Mr. O’Banion would be a great political risk. But he keeps a little bit of fluff on the side. She was the one I was supposed to kill.”

“As a warning,” Brian said in a low, fascinated voice.

“Yes. As a warning.”

Almost a full minute passed as the two men sat in the cockpit, looking at each other. The only sound was the sleepy drone of the jet engines. Brian’s eyes were shocked and somehow very young. Nick only looked weary.

“If we get out of this,” Brian said at last, “if we get back, will you carry through with it?”

Nick shook his head. He did this slowly, but with great finality. “I believe I’ve had what the Adventist blokes like to call a soul conversion, old mate of mine. No more midnight creeps or extreme-prejudice jobs for Mrs. Hopewell’s boy Nicholas. If we get out of this—a proposition I find rather shaky just now—I believe I’ll retire.”

“And do what?”

Nick looked at him thoughtfully for a moment or two and then said, “Well . . . I suppose I could take flying lessons.”

Brian burst out laughing. After a moment, Mrs. Hopewell’s boy Nicholas joined him.

Laurel looked around and saw that Dinah’s sightless eyes were open.

Yet were they entirely sightless? There was something in them, something just beyond definition, which made Laurel wonder. She felt a sense of unknown awe creep into her, a feeling which almost touched upon fear.

She reached out and gently grasped one of Dinah’s hands. “Don’t try to talk,” she said quietly. “If you’re awake, Dinah, don’t try to talk—just listen. We’re in the air. We’re going back, and you’re going to be all right—I promise you that.”

Dinah’s hand tightened on hers, and after a moment Laurel realized the little girl was tugging her forward. She leaned over the secured stretcher. Dinah spoke in a tiny voice that seemed to Laurel a perfect scale model of her former voice.

“Don’t worry about me, Laurel. I got . . . what I wanted.”

“Dinah, you shouldn’t—”

The unseeing brown eyes moved toward the sound of Laurel’s voice. A little smile touched Dinah’s bloody mouth. “I saw,” that tiny voice, frail as a glass reed, told her. “I saw through Mr. Toomy’s eyes. At the beginning, and then again at the end. It was better at the end. At the start, everything looked mean and nasty to him. It was better at the end.”

Laurel looked at her with helpless wonder.

The girl’s hand let go of Laurel’s and rose waveringly to touch her cheek. “He wasn’t such a bad guy, you know.” She coughed. Small flecks of blood flew from her mouth.

“Please, Dinah,” Laurel said. She had a sudden sensation that she could almost see through the little blind girl, and this brought a feeling of stifling, directionless panic. “Please don’t try to talk anymore.”

Dinah smiled. “I saw you,” she said. “You are beautiful, Laurel. Everything was beautiful . . . even the things that were dead. It was so wonderful to ... you know . . . just to see.”

She drew in one of her tiny sips of air, let it out, and simply didn’t take the next one. Her sightless eyes now seemed to be looking far beyond Laurel Stevenson.

“Please breathe, Dinah,” Laurel said. She took the girl’s hands in hers and began to kiss them repeatedly, as if she could kiss life back into that which was now beyond it. It was not fair for Dinah to die after she had saved them all; no God could demand such a sacrifice, not even for people who had somehow stepped outside of time itself. “Please breathe, please, please, please breathe.”

But Dinah did not breathe. After a long time, Laurel returned the girl’s hands to her lap and looked fixedly into her pale, still face. Laurel waited for her own eyes to fill up with tears, but no tears came. Yet her heart ached with fierce sorrow and her mind beat with its own deep and outraged protest: Oh, no! Oh, not fair! This is not fair! Take it back, God! Take it back, damn you, take it back, you just take it BACK!

But God did not take it back. The jet engines throbbed steadily, the sun shone on the bloody sleeve of Dinah’s good travelling dress in a bright oblong, and God did not take it back. Laurel looked across the aisle and saw Albert and Bethany kissing. Albert was touching one of the girl’s breasts through her tee-shirt, lightly, delicately, almost religiously. They seemed to make a ritual shape, a symbolic representation of life and that stubborn, intangible spark which carries life on in the face of the most dreadful reversals and ludicrous turns of fate. Laurel looked hopefully from them to Dinah . . . and God had not taken it back.

God had not taken it back.

Laurel kissed the still slope of Dinah’s cheek and then raised her hand to the little girl’s face. Her fingers stopped only an inch from her eyelids.

“Yes,” Laurel said. “I can live with that.”

She left Dinah’s eyes open.

A little over three hours into the flight, the clouds below them ceased, and over exactly the same spot where they had begun on the flight east. Brian was willing to bet the front had not moved so much as a single foot. The Great Plains lay below them in a silent roan-colored expanse of land.

“No sign of them over here,” Rudy Warwick said. He did not have to specify what he was talking about.

“No,” Bob Jenkins agreed. “We seem to have outrun them, either in space or in time.”

“Or in both,” Albert put in.

“Yes—or both.”

But they had not. As Flight 29 crossed the Rockies, they began to see the black lines below them again, thin as threads from this height. They shot up and down the rough, slabbed slopes and drew not-quite-meaningless patterns in the blue-gray carpet of trees. Nick stood at the forward door, looking out of the bullet porthole set into it. This porthole had a queer magnifying effect, and he soon discovered he could see better than he really wanted to. As he watched, two of the black lines split, raced around a jagged, snow-tipped peak, met on the far side, crossed, and raced down the other slope in diverging directions. Behind them the entire top of the mountain fell into itself, leaving something which looked like a volcano with a vast dead caldera at its truncated top.

“Jumping Jiminy Jesus,” Nick muttered, and passed a quivering hand over his brow.

As they crossed the Western Slope toward Utah, the dark began to come down again. The setting sun threw an orange-red glare over a fragmented hellscape that none of them could look at for long; one by one, they followed Bethany’s example and pulled their windowshades. Nick went back to his seat on unsteady legs and dropped his forehead into one cold, clutching hand. After a moment or two he turned toward Laurel and she took him wordlessly in her arms.

Brian was forced to look at it. There were no shades in the cockpit.

Western Colorado and eastern Utah fell into the pit of eternity piece by jagged piece below him and ahead of him. Mountains, buttes, mesas, and cols one by one ceased to exist as the crisscrossing langoliers cut them adrift from the rotting fabric of this dead past, cut them loose and sent them tumbling into sunless endless gulfs of forever. There was no sound up here, and somehow that was the most horrible thing of all. The land below them disappeared as silently as dust-motes.

Then darkness came like an act of mercy and for a little while he could concentrate on the stars. He clung to them with the fierceness of panic, the only real things left in this horrible world: Orion the hunter; Pegasus, the great shimmering horse of midnight; Cassiopeia in her starry chair.

The world had been torn from beneath Flight 29.

Bethany’s thought had also crossed Brian’s mind; if push came to shove, if worse came to worst, he had thought, he could put the 767 into a dive and crash them into a mountain, ending it for good and all. But now there were no mountains to crash into.

Now there was no earth to crash into.

But how, exactly, did one do that? How did one refuse to think about nothing?

He turned deliberately back to his sheet of calculations. He worked on them, referring frequently to the INS readout, until the light had begun to fade out of the sky again. He now put the elapsed time between sunrise and sunset at about twenty-eight minutes.

He reached for the switch that controlled the cabin intercom and opened the circuit.

“Nick? Can you come up front?”

Nick appeared in the cockpit doorway less than thirty seconds later.

“Have they got their shades pulled back there?” Brian asked him before he could come all the way in.

“You better believe it,” Nick said.

“Very wise of them. I’m going to ask you not to look down yet, if you can help it. I’ll want you to look out in a few minutes, and once you look out I don’t suppose you’ll be able to help looking down, but I advise you to put it off as long as possible. It’s not . . . very nice.”

“Gone, is it?”

“Yes. Everything.”

“The little girl is gone, too. Dinah. Laurel was with her at the end. She’s taking it very well. She liked that girl. So did I.”

