Four Past Midnight

CHAPTER 5

A Book of Matches. The Adventure of

the Salami Sandwich. Another Example

of the Deductive Method. The Arizona

Yew Plays the Violin. The Only Sound in

Town.

1

The frozen silence following Dinah's warning was finally broken by Robert Jenkins. 'We have some problems,' he said in a dry lecture-hall voice. 'If Dinah hears something - and following the remarkable demonstration she's just given us, I'm inclined to think she does - it would be helpful if we knew what it is. We don't. That's one problem. The plane's lack of fuel is another problem.'

'There's a 727 Out there,' Nick said, 'all cozied up to a jetway. Can you fly one of those, Brian?'

'Yes,' Brian said.

Nick spread his hands in Bob's direction and shrugged, as if to say There you are: one knot untied already.

'Assuming we do take off again, where should we go?' Bob Jenkins went on. 'A third problem.'

'Away,' Dinah said immediately. 'Away from that sound. We have to get away from that sound, and what's making it.'

'How long do you think we have?' Bob asked her gently. 'How long before it gets here, Dinah? Do you have any idea at all?'

'No,' she said from the safe circle of Laurel's arms. 'I think it's still far. I think there's still time. But . . .'

'Then I suggest we do exactly as Mr Warwick has suggested,' Bob said. 'Let's step over to the restaurant, have a bite to eat, and discuss what happens next. Food does have a beneficial effect on what Monsieur Poirot liked to call the little gray cells.'

'We shouldn't wait,' Dinah said fretfully.

'Fifteen minutes,' Bob said. 'No more than that. And even at your age, Dinah, you should know that useful thinking must always precede useful action.'

Albert suddenly realized that the mystery writer had his own reasons for wanting to go to the restaurant. Mr Jenkins's little gray cells were all in apple-pie working order - or at least he believed they were - and following his eerily sharp assessment of their situation on board the plane, Albert was willing at least to give him the benefit of the doubt. He wants to show us something, or prove something to us, he thought.

'Surely we have fifteen minutes?' he coaxed.

'Well . . .'Dinah said unwillingly. 'I guess so.'

'Fine,' Bob said briskly. 'It's decided.' And he struck off across the room toward the restaurant, as if taking it for granted that the others would follow him.

Brian and Nick looked at each other.

'We better go along,' Albert said quietly. 'I think he knows stuff.'

'What kind of stuff?' Brian asked.

'I don't know, exactly, but I think it might be stuff worth finding out.'

Albert followed Bob; Bethany followed Albert; the others fell in behind them, Laurel leading Dinah by the hand. The little girl was very pale.

2

The Cloud Nine Restaurant was really a cafeteria with a cold-case full of drinks and sandwiches at the rear and a stainless steel counter running beside a long, compartmentalized steam-table. All the compartments were empty, all sparkling clean. There wasn't a speck of grease on the grill. Glasses - those tough cafeteria glasses with the ripply sides - were stacked in neat pyramids on rear shelves, along with a wide selection of even tougher cafeteria crockery.

Robert Jenkins was standing by the cash register. As Albert and Bethany came in, he said: 'May I have another cigarette, Bethany?'

'Gee, you're a real mooch,' she said, but her tone was good-natured. She produced her box of Marlboros and shook one out. He took it, then touched her hand as she also produced her book of matches.

'I'll just use one of these, shall I?' There was a bowl filled with paper matches advertising LaSalle Business School by the cash register. FOR OUR MATCHLESS FRIENDS, a little sign beside the bowl read. Bob took a book of these matches, opened it, and pulled one of the matches free.

'Sure,' Bethany said, 'but why?'

'That's what we're going to find out,' he said. He glanced at the others. They were standing around in a semicircle, watching - all except Rudy Warwick, who had drifted to the rear of the serving area and was closely inspecting the contents of the cold-case.

Bob struck the match. It left a little smear of white stuff on the striker but didn't light. He struck it again with the same result. On the third try, the paper match bent. Most of the flammable head was gone, anyway.

