Four Past Midnight

  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.

  11

  Half an hour later the sun rose again, and Brian felt his sanity give a deep shudder and slide closer to the edge of its own abyss. The world below was gone; utterly and finally gone. The deepening blue sky was a dome over a cyclopean ocean of deepest, purest ebony.

  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.

  What will happen to us if we can't find the rip again? he wondered. What will happen if we run out of fuel? Don't try to tell me we'll crash, because I simply don't believe it--you can't crash into nothing. I think we'll simply fall . . . and fall . . . and fall. For how long? And how far? How far can you fall into nothing?

  Don't think about it.

  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 coul
d 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."

  12

  Bob Jenkins sat with his arms folded tightly across his chest, as if he were cold. Part of him was cold, but this was not a physical coldness. The chill was coming out of his head.

  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.

  Wrong.

  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.

  I must warn them. I have to. They are going forward on my hypothesis, but if my hypothesis is somehow mistaken--and dangerous--then I must warn them.

  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.

  13

  Brian tore his eyes away from the sky--which was already showing signs of light again--long enough to take a quick glance first at the INS readout and then at the circle on his chart. They were approaching the far side of the circle now. If the time-rip was still here, they should see it soon. If they didn't, he supposed he would have to take over the controls and send them circling back for another pass at a slightly different altitude and on a slightly different heading. It would play hell on their fuel situation, which was already tight, but since the whole thing was probably hopeless anyway, it didn't matter very--

  "Brian?" Nick's voice was unsteady. "Brian? I think I see something."

  14

  Bob Jenkins reached the rear of the plane, made an about-face, and started slowly back up the aisle again, passing row after row of empty seats. He looked at the objects that lay in them and on the floor in front of them as he passed: purses . . . pairs of eyeglasses . . . wristwatches . . . a pocket-watch . . . two worn, crescent-shaped pieces of metal that were probably heel-taps . . . dental fillings . . . wedding rings . . .

  Something is wrong.

  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?

  Leave it, he advised himself, but he couldn't.

  If something really is amiss, why can't you see it? Didn't you tell the boy that deduction is your meat and drink? Haven't you written forty mystery novels, and weren't a dozen of those actually quite good? Didn't Newgate Callendar call The Sleeping Madonna "a masterpiece of logic" when he--

  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 Madonna.

  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.

  They, the survivors, had all been asleep.

  Now, with the exception of the bearded man, none of them were asleep.

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

  15

  "Holy Christ in the morning," Brian whispered.

  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 can follow it right in, Brian thought excitedly. It's better than an ILS beacon!

  "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."

  "Oka
y," 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.

  16