Brian nodded. He was not surprised—the girl’s wound was the sort that demanded immediate treatment in an emergency room, and even then the prognosis would undoubtedly be cloudy—but it still rolled a stone against his heart. He had also liked Dinah, and he believed what Laurel believed—that the girl was somehow more responsible for their continued survival than anyone else. She had done something to Mr. Toomy, had used him in some strange way . . . and Brian had an idea that, somewhere inside, Toomy would not have minded being used in such a fashion. So, if her death was an omen, it was one of the worst sort.

“She never got her operation,” he said.

“No. ”

“But Laurel is okay?”

“More or less.”

“You like her, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Nick said. “I have mates who would laugh at that, but I do like her. She’s a bit dewy-eyed, but she’s got grit.”

Brian nodded. “Well, if we get back, I wish you the best of luck.”

“Thanks.” Nick sat down in the co-pilot’s seat again. “I’ve been thinking about the question you asked me before. About what I’ll do when and if we get out of this mess . . . besides taking the lovely Laurel to dinner, that is. I suppose I might end up going after Mr. O’Banion after all. As I see it, he’s not all that much different from our friend Toomy.”

“Dinah asked you to spare Mr. Toomy,” Brian pointed out. “Maybe that’s something you should add into the equation.”

Nick nodded. He did this as if his head had grown too heavy for his neck. “Maybe it is.”

“Listen, Nick. I called you up front because if Bob’s time-rip actually exists, we’ve got to be getting close to the place where we went through it. We’re going to man the crow’s nest together, you and I. You take the starboard side and right center; I’ll take port and left center. If you see anything that looks like a time-rip, sing out.”

Nick gazed at Brian with wide, innocent eyes. “Are we looking for a thingumabob-type time-rip, or do you think it’ll be one of the more or less fuckadelic variety, mate?”

“Very funny.” Brian felt a grin touch his lips in spite of himself. “I don’t have the slightest idea what it’s going to look like or even if we’ll be able to see it at all. If we can’t, we’re going to be in a hell of a jam if it’s drifted to one side, or if its altitude has changed. Finding a needle in a haystack would be child’s play in comparison.”

“What about radar?”

Brian pointed to the RCA/TL color radar monitor. “Nothing, as you can see. But that’s not surprising. If the original crew had acquired the damned thing on radar, they never would have gone through it in the first place.”

“They wouldn’t have gone through it if they’d seen it, either,” Nick pointed out gloomily.

“That’s not necessarily true. They might have seen it too late to avoid it. Jetliners move fast, and airplane crews don’t spend the entire flight searching the sky for bogies. They don’t have to; that’s what ground control is for. Thirty or thirty-five minutes into the flight, the crew’s major outbound tasks are completed. The bird is up, it’s out of L.A. airspace, the anti-collision honker is on and beeping every ninety seconds to show it’s working. The INS is all programmed—that happens before the bird ever leaves the ground—and it is telling the autopilot just what to do. From the look of the cockpit, the pilot and co-pilot were on their coffee break. They could have been sitting here, facing each other, talking about the last movie they saw or how much they dropped at Hollywood Park. If there had been a flight attendant up front just before The Event took place, there would at least have been one more set of eyes, but we know there wasn’t. The male crew had their coffee and Danish; the flight attendants were getting ready to serve drinks to the passengers when it happened.”

“That’s an extremely detailed scenario,” Nick said. “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”

“At this point, I’ll settle for convincing anyone at all.”

Nick smiled and stepped to the starboard cockpit window. His eyes dropped involuntarily downward, toward the place where the ground belonged, and his smile first froze, then dropped off his face. His knees buckled, and he gripped the bulkhead with one hand to steady himself.

“Shit on toast,” he said in a tiny dismayed voice.

“Not very nice, is it?”

Nick looked around at Brian. His eyes seemed to float in his pallid face. “All my life,” he said, “I’ve thought of Australia when I heard people talk about the great bugger-all, but it’s not. That’s the great bugger-all, right down there.”

Brian checked the INS and the charts again, quickly. He had made a small red circle on one of the charts; they were now on the verge of entering the airspace that circle represented. “Can you do what I asked? If you can‘t, say so. Pride is a luxury we can’t—”

“Of course I can,” Nick murmured. He had torn his eyes away from the huge black socket below the plane and was scanning the sky. “I only wish I knew what I was looking for.”

“I think you’ll know it when you see it,” Brian said. He paused and then added, “If you see it.”

Something was wrong.

He did not know what it was, but something was wrong. Something was out of place . . . or lost . . . or forgotten. Either a mistake had been made or was going to be made. The feeling nagged at him like some pain not quite localized enough to be identified. That sense of wrongness would almost crystallize into a thought . . . and then it would skitter away again like some small, not-quite-tame animal.

Something wrong.

Or out of place. Or lost.

Or forgotten.

Ahead of him, Albert and Bethany were spooning contentedly. Behind him, Rudy Warwick was sitting with his eyes closed and his lips moving. The beads of a rosary were clamped in one fist. Across the aisle, Laurel Stevenson sat beside Dinah, holding one of her hands and stroking it gently.

Bob eased up the shade beside his seat, peeked out, and slammed it down again. Looking at that would not aid rational thought but erase it. What lay below the plane was utter madness.

Warn them of what?

Again it almost came into the light of his focussed thoughts, then slipped away, becoming just a shadow among shadows . . . but one with shiny feral eyes.

He abruptly unbuckled his seatbelt and stood up.

Albert looked around. “Where are you going?”

“Cleveland,” Bob said grumpily, and began to walk down the aisle toward the tail of the aircraft, still trying to track the source of that interior alarm bell.

“Brian?” Nick’s voice was unsteady. “Brian? I think I see something.”

Yes? Was that really so, or was it only his overworked mind nagging fiercely over nothing? The mental equivalent of a tired muscle which will not stop twitching?

Bob Jenkins came to a dead stop, his eyes widening. They fixed on a portside seat near the front of the cabin. In it, the man with the black beard was out cold again, snoring lustily. Inside Bob’s head, the shy animal at last began to creep fearfully into the light. Only it wasn’t small, as he had thought. That had been his mistake. Sometimes you couldn’t see things because they were too small, but sometimes you ignored things because they were too big, too obvious.

The sleeping man.

He opened his mouth and tried to scream, but no sound came out. His throat was locked. Terror sat on his chest like an ape. He tried again to scream and managed no more than a breathless squeak.

Sleeping madonna, sleeping man.

Bob opened his mouth once more, tried once more to scream, and once more nothing came out.

The time-rip lay about ninety miles ahead, off to the starboard side of the 767’s nose by no more than seven or eight degrees. If it had drifted, it had not drifted much; Brian’s guess was that the slight differential was the result of a minor navigational error.

It was a lozenge-shaped hole in reality, but not a black void. It cycled with a dim pink-purple light, like the aurora borealis. Brian could see the stars beyond it, but they were also rippling. A wide white ribbon of vapor was slowly streaming either into or out of the shape which hung in the sky. It looked like some strange, ethereal highway.

“We’re in business!” he said, laughed idiotically, and shook his clenched fists in the air.

“It must be two miles across,” Nick whispered. “My God, Brian, how many other planes do you suppose went through?”

“I don’t know,” Brian said, “but I’ll bet you my gun and dog that we’re the only one with a shot at getting back.”

He opened the intercom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve found what we were looking for.” His voice crackled with triumph and relief. “I don’t know exactly what happens next, or how, or why, but we have sighted what appears to be an extremely large trapdoor in the sky. I’m going to take us straight through the middle of it. We’ll find out what’s on the other side together. Right now I’d like you all to fasten your seatbelts and—”

That was when Bob Jenkins came pelting madly up the aisle, screaming at the top of his lungs. “No! No! We’ll all die if you go into it! Turn back! You’ve got to turn back!”

Brian swung around in his seat and exchanged a puzzled look with Nick.

Nick unbuckled his belt and stood up. “That’s Bob Jenkins,” he said. “Sounds like he’s worked himself up to a good set of nerves. Carry on, Brian. I’ll handle him.”

“Okay,” Brian said. “Just keep him away from me. I’d hate to have him grab me at the wrong second and send us into the edge of that thing.”