'My, my,' he said in an utterly unsurprised tone. 'I suppose they must be wet. Let's try a book from the bottom, shall we? They should be dry.'

He dug to the bottom of the bowl, spilling a number of matchbooks off the top and onto the counter as he did so. They all looked perfectly dry to Albert. Behind him, Nick and Brian exchanged another glance.

Bob fished out another book of matches, pulled one, and tried to strike it. It didn't light.

'Son of a bee,' he said. 'We seem to have discovered yet another problem. May I borrow your book of matches, Bethany?'

She handed it over without a word.

'Wait a minute,' Nick said slowly. 'What do you know, matey?'

'Only that this situation has even wider implications than we at first thought,' Bob said. His eyes were calm enough, but the face from which they looked was haggard. 'And I have an idea that we all may have made one big mistake. Understandable enough under the circumstances ... but until we've rectified our thinking on this subject, I don't believe we can make any progress. An error of perspective, I'd call it.'

Warwick was wandering back toward them. He had selected a wrapped sandwich and a bottle of beer. His acquisitions seemed to have cheered him considerably. 'What's happening, folks?'

'I'll be damned if I know,' Brian said, 'but I don't like it much.'

Bob Jenkins pulled one of the matches from Bethany's book and struck it. It lit on the first strike. 'Ah,' he said, and applied the flame to the tip of his cigarette. The smoke smelled incredibly pungent, incredibly sweet to Brian, and a moment's reflection suggested a reason why: it was the only thing, save for the faint tang of Nick Hopewell's shaving lotion and Laurel's perfume, that he could smell. Now that he thought about it, Brian realized that he could also smell his travelling companions' sweat.

Bob still held the lit match in his hand. Now he bent back the top of the book he'd taken from the bowl, exposing all the matches, and touched the lit match to the heads of the others. For a long moment nothing happened. The writer slipped the flame back and forth along the heads of the matches, but they didn't light. The others watched, fascinated.

At last there was a sickly phsssss sound, and a few of the matches erupted into dull, momentary life. They did not really burn at all; there was a weak glow and they went out. A few tendrils of smoke drifted up ... smoke which seemed to have no odor at all.

Bob looked around at them and smiled grimly. 'Even that,' he said, 'is more than I expected.'

'All right,' Brian said. 'Tell us about it. I know -'

At that moment, Rudy Warwick uttered a cry of disgust. Dinah gave a little shriek and pressed closer to Laurel. Albert felt his heart take a high skip in his chest.

Rudy had unwrapped his sandwich - it looked to Brian like salami and cheese -and had taken a large bite. Now he spat it out onto the floor with a grimace of disgust.

'It's spoiled!' Rudy cried. 'Oh, goddam! I hate that!'

'Spoiled?' Bob Jenkins said swiftly. His eyes gleamed like blue electrical sparks. 'Oh, I doubt that. Processed meats are so loaded with preservatives these days that it takes eight hours or more in the hot sun to send them over. And we know by the clocks that the power in that cold-case went out less than five hours ago.'

'Maybe not,' Albert spoke up. 'You were the one who said it felt later than our wristwatches say.'

'Yes, but I don't think ... Was the case still cold, Mr Warwick? When you opened it, was the case still cold?'

'Not cold, exactly, but cool,' Rudy said. 'That sandwich is all fucked up, though. Pardon me, ladies. Here.' He held it out. 'If you don't think it's spoiled, you try it.'

Bob stared at the sandwich, appeared to screw up his courage, and then did just that, taking a small bite from the untouched half. Albert saw an expression of disgust pass over his face, but he did not get rid of the food immediately. He chewed once ... twice ... then turned and spat into his hand. He stuffed the halfchewed bite of sandwich into the trash-bin below the condiments shelf, and dropped the rest of the sandwich in after it.

'Not spoiled,' he said. 'Tasteless. And not just that, either. It seemed to have no texture.' His mouth drew down in an involuntary expression of disgust. 'We talk about things being bland - unseasoned white rice, boiled potatoes - but even the blandest food has some taste, I think. That had none. It was like chewing paper. No wonder you thought it was spoiled.'

