Four Past Midnight (36 page)

Did Nick have a reason for what he was saying, or had Bob's panic been infectious? There was no time to make a decision on any rational basis; only a split-second to consult the silent tickings of instinct.

Brain Engle grabbed the steering yoke and hauled it hard over to port.

Nick was thrown across the cockpit and into a bulkhead; there was a sickening crack as his arm broke. In the main cabin, the luggage which had fallen from the overhead compartments when Brian swerved onto the runway at BIA now flew once more, striking the curved walls and thudding off the windows in a vicious hail. The man with the black beard was thrown out of his seat like a Cabbage Patch Kid and had time to utter one bleary squawk before his head collided with the arm of a seat and he fell into the aisle in an untidy tangle of limbs. Bethany screamed and Albert hugged her tight against him. Two rows behind, Rudy Warwick closed his eyes tighter, clutched his rosary harder, and prayed faster as his seat tilted away beneath him.

Now
there was turbulence; Flight 29 became a surfboard with wings, rocking and twisting and thumping through the unsteady air. Brian's hands were momentarily thrown off the yoke and then he grabbed it again. At the same time he opened the throttle all the way to the stop and the plane's turbos responded with a deep snarl of power rarely heard outside of the airline's diagnostic hangars. The turbulence increased; the plane slammed viciously up and down, and from somewhere came the deadly shriek of overstressed metal.

In first class, Bob Jenkins clutched at the arms of his seat, numbly grateful that the Englishman had managed to belt him in. He felt as if he had been strapped to some madman's jet-powered pogo stick. The plane took another great leap, rocked up almost to the vertical on its portside wing, and his false teeth shot from his mouth.

He didn't know. He only knew that the world was a thumping, bucking nightmare . . . but he was still in it.

For the time being, at least, he was still in it.

The turbulence continued to increase as Brian drove the 767 across the wide stream of vapor feeding into the rip. Ahead of him, the hole continued to swell in front of the plane's nose even as it continued sliding off to starboard. Then, after one particularly vicious jolt, they came out of the rapids and into smoother air. The time-rip disappeared to starboard. They had missed it ... by how little Brian did not like to think.

He continued to bank the plane, but at a less drastic angle. “Nick!” he shouted without turning around. “Nick, are you all right?”

Nick got slowly to his feet, holding his right arm against his belly with his left hand. His face was very white and his teeth were set in a grimace of pain. Small trickles of blood ran from his nostrils. “I've been better, mate. Broke my arm, I think. Not the first time for this poor old fellow, either. We missed it, didn't we?”

“We missed it,” Brian agreed. He continued to bring the plane back in a big, slow circle. “And in just a minute you're going to tell me
why
we missed it, when we came all this way to find it. And it better be good, broken arm or no broken arm.”

He reached for the intercom toggle.

Laurel opened her eyes as Brian began to speak and discovered that Dinah's head was in her lap. She stroked her hair gently and then readjusted her position on the stretcher.

“This is Captain Engle, folks. I'm sorry about that. It was pretty damned hairy, but we're okay; I've got a green board. Let me repeat that we've found what we were looking for, but—”

He clicked off suddenly.

The others waited. Bethany Simms was sobbing against Albert's chest. Behind them, Rudy was still saying his rosary.

Brian had broken his transmission when he realized that Bob Jenkins was standing beside him. The writer was shaking, there was a wet patch on his slacks, his mouth had an odd, sunken look Brian hadn't noticed before . . . but he seemed in charge of himself. Behind him, Nick sat heavily in the co-pilot's chair, wincing as he did so and still cradling his arm. It had begun to swell.

“What the hell is this all about?” Brian asked Bob sternly. “A little more turbulence and this bitch would have broken into about ten thousand pieces.”

“Can I talk through that thing?” Bob asked, pointing to the switch marked INTERCOM.

“Yes, but—”

“Then let me do it.”