He turned off the autopilot and took control of the 767 himself. The floor tilted gently to the right as he banked toward the long, glowing slot ahead of them. It seemed to slide across the sky until it was centered in front of the 767’s nose. Now he could hear a sound mixing with the drone of the jet engines—a deep throbbing noise, like a huge diesel idling. As they approached the river of vapor—it was flowing into the hole, he now saw, not out of it—he began to pick up flashes of color travelling within it: green, blue, violet, red, candy pink. It’s the first real color I’ve seen in this world, he thought.

Behind him, Bob Jenkins sprinted through the first-class section, up the narrow aisle which led to the service area . . . and right into Nick’s waiting arms.

“Easy, mate,” Nick soothed. “Everything’s going to be all right now.”

“No!” Bob struggled wildly, but Nick held him as easily as a man might hold a struggling kitten. “No, you don’t understand! He’s got to turn back! He’s got to turn back before it’s too late!”

Nick pulled the writer away from the cockpit door and back into first class. “We’ll just sit down here and belt up tight, shall we?” he said in that same soothing, chummy voice. “It may be a trifle bumpy.”

To Brian, Nick’s voice was only a faint blur of sound. As he entered the wide flow of vapor streaming into the time-rip, he felt a large and immensely powerful hand seize the plane, dragging it eagerly forward. He found himself thinking of the leak on the flight from Tokyo to L.A., and of how fast air rushed out of a hole in a pressurized environment.

It’s as if this whole world—or what is left of it—is leaking through that hole, he thought, and then that queer and ominous phrase from his dream recurred again: SHOOTING STARS

ONLY.

The rip lay dead ahead of the 767’s nose now, growing rapidly.

We’re going in, he thought. God help us, we’re really going in.

“We’re really going to be all right, matey,” Nick said. He finally managed to click Bob’s seatbelt shut. “We were when we came through, weren’t we?”

“We were all asleep when we came through, you damned fool!” Bob shrieked into his face. “Don’t you understand? WE WERE ASLEEP! You’ve got to stop him!”

Nick froze in the act of reaching for his own belt. What Bob was saying—what he had been trying to say all along—suddenly struck him like a dropped load of bricks.

“Oh dear God,” he whispered. “Dear God, what were we thinking of?”

He leaped out of his seat and dashed for the cockpit.

“Brian, stop! Turn back! Turn back!”

Did Nick have a reason for what he was saying, or had Bob’s panic been infectious? There was no time to make a decision on any rational basis; only a split-second to consult the silent tickings of instinct.

Brain Engle grabbed the steering yoke and hauled it hard over to port.

Now there was turbulence; Flight 29 became a surfboard with wings, rocking and twisting and thumping through the unsteady air. Brian’s hands were momentarily thrown off the yoke and then he grabbed it again. At the same time he opened the throttle all the way to the stop and the plane’s turbos responded with a deep snarl of power rarely heard outside of the airline’s diagnostic hangars. The turbulence increased; the plane slammed viciously up and down, and from somewhere came the deadly shriek of overstressed metal.

In first class, Bob Jenkins clutched at the arms of his seat, numbly grateful that the Englishman had managed to belt him in. He felt as if he had been strapped to some madman’s jet-powered pogo stick. The plane took another great leap, rocked up almost to the vertical on its portside wing, and his false teeth shot from his mouth.

He didn’t know. He only knew that the world was a thumping, bucking nightmare . . . but he was still in it.

For the time being, at least, he was still in it.

He continued to bank the plane, but at a less drastic angle. “Nick!” he shouted without turning around. “Nick, are you all right?”

Nick got slowly to his feet, holding his right arm against his belly with his left hand. His face was very white and his teeth were set in a grimace of pain. Small trickles of blood ran from his nostrils. “I’ve been better, mate. Broke my arm, I think. Not the first time for this poor old fellow, either. We missed it, didn’t we?”

“We missed it,” Brian agreed. He continued to bring the plane back in a big, slow circle. “And in just a minute you’re going to tell me why we missed it, when we came all this way to find it. And it better be good, broken arm or no broken arm.”

He reached for the intercom toggle.

“This is Captain Engle, folks. I’m sorry about that. It was pretty damned hairy, but we’re okay; I’ve got a green board. Let me repeat that we’ve found what we were looking for, but—”

He clicked off suddenly.

The others waited. Bethany Simms was sobbing against Albert’s chest. Behind them, Rudy was still saying his rosary.

“What the hell is this all about?” Brian asked Bob sternly. “A little more turbulence and this bitch would have broken into about ten thousand pieces.”

“Can I talk through that thing?” Bob asked, pointing to the switch marked INTERCOM.

“Yes, but—”

“Then let me do it.”

Brian started to protest, then thought better of it. He flicked the switch. “Go ahead; you’re on.” Then he repeated: “And it better be good.”

“Listen to me, all of you!” Bob shouted.

From behind them came a protesting whine of feedback. “We—”

“Just talk in your normal tone of voice,” Brian said. “You’ll blow their goddam eardrums out.”

Bob made a visible effort to compose himself, then went on in a lower tone of voice. “We had to turn back, and we did. The captain has made it clear to me that we only just managed to do it. We have been extremely lucky . . . and extremely stupid, as well. We forgot the most elementary thing, you see, although it was right in front of us all the time. When we went through the time-rip in the first place, everyone on the plane who was awake disappeared.”

Brian jerked in his seat. He felt as if someone had slugged him. Ahead of the 767’s nose, about thirty miles distant, the faintly glowing lozenge shape had appeared again in the sky, looking like some gigantic semi-precious stone. It seemed to mock him.

“We are all awake,” Bob said. (In the main cabin, Albert looked at the man with the black beard lying out cold in the aisle and thought, With one exception.) “Logic suggests that if we try to go through that way, we will disappear.” He thought about this and then said, “That is all.”

Brian flicked the intercom link closed without thinking about it. Behind him, Nick voiced a painful, incredulous laugh.

“That is all? That is bloody all? What do we do about it?”

Brian looked at him and didn’t answer. Neither did Bob Jenkins.

“I don’t know.” He looked hopefully across the aisle at Laurel. She was already shaking her head. She wished she could go to sleep, just go to sleep and make this whole crazy nightmare gone—but, like Bethany, she had never felt less like it in her entire life.

A line from some rock-and-roll song popped into Brian’s head: You can look but you better not touch. He glanced down at the LED fuel indicators. What he saw there didn’t ease his mind any, and he raised his eyes helplessly to Nick’s. Like the others, he had never felt so wide awake in his life.

“I don’t know what we do now,” he said, “but if we’re going to try that hole, it has to be soon. The fuel we’ve got will carry us for an hour, maybe a little more. After that, forget it. Got any ideas?”

Nick lowered his head, still cradling his swelling arm. After a moment or two he looked up again. “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I do. People who fly rarely stick their prescription medicine in their checked baggage—they like to have it with them in case their luggage ends up on the other side of the world and takes a few days to get back to them. If we go through the hand-carry bags, we’re sure to find scads of sedatives. We won’t even have to take the bags out of the bins. Judging from the sounds, most of them are already lying on the floor . . . what? What’s the matter with it?”

This last was directed at Bob Jenkins, who had begun shaking his head as soon as the phrase “prescription medicines” popped out of Nick’s mouth.

“Do you know anything about prescription sedatives?” he asked Nick.

“A little,” Nick said, but he sounded defensive. “A little, yeah.”

“Well, I know a lot,” Bob said dryly. “I’ve researched them exhaustively—from All-Nite to Xanax. Murder by sleeping potion has always been a great favorite in my field, you understand. Even if you happened to find one of the more potent medications in the very first bag you checked—unlikely in itself—you couldn’t administer a safe dose which would act quickly enough.”

“Why bloody not?”

“Because it would take at least forty minutes for the stuff to work . . . and I strongly doubt it would work on everyone. The natural reaction of minds under stress to such medication is to fight—to try to refuse it. There is absolutely no way to combat such a reaction, Nick . . . you might as well try to legislate your own heartbeat. What you’d do, always supposing you found a supply of medication large enough to allow it, would be to administer a series of lethal overdoses and turn the plane into Jonestown. We might all come through, but we’d be dead.”