'It was spoiled,' the bald man reiterated stubbornly.

'Try your beer,' Bob invited. 'That shouldn't be spoiled. The cap is still on, and a capped bottle of beer shouldn't spoil even if it isn't refrigerated.'

Rudy looked thoughtfully at the bottle of Budweiser in his hand, then shook his head and held it out to Bob. 'I don't want it anymore,' he said. He glanced at the cold-case. His gaze was baleful, as if he suspected Jenkins of having played an unfunny practical joke on him.

'I will if I have to,' Bob said, 'but I've already offered my body up to science once. Will somebody else try this beer? I think it's very important.'

'Give it to me,' Nick said.

'No.' It was Don Gaffney. 'Give it to me. I could use a beer, by God. I've drunk 'em warm before and they don't cross my eyes none.'

He took the beer, twisted off the cap, and upended it. A moment later he whirled and sprayed the mouthful he had taken onto the floor.

'Jesus!' he cried. 'Flat! Flat as a pancake!'

'Is it?' Bob asked brightly. 'Good! Great! Something we can all see!' He was around the counter in a flash, and taking one of the glasses down from the shelf. Gaffney had set the bottle down beside the cash register, and Brian looked at it closely as Bob Jenkins picked it up. He could see no foam clinging to the inside of the bottleneck. It might as well be water in there, he thought.

What Bob poured out didn't look like water, however; it looked like beer. Flat beer. There was no head. A few small bubbles clung to the inside of the glass, but none of them came pinging up through the liquid to the surface.

'All right,' Nick said slowly, 'it's flat. Sometimes that happens. The cap doesn't get screwed on all the way at the factory and the gas escapes. Everyone's gotten a flat lager from time to time.'

'But when you add in the tasteless salami sandwich, it's suggestive, isn't it?'

'Suggestive of what?' Brian exploded.

'In a moment,' Bob said. 'Let's take care of Mr Hopewell's caveat first, shall we?' He turned, grabbed glasses with both hands (a couple of others fell off the shelf and shattered on the floor), then began to set them out along the counter with the agile speed of a bartender. 'Bring me some more beer. And a couple of soft drinks, while you're at it.'

Albert and Bethany went down to the cold-case and each took four or five bottles, picking at random.

'Is he nuts?' Bethany asked in a low voice.

'I don't think so,' Albert said. He had a vague idea of what the writer was trying to show them ... and he didn't like the shape it made in his mind. 'Remember when he told you to save your matches? He knew something like this was going to happen. That's why he was so hot to get us over to the restaurant. He wanted to show us.'

3

The duty roster was ripped into three dozen narrow strips and the langoliers were closer now.

Craig could feel their approach at the back of his mind - more weight.

More insupportable weight.

It was time to go.

He picked up the gun and his briefcase, then stood up and left the security room. He walked slowly, rehearsing as he went: I don't want to shoot you, but I will if I have to. Take me to Boston. I don't want to shoot you, but I will if I have to. Take me to Boston.

'I will if I have to,' Craig muttered as he walked back into the waiting room. 'I will if I have to.' His finger found the hammer of the gun and cocked it back.

Halfway across the room, his attention was once more snared by the pallid light which fell through the windows, and he turned in that direction. He could feel them out there. The langoliers. They had eaten all the useless, lazy people, and now they were returning for him. He had to get to Boston. It was the only way he knew to save the rest of himself ... because their death would be horrible. Their death would be horrible indeed.

He walked slowly to the windows and looked out, ignoring - at least for the time being - the murmur of the other passengers behind him.

4

Bob Jenkins poured a little from each bottle into its own glass. The contents of each was as flat as the first beer had been. 'Are you convinced?' he asked Nick.

'Yes,' Nick said. 'If you know what's going on here, mate, spill it. Please spill it.'

'I have an idea,' Bob said. 'It's not ... I'm afraid it's not very comforting, but I'm one of those people who believe that knowledge is always better - safer - in the long run than ignorance, no matter how dismayed one may feel when one first understands certain facts. Does that make any sense?'

'No,' Gaffney said at once.

