We hurried back to tourist, which is always a bigger problem. They hadn't started putting people to bed yet. Ralph was still working the thinning con, and as I watched, he leaned over a man in an aisle seat and asked if the man would please come with her (him) for a moment.

The guy stood up and Ralph's back exploded. Something hit me hard in the right shoulder. I spun around on my heel, starting into a crouch.

I noticed a fine film of red on my hands and arms.

I thought: hijacker, the guy's a hijacker.

And: But why did he wait so long? And: Hijackers were rare in the 1980s.

And: Was that a bullet that hit my shoulder? Is Ralph dead? And: The goddam motherfucker is a hijacker!

It seemed I had all the time in the world.

What actually happened was the bullet hit my shoulder and I turned with it and brought my left arm up and thumbed the selector switch to OBLITERATE

and crouched as I came around and took careful aim and blew him apart.

His upper torso and head lifted away from the rest of his body. It leaped into the air and landed six rows back, in the aisle. His left arm landed in somebody's lap, and his right, still holding his gun, just dropped. His legs and groin fell over backwards.

Okay. I could have stunned him.

Better for him that I didn't. If I'd taken him through the Gate with me alive, I'd have fried his balls for breakfast.

There's little point in describing the pandemonium that followed. I'd have a hard time doing it, even if it was worth describing; I was sitting in the aisle during most of it, looking at blood.

The crew had to stun just about everybody. The only bright spot was the number we'd managed to shuffle through during the thinning phase. The rest would have to go through on our backs.

When Lilly finally knelt beside me she thought I was hurt more than I actually was. She acted as if I might break if she touched me.

"Most of this is Ralph's blood," I told her, hoping it was so. "I guess it's a good thing I stopped the bullet. It could have punctured the fuselage."

"That's one way of looking at it, I guess. We had to take the cockpit crew, Louise. They heard the ruckus."

"That's okay. We're still in business. Let's get them through."

I started to get up. On the count of three: one, and a two, and ...

Not that time.

"We can't move them yet," Lilly said. l didn't care for the alarmed expression on her face when I had tried to rise. Well, I'd show her. "We're stacking them by the lavatory," she went on. "But the Gate is with the 747 right now."

"Where's Ralph?"

"Dead."

"Don't leave him here. Take him back with us."

"Of course. I'd have to anyway; he's mostly prosthetics."

I managed to get to my feet and that felt a little better. This didn't have to be a disaster, I kept telling myself. One dead, one wounded; we were still all right. But I was beginning to appreciate the drawbacks in snatching two planes at once. I like to have the Gate there, ready to use, all during the operation.

We couldn't. The most limiting factor about the Gate is the Temporal Law that states it can only appear once in any specific time. Once, and once only.

If we send the Gate back to -- for instance -- December 7, 1941, from six to nine in the morning on the island of Oahu, we can snatch most of the crew of the Battleship Arizona, but then those three hours are closed to us forever. If something interesting is happening during those same hours in China, or in Amsterdam, or even on Mars, it's just too damn bad. We can't even see the events of those hours in the time scanners.

This results in another paradox. The timestream is littered with these blank areas. Most of them were the result of snatches we'd done, or time-traveling done by people who came before us. But some were the result of trips yet to be taken. In other words, in a few years or a few days somebody would decide it was worth our effort to go to those times, at a location we didn't know yet. Because we would take that trip, that stretch of time was closed to scanning.

The phenomenon was known as Temporal Censorship. We couldn't look back and see ourselves and thus find out what we would do. We could know a blank area existed and that nobody had yet visited that time, but we couldn't know why somebody would decide to go there.

If you think all this makes sense to me, you're giving me too much credit. I simply take the rules as they are handed to me and do the best I can.

My right arm was useless. I can't say it hurt much by then. It simply wasn't there. So I ignored it and pulled the goats by winding the fingers of my left hand into their hair -- a trick known in the trade as Excedrin Headache number one million B.C.

Finally the Gate appeared and we practically shoveled them through. It took three minutes, tops. As soon as that was done the Gate vanished again. It came back on almost instantly and the wimps started to pour through.

No more than five percent of these had faces. Flight 35 was going to hit so goddam hard there was little point in expending our best work on them. A lot of them came through in sacks, just bundles of burnt body parts which we scattered through the plane.

I guess I passed out. All I know for sure is somebody pushed me through the Gate and, for once, I didn't recall the trip. I sat there on the floor and the medical teams started to lift me onto a stretcher, but I waved them away. Something was bothering me. I saw Lilly step through.

"Who got Ralph's stunner?" I yelled.

Lilly looked at me oddly, then turned around. But she didn't get anywhere; the rest of the team came tumbling out behind her and she was sent sprawling on the floor not far from me.

"I thought you got it," she said.

"I didn't get it," I said.

"Get what?"

"Ralph? Did somebody say Ralph? He's dead."

"Where's his stunner?"

I was already up and running for the Gate. I had no idea how much time there was on the other side before the crash, but it didn't matter. Even if it was seconds I had to go back.

A warning horn sounded. I glanced up, thought I could see Lawrence frantically waving his hands behind the glassed-in Operations section overhead. I turned back and screamed some thing, but Lilly was already through.

Or at least she was half through.

An odd thing happened to her. Leaning forward, she was into the Gate with her head and shoulders, almost to the waist.

And the Gate shut down.

We had discussed what might happen in a case like that, but we didn't know because nobody had tried it. The theory was undear. It seemed certain that a body half-way through the Gate would not simply be cut in half. The process was much mote complex than that: When passing through the Gate one is never actually in two pieces. The integrity of the body is preserved through a dimension we can't sense.

Lilly did not get cut in half. She just vanished. As she did, the building shook as if from an explosion. Alarms began sounding.

I was picked up and put on a stretcher. I cold see frantic activity in Operations. Then I passed out.

I was brought up to date as the doctors fixed my shoulder.

The explosion I heard had resulted from Lilly's body overloading the power system that supplied the Gate with the awesome amount of energy it consumes. It would be inoperative for two days while repairs were made.

What happened to Lilly? I don't even like to think about it. When we pass through the Gate we enter a region that is in many ways beyond the reach of human senses, yet in other ways impinges on our minds unpredictably. Some people emerge from a trip through the Gate as screaming animals, and they never get better. We lose five percent of the goats that way, and a fair number of snatch team novices.