“Forty minutes,” Nick said. “Christ. Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”

“Yes,” Bob said unflinchingly.

Brian looked out at the glowing lozenge shape in the sky. He had put Flight 29 into a circling pattern and the rip was on the verge of disappearing again. It would be back shortly . . . but they would be no closer to it.

“I can’t believe it,” Nick said heavily. “To go through the things we’ve gone through . . . to have taken off successfully and come all this way ... to have actually found the bloody thing ... and then we find out we can’t go through it and back to our own time just because we can’t go to sleep?”

“We don’t have forty minutes, anyway,” Brian said quietly. “If we waited that long, this plane would crash sixty miles east of the airport.”

“Surely there are other fields—”

“There are, but none big enough to handle an airplane of this size.”

“If we went through and then turned back east again?”

“Vegas. But Vegas is going to be out of reach in ...” Brian glanced at his instruments. “. . . less than eight minutes. I think it has to be LAX. I’ll need at least thirty-five minutes to get there. That’s cutting it extremely fine even if they clear everything out of our way and vector us straight in. That gives us ...” He looked at the chronometer again. “... twenty minutes at most to figure this thing out and get through the hole.”

Bob was looking thoughtfully at Nick. “What about you?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what about me?”

“I think you’re a soldier ... but I don’t think you’re an ordinary one. Might you be SAS, perhaps?”

Nick’s face tightened. “And if I was that or something like it, mate?”

“Maybe you could put us to sleep,” Bob said. “Don’t they teach you Special Forces men tricks like that?”

Brian’s mind flashed back to Nick’s first confrontation with Craig Toomy. Have you ever watched Star Trek? he had asked Craig. Marvellous American program . . . And if you don’t shut your gob at once, you bloody idiot, I’ll be happy to demonstrate Mr. Spock’s famous Vulcan sleeper-hold for you.

“What about it, Nick?” he said softly. “If we ever needed the famous Vulcan sleeper-hold, it’s now.”

Nick looked unbelievingly from Bob to Brian and then back to Bob again. “Please don’t make me laugh, gents—it makes my arm hurt worse.”

“What does that mean?” Bob asked.

“I’ve got my sedatives all wrong, have I? Well, let me tell you both that you’ve got it all wrong about me. I am not James Bond. There never was a James Bond in the real world. I suppose I might be able to kill you with a neck-chop, Bob, but I’d more likely just leave you paralyzed for life. Might not even knock you out. And then there’s this.” Nick held up his rapidly swelling right arm with a little wince. “My smart hand happens to be attached to my recently re-broken arm. I could perhaps defend myself with my left hand—against an unschooled opponent—but the kind of thing you’re talking about? No. No way.”

“You’re all forgetting the most important thing of all,” a new voice said.

They turned. Laurel Stevenson, white and haggard, was standing in the cockpit door. She had folded her arms across her breasts as if she was cold and was cupping her elbows in her hands.

“If we’re all knocked out, who is going to fly the plane?” she asked. “Who is going to fly the plane into L.A.?”

The three men gaped at her wordlessly. Behind them, unnoticed, the large semi-precious stone that was the time-rip glided into view again.

“We’re fucked,” Nick said quietly. “Do you know that? We are absolutely dead-out fucked.” He laughed a little, then winced as his stomach jogged his broken arm.

“Maybe not,” Albert said. He and Bethany had appeared behind Laurel; Albert had his arm around the girl’s waist. His hair was plastered against his forehead in sweaty ringlets, but his dark eyes were clear and intent. They were focussed on Brian. “I think you can put us to sleep,” he said, “and I think you can land us.”

“What are you talking about?” Brian asked roughly.

Albert replied: “Pressure. I’m talking about pressure.”

Pressure.

“What does he mean, Brian?” Nick asked. “I can see he’s got something—your face says so. What is it?”

Brian ignored him. He looked steadily at the seventeen-year-old music student who might just have thought of a way out of the box they were in.

“What about after?” he asked. “What about after we come through? How do I wake up again so I can land the plane?”

“Will somebody please explain this?” Laurel pleaded. She had gone to Nick, who put his good arm around her waist.

“Albert is suggesting that I use this”—Brian tapped a rheostat on the control board, a rheostat marked CABIN PRESSURE—“ to knock us all out cold.”

“Can you do that, mate? Can you really do that?”

“Yes,” Brian said. “I’ve known pilots—charter pilots ... who have done it, when passengers who’ve had too much to drink started cutting up and endangering either themselves or the crew. Knocking out a drunk by lowering the air pressure isn’t that difficult. To knock out everyone, all I have to do is lower it some more ... to half sea-level pressure, say. It’s like ascending to a height of two miles without an oxygen mask. Boom! You’re out cold.”

“If you can really do that, why hasn’t it been used on terrorists?” Bob asked.

“Because there are oxygen masks, right?” Albert asked.

“Yes,” Brian said. “The cabin crew demonstrates them at the start of every commercial jet-night—put the gold cup over your mouth and nose and breathe normally, right? They drop automatically when cabin pressure falls below twelve psi. If a hostage pilot tried to knock out a terrorist by lowering the air pressure, all the terrorist would have to do is grab a mask, put it on, and start shooting. On smaller jets, like the Lear, that isn’t the case. If the cabin loses pressure, the passenger has to open the overhead compartment himself.”

Nick looked at the chronometer. Their window was now only fourteen minutes wide.

“I think we better stop talking about it and just do it,” he said. “Time is getting very short.”

“Not yet,” Brian said, and looked at Albert again. “I can bring us back in line with the rip, Albert, and start decreasing pressure as we head toward it. I can control the cabin pressure pretty accurately, and I’m pretty sure I can put us all out before we go through. But that leaves Laurel’s question: who flies the airplane if we’re all knocked out?”

Albert opened his mouth; closed it again and shook his head.

Bob Jenkins spoke up then. His voice was dry and toneless, the voice of a judge pronouncing doom. “I think you can fly us home, Brian. But someone else will have to die in order for you to do it.”

“Explain,” Nick said crisply.

Bob did so. It didn’t take long. By the time he finished, Rudy Warwick had joined the little group standing in the cockpit door.

“Would it work, Brian?” Nick asked.

“Yes,” Brian said absently. “No reason why not.” He looked at the chronometer again. Eleven minutes now. Eleven minutes to get across to the other side of the rip. It would take almost that long to line the plane up, program the autopilot, and move them along the forty-mile approach. “But who’s going to do it? Do the rest of you draw straws, or what?”

“No need for that,” Nick said. He spoke lightly, almost casually. “I’ll do it.”

“No!” Laurel said. Her eyes were very wide and very dark. “Why you? Why does it have to be you?”

“Shut up!” Bethany hissed at her. “If he wants to, let him!”

Albert glanced unhappily at Bethany, at Laurel, and then back at Nick. A voice—not a very strong one—was whispering that he should have volunteered, that this was a job for a tough Alamo survivor like The Arizona Jew. But most of him was only aware that he loved life very much . . . and did not want it to end just yet. So he opened his mouth and then closed it again without speaking.

“Why you?” Laurel asked again, urgently. “Why shouldn’t we draw straws? Why not Bob? Or Rudy? Why not me?”

Nick took her arm. “Come with me a moment,” he said.

“Nick, there’s not much time,” Brian said. He tried to keep his tone of voice even, but he could hear desperation—perhaps even panic—bleeding through.

“I know. Start doing the things you have to do.”

Nick drew Laurel through the door.

“I think we might have had something, you and me,” he said. “Do you think I could be right about that? If you do, say so—there’s no time to dance. Absolutely none.”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was dry, uneven. “I think that’s right. ”

“But we don’t know. We can’t know. It all comes back to time, doesn’t it? Time . . . and sleep . . . and not knowing. But I have to be the one, Laurel. I have tried to keep some reasonable account of myself, and all my books are deeply in the red. This is my chance to balance them, and I mean to take it.”