Bob shrugged and offered a small, wry smile. 'Be that as it may, I stand by my statement. And before I say anything else, I want to ask you all to look around this place and tell me what you see.'

They looked around, concentrating so fiercely on the little clusters of tables and chairs that no one noticed Craig Toomy standing on the far side of the waiting room, his back to them, gazing out at the tarmac.

'Nothing,' Laurel said at last. 'I'm sorry, but I don't see anything. Your eyes must be sharper than mine, Mr Jenkins.'

'Not a bit. I see what you see: nothing. But airports are open twenty-four hours a day. When this thing - this Event - happened, it was probably at the dead low tide of its twenty-four-hour cycle, but I find it difficult to believe there weren't at least a few people in here, drinking coffee and perhaps eating early breakfasts. Aircraft maintenance men. Airport personnel. Perhaps a handful of connecting passengers who elected to save money by spending the hours between midnight and six or seven o'clock in the terminal instead of in a nearby motel. When I first got off that baggage conveyor and looked around, I felt utterly dislocated. Why? Because airports are never completely deserted, just as police and fire stations are never completely deserted. Now look around again, and ask yourself this: where are the half-eaten meals, the half-empty glasses? Remember the drinks trolley on the airplane with the dirty glasses on the lower shelf ? Remember the half-eaten pastry and the half-drunk cup of coffee beside the pilot's seat in the cockpit? There's nothing like that here. Where is the least sign that there were people here at all when this Event occurred?'

Albert looked around again and then said slowly, 'There's no pipe on the foredeck, is there?'

Bob looked at him closely. 'What? What do you say, Albert?'

'When we were on the plane,' Albert said slowly, 'I was thinking of this sailing ship I read about once. It was called the Mary Celeste, and someone spotted it, just floating aimlessly along. Well . . . not really floating, I guess, because the book said the sails were set, but when the people who found it boarded her, everyone on the Mary Celeste was gone. Their stuff was still there, though, and there was food cooking on the stove. Someone even found a pipe on the foredeck. It was still lit.'

'Bravo!' Bob cried, almost feverishly. They were all looking at him now, and no one saw Craig Toomy walking slowly toward them. The gun he had found was no longer pointed at the floor.

'Bravo, Albert! You've put your finger on it! And there was another famous disappearance - an entire colony of settlers at a place called Roanoke Island ... off the coast of North Carolina, I believe. All gone, but they had left remains of campfires, cluttered houses, and trash middens behind. Now, Albert, take this a step further. How else does this terminal differ from our airplane?'

For a moment Albert looked entirely blank, and then understanding dawned in his eyes. 'The rings!' he shouted. 'The purses! The wallets! The money! The surgical pins! None of that stuff is here!'

'Correct,' Bob said softly. 'One hundred per cent correct. As you say, none of that stuff is here. But it was on the airplane when we survivors woke up, wasn't it? There were even a cup of coffee and a half-eaten Danish in the cockpit. The equivalent of a smoking pipe on the foredeck.'

'You think we've flown into another dimension, don't you?' Albert said. His voice was awed. 'Just like in a science-fiction story.'

Dinah's head cocked to one side, and for a moment she looked strikingly like Nipper, the dog on the old RCA Victor labels.

'No,' Bob said, 'I think -'

'Watch out!' Dinah cried sharply. 'I hear some-'

She was too late. Once Craig Toomy broke the paralysis which had held him and he started to move, he moved fast. Before Nick or Brian could do more than begin to turn around, he had locked one forearm around Bethany's throat and was dragging her backward. He pointed the gun at her temple. The girl uttered a desperate, terrorized squawk.

'I don't want to shoot her, but I will if I have to,' Craig panted. 'Take me to Boston.' His eyes were no longer blank; they shot glances full of terrified, paranoid intelligence in every direction. 'Do you hear me? Take me to Boston!'

Brian started toward him, and Nick placed a hand against his chest without shifting his eyes away from Craig. 'Steady down, mate,' he said in a low voice. 'It wouldn't be safe. Our friend here is quite bonkers.'