Brian started to protest, then thought better of it. He flicked the switch. “Go ahead; you're on.” Then he repeated: “And it better be good.”

“Listen to me, all of you!” Bob shouted.

From behind them came a protesting whine of feedback. “We—”

“Just talk in your normal tone of voice,” Brian said. “You'll blow their goddam eardrums out.”

Bob made a visible effort to compose himself, then went on in a lower tone of voice. “We had to turn back, and we did. The captain has made it clear to me that we only just managed to do it. We have been extremely lucky . . . and extremely stupid, as well. We forgot the most elementary thing, you see, although it was right in front of us all the time. When we went through the time-rip in the first place,
everyone on the plane who was awake disappeared.”

Brian jerked in his seat. He felt as if someone had slugged him. Ahead of the 767's nose, about thirty miles distant, the faintly glowing lozenge shape had appeared again in the sky, looking like some gigantic semi-precious stone. It seemed to mock him.

“We
are all awake,” Bob said. (In the main cabin, Albert looked at the man with the black beard lying out cold in the aisle and thought,
With one exception.)
“Logic suggests that if we try to go through that way,
we
will disappear.” He thought about this and then said, “That is all.”

Brian flicked the intercom link closed without thinking about it. Behind him, Nick voiced a painful, incredulous laugh.

“That is all? That is bloody
all?
What do we
do
about it?”

Brian looked at him and didn't answer. Neither did Bob Jenkins.

Bethany raised her head and looked into Albert's strained, bewildered face. “We have to go to sleep? How do we do
that?
I never felt less like sleeping in my whole
life!”

“I don't know.” He looked hopefully across the aisle at Laurel. She was already shaking her head. She wished she
could
go to sleep, just go to sleep and make this whole crazy nightmare
gone—
but, like Bethany, she had never felt less like it in her entire life.

Bob took a step forward and gazed out through the cockpit window in silent fascination. After a long moment he said in a soft, awed voice: “So that's what it looks like.”

A line from some rock-and-roll song popped into Brian's head:
You can look but you better not touch.
He glanced down at the LED fuel indicators. What he saw there didn't ease his mind any, and he raised his eyes helplessly to Nick's. Like the others, he had never felt so wide awake in his life.

“I don't know what we do now,” he said, “but if we're going to try that hole, it has to be soon. The fuel we've got will carry us for an hour, maybe a little more. After that, forget it. Got any ideas?”

Nick lowered his head, still cradling his swelling arm. After a moment or two he looked up again. “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I do. People who fly rarely stick their prescription medicine in their checked baggage—they like to have it with them in case their luggage ends up on the other side of the world and takes a few days to get back to them. If we go through the hand-carry bags, we're sure to find scads of sedatives. We won't even have to take the bags out of the bins. Judging from the sounds, most of them are already lying on the floor . . . what? What's the matter with it?”

This last was directed at Bob Jenkins, who had begun shaking his head as soon as the phrase “prescription medicines” popped out of Nick's mouth.

“Do you know anything about prescription sedatives?” he asked Nick.

“A little,” Nick said, but he sounded defensive. “A little, yeah.”

“Well, I know a lot,” Bob said dryly. “I've researched them exhaustively—from All-Nite to Xanax. Murder by sleeping potion has always been a great favorite in my field, you understand. Even if you happened to find one of the more potent medications in the very first bag you checked—unlikely in itself—you couldn't administer a safe dose which would act quickly enough.”

“Why bloody
not?”

“Because it would take at least forty minutes for the stuff to work . . . and I strongly doubt it
would
work on everyone. The natural reaction of minds under stress to such medication is to fight—to try to refuse it. There is absolutely no way to combat such a reaction, Nick . . . you might as well try to legislate your own heartbeat. What you'd do, always supposing you found a supply of medication large enough to allow it, would be to administer a series of lethal overdoses and turn the plane into Jonestown. We might all come through, but we'd be dead.”