“I don’t understand what you mea—”

“No—but I do.” He spoke fast, almost rapping his words. Now he reached out and took her forearm and drew her even closer to him. “You were on an adventure of some sort, weren’t you, Laurel?”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

He gave her a brisk shake. “I told you—there’s no time to dance! Were you on an adventure?”

“I ... yes.”

“Nick!” Brian called from the cockpit.

Nick looked rapidly in that direction. “Coming!” he shouted, and then looked back at Laurel. “I’m going to send you on another one. If you get out of this, that is, and if you agree to go.”

She only looked at him, her lips trembling. She had no idea of what to say. Her mind was tumbling helplessly. His grip on her arm was very tight, but she would not be aware of that until later, when she saw the bruises left by his fingers; at that moment, the grip of his eyes was much stronger.

“Listen. Listen carefully.” He paused and then spoke with peculiar, measured emphasis: “I was going to quit it. I’d made up my mind.”

“Quit what?” she asked in a small, quivery voice.

Nick shook his head impatiently. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not you believe me. Do you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I believe you mean it.”

“Nick!” Brian warned from the cockpit. “We’re heading toward it!”

He shot a glance toward the cockpit again, his eyes narrow and gleaming. “Coming just now!” he called. When he looked at her again, Laurel thought she had never in her life been the focus of such ferocious, focussed intensity. “My father lives in the village of Fluting, south of London,” he said. “Ask for him in any shop along the High Street. Mr. Hopewell. The older ones still call him the gaffer. Go to him and tell him I’d made up my mind to quit it. You’ll need to be persistent; he tends to turn away and curse loudly when he hears my name. The old I-have-no-son bit. Can you be persistent?”

“Yes.”

He nodded and smiled grimly. “Good! Repeat what I’ve told you, and tell him you believed me. Tell him I tried my best to atone for the day behind the church in Belfast.”

“In Belfast.”

“Right. And if you can’t get him to listen any other way, tell him he must listen. Because of the daisies. The time I brought the daisies. Can you remember that, as well?”

“Because once you brought him daisies.”

Nick seemed to almost laugh—but she had never seen a face filled with such sadness and bitterness. “No—not to him, but it’ll do. That’s your adventure. Will you do it?”

“Yes ... but . . .”

“Good. Laurel, thank you.” He put his left hand against the nape of her neck, pulled her face to his, and kissed her. His mouth was cold, and she tasted fear on his breath.

A moment later he was gone.

“No,” Brian said. He had gotten up to see if Nick was coming; now, as Nick reappeared with a very shaken Laurel Stevenson behind him, Brian dropped back into his seat. “You’ll feel a little giddy ... swimmy in the head ... then, nothing.” He glanced at Nick. “Until we all wake up.”

“Right!” Nick said cheerily. “And who knows? I may still be right here. Bad pennies have a way of turning up, you know. Don’t they, Brian?”

“Anything’s possible, I guess,” Brian said. He pushed the throttle forward slightly. The sky was growing bright again. The rip lay dead ahead. “Sit down, folks. Nick, right up here beside me. I’m going to show you what to do ... and when to do it.”

“One second, please,” Laurel said. She had regained some of her color and self-possession. She stood on tiptoe and planted a kiss on Nick’s mouth.

“Thank you,” Nick said gravely.

“You were going to quit it. You’d made up your mind. And if he won’t listen, I’m to remind him of the day you brought the daisies. Have I got it right?”

He grinned. “Letter-perfect, my love. Letter-perfect.” He encircled her with his left arm and kissed her again, long and hard. When he let her go, there was a gentle, thoughtful smile on his mouth. “That’s the one to go on,” he said. “Right enough.”

They did so. Albert waited tensely for some sound—the hiss of escaping air, perhaps—but there was only the steady, droning mumble of the jet engines. He felt more wide awake than ever.

“Albert?” Bethany said in a small, scared voice. “Would you hold me, please?”

“Yes,” Albert said. “If you’ll hold me.”

Behind them, Rudy Warwick was telling his rosary again. Across the aisle, Laurel Stevenson gripped the arms of her seat. She could still feel the warm print of Nick Hopewell’s lips on her mouth. She raised her head, looked at the overhead compartment, and began to take deep, slow breaths. She was waiting for the masks to fall . . . and ninety seconds or so later, they did.

In the middle of that thought, her mind drifted away.

“I know,” Nick said. He was standing beside Brian and his words were muffled by the oxygen mask he wore. Above the rubber seal, his eyes were calm and clear. “No fear, Brian. All’s safe as houses. Off to sleep you go. Sweet dreams, and all that.”

Brian was fading now. He could feel himself going . . . and yet he hung on, staring at the vast fault in the fabric of reality. It seemed to be swelling toward the cockpit windows, reaching for the plane. It’s so beautiful, he thought. God, it’s so beautiful !

He felt that invisible hand seize the plane and draw it forward again. No turning back this time.

“Nick,” he said. It now took a tremendous effort to speak; he felt as if his mouth was a hundred miles away from his brain. He held his hand up. It seemed to stretch away from him at the end of a long taffy arm.

“Go to sleep,” Nick said, taking his hand. “Don’t fight it, unless you want to go with me. It won’t be long now.”

“I just wanted to say ... thank you.”

Nick smiled and gave Brian’s hand a squeeze. “You’re welcome, mate. It’s been a flight to remember. Even without the movie and the free mimosas.”

Brian looked back into the rip. A river of gorgeous colors flowed into it now. They spiralled . . . mixed . . . and seemed to form words before his dazed, wondering eyes:

“Is that . . . what we are?” he asked curiously, and now his voice came to him from some distant universe.

The darkness swallowed him.

He was not afraid, but an intense loneliness filled him. The feeling wasn’t a new one. This was not the first watch he had stood alone, with the lives of others in his hands.

Ahead of him, the rip neared. He dropped his hand to the rheostat which controlled the cabin pressure.

It’s gorgeous, he thought. It seemed to him that the colors that now blazed out of the rip were the antithesis of everything which they had experienced in the last few hours; he was looking into a crucible of new life and new motion.

Colors ran across his cheeks and brows in a fountain-spray of hues: jungle green was overthrown by lava orange; lava orange was replaced by yellow-white tropical sunshine; sunshine was supplanted by the chilly blue of Northern oceans. The roar of the jet engines seemed muted and distant; he looked down and was not surprised to see that Brian Engle’s slumped, sleeping form was being consumed by color, his form and features overthrown in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of brightness. He had become a fabulous ghost.

Nor was Nick surprised to see that his own hands and arms were as colorless as clay. Brian’s not the ghost; I am.

The rip loomed.

Now the sound of the jets was lost entirely in a new sound; the 767 seemed to be rushing through a windtunnel filled with feathers. Suddenly, directly ahead of the airliner’s nose, a vast nova of light exploded like a heavenly firework; in it, Nick Hopewell saw colors no man had ever imagined. It did not just fill the time-rip; it filled his mind, his nerves, his muscles, his very bones in a gigantic, coruscating fireflash.

“Oh my God, so BEAUTIFUL!” he cried, and as Flight 29 plunged into the rip, he twisted the cabin-pressure rheostat back up to full.

A split-second later the fillings from Nick’s teeth pattered onto the cockpit floor. There was a small thump as the Teflon disc which had been in his knee—souvenir of a conflict marginally more honorable than the one in Northern Ireland—joined them. That was all.

Nick Hopewell had ceased to exist.

He sat up slowly in his seat, wincing at the bolt of pain in his head, and tried to remember who he was, where he was, and why he felt such a vast and urgent need to wake up quickly. What had he been doing that was so important?

The leak, his mind whispered. There’s a leak in the main cabin, and if it isn’t stabilized, there’s going to be big tr—

No, that wasn’t right. The leak had been stabilized—or had in some mysterious way stabilized itself—and he had landed Flight 7 safely at LAX. Then the man in the green blazer had come, and—

His eyes flew open, but he was in neither a motel room nor the spare bedroom at Anne’s brother’s house in Revere. He was looking through a cockpit window at a sky filled with stars.

Suddenly it came back to him . . . everything.