Bethany was squirming under Craig's restraining forearm. 'You're choking me! Please stop choking me.'

'What's happening?' Dinah cried. 'What is it?'

'Stop that!' Craig shouted at Bethany. 'Stop moving around! You're going to force me to do something I don't want to do!' He pressed the muzzle of the gun against the side of her head. She continued to struggle, and Albert suddenly realized she didn't know he had a gun - even with it pressed against her skull she didn't know.

'Quit it, girl!' Nick said sharply. 'Quit fighting!'

For the first time in his waking life, Albert found himself not just thinking like The Arizona Jew but possibly called upon to act like that fabled character. Without taking his eyes off the lunatic in the crewneck jersey, he slowly began to raise his violin case. He switched his grip from the handle and settled both hands around the neck of the case. Toomy was not looking at him; his eyes were shuttling rapidly back and forth between Brian and Nick, and he had his hands full - quite literally - holding onto Bethany.

'I don't want to shoot her -' Craig was beginning again, and then his arm slipped upward as the girl bucked against him, socking her behind into his crotch. Bethany immediately sank her teeth into his wrist. 'Ow!' Craig screamed. 'owww!'

His grip loosened. Bethany ducked under it. Albert leaped forward, raising the violin case, as Toomy pointed the gun at Bethany. Toomy's face was screwed into a grimace of pain and anger.

'No, Albert!' Nick bawled.

Craig Toomy saw Albert coming and shifted the muzzle toward him. For one moment Albert looked straight into it, and it was like none of his dreams or fantasies. Looking into the muzzle was like looking into an open grave.

I might have made a mistake here, he thought, and then Craig pulled the trigger.

5

Instead of an explosion there was a small pop - the sound of an old Daisy air rifle, no more. Albert felt something thump against the chest of his Hard Rock Cafe tee-shirt, had time to realize he had been shot, and then he brought the violin case down on Craig's head. There was a solid thud which ran all the way up his arms and the indignant voice of his father suddenly spoke up in his mind: What's the matter with you, Albert? That's no way to treat an expensive musical instrument!

There was a startled broink! from inside the case as the violin jumped. One of the brass latches dug into Toomy's forehead and blood splashed outward in an amazing spray. Then the man's knees came unhinged and he went down in front of Albert like an express elevator. Albert saw his eyes roll up to whites, and then Craig Toomy was lying at his feet, unconscious.

A crazy but somehow wonderful thought filled Albert's mind for a moment: By God, I never played better in my life! And then he realized that he was no longer able to get his breath. He turned to the others, the corners of his mouth turning up in a thin-lipped, slightly confused smile. 'I think I have been plugged,' Ace Kaussner said, and then the world bleached out to shades of gray and his own knees came unhinged. He crumpled to the floor on top of his violin case.

6

He was out for less than thirty seconds. When he came around, Brian was slapping his cheeks lightly and looking anxious. Bethany was on her knees beside him, looking at Albert with shining my-hero eyes. Behind her, Dinah Bellman was still crying within the circle of Laurel's arms. Albert looked back at Bethany and felt his heart - apparently still whole - expand in his chest. 'The Arizona Jew rides again,' he muttered.

'What, Albert?' she asked, and stroked his cheek. Her hand was wonderfully soft, wonderfully cool. Albert decided he was in love.

'Nothing,' he said, and then the pilot whacked him across the face again.

'Are you all right, kid?' Brian was asking. 'Are you all right?'

'I think so,' Albert said. 'Stop doing that, okay? And the name is Albert. Ace, to my friends. How bad am I hit? I can't feel anything yet. Were you able to stop the bleeding?'

Nick Hopewell squatted beside Bethany. His face wore a bemused, unbelieving smile. 'I think you'll live, matey. I never saw anything like that in my life ... and I've seen a lot. You Americans are too foolish not to love. Hold out your hand and I'll give you a souvenir.'

Albert held out a hand which shook uncontrollably with reaction, and Nick dropped something into it. Albert held it up to his eyes and saw it was a bullet.