“Forty minutes,” Nick said. “Christ. Are you sure? Are you absolutely
sure?”

“Yes,” Bob said unflinchingly.

Brian looked out at the glowing lozenge shape in the sky. He had put Flight 29 into a circling pattern and the rip was on the verge of disappearing again. It would be back shortly . . . but they would be no closer to it.

“I can't believe it,” Nick said heavily. “To go through the things we've gone through . . . to have taken off successfully and come all this way ... to have
actually found
the bloody thing ... and then we find out we can't go through it and back to our own time just because we can't go to
sleep?”

“We don't have forty minutes, anyway,” Brian said quietly. “If we waited that long, this plane would crash sixty miles east of the airport.”

“Surely there are other fields—”

“There are, but none big enough to handle an airplane of this size.”

“If we went through and then turned back east again?”

“Vegas. But Vegas is going to be out of reach in ...” Brian glanced at his instruments. “. . . less than eight minutes. I think it has to be LAX. I'll need at least thirty-five minutes to get there. That's cutting it extremely fine even if they clear everything out of our way and vector us straight in. That gives us ...” He looked at the chronometer again. “... twenty minutes at most to figure this thing out and get through the hole.”

Bob was looking thoughtfully at Nick. “What about you?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what about me?”

“I think you're a soldier ... but I don't think you're an ordinary one. Might you be SAS, perhaps?”

Nick's face tightened. “And if I was that or something like it, mate?”

“Maybe you could put us to sleep,” Bob said. “Don't they teach you Special Forces men tricks like that?”

Brian's mind flashed back to Nick's first confrontation with Craig Toomy.
Have you ever watched
Star Trek? he had asked Craig.
Marvellous American program . . . And if you don't shut your gob at once, you bloody idiot, I'll be happy to demonstrate Mr. Spock's famous Vulcan sleeper-hold for you.

“What about it, Nick?” he said softly. “If we ever needed the famous Vulcan sleeper-hold, it's now.”

Nick looked unbelievingly from Bob to Brian and then back to Bob again. “Please don't make me laugh, gents—it makes my arm hurt worse.”

“What does that mean?” Bob asked.

“I've got my sedatives all wrong, have I? Well, let me tell you both that you've got it all wrong about me. I am
not
James Bond. There never
was
a James Bond in the real world. I suppose I might be able to kill you with a neck-chop, Bob, but I'd more likely just leave you paralyzed for life. Might not even knock you out. And then there's this.” Nick held up his rapidly swelling right arm with a little wince. “My smart hand happens to be attached to my recently re-broken arm. I could perhaps defend myself with my left hand—against an unschooled opponent—but the kind of thing you're talking about? No. No way.”

“You're all forgetting the most important thing of all,” a new voice said.

They turned. Laurel Stevenson, white and haggard, was standing in the cockpit door. She had folded her arms across her breasts as if she was cold and was cupping her elbows in her hands.

“If we're all knocked out, who is going to fly the plane?” she asked. “Who is going to fly the plane into L.A.?”

The three men gaped at her wordlessly. Behind them, unnoticed, the large semi-precious stone that was the time-rip glided into view again.

“We're fucked,” Nick said quietly. “Do you know that? We are absolutely dead-out fucked.” He laughed a little, then winced as his stomach jogged his broken arm.

“Maybe not,” Albert said. He and Bethany had appeared behind Laurel; Albert had his arm around the girl's waist. His hair was plastered against his forehead in sweaty ringlets, but his dark eyes were clear and intent. They were focussed on Brian. “I think
you
can put us to sleep,” he said, “and I think
you
can land us.”

“What are you talking about?” Brian asked roughly.

Albert replied: “Pressure. I'm talking about pressure.”

Brian's dream recurred to him then, recurred with such terrible force that he might have been reliving it: Anne with her hand plastered over the crack in the body of the plane, the crack with the words SHOOTING STARS ONLY printed over it in red.