Four Past Midnight

  Don returned with a red-and-white-checked tablecloth in each fist.

  "Marvellous," Nick said. He took one of them and spun it quickly and expertly into a rope. He put the center of it in his mouth, clamping his teeth on it to keep it from unwinding, and used his hands to flip Craig over like a human omelette.

  Craig cried out and his eyelids fluttered.

  "Do you have to be so rough?" Laurel asked sharply.

  Nick gazed at her for a moment, and she dropped her eyes at once. She could not help comparing Nick Hopewell's eyes with the eyes in the pictures which Darren Crosby had sent her. Widely spaced, clear eyes in a good-looking-if unremarkable--face. But the eyes had also been rather unremarkable, hadn't they? And didn't Darren's eyes have something, perhaps even a great deal, to do with why she had made this trip in the first place? Hadn't she decided, after a great deal of close study, that they were the eyes of a man who would behave himself? A man who would back off if you told him to back off?

  She had boarded Flight 29 telling herself that this was her great adventure, her one extravagant tango with romance--an impulsive transcontinental dash into the arms of the tall, dark stranger. But sometimes you found yourself in one of those tiresome situations where the truth could no longer be avoided, and Laurel reckoned the truth to be this: she had chosen Darren Crosby because his pictures and letters had told her he wasn't much different from the placid boys and men she had been dating ever since she was fifteen or so, boys and men who would learn quickly to wipe their feet on the mat before they came in on rainy nights, boys and men who would grab a towel and help with the dishes without being asked, boys and men who would let you go if you told them to do it in a sharp enough tone of voice.

  Would she have been on Flight 29 tonight if the photos had shown Nick Hopewell's dark-blue eyes instead of Darren's mild brown ones? She didn't think so. She thought she would have written him a kind but rather impersonal note--Thank you for your reply and your picture, Mr. Hopewell, but I somehow don't think we would be right for each other--and

  gone on looking for a man like Darren. And, of course, she doubted very much if men like Mr. Hopewell even read the lonely-hearts magazines, let alone placed ads in their personals columns. All the same, she was here with him now, in this weird situation.

  Well ... she had wanted to have an adventure, just one adventure, before middle-age settled in for keeps. Wasn't that true? Yes. And here she was, proving Tolkien right--she had stepped out of her own door last evening, just the same as always, and look where she had ended up: a strange and dreary version of Fantasyland. But it was an adventure, all right. Emergency landings ... deserted airports ... a lunatic with a gun. Of course it was an adventure. Something she had read years ago suddenly popped into Laurel's mind. Be careful what you pray for, because you just might get it.

  How true.

  And how confusing.

  There was no confusion in Nick Hopewell's eyes ... but there was no mercy in them, either. They made Laurel feel shivery, and there was nothing romantic in the feeling.

  Are you sure? a voice whispered, and Laurel shut it up at once.

  Nick pulled Craig's hands out from under him, then brought his wrists together at the small of his back. Craig groaned again, louder this time, and began to struggle weakly.

  "Easy now, my good old mate," Nick said soothingly. He wrapped the tablecloth rope twice around Craig's lower forearms and knotted it tightly. Craig's elbows flapped and he uttered a strange weak scream. "There!" Nick said, standing up. "Trussed as neatly as Father John's Christmas turkey. We've even got a spare if that one looks like not holding." He sat on the edge of one of the tables and looked at Bob Jenkins. "Now, what were you saying when we were so rudely interrupted?"

  Bob looked at him, dazed and unbelieving. "What?"

  "Go on," Nick said. He might have been an interested lecturegoer instead of a man sitting on a table in a deserted airport restaurant with his feet planted beside a bound man lying in a pool of his own blood. "You had just got to the part about Flight 29 being like the Mary Celeste. Interesting concept, that."

  "And you want me to ... to just go on?" Bob asked incredulously. "As if nothing had happened?"

  "Let me up!" Craig shouted. His words were slightly muffled by the tough industrial carpet on the restaurant floor, but he still sounded remarkably lively for a man who had been coldcocked with a violin case not five minutes previous. "Let me up right now! I demand that you--"

  Then Nick did something that shocked all of them, even those who had seen the Englishman twist Craig's nose like the handle of a bathtub faucet. He drove a short, hard kick into Craig's ribs. He pulled it at the last instant ... but not much. Craig uttered a pained grunt and shut up.

