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.

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.

He could feel the hairs on the nape of his neck stiffening in response to that sound. He looked at the others and saw identical expressions of frightened dismay on every face. Nick was controlling himself the best and the young girl who had almost balked at using the slide — Bethany — looked the most deeply scared, but they all heard the same thing in the sound.

Bad.

Something bad on the way. Hurrying.

Nick turned toward him. “What do you make of it, Brian? Any ideas?”

“No,” Brian said. “Not even a little one. All I know is that it’s the only sound in town.”

“It’s not in town yet,” Don said, “but it’s going to be, I think. I only wish I knew how long it was going to take.”

They were quiet again, listening to the steady hissing crackle from the east. And Brian thought: I almost know the sound, I think. Not cereal in milk, not radio static, but... what? If only it wasn’t so faint...

But he didn’t want to know. He suddenly realized that, and very strongly. He didn’t want to know at all. The sound filled him with a bone-deep loathing.

“We do have to get out of here!” Bethany said. Her voice was loud and wavery. Albert put an arm around her waist and she gripped his hand in both of hers. Gripped it with panicky tightness. “We have to get out of here right now!”

“Yes,” Bob Jenkins said. “She’s right. That sound — I don’t know what it is, but it’s awful. We have to get out of here.”

They were all looking at Brian and he thought, It looks like I’m the captain again. But not for long. Because they didn’t understand. Not even Jenkins understood, sharp as some of his other deductions might have been, that they weren’t going anywhere.

Whatever was making that sound was on its way, and it didn’t matter, because they would still be here when it arrived. There was no way out of that. He understood the reason why it was so, even if none of the others did... and Brian Engle suddenly understood how an animal caught in a trap must feel as it hears the steady thud of the hunter’s approaching boots.

Stranded. Bethany’s Matches. Two-Way Traffic Ahead. Albert’s Experiment. Nightfall. The Dark and the Blade.

Brian turned to look at the writer. “You say we have to get out of here, right?”

“Yes. I think we must do that just as soon as we possibly—”

“And where do you suggest we go? Atlantic City? Miami Beach? Club Med?”

“You are suggesting, Captain Engle, that there’s no place we can go. I think — I hope — that you’re wrong about that. I have an idea.”

“Which is?”

“In a moment. First, answer one question for me. Can you refuel the airplane? Can you do that even if there’s no power?”

“I think so, yes. Let’s say that, with the help of a few able-bodied men, I could. Then what?”

“Then we take off again,” Bob said. Little beads of sweat stood out on his deeply lined face. They looked like droplets of clear oil. “That sound — that crunchy sound — is coming from the east. The time-rip was several thousand miles west of here. If we retraced our original course... could you do that?”

“Yes,” Brian said. He had left the auxiliary power units running, and that meant the INS computer’s program was still intact. That program was an exact log of the trip they had just made, from the moment Flight 29 had left the ground in southern California until the moment it had set down in central Maine. One touch of a button would instruct the computer to simply reverse that course; the touch of another button, once in the air, would put the autopilot to work flying it. The Teledyne inertial navigation system would re-create the trip down to the smallest degree deviations. “I could do that, but why?”

“Because the rip may still be there. Don’t you see? We might be able to fly back through it.”

Nick looked at Bob in sudden startled concentration, then turned to Brian. “He might have something there, mate. He just might.”

Albert Kaussner’s mind was diverted onto an irrelevant but fascinating side-track: if the rip were still there, and if Flight 29 had been on a frequently used altitude and heading — a kind of east-west avenue in the sky — then perhaps other planes had gone through it between 1:07 this morning and now (whenever now was). Perhaps there were other planes landing or landed at other deserted American airports, other crews and passengers wandering around, stunned...

No, he thought. We happened to have a pilot on board. What are the chances of that happening twice?

He thought of what Mr Jenkins had said about Ted Williams’s sixteen consecutive on-bases and shivered.

“He might or he might not,” Brian said. “It doesn’t really matter, because we’re not going anyplace in that plane.”

“Why not?” Rudy asked. “If you could refuel it, I don’t see.”

“Remember the matches? The ones from the bowl in the restaurant? The ones that wouldn’t light?”

Rudy looked blank, but an expression of huge dismay dawned on Bob Jenkins’s face. He put his hand to his forehead and took a step backwards. He actually seemed to shrink before them.