Four Past Midnight (34 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes. As a warning.”

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

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

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

“And do what?”

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

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

Thirty-five minutes later, daylight began to seep back into the main cabin of Flight 29. Three minutes later it might have been mid-morning; fifteen minutes after that it might have been noon.

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

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

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

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

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

“Dinah, you shouldn't—”

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

Laurel looked at her with helpless wonder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God had not taken it back.

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

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

She left Dinah's eyes open.

American Pride 29 flew west through the days and nights, going from light to darkness and light to darkness as if flying through a great, lazily shifting parade of fat clouds. Each cycle came slightly faster than the one before.

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.

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.

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.”