  "Start again, mate, and I'll stave them in," Nick said grimly. "My patience with you has run out."

  "Hey!" Gaffney cried, bewildered. "What did you do that f--"

  "Listen to me!" Nick said, and looked around. His urbane surface was entirely gone for the first time; his voice vibrated with anger and urgency. "You need waking up, fellows and girls, and I haven't the time to do it gently. That little girl--Dinah--says we are in bad trouble here, and I believe her. She says she hears something, something which may be coming our way, and I rather believe that, too. I don't hear a bloody thing, but my nerves are jumping like grease on a hot griddle, and I'm used to paying attention when they do that. I think something is coming, and I don't believe it's going to try and sell us vacuum-cleaner attachments or the latest insurance scheme when it gets here. Now we can make all the correct civilized noises over this bloody madman or we can try to understand what has happened to us. Understanding may not save our lives, but I'm rapidly becoming convinced that the lack of it may end them, and soon." His eyes shifted to Dinah. "Tell me I'm wrong if you believe I am, Dinah. I'll listen to you, and gladly."

  "I don't want you to hurt Mr. Toomy, but I don't think you're wrong, either," Dinah said in a small, wavery voice.

  "All right," Nick said. "Fair enough. I'll try my very best not to hurt him again ... but I make no promises. Let's begin with a very simple concept. This fellow I've trussed up--"

  "Toomy," Brian said. "His name is Craig Toomy."

  "All right. Mr. Toomy is mad. Perhaps if we find our way back to our proper place, or if we find the place where all the people have gone, we can get some help for him. But for now, we can only help him by putting him out of commission--which I have done, with the generous if foolhardy assistance of Albert there--and getting back to our current business. Does anyone hold a view which runs counter to this?"

  There was no reply. The other passengers who had been aboard Flight 29 looked at Nick uneasily.

  "All right," Nick said. "Please go on, Mr. Jenkins."

  "I ... I'm not used to ..." Bob made a visible effort to collect himself. "In books, I suppose I've killed enough people to fill every seat in the plane that brought us here, but what just happened is the first act of violence I've ever personally witnessed. I'm sorry if I've ... er ... behaved badly."

  "I think you're doing great, Mr. Jenkins," Dinah said. "And I like listening to you, too. It makes me feel better."

  Bob looked at her gratefully and smiled. "Thank you, Dinah." He stuffed his hands in his pockets, cast a troubled glance at Craig Toomy, then looked beyond them, across the empty waiting room.

  "I think I mentioned a central fallacy in our thinking," he said at last. "It is this: we all assumed, when we began to grasp the dimensions of this Event, that something had happened to the rest of the world. That assumption is easy enough to understand, since we are all fine and everyone else--including those other passengers with whom we boarded at Los Angeles International--seems to have disappeared. But the evidence before us doesn't bear the assumption out. What has happened has happened to us and us alone. I am convinced that the world as we have always known it is ticking along just as it always has.

  "It's us--the missing passengers and the eleven survivors of Fligh
t 29--who are lost."

  7

  "Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't understand what you're getting at," Rudy Warwick said after a moment.

  "Neither do I," Laurel added.

  "We've mentioned two famous disappearances," Bob said quietly. Now even Craig Toomy seemed to be listening ... he had stopped struggling, at any rate. "One, the case of the Mary Celeste, took place at sea. The second, the case of Roanoke Island, took place near the sea. They are not the only ones, either. I can think of at least two others which involved aircraft: the disappearance of the aviatrix Amelia Earhart over the Pacific Ocean, and the disappearance of several Navy planes over that part of the Atlantic known as the Bermuda Triangle. That happened in 1945 or 1946, I believe. There was some sort of garbled transmission from the lead aircraft's pilot, and rescue planes were sent out at once from an airbase in Florida, but no trace of the planes or their crews was ever found."

  "I've heard of the case," Nick said. "It's the basis for the Triangle's infamous reputation, I think."