'I picked it up off the floor,' Nick said. 'Not even misshapen. It must have hit you square in the chest - there's a little powder mark on your shirt - and then bounced off. It was a misfire. God must like you, mate.'

'I was thinking of the matches,' Albert said weakly. 'I sort of thought it wouldn't fire at all.'

'That was very brave and very foolish, my boy,' Bob Jenkins said. His face was dead white and he looked as if he might pass out himself in another few moments. 'Never believe a writer. Listen to them, by all means, but never believe them. My God, what if I'd been wrong?'

'You almost were,' Brian said. He helped Albert to his feet. 'It was like when you lit the other matches - the ones from the bowl. There was just enough pop to drive the bullet out of the muzzle. A little more pop and Albert would have had a bullet in his lung.'

Another wave of dizziness washed over Albert. He swayed on his feet, and Bethany immediately slipped an arm around his waist. 'I thought it was really brave,' she said, looking up at him with eyes which suggested she believed Albert Kaussner must shit diamonds from a platinum asshole. 'I mean incredible.'

'Thanks,' Ace said, smiling coolly (if a trifle woozily). 'It wasn't much.' The fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi was aware that there was a great deal of girl pressed tightly against him, and that the girl smelled almost unbearably good. Suddenly he felt good. In fact, he believed he had never felt better in his life. Then he remembered his violin, bent down, and picked up the case. There was a deep dent in one side, and one of the catches had been sprung. There was blood and hair on it, and Albert felt his stomach turn over lazily. He opened the case and looked in. The instrument looked all right, and he let out a little sigh.

Then he thought of Craig Toomy, and alarm replaced relief.

'Say, I didn't kill that guy, did I? I hit him pretty hard.' He looked towards Craig, who was lying near the restaurant door with Don Gaffney kneeling beside him. Albert suddenly felt like passing out again. There was a great deal of blood on Craig's face and forehead.

'He's alive,' Don said, 'but he's out like a light.'

Albert, who had blown away more hardcases than The Man with No Name in his dreams, felt his gorge rise. 'Jesus, there's so much blood!'

'Doesn't mean a thing,' Nick said. 'Scalp wounds tend to bleed a lot.' He joined Don, picked up Craig's wrist, and felt for a pulse. 'You want to remember he had a gun to that girl's head, matey. If he'd pulled the trigger at point-blank range, he might well have done for her. Remember the actor who killed himself with a blank round a few years ago? Mr Toomy brought this on himself; he owns it completely. Don't take on.'

Nick dropped Craig's wrist and stood up.

'Besides,' he said, pulling a large swatch of paper napkins from the dispenser on one of the tables, 'his pulse is strong and regular. I think he'll wake up in a few minutes with nothing but a bad headache. I also think it might be prudent to take a few precautions against that happy event. Mr Gaffney, the tables in yonder watering hole actually appear to be equipped with tablecloths - strange but true. I wonder if you'd get a couple? We might be wise to bind old Mr I've-Got-to-Get-to-Boston's hands behind him.'

'Do you really have to do that?' Laurel asked quietly. 'The man is unconscious, after all, and bleeding.'

Nick pressed his makeshift napkin compress against Craig Toomy's headwound and looked up at her. 'You're Laurel, right?'

'Right.'

'Well, Laurel, let's not paint it fine. This man is a lunatic. I don't know if our current adventure did that to him or if he just growed that way, like Topsy, but I do know he's dangerous. He would have grabbed Dinah instead of Bethany if she had been closer. If we leave him untied, he might do just that next time.'

Craig groaned and waved his hands feebly. Bob Jenkins stepped away from him the moment he began to move, even though the revolver was now safely tucked into the waistband of Brian Engle's pants, and Laurel did the same, pulling Dinah with her.

'Is anybody dead?' Dinah asked nervously. 'No one is, are they?'

'No, honey.'

'I should have heard him sooner, but I was listening to the man who sounds like a teacher.'

'It's okay,' Laurel said. 'It turned out all right, Dinah.' Then she looked out at the empty terminal and her own words mocked her. Nothing was all right here. Nothing at all.

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 goodlooking - 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 lecture-goer 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 Flight 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 and in reasonably good order, 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 latches 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.'