He sat up all the way, too quickly. His head screamed a sickly hungover protest. Blood flew from his nose and splattered on the center control console. He looked down and saw the front of his shirt was soaked with it. There had been a leak, all right. In him.

Of course, he thought. Depressurization often does that. I should have warned the passengers . . . How many passengers do I have left, by the way?

He couldn’t remember. His head was filled with fog.

He looked at his fuel indicators, saw that their situation was rapidly approaching the critical point, and then checked the INS. They were exactly where they should be, descending rapidly toward L.A., and at any moment they might wander into someone else’s airspace while the someone else was still there.

Someone else had been sharing his airspace just before he passed out . . . who?

He fumbled, and it came. Nick, of course. Nick Hopewell. Nick was gone. He hadn’t been such a bad penny after all, it seemed. But he must have done his job, or Brian wouldn’t be awake now.

He got on the radio, fast.

“LAX ground control, this is American Pride Flight—” He stopped. What flight were they? He couldn’t remember. The fog was in the way.

“Twenty-nine, aren’t we?” a dazed, unsteady voice said from behind him.

“Thank you, Laurel.” Brian didn’t turn around. “Now go back and belt up. I may have to make this plane do some tricks.”

He spoke into his mike again.

“American Pride Flight 29, repeat, two-niner. Mayday, ground control, I am declaring an emergency here. Please clear everything in front of me, I am coming in on heading 85 and I have no fuel. Get a foam truck out and—”

“Oh, quit it,” Laurel said dully from behind him. “Just quit it.”

Brian wheeled around then, ignoring the fresh bolt of pain through his head and the fresh spray of blood which flew from his nose. “Sit down, goddammit!” he snarled. “We’re coming in unannounced into heavy traffic. If you don’t want to break your neck—”

“There’s no heavy traffic down there,” Laurel said in the same dull voice. “No heavy traffic, no foam trucks. Nick died for nothing, and I’ll never get a chance to deliver his message. Look for yourself.”

Brian did. And, although they were now over the outlying suburbs of Los Angeles, he saw nothing but darkness.

There was no one down there, it seemed.

No one at all.

Behind him, Laurel Stevenson burst into harsh, raging sobs of terror and frustration.

The plane printed no shadow on the deserted grid of streets as it passed above them; dawn was still an hour away. Below it, no car moved, no streetlight glowed. Below it, all was silent and moveless. Ahead of it, no runway lights gleamed.

The plane’s belly slid open. The undercarriage dropped down and spread out. The landing gear locked in place.

American Pride Flight 29 slipped down the chute toward L.A. It banked slightly to the right as it came; Brian was now able to correct his course visually, and he did so. They passed over a cluster of airport motels, and for a moment Brian could see the monument that stood near the center of the terminal complex, a graceful tripod with curved legs and a restaurant in its center. They passed over a short strip of dead grass and then concrete runway was unrolling thirty feet below the plane.

There was no time to baby the 767 in this time; Brian’s fuel indicators read zeros across and the bird was about to turn into a bitch. He brought it in hard, like a sled filled with bricks. There was a thud that rattled his teeth and started his nose bleeding again. His chest harness locked. Laurel, who was in the co-pilot’s seat, cried out.

Then he had the flaps up and was applying reverse thrusters at full. The plane began to slow. They were doing a little over a hundred miles an hour when two of the thrusters cut out and the red ENGINE SHUTDOWN lights flashed on. He grabbed for the intercom switch.

“Hang on! We’re going in hard! Hang on!”

Thrusters two and four kept running a few moments longer, and then they were gone, too. Flight 29 rushed down the runway in ghastly silence, with only the flaps to slow her now. Brian watched helplessly as the concrete ran away beneath the plane and the crisscross tangle of taxiways loomed. And there, dead ahead, sat the carcass of a Pacific Airways commuter jet.

The 767 was still doing at least sixty-five. Brian horsed it to the right, leaning into the dead steering yoke with every ounce of his strength. The plane responded soupily, and he skated by the parked jet with only six feet to spare. Its windows flashed past like a row of blind eyes.

Then they were rolling toward the United terminal, where at least a dozen planes were parked at extended jetways like nursing infants. The 767’s speed was down to just over thirty now.

“Brace yourselves!” Brian shouted into the intercom, momentarily forgetting that his own plane was now as dead as the rest of them and the intercom was useless. “Brace yourselves for a collision! Bra—” American Pride 29 crashed into Gate 29 of the United Airlines terminal at roughly twenty-nine miles an hour. There was a loud, hollow bang followed by the sound of crumpling metal and breaking glass. Brian was thrown into his harness again, then snapped back into his seat. He sat there for a moment, stiff, waiting for the explosion ... and then remembered there was nothing left in the tanks to explode.

He flicked all the switches on the control panel off—the panel was dead, but the habit ran deep—and then turned to check on Laurel. She looked at him with dull, apathetic eyes.

“That was about as close as I’d ever want to cut it,” Brian said unsteadily.

“You should have let us crash. Everything we tried . . . Dinah . . . Nick . . . all for nothing. It’s just the same here. Just the same.”

Brian unbuckled his harness and got shakily to his feet. He took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and handed it to her. “Wipe your nose. It’s bleeding.”

She took the handkerchief and then only looked at it, as if she had never seen one before in her life.

Brian passed her and plodded slowly into the main cabin. He stood in the doorway, counting noses. His passengers—those few still remaining, that was—seemed all right. Bethany’s head was pressed against Albert’s chest and she was sobbing hard. Rudy Warwick unbuckled his seatbelt, got up, rapped his head on the overhead bin, and sat down again. He looked at Brian with dazed, uncomprehending eyes. Brian found himself wondering if Rudy was still hungry. He guessed not.

“Let’s get off the plane,” Brian said.

Bethany raised her head. “When do they come?” she asked him hysterically. “How long will it be before they come this time? Can anyone hear them yet?”

Fresh pain stroked Brian’s head and he rocked on his feet, suddenly quite sure he was going to faint.

A steadying arm slipped around his waist and he looked around, surprised. It was Laurel.

“Captain Engle’s right,” she said quietly. “Let’s get off the plane. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks.”

Bethany uttered a hysterical bark of laughter. “How bad can it look?” she demanded. “Just how bad can it—”

“Something’s different,” Albert said suddenly. He was looking out the window. “Something’s changed. I can’t tell what it is ... but it’s not the same.” He looked first at Bethany, then at Brian and Laurel. “It’s just not the same.”

Brian bent down next to Bob Jenkins and looked out the window. He could see nothing very different from BIA—there were more planes, of course, but they were just as deserted, just as dead—yet he felt that Albert might be onto something, just the same. It was feeling more than seeing. Some essential difference which he could not quite grasp. It danced just beyond his reach, as the name of his ex-wife’s perfume had done.

Don’t you remember?

“Come on,” he said. “This time we use the cockpit exit.”

He dropped down into the forward-hold area, ducked below a cluster of electrical cables, and undogged the hatch in the floor of the 767’s nose. Albert joined him and helped Bethany down. Brian helped Laurel, and then he and Albert helped Rudy, who moved as if his bones had turned to glass. Rudy was still clutching his rosary tight in one hand. The space below the cockpit was now very cramped, and Bob Jenkins waited for them above, propped on his hands and peering down at them through the trapdoor.

Brian pulled the ladder out of its storage clips, secured it in place, and then, one by one, they descended to the tarmac, Brian first, Bob last.

As Brian’s feet touched down, he felt a mad urge to place his hand over his heart and cry out: I claim this land of rancid milk and sour honey for the survivors of Flight 29 ... at least until the langoliers arrive!

He said nothing. He only stood there with the others below the loom of the jetliner’s nose, feeling a light breeze against one cheek and looking around. In the distance he heard a sound. It was not the chewing, crunching sound of which they had gradually become aware in Bangor—nothing like it—but he couldn’t decide exactly what it did sound like.

“What’s that?” Bethany asked. “What’s that humming? It sounds like electricity.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Bob said thoughtfully. “It sounds like . . .” He shook his head.

“It doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard before,” Brian said, but he wasn’t sure if that was true. Again he was haunted by the sense that something he knew or should know was dancing just beyond his mental grasp.

