Four Past Midnight (22 page)

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 falling 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, pocket-change, 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 State School 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.”

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.

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 them. 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 that 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.

Brian turned to look at the writer. “You say we have to get out of here, right?”

“Yes. I think we must do that just as soon as we possibly—”

“And where do you suggest we go? Atlantic City? Miami Beach? Club Med?”

“You are suggesting, Captain Engle, that there's no place we
can
go. I think—I
hope
—that you're wrong about that. I have an idea.”

“Which is?”

“In a moment. First, answer one question for me. Can you refuel the airplane? Can you do that even if there's no power?”

“I think so, yes. Let's say that, with the help of a few able-bodied men, I could. Then what?”

“Then we take off again,” Bob said. Little beads of sweat stood out on his deeply lined face. They looked like droplets of clear oil. “That sound—that crunchy sound—is coming from the east. The time-rip was several thousand miles west of here. If we retraced our original course ... could you do that?”

“Yes,” Brian said. He had left the auxiliary power units running, and that meant the INS computer's program was still intact. That program was an exact log of the trip they had just made, from the moment Flight 29 had left the ground in southern California until the moment it had set down in central Maine. One touch of a button would instruct the computer to simply reverse that course; the touch of another button, once in the air, would put the autopilot to work flying it. The Teledyne inertial navigation system would re-create the trip down to the smallest degree deviations. “I could do that, but why?”

“Because the rip may still be there. Don't you see?
We might be able to fly back through it.”

Nick looked at Bob in sudden startled concentration, then turned to Brian. “He might have something there, mate. He just might.”

Albert Kaussner's mind was diverted onto an irrelevant but fascinating side-track: if the rip were still there, and if Flight 29 had been on a frequently used altitude and heading—a kind of east-west avenue in the sky—then perhaps other planes had gone through it between 1:07 this morning and now (whenever now was). Perhaps there were other planes landing or landed at other deserted American airports, other crews and passengers wandering around, stunned ...

No, he thought.
We happened to have a pilot on board. What are the chances of that happening twice?

He thought of what Mr. Jenkins had said about Ted Williams's sixteen consecutive on-bases and shivered.

“He might or he might not,” Brian said. “It doesn't really matter, because we're not going anyplace in that plane.”

“Why not?” Rudy asked. “If you could refuel it, I don't see...”

“Remember the matches? The ones from the bowl in the restaurant? The ones that wouldn't light?”

Rudy looked blank, but an expression of huge dismay dawned on Bob Jenkins's face. He put his hand to his forehead and took a step backward. He actually seemed to shrink before them.

“What?” Don asked. He was looking at Brian from beneath drawn-together brows. It was a look which conveyed both confusion and suspicion. “What does that have to—”