Four Past Midnight

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.