“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-traveclass="underline" 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.
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.