  "No, there have been lots of ships and planes lost there," Albert put in. "I read the book about it by Charles Berlitz. Really interesting." He glanced around. "I just never thought I'd be in it, if you know what I mean."

  Jenkins said, "I don't know if an aircraft has ever disappeared over the continental United States before, but--"

  "It's happened lots of times with small planes," Brian said, "and once, about thirty-five years ago, it happened with a commercial passenger plane. There were over a hundred people aboard. 1955 or '56, this was. The carrier was either TWA or Monarch, I can't remember which. The plane was bound for Denver out of San Francisco. The pilot made radio contact with the Reno tower--absolutely routine--and the plane was never heard from again. There was a search, of course, but ... nothing."

  Brian saw they were all looking at him with a species of dreadful fascination, and he laughed uncomfortably.

  "Pilot ghost stories," he said with a note of apology in his voice. "It sounds like a caption for a Gary Larson cartoon."

  "I'll bet they all went through," the writer muttered. He had begun to scrub the side of his face with his hand again. He looked distressed--almost horrified. "Unless they found bodies ... ?"

  "Please tell us what you know, or what you think you know," Laurel said. "The effect of this ... this thing ... seems to pile up on a person. If I don't get some answers soon, I think you can tie me up and put me down next to Mr. Toomy."

  "Don't flatter yourself," Craig said, speaking clearly if rather obscurely.

  Bob favored him with another uncomfortable glance and then appeared to muster his thoughts. "There's no mess here, but there's a mess on the plane. There's no electricity here, but there's electricity on the plane. That isn't conclusive, of course--the plane has its own self-contained power supply, while the electricity here comes from a power plant somewhere. But then consider the matches. Bethany was on the plane, and her matches work fine. The matches I took from the bowl in here wouldn't strike. The gun which Mr. Toomy took--from the Security office, I imagine--barely fired. I think that, if you tried a battery-powered flashlight, you'd find that wouldn't work, either. Or, if it did work, it wouldn't work for long."

  "You're right," Nick said. "And we don't need to find a flashlight in order to test your theory." He pointed upward. There was an emergency light mounted on the wall behind the kitchen grill. It was as dead as the overhead lights. "That's battery-powered," Nick went on. "A light-sensitive solenoid turns it on when the power fails. It's dim enough in here for that thing to have gone into operation, but it didn't do so. Which means that either the solenoid's circuit failed or the battery is dead."

  "I suspect it's both," Bob Jenkins said. He walked slowly toward the restaurant door and looked out. "We find ourselves in a world which appears to be whole, but it is also a world which seems almost exhausted. The carbonated drinks are flat. The food is tasteless. The air is odorless. We still give off scents--I can smell Laurel's perfume and the captain's aftershave lotion, for instance--but everything else seems to have lost its smell."

  Albert picked up one of the glasses with beer in it and sniffed deeply. There was a smell, he decided, but it was very, very faint. A flower-petal pressed for many years between the pages of a book might give off the same distant memory of scent.

  "The same is true for sounds," Bob went on. "They are flat, one-dimensional, utterly without resonance."

  Laurel thought of the listless clup-clup sound of her high heels on the cement, and the lack of echo when Captain Engle cupped his hands around his mouth and called up the escalator for Mr. Toomy.

  "Albert, could I ask you to play something on your violin?" Bob asked.

  Albert glanced at Bethany. She smiled and nodded.

  "All right. Sure. In fact, I'm sort of curious about how it sounds after ..." He glanced at Craig Toomy. "You know."

  He opened the case, grimacing as his fingers touched the latch which had opened the wound in Craig Toomy's forehead, and drew out his violin. He caressed it briefly, then took the bow in his right hand and tucked the violin under his chin. He stood like that for a moment, thinking. What was the proper sort of music for this strange new world where no phones rang and no dogs barked? Ralph Vaughan Williams? Stravinsky? Mozart? Dvorak, perhaps? No. None of them were right. Then inspiration struck, and he began to play "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah."

  Halfway through the tune the bow faltered to a stop.

  "I guess you must have hurt your fiddle after all when you bopped that guy with it," Don Gaffney said. "It sounds like it's stuffed full of cotton batting."

