Four Past Midnight

'Oh boy,' she said breathlessly. 'Just like being a kid again.'

'Are you all right?' Nick asked.

'Yeah. I think I might have wet my pants a little, but I'm okay.'

Nick smiled at her and turned back to the slide.

Albert looked apologetically at Brian and extended the violin case. 'Would you mind holding this for me? I'm afraid if I fall off the slide, it might get broken. My folks'd kill me. It's a Gretch.'

Brian took it. His face was calm and serious, but he was smiling inside. 'Could I look? I used to play one of these about a thousand years ago.'

'Sure,' Albert said.

Brian's interest had a calming effect on the boy ... which was exactly what he had hoped for. He unsnapped the three catches and opened the case. The violin inside was indeed a Gretch, and not from the bottom of that prestigious line, either. Brian guessed you could buy a compact car for the amount of money this had cost.

'Beautiful,' he said, and plucked out four quick notes along the neck: My dog has fleas. They rang sweetly and beautifully. Brian closed and latched the case again. 'I'll keep it safe. Promise.'

'Thanks.' Albert stood in the doorway, took a deep breath, then let it out again. 'Geronimo,' he said in a weak little voice and jumped. He tucked his hands into his armpits as he did so - protecting his hands in any situation where physical damage was possible was so ingrained in him that it had become a reflex. He seatdropped onto the slide and shot neatly to the bottom.

'Well done!' Nick said.

'Nothing to it,' Ace Kaussner drawled, stepped off, and then nearly tripped over his own feet.

'Albert!' Brian called down. 'Catch!' He leaned out, placed the violin case on the center of the slide, and let it go. Albert caught it easily five feet from the bottom, tucked it under his arm, and stood back.

Jenkins shut his eyes as he leaped and came down aslant on one scrawny buttock. Nick stepped nimbly to the left side of the slide and caught the writer just as he fell off, saving him a nasty tumble to the concrete.

'Thank you, young man.'

'Don't mention it, matey.'

Gaffney followed; so did the bald man. Then Laurel and Dinah Bellman stood in the hatchway.

'I'm scared,' Dinah said in a thin, wavery voice.

'You'll be fine, honey,' Brian said. 'You don't even have to jump.' He put his hands on Dinah's shoulders and turned her so she was facing him with her back to the slide. 'Give me your hands and I'll lower you onto the slide.'

But Dinah put them behind her back. 'Not you. I want Laurel to do it.'

Brian looked at the youngish woman with the dark hair. 'Would you?'

'Yes,' she said. 'If you tell me what to do.'

'Dinah already knows. Lower her onto the slide by her hands. When she's lying on her tummy with her feet pointed straight, she can shoot right down.'

Dinah's hands were cold in Laurel's. 'I'm scared,' she repeated.

'Honey, it'll be just like going down a playground slide,' Brian said. 'The man with the English accent is waiting at the bottom to catch you. He's got his hands up just like a catcher in a baseball game.' Not, he reflected, that Dinah would know what that looked like.

Dinah looked at him as if he were being quite foolish. 'Not of that. I'm scared of this place. It smells funny.'

Laurel, who detected no smell but her own nervous sweat, looked helplessly at Brian.

'Honey,' Brian said, dropping to one knee in front of the little blind girl, 'we have to get off the plane. You know that, don't you?'

The lenses of the dark glasses turned toward him. 'Why? Why do we have to get off the plane? There's no one here.'

Brian and Laurel exchanged a glance.

'Well,' Brian said, 'we won't really know that until we check, will we?'

'I know already,' Dinah said. 'There's nothing to smell and nothing to hear. But ... but . . .'

'But what, Dinah?' Laurel asked.

Dinah hesitated. She wanted to make them understand that the way she had to leave the plane was really not what was bothering her. She had gone down slides before, and she trusted Laurel. Laurel would not let go of her hands if it was dangerous. Something was wrong here, wrong, and that was what she was afraid of - the wrong thing. It wasn't the quiet and it wasn't the emptiness. It might have to do with those things, but it was more than those things.

Something wrong.

But grownups did not believe children, especially not blind children, even more especially not blind girl children. She wanted to tell them they couldn't stay here, that it wasn't safe to stay here, that they had to start the plane up and get going again. But what would they say? Okay, sure, Dinah's right, everybody back on the plane? No way.

They'll see. They'll see that it's empty and then we'll get back on the airplane and go someplace else. Someplace where it doesn't feel wrong. There's still time.

I think.

'Never mind,' she told Laurel. Her voice was low and resigned. 'Lower me down.'

Laurel lowered her carefully onto the slide. A moment later Dinah was looking up at her - except she's not really looking, Laurel thought, she can't really look at all - with her bare feet splayed out behind her on the orange slide.

'Okay, Dinah?' Laurel asked.

'No,' Dinah said. 'Nothing's okay here.' And before Laurel could release her, Dinah unlocked her hands from Laurel's and released herself. She slid to the bottom, and Nick caught her.

Laurel went next, dropping neatly onto the slide and holding her skirt primly as she slid to the bottom. That left Brian, the snoozing drunk at the back of the plane, and that fun-loving, paper-ripping party animal, Mr Crew-Neck jersey.

I'm not going to have any trouble with him, Brian had said, because I don't give a crap what he does. Now he discovered that was not really true. The man was not playing with a full deck. Brian suspected even the little girl knew that, and the little girl was blind. What if they left him behind and the guy decided to go on a rampage? What if, in the course of that rampage, he decided to trash the cockpit?

So what? You're not going anyplace. The tanks are almost dry.

Still, he didn't like the idea, and not just because the 767 was a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment, either. Perhaps what he felt was a vague echo of what he had seen in Dinah's face as she looked up from the slide. Things here seemed wrong, even wronger than they looked ... and that was scary, because he didn't know how things could be wronger than that. The plane, however, was right. Even with its fuel tanks all but empty, it was a world he knew and understood.

'Your turn, friend,' he said as civilly as he could.

'You know I'm going to report you for this, don't you?' Craig Toomy asked in a queerly gentle voice. 'You know I plan to sue this entire airline for thirty million dollars, and that I plan to name you a primary respondent?'

'That's your privilege, Mr -'