“As a warning,” Brian said in a low, fascinated voice.
“Yes. As a warning.”
Almost a full minute passed as the two men sat in the cockpit, looking at each other. The only sound was the sleepy drone of the jet engines. Brian’s eyes were shocked and somehow very young. Nick only looked weary.
“If we get out of this,” Brian said at last, “if we get back, will you carry through with it?”
Nick shook his head. He did this slowly, but with great finality. “I believe I’ve had what the Adventist blokes like to call a soul conversion, old mate of mine. No more midnight creeps or extreme-prejudice jobs for Mrs Hopewell’s boy Nicholas. If we get out of this — a proposition I find rather shaky just now — I believe I’ll retire.”
“And do what?”
Nick looked at him thoughtfully for a moment or two and then said, “Well... I suppose I could take flying lessons.”
Brian burst out laughing. After a moment, Mrs Hopewell’s boy Nicholas joined him.
9
Thirty-five minutes later, daylight began to seep back into the main cabin of Flight 29. Three minutes later it might have been mid-morning; fifteen minutes after that it might have been noon.
Laurel looked around and saw that Dinah’s sightless eyes were open.
Yet were they entirely sightless? There was something in them, something just beyond definition, which made Laurel wonder. She felt a sense of unknown awe creep into her, a feeling which almost touched upon fear.
She reached out and gently grasped one of Dinah’s hands. “Don’t try to talk,” she said quietly. “If you’re awake, Dinah, don’t try to talk — just listen. We’re in the air. We’re going back, and you’re going to be all right — I promise you that.”
Dinah’s hand tightened on hers, and after a moment Laurel realized the little girl was tugging her forward. She leaned over the secured stretcher. Dinah spoke in a tiny voice that seemed to Laurel a perfect scale model of her former voice.
“Don’t worry about me, Laurel. I got... what I wanted.”
“Dinah, you shouldn’t—”
The unseeing brown eyes moved toward the sound of Laurel’s voice. A little smile touched Dinah’s bloody mouth. “I saw,” that tiny voice, frail as a glass reed, told her. “I saw through Mr Toomy’s eyes. At the beginning, and then again at the end. It was better at the end. At the start, everything looked mean and nasty to him. It was better at the end.”
Laurel looked at her with helpless wonder.
The girl’s hand let go of Laurel’s and rose waveringly to touch her cheek. “He wasn’t such a bad guy, you know.” She coughed. Small flecks of blood flew from her mouth.
“Please, Dinah,” Laurel said. She had a sudden sensation that she could almost see through the little blind girl, and this brought a feeling of stifling, directionless panic. “Please don’t try to talk anymore.”
Dinah smiled. “I saw you.” she said. “You are beautiful, Laurel. Everything was beautiful... even the things that were dead. It was so wonderful to... you know... just to see.”
She drew in one of her tiny sips of air, let it out, and simply didn’t take the next one. Her sightless eyes now seemed to be looking far beyond Laurel Stevenson.
“Please breathe, Dinah,” Laurel said. She took the girl’s hands in hers and began to kiss them repeatedly, as if she could kiss life back into that which was now beyond it. It was not fair for Dinah to die after she had saved them all; no God could demand such a sacrifice, not even for people who had somehow stepped outside of time itself. “Please breathe, please, please, please breathe.”
But Dinah did not breathe. After a long time, Laurel returned the girl’s hands to her lap and looked fixedly into her pale, still face. Laurel waited for her own eyes to fill up with tears, but no tears came. Yet her heart ached with fierce sorrow and her mind beat with its own deep and outraged protest: Oh, no! Oh, not fair! This is not fair! Take it back, God! Take It back, damn you, take it back, you just take it BACK!
But God did not take it back. The jet engines throbbed steadily, the sun shone on the bloody sleeve of Dinah’s good travelling dress in a bright oblong, and God did not take it back. Laurel looked across the aisle and saw Albert and Bethany kissing. Albert was touching one of the girl’s breasts through her tee-shirt, lightly, delicately, almost religiously. They seemed to make a ritual shape, a symbolic representation of life and that stubborn, intangible spark which carries life on in the face of the most dreadful reversals and ludicrous turns of fate. Laurel looked hopefully from them to Dinah... and God had not taken it back.
God had not taken it back.
Laurel kissed the still slope of Dinah’s cheek and then raised her hand to the little girl’s face. Her fingers stopped only an inch from her eyelids.
I saw through Mr Toomy’s eyes. Everything was beautiful... even the things that were dead. It was so wonderful to see. “Yes,” Laurel said. “I can live with that.” She left Dinah’s eyes open.
10
American Pride 29 flew west through the days and nights, going from light to darkness and light to darkness as if flying through a great, lazily shifting parade of fat clouds. Each cycle came slightly faster than the one before.
A little over three hours into the flight, the clouds below them ceased, and over exactly the same spot where they had begun on the flight east. Brian was willing to bet the front had not moved so much as a single foot. The Great Plains lay below them in a silent roan-colored expanse of land.
“No sign of them over here,” Rudy Warwick said. He did not have to specify what he was talking about.
“No,” Bob Jenkins agreed. “We seem to have outrun them, either in space or in time.”
“Or in both,” Albert put in.
“Yes — or both.”
But they had not. As Flight 29 crossed the Rockies, they began to see the black lines below them again, thin as threads from this height. They shot up and down the rough, slabbed slopes and drew not-quite-meaningless patterns in the blue-gray carpet of trees. Nick stood at the forward door, looking out of the bullet porthole set into it. This porthole had a queer magnifying effect, and he soon discovered he could see better than he really wanted to. As he watched, two of the black lines split, raced round a jagged, snow-tipped peak, met on the far side, crossed, and raced down the other slope in diverging directions. Behind them the entire top of the mountain fell into itself, leaving something which looked like a volcano with a vast dead caldera at its truncated top.
“Jumping Jiminy Jesus,” Nick muttered, and passed a quivering hand over his brow.
As they crossed the Western Slope toward Utah, the dark began to come down again. The setting sun threw an orange-red glare over a fragmented hellscape that none of them could look at for long; one by one, they followed Bethany’s example and pulled their windowshades. Nick went back to his seat on unsteady legs and dropped his forehead into one cold, clutching hand. After a moment or two he turned toward Laurel and she took him wordlessly in her arms.
Brian was forced to look at it. There were no shades in the cockpit.
Western Colorado and eastern Utah fell into the pit of eternity piece by jagged piece below him and ahead of him. Mountains, buttes, mesas, and cols one by one ceased to exist as the crisscrossing langoliers cut them adrift from the rotting fabric of this dead past, cut them loose and sent them tumbling into sunless endless gulfs of forever. There was no sound up here, and somehow that was the most horrible thing of all. The land below them disappeared as silently as dust-motes.