Laurel had her arm around Dinah’s shoulders. Dinah was holding Laurel’s free hand in both of hers.

Albert sat with Robert Jenkins, just ahead of Gaffney. Ahead of him was the girl with the short dark hair. She was looking out the window, her body held so stiffly upright it might have been wired together. And ahead of her sat Baldy from business class.

“Well, at least we’ll be able to get some chow!” he said loudly.

No one answered. The main cabin seemed encased in a stiff shell of tension. Albert Kaussner felt each individual hair on his body standing at attention. He searched for the comforting cloak of Ace Kaussner, that duke of the desert, that baron of the Buntline, and could not find him. Ace had gone on vacation.

The clouds were much closer. They had lost their flat look; Laurel could now see fluffy curves and mild crenellations filled with early-morning shadows. She wondered if Darren Crosby was still down there, patiently waiting for her at a Logan Airport arrivals gate somewhere along the American Pride concourse. She was not terribly surprised to find she didn’t care much, one way or another. Her gaze was drawn back to the clouds, and she forgot all about Darren Crosby, who liked Scotch (although not to excess) and claimed to be a perfect gentleman.

She imagined a hand, a huge green hand, suddenly slamming its way up through those clouds and seizing the 767 the way an angry child might seize a toy. She imagined the hand squeezing, saw jet-fuel exploding in orange licks of flame between the huge knuckles, and closed her eyes for a moment.

Don’t go down there! she wanted to scream. Oh please, don’t go down there!

But what choice had they? What choice?

“I’m very scared,” Bethany Simms said in a blurred, watery voice. She moved to one of the seats in the center section, fastened her lap-belt, and pressed her hands tightly against her middle. “I think I’m going to pass out.”

Craig Toomy glanced at her, and then began ripping a fresh strip from the route map. After a moment, Albert unbuckled his seatbelt, got up, sat down beside Bethany, and buckled up again. As soon as he had, she grasped his hands. Her skin was as cold as marble.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, striving to sound tough and unafraid, striving to sound like the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi. Instead he only sounded like Albert Kaussner, a seventeen-year-old violin student who felt on the verge of pissing his pants.

“I hope—” she began, and then Flight 29 began to bounce. Bethany screamed.

“What’s wrong?” Dinah asked Laurel in a thin, anxious voice. “Is something wrong with the plane? Are we going to crash?”

“I don’t—”

Brian’s voice came over the speakers. “This is ordinary light turbulence, folks,” he said. “Please be calm. We’re apt to hit some heavier bumps when we go into the clouds. Most of you have been through this before, so just settle down.”

Rii-ip.

Don Gaffney looked toward the man in the crew-neck jersey again and felt a sudden, almost overmastering urge to rip the flight magazine out of the weird son of a bitch’s hands and begin whacking him with it.

The clouds were very close now. Robert Jenkins could see the 767’s black shape rushing across their white surfaces just below the plane. Shortly the plane would kiss its own shadow and disappear. He had never had a premonition in his life, but one came to him now, one which was sure and complete. When we break through those clouds, we are going to see something no human being has ever seen before. It will be something which is utterly beyond belief... yet we will be forced to believe it. We will have no choice.

His hands curled into tight knobs on the arms of his seat. A drop of sweat ran into one eye. Instead of raising a hand to wipe the eye clear, Jenkins tried to blink the sting away. His hands felt nailed to the arms of the seat.

“Is it going to be all right?” Dinah asked frantically. Her hands were locked over Laurel’s. They were small, but they squeezed with almost painful force. “Is it really going to be all right?”

Laurel looked out the window. Now the 767 was skimming the tops of the clouds, and the first cotton-candy wisps drifted past her window. The plane ran through another series of jolts and she had to close her throat against a moan. For the first time in her life she felt physically ill with terror.

“I hope so, honey,” she said. “I hope so, but I really don’t know.”

“What’s on your radar, Brian?” Nick asked. “Anything unusual? Anything at all?”

“No,” Brian said. “It says the world is down there, and that’s all it says. We’re—”

“Wait,” Nick said. His voice had a tight, strangled sound, as if his throat had closed down to a bare pinhole. “Climb back up. Let’s think this over. Wait for the clouds to break—”

“Not enough time and not enough fuel.” Brian’s eyes were locked on his instruments. The plane began to bounce again. He made the corrections automatically. “Hang on. We’re going in.”

He pushed the wheel forward. The altimeter needle began to move more swiftly beneath its glass circle. And Flight 29 slid into the clouds. For a moment its tail protruded, cutting through the fluffy surface like the fin of a shark. A moment later that was also gone and the sky was empty... as if no plane had ever been there at all.

In the Clouds. Welcome to Bangor. A Round of Applause. The Slide and the Conveyor Belt. The Sound of No Phones Ringing. Craig Toomy Makes a Side-Trip. The Little Blind Girl’s Warning.

The main cabin went from bright sunlight to the gloom of late twilight and the plane began to buck harder. After one particularly hard washboard bump, Albert felt a pressure against his right shoulder. He looked around and saw Bethany’s head lying there, as heavy as a ripe October pumpkin. The girl had fainted.

The plane leaped again and there was a heavy thud in first class. This time it was Dinah who shrieked, and Gaffney let out a yell: “What was that? For God’s sake what was that?”

“The drinks trolley,” Bob Jenkins said in a low, dry voice. He tried to speak louder so they would all hear him and found himself unable. “The drinks trolley was left out, remember? I think it must have rolled across—”

The plane took a dizzying rollercoaster leap, came down with a jarring smack, and the drinks trolley fell over with a bang. Glass shattered. Dinah screamed again.

“It’s all right,” Laurel said frantically. “Don’t hold me so tight, Dinah, honey, it’s okay—”

“Please, I don’t want to die! I just don’t want to die!”

“Normal turbulence, folks.” Brian’s voice, coming through the speakers, sounded calm... but Bob Jenkins thought he heard barely controlled terror in that voice. “Just be—”

Another rocketing, twisting bump. Another crash as more glasses and mini-bottles fell out of the overturned drinks trolley.

“—calm,” Brian finished.

From across the aisle on Don Gaffney’s left: rii-ip.

Gaffney turned in that direction. “Quit it right now, motherfucker, or I’ll stuff what’s left of that magazine right down your throat.”

Craig looked at him blandly. “Try it, you old jackass.”

The plane bumped up and down again. Albert leaned over Bethany toward the window. Her breasts pressed softly against his arm as he did, and for the first time in the last five years that sensation did not immediately drive everything else out of his mind. He stared out the window, desperately looking for a break in the clouds, trying to will a break in the clouds.

There was nothing but shades of dark gray.