“It’s them, isn’t it?” Bethany asked half-hysterically. “It’s them, coming. It’s the langoliers Dinah told us about.”

“I don’t think so. It doesn’t sound the same at all.” But he felt the fear begin in his belly just the same.

“Now what?” Rudy asked. His voice was as harsh as a crow’s. “Do we start all over again?”

“Well, we won’t need the conveyor belt, and that’s a start,” Brian said. “The jetway service door is open.” He stepped out from beneath the 767’s nose and pointed. The force of their arrival at Gate 29 had knocked the rolling ladder away from the door, but it would be easy enough to slip it back into position. “Come on.”

They walked toward the ladder.

“Albert?” Brian said. “Help me with the lad—”

“Wait,” Bob said.

Brian turned his head and saw Bob looking around with cautious wonder. And the expression in his previously dazed eyes . . . was that hope?

“What? What is it, Bob? What do you see?”

“Just another deserted airport. It’s what I feel.” He raised a hand to his cheek . . . then simply held it out in the air, like a man trying to flag a ride.

Brian started to ask him what he meant, and realized that he knew. Hadn’t he noticed it himself while they had been standing under the liner’s nose? Noticed it and then dismissed it?

There was a breeze blowing against his face. Not much of a breeze, hardly more than a puff, but it was a breeze. The air was in motion.

“Holy crow,” Albert said. He popped a finger into his mouth, wetting it, and held it up. An unbelieving grin touched his face.

“That isn’t all, either,” Laurel said. “Listen!”

She dashed from where they were standing down toward the 767’s wing. Then she ran back to them again, her hair streaming out behind her. The high heels she was wearing clicked crisply on the concrete.

“Did you hear it?” she asked them. “Did you hear it?”

They had heard. The flat, muffled quality was gone. Now, just listening to Laurel speak, Brian realized that in Bangor they had all sounded as if they had been talking with their heads poked inside bells which had been cast from some dulling metal—brass, or maybe lead.

Bethany raised her hands and rapidly clapped out the back-beat of the old Routers instrumental, “Let’s Go.” Each clap was as clean and clear as the pop of a track-starter’s pistol. A delighted grin broke over her face.

“What does it m—” Rudy began.

“The plane!” Albert shouted in a high-pitched, gleeful voice, and for a moment Brian was absurdly reminded of the little guy on that old TV show, Fantasy Island. He almost laughed out loud. “I know what’s different! Look at the plane! Now it’s the same as all the others!”

They turned and looked. No one said anything for a long moment; perhaps no one was capable of speech. The Delta 727 standing next to the American Pride jetliner in Bangor had looked dull and dingy, somehow less real than the 767. Now all the aircraft—Flight 29 and the United planes lined up along the extended jetways behind it—looked equally bright, equally new. Even in the dark, their paintwork and trademark logos appeared to gleam.

“What does it mean?” Rudy asked, speaking to Bob. “What does it mean? If things have really gone back to normal, where’s the electricity? Where are the people?”

“And what’s that noise?” Albert put in.

The sound was already closer, already clearer. It was a humming sound, as Bethany had said, but there was nothing electrical about it. It sounded like wind blowing across an open pipe, or an inhuman choir which was uttering the same open-throated syllable in unison: aaaaaaa ...

Bob shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, turning away. “Let’s push that ladder back into position and go in—”

Laurel grabbed his shoulder.

“You know something!” she said. Her voice was strained and tense. “I can see that you do. Let the rest of us in on it, why don’t you?”

He hesitated for a moment before shaking his head. “I’m not prepared to say right now, Laurel. I want to go inside and look around first.”

With that they had to be content. Brian and Albert pushed the ladder back into position. One of the supporting struts had buckled slightly, and Brian held it as they ascended one by one. He himself came last, walking on the side of the ladder away from the buckled strut. The others had waited for him, and they walked up the jetway and into the terminal together.

They found themselves in a large, round room with boarding gates located at intervals along the single curving wall. The rows of seats stood ghostly and deserted, the overhead fluorescents were dark squares, but here Albert thought he could almost smell other people . . . as if they had all trooped out only seconds before the Flight 29 survivors emerged from the jetway.

From outside, that choral humming continued to swell, approaching like a slow invisible wave: —aaaaaaaaaaaaaa—

“Come with me,” Bob Jenkins said, taking effortless charge of the group. “Quickly, please.”

He set off toward the concourse. and the others fell into line behind him, Albert and Bethany walking together with arms linked about each other’s waists. Once off the carpeted surface of the United boarding lounge and in the concourse itself, their heels clicked and echoed, as if there were two dozen of them instead of only six. They passed dim, dark advertising posters on the walls: Watch CNN, Smoke Marlboros, Drive Hertz, Read Newsweek, See Disneyland.

And that sound, that open-throated choral humming sound, continued to grow. Outside, Laurel had been convinced the sound had been approaching them from the west. Now it seemed to be right in here with them, as though the singers—if they were singers—had already arrived. The sound did not frighten her, exactly, but it made the flesh of her arms and back prickle with awe.

They reached a cafeteria-style restaurant, and Bob led them inside. Without pausing, he went around the counter and took a wrapped pastry from a pile of them on the counter. He tried to tear it open with his teeth . . . then realized his teeth were back on the plane. He made a small, disgusted sound and tossed it over the counter to Albert.

“You do it,” he said. His eyes were glowing now. “Quickly, Albert! Quickly!”

“Quick, Watson, the game’s afoot!” Albert said, and laughed crazily. He tore open the cellophane and looked at Bob, who nodded. Albert took out the pastry and bit into it. Cream and raspberry jam squirted out the sides. Albert grinned. “Ith delicious!” he said in a muffled voice, spraying crumbs as he spoke. “Delicious!” He offered it to Bethany, who took an even larger bite.

Laurel could smell the raspberry filling, and her stomach made a goinging, boinging sound. She laughed. Suddenly she felt giddy, joyful, almost stoned. The cobwebs from the depressurization experience were entirely gone; her head felt like an upstairs room after a fresh sea breeze had blown in on a hot and horribly muggy afternoon. She thought of Nick, who wasn’t here, who had died so the rest of them could be here, and thought that Nick would not have minded her feeling this way.

The choral sound continued to swell, a sound with no direction at all, a sourceless, singing sigh that existed all around them:

Bob Jenkins raced back around the counter, cutting the corner by the cash register so tightly that his feet almost flew out from beneath him and he had to grab the condiments trolley to keep from falling. He stayed up but the stainless-steel trolley fell over with a gorgeous, resounding crash, spraying plastic cutlery and little packets of mustard, ketchup, and relish everywhere.

“Quickly!” he cried. “We can’t be here! It’s going to happen soon—at any moment, I believe—and we can’t be here when it does! I don’t think it’s safe!”

“What isn’t sa—” Bethany began, but then Albert put his arm around her shoulders and hustled her after Bob, a lunatic tour-guide who had already bolted for the cafeteria door.

They ran out, following him as he dashed for the United boarding lobby again. Now the echoing rattle of their footfalls was almost lost in the powerful hum which filled the deserted terminal, echoing and reechoing in the many throats of its spoked corridors.

Brian could hear that single vast note beginning to break up. It was not shattering, not even really changing, he thought, but focussing, the way the sound of the langoliers had focussed as they approached Bangor.

As they re-entered the boarding lounge, he saw an ethereal light begin to skate over the empty chairs, the dark ARRIVALS and DEPARTURES TV monitors, and the boarding desks. Red followed blue; yellow followed red; green followed yellow. Some rich and exotic expectation seemed to fill the air. A shiver chased through him; he felt all his body-hair stir and try to stand up. A clear assurance filled him like a morning sunray: We are on the verge of something—some great and amazing thing.

“Over here!” Bob shouted. He led them toward the wall beside the jetway through which they had entered. This was a passengers-only area, guarded by a red velvet rope. Bob jumped it as easily as the high-school hurdler he might once have been. “Against the wall!”

“Up against the wall, motherfuckers!” Albert cried through a spasm of sudden, uncontrollable laughter.