'Aw, this is a fairy tale,' Gaffney said.

'I agree completely,' Craig said from the floor.

'Shut your cake-hole,' Gaffney growled at him. Craig blinked, then lifted his upper lip in a feeble sneer.

'It feels right,' Bethany said in a low voice. 'It feels as if we're out of step with ... with everything.'

'What happened to the crew and the passengers?' Albert asked. He sounded sick. 'If the plane came through, and we came through, what happened to the rest of them?'

His imagination provided him with an answer in the form of a sudden indelible image: hundreds of people failing out of the sky, ties and trousers rippling, dresses skating up to reveal garter-belts and underwear, shoes falling off, pens (the ones which weren't back on the plane, that was) shooting out of pockets; people waving their arms and legs and trying to scream in the thin air; people who had left wallets, purses, pocketchange, and, in at least one case, a pacemaker implant, behind. He saw them hitting the ground like dud bombs, squashing bushes flat, kicking up small clouds of stony dust, imprinting the desert floor with the shapes of their bodies.

'My guess is that they were vaporized,' Bob said. 'Utterly discorporated.'

Dinah didn't understand at first; then she thought of Aunt Vicky's purse with the traveller's checks still inside and began to cry softly. Laurel crossed her arms over the little blind girl's shoulders and hugged her. Albert, meanwhile, was fervently thanking God that his mother had changed her mind at the last moment, deciding not to accompany him east after all.

'In many cases their things went with them,' the writer went on. 'Those who left wallets and purses may have had them out at the time of The ... The Event. It's hard to say, though. What was taken and what was left behind - I suppose I'm thinking of the wig more than anything else - doesn't seem to have a lot of rhyme or reason to it.'

'You got that right,' Albert said. 'The surgical pins, for instance. I doubt if the guy they belonged to took them out of his shoulder or knee to play with because he got bored.'

'I agree,' Rudy Warwick said. 'It was too early in the flight to get that bored.'

Bethany looked at him, startled, then burst out laughing.

'I'm originally from Kansas,' Bob said, 'and the element of caprice makes me think of the twisters we used to sometimes get in the summer. They'd totally obliterate a farmhouse and leave the privy standing, or they'd rip away a barn without pulling so much as a shingle from the silo standing right next to it.'

'Get to the bottom line, mate,' Nick said. 'Whatever time it is we're in, I can't help feeling that it's very late in the day.'

Brian thought of Craig Toomy, Old Mr I've-Got-to-Get-to-Boston, standing at the head of the emergency slide and screaming: Time is short! Time is very fucking short!

'All right,' Bob said. 'The bottom line. Let's suppose there are such things as time-rips, and we've gone through one. I think we've gone into the past and discovered the unlovely truth of time-travel: you can't appear in the Texas Book Depository on November 22, 1963, and put a stop to the Kennedy assassination; you can't watch the building of the pyramids or the sack of Rome; you can't investigate the Age of the Dinosaurs at first hand.'

He raised his arms, hands outstretched, as if to encompass the whole silent world in which they found themselves.

'Take a good look around you, fellow time-travellers. This is the past. It is empty; it is silent. It is a world - perhaps a universe - with all the sense and meaning of a discarded paint-can. I believe we may have hopped an absurdly short distance in time, perhaps as little as fifteen minutes ... at least initially. But the world is clearly unwinding around us. Sensory input is disappearing. Electricity has already disappeared. The weather is what the weather was when we made the jump into the past. But it seems to me that as the world winds down, time itself is winding up in a kind of spiral crowding in on itself.'

'Couldn't this be the future?' Albert asked cautiously.

Bob Jenkins shrugged. He suddenly looked very tired. 'I don't know for sure, of course - how could I? - but I don't think so. This place we're in feels old and stupid and feeble and meaningless. It feels I don't know .

Dinah spoke then. They all looked toward her.

'It feels over,' she said softly.

'Yes,' Bob said. 'Thank you, dear. That's the word I was looking for.'

'Mr Jenkins?'

'Yes?'