  "No," Albert said slowly. "My violin is perfectly okay. I can tell just by the way it feels, and the action of the strings under my fingers ... but there's something else as well. Come on over here, Mr. Gaffney." Gaffney came over and stood beside Albert. "Now get as close to my violin as you can. No ... not that close; I'd put out your eye with the bow. There. Just right. Listen again."

  Albert began to play, singing along in his mind, as he almost always did when he played this corny but endlessly cheerful shitkicking music: Singing fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh,

  Fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh-oh-oh-oh,

  Fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh,

  Strummin' on the old banjo.

  "Did you hear the difference?" he asked when he had finished.

  "It sounds a lot better close up, if that's what you mean," Gaffney said. He was looking at Albert with real respect. "You play good, kid."

  Albert smiled at Gaffney, but it was really Bethany Simms he was talking to. "Sometimes, when I'm sure my music teacher isn't around, I play old Led Zeppelin songs," he said. "That stuff really cooks on the violin. You'd be surprised." He looked at Bob. "Anyway, it fits right in with what you were saying. The closer you get, the better the violin sounds. It's the air that's wrong, not the instrument. It's not conducting the sounds the way it should, and so what comes out sounds the way the beer tasted."

  "Flat," Brian said.

  Albert nodded.

  "Thank you, Albert," Bob said.

  "Sure. Can I put it away now?"

  "Of course." Bob continued as Albert replaced his violin in its case, and then used a napkin to clean off the fouled latch and his own fingers. "Taste and sound are not the only off-key elements of the situation in which we find ourselves. Take the clouds, for instance."

  "What about them?" Rudy Warwick asked.

  "They haven't moved since we arrived, and I don't think they're going to move. I think the weather patterns we're all used to living with have either stopped or are running down like an old pocket-watch."

  Bob paused for a moment. He suddenly looked old and helpless and frightened.

  "As Mr. Hopewell would say, let's not draw it fine. Everything here feels wrong. Dinah, whose senses--including that odd, vague one we call the sixth sense--are more developed than ours, has perhaps felt it the most strongly, but I think we've all felt it to some degree. Things here are just wrong.

  "And
now we come to the very hub of the matter."

  He turned to face them.

  "I said not fifteen minutes ago that it felt like lunchtime. It now feels much later than that to me. Three in the afternoon, perhaps four. It isn't breakfast my stomach is grumbling for right now; it wants high tea. I have a terrible feeling that it may start to get dark outside before our watches tell us it's quarter to ten in the morning."

  "Get to it, mate," Nick said.

  "I think it's about time," Bob said quietly. "Not about dimension, as Albert suggested, but time. Suppose that, every now and then, a hole appears in the time stream? Not a time-warp, but a time-rip. A rip in the temporal fabric."

  "That's the craziest shit I ever heard!" Don Gaffney exclaimed.

  "Amen!" Craig Toomy seconded from the floor.

  "No," Bob replied sharply. "If you want crazy shit, think about how Albert's violin sounded when you were standing six feet away from it. Or look around you, Mr. Gaffney. Just look around you. What's happening to us ... what we're in ... that's crazy shit."

  Don frowned and stuffed his hands deep in his pockets.

  "Go on," Brian said.

  "All right. I'm not saying that I've got this right; I'm just offering a hypothesis that fits the situation in which we have found ourselves. Let us say that such rips in the fabric of time appear every now and then, but mostly over unpopulated areas ... by which I mean the ocean, of course. I can't say why that would be, but it's still a logical assumption to make, since that's where most of these disappearances seem to occur."

  "Weather patterns over water are almost always different from weather patterns over large land-masses," Brian said. "That could be it."

  Bob nodded. "Right or wrong, it's a good way to think of it, because it puts it in a context we're all familiar with. This could be similar to rare weather phenomena which are sometimes reported: upside-down tornadoes, circular rainbows, daytime starlight. These time-rips may appear and disappear at random, or they may move, the way fronts and pressure systems move, but they very rarely appear over land.

  "But a statistician will tell you that sooner or later whatever can happen will happen, so let us say that last night one did appear over land ... and we had the bad luck to fly into it. And we know something else. Some unknown rule or property of this fabulous meteorological freak makes it impossible for any living being to travel through unless he or she is fast asleep."