He and the rest joined Bob, pressing against the wall like suspects in a police line-up. In the deserted circular lounge which now lay before them, the colors flared for a moment ... and then began to fade out. The sound, however, continued to deepen and become more real. Brian thought he could now hear voices in that sound, and footsteps, even a few fussing babies.

“I don’t know what it is, but it’s wonderful!” Laurel cried. She was half-laughing, half-weeping. “I love it!”

“I hope we’re safe here,” Bob said. He had to raise his voice to be heard. “I think we will be. We’re out of the main traffic areas.”

“What’s going to happen?” Brian asked. “What do you know?”

“When we went through the time-rip headed east, we travelled back in time!” Bob shouted. “We went into the past! Perhaps as little as fifteen minutes . . . do you remember me telling you that?”

Brian nodded, and Albert’s face suddenly lit up.

“This time it brought us into the future!” Albert cried. “That’s it, isn’t it? This time the rip brought us into the future!”

“I believe so, yes!” Bob yelled back. He was grinning helplessly. “And instead of arriving in a dead world—a world which had moved on without us—we have arrived in a world waiting to be born! A world as fresh and new as a rose on the verge of opening! That is what is happening now, I believe. That is what we hear, and what we sense . . . what has filled us with such marvellous, helpless joy. I believe we are about to see and experience something which no living man or woman has ever witnessed before. We have seen the death of the world; now I believe we are going to see it born. I believe that the present is on the verge of catching up to us.”

As the colors had flared and faded, so now the deep, reverberating quality of the sound suddenly dropped. At the same time, the voices which had been within it grew louder, clearer. Laurel realized she could make out words, even whole phrases.

“—have to call her before she decides—”

“—I really don’t think the option is a viable—”

“—home and dry if we can just turn this thing over to the parent company—”

That one passed directly before them through the emptiness on the other side of the velvet rope.

Brian Engle felt a kind of ecstasy rise within him, suffusing him in a glow of wonder and happiness. He took Laurel’s hand and grinned at her as she clasped it and then squeezed it fiercely. Beside them, Albert suddenly hugged Bethany, and she began to shower kisses all over his face, laughing as she did it. Bob and Rudy grinned at each other delightedly, like long-lost friends who have met by chance in one of the world’s more absurd backwaters.

Overhead, the fluorescent squares in the ceiling began to flash on. They went sequentially, racing out from the center of the room in an expanding circle of light that flowed down the concourse, chasing the night-shadows before it like a flock of black sheep.

Smells suddenly struck Brian with a bang: sweat, perfume, aftershave, cologne, cigarette smoke, leather, soap, industrial cleaner.

For a moment longer the wide circle of the boarding lounge remained deserted, a place haunted by the voices and footsteps of the not-quite-living. And Brian thought: I am going to see it happen; I am going to see the moving present lock onto this stationary future and pull it along, the way hooks on moving express trains used to snatch bags of mail from the Postal Service poles standing by the tracks in sleepy little towns down south and out west. I am going to see time itself open like a rose on a summer morning.

“Brace yourselves,” Bob murmured. “There may be a jerk.”

A bare second later Brian felt a thud—not just in his feet, but all through his body. At the same instant he felt as if an invisible hand had given him a strong push, directly in the center of his back. He rocked forward and felt Laurel rock forward with him. Albert had to grab Rudy to keep him from falling over. Rudy didn’t seem to mind; a huge, goony smile split his face.

“Look!” Laurel gasped. “Oh, Brian—look!”

He looked . . . and felt his breath stop in his throat.

The boarding lounge was full of ghosts.

Ethereal, transparent figures crossed and crisscrossed the large central area: men in business suits toting briefcases, women in smart travelling dresses, teenagers in Levi’s and tee-shirts with rock-group logos printed on them. He saw a ghost-father leading two small ghost-children, and through them he could see more ghosts sitting in the chairs, reading transparent copies of Cosmopolitan and Esquire and U.S. News & World Report. Then color dove into the shapes in a series of cometary flickers, solidifying them, and the echoing voices resolved themselves into the prosaic stereo swarm of real human voices.

Shooting stars, Brian thought wonderingly. Shooting stars only.

The two children were the only ones who happened to be looking directly at the survivors of Flight 29 when the change took place; the children were the only ones who saw four men and two women appear in a place where there had only been a wall the second before.

“Daddy!” the little boy exclaimed, tugging his father’s right hand.

“Dad!” the little girl demanded, tugging his left.

“What?” he asked, tossing them an impatient glance. “I’m looking for your mother!”

“New people!” the little girl said, pointing at Brian and his bedraggled quintet of passengers. “Look at the new people!”

The man glanced at Brian and the others for a moment, and his mouth tightened nervously. It was the blood, Brian supposed. He, Laurel, and Bethany had all suffered nosebleeds. The man tightened his grip on their hands and began to pull them away fast. “Yes, great. Now help me look for your mother. What a mess this turned out to be.”

“But they weren’t there before!” the little boy protested. “They—”

Then they were gone into the hurrying crowds.

Brian glanced up at the monitors and noted the time as 4:17 A.M.

Too many people here, he thought, and I bet I know why.

As if to confirm this, the overhead speaker blared: “All eastbound flights out of Los Angeles International Airport continue to be delayed because of unusual weather patterns over the Mojave Desert. We are sorry for this inconvenience, but ask for your patience and understanding while this safety precaution is in force. Repeat: all eastbound flights. . .”

Laurel turned to Brian and looked up into his face. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she made no effort to wipe them away. “Did you hear her? Did you hear what that little girl said?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what we are, Brian? The new people? Do you think that’s what we are?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but that’s what it feels like.”

“That was wonderful,” Albert said. “My God, that was the most wonderful thing.”

“Totally tubular!” Bethany yelled happily, and then began to clap out “Let’s Go” again.

“What do we do now, Brian?” Bob asked. “Any ideas?”

Brian glanced around at the choked boarding area and said, “I think I want to go outside. Breathe some fresh air. And look at the sky.”

“Shouldn’t we inform the authorities of what—”

“We will,” Brian said. “But the sky first.”

“And maybe something to eat on the way?” Rudy asked hopefully.

Brian laughed. “Why not?”

“My watch has stopped,” Bethany said.

Brian looked down at his wrist and saw that his watch had also stopped. All their watches had stopped.

Brian took his off, dropped it indifferently to the floor, and put his arm around Laurel’s waist. “Let’s blow this joint,” he said. “Unless any of you want to wait for the next flight east?”

“Not today,” Laurel said, “but soon. All the way to England. There’s a man I have to see in ...” For one horrible moment the name wouldn’t come to her ... and then it did. “Fluting,” she said. “Ask anyone along the High Street. The old folks still just call him the gaffer.”

“What are you talking about?” Albert asked.

“Daisies,” she said, and laughed. “I’m talking about daisies. Come on—let’s go.”

Bob grinned widely, exposing baby-pink gums. “As for me, I think that the next time I have to go to Boston, I’ll take the train.”

Laurel toed Brian’s watch and asked, “Are you sure you don’t want that? It looks expensive.”

Brian grinned, shook his head, and kissed her forehead. The smell of her hair was amazingly sweet. He felt more than good; he felt reborn, every inch of him new and fresh and unmarked by the world. He felt, in fact, that if he spread his arms, he would be able to fly without the aid of engines. “Not at all,” he said. “I know what time it is.”

“Oh? And what time is that?”

“It’s half past now.”

Albert clapped him on the back.

They left the boarding lounge in a group, weaving their way through the disgruntled clots of delayed passengers. A good many of these looked curiously after them, and not just because some of them appeared to have recently suffered nosebleeds, or because they were laughing their way through so many angry, inconvenienced people.

They looked because the six people seemed somehow brighter than anyone else in the crowded lounge.

More actual.

More there.

Shooting stars only, Brian thought, and suddenly remembered that there was one passenger still back on the plane—the man with the black beard. This is one hangover that guy will never forget, Brian thought, grinning. He swept Laurel into a run. She laughed and hugged him.

The six of them ran down the concourse together toward the escalators and all the outside world beyond.