'The sound I told you about before? I can hear it again.' She paused. 'It's getting closer.'

8

They all fell silent, their faces long and listening. Brian thought he heard something, then decided it was the sound of his own heart. Or simply imagination.

'I want to go out by the windows again,' Nick said abruptly. He stepped over Craig's prone body without so much as a glance down and strode from the restaurant without another word.

'Hey!' Bethany cried. 'Hey, I want to come, too!'

Albert followed her; most of the others trailed after. 'What about you two?' Brian asked Laurel and Dinah.

'I don't want to go,' Dinah said. 'I can hear it as well as I want to from here.' She paused and added: 'But I'm going to hear it better, I think, if we don't get out of here soon.'

Brian glanced at Laurel Stevenson.

'I'll stay here with Dinah,' she said quietly.

'All right,' Brian said. 'Keep away from Mr Toomy.'

"'Keep away from Mr Toomy."' Craig mimicked savagely from his place on the floor. He turned his head with an effort and rolled his eyes in their sockets to look at Brian. 'You really can't get away with this, Captain Engle. I don't know what game you and your Limey friend think you're playing, but you can't get away with it. Your next piloting job will probably be running cocaine in from Colombia after dark. At least you won't be lying when you tell your friends all about what a crack pilot you are.'

Brian started to reply, then thought better of it. Nick said this man was at least temporarily insane, and Brian thought Nick was right. Trying to reason with a madman was both useless and time-consuming.

'We'll keep our distance, don't worry,' Laurel said. She drew Dinah over to one of the small tables and sat down with her. 'And we'll be fine.'

'All right,' Brian said. 'Yell if he starts trying to get loose.'

Laurel smiled wanly. 'You can count on it.'

Brian bent, checked the tablecloth with which Nick had bound Craig's hands, then walked across the waiting room to join the others, who were standing in a line at the floor-to-ceiling windows.

9

He began to hear it before he was halfway across the waiting room, and by the time he had joined the others, it was impossible to believe it was an auditory hallucination.

That girl's hearing is really remarkable, Brian thought.

The sound was very faint - to him, at least - but it was there, and it did seem to be coming from the east. Dinah had said it sounded like Rice Krispies after you poured milk over it. To Brian it sounded more like radio static - the exceptionally rough static you got sometimes during periods of high sunspot activity. He agreed with Dinah about one thing, though; it sounded bad.

He could feel the hairs on the nape of his neck stiffening in response to that sound. He looked at the others and saw identical expressions of frightened dismay on every face. Nick was controlling himself the best ' and the young girl who had almost balked at using the slide - Bethany - looked the most deeply scared, but they all heard the same thing in the sound.

Bad.

Something bad on the way. Hurrying.

Nick turned toward him. 'What do you make of it, Brian? Any ideas?'

'No,' Brian said. 'Not even a little one. All I know is that it's the only sound in town.'

'It's not in town yet,' Don said, 'but it's going to be, I think. I only wish I knew how long it was going to take.'

They were quiet again, listening to the steady hissing crackle from the east. And Brian thought: I almost know the sound, I think. Not cereal in milk, not radio static, but ... what? If only it wasn't so faint ...

But he didn't want to know. He suddenly realized that, and very strongly. He didn't want to know at all. The sound filled him with a bone-deep loathing.

'We do have to get out of here!' Bethany said. Her voice was loud and wavery. Albert put an arm around her waist and she gripped his hand in both of hers. Gripped it with panicky tightness. 'We have to get out of here right now!'

'Yes,' Bob Jenkins said. 'She's right. That sound - I don't know what it is, but it's awful. We have to get out of here.'

They were all looking at Brian and he thought, It looks like I'm the captain again. But not for long. Because they didn't understand. Not even Jenkins understood, sharp as some of his other deductions might have been, that they weren't going anywhere.

Whatever was making that sound was on its way, and it didn't matter, because they would still be here when it arrived. There was no way out of that. He understood the reason why it was so, even if none of the others did ... and Brian Engle suddenly understood how an animal caught in a trap must feel as it hears the steady thud of the hunter's approaching boots.