Nick Hopewell was not laughing. He was leaning over Brian’s seat and peering out through the cockpit window. Nothing moved on the gridwork of runways; nothing moved on the taxiways. No trucks or security vehicles buzzed back and forth on the tarmac. He could see a few vehicles, he could see an Army transport plane — a C-12 — parked on an outer taxiway and a Delta 727 parked at one of the jetways, but they were as still as statues.

“Thank you for the welcome, my friend,” Nick said softly. “My deep appreciation stems from the fact that it appears you are the only one who is going to extend one. This place is utterly deserted.”

5

In spite of the continued radio silence, Brian was reluctant to accept Nick’s judgment... but by the time he had taxied to a point between two of the passenger terminal’s jetways, he found it impossible to believe anything else. It was not just the absence of people; not just the lack of a single security car rushing out to see what was up with this unexpected 767; it was an air of utter lifelessness, as if Bangor International Airport had been deserted for a thousand years, or a hundred thousand. A jeep-driven baggage train with a few scattered pieces of luggage on its flatties was parked beneath one wing of the Delta jet. It was to this that Brian’s eyes kept returning as he brought Flight 29 as close to the terminal as he dared and parked it. The dozen or so bags looked as ancient as artifacts exhumed from the site of some fabulous ancient city. I wonder if the guy who discovered King Tut’s tomb felt the way I do now, he thought.

He let the engines die and just sat there for a moment. Now there was no sound but the faint whisper of an auxiliary power unit — one of four — at the rear of the plane. Brian’s hand moved toward a switch marked INTERNAL POWER and actually touched it before drawing his hand back. Suddenly he didn’t want to shut down completely. There was no reason not to, but the voice of instinct was very strong.

Besides, he thought, I don’t think there’s anyone around to bitch about wasting fuel... what little there is left to waste.

Then he unbuckled his safety harness and got up.

“Now what, Brian?” Nick asked. He had also risen, and Brian noticed for the first time that Nick was a good four inches taller than he was. He thought: I have been in charge. Ever since this weird thing happened — ever since we discovered it had happened, to be more accurate — I have been in charge. But I think that’s going to change very shortly.

He discovered he didn’t care. Flying the 767 into the clouds had taken every ounce of courage he possessed, but he didn’t expect any thanks for keeping his head and doing his job; courage was one of the things he got paid for. He remembered a pilot telling him once, “They pay us a hundred thousand dollars or more a year, Brian, and they really do it for just one reason. They know that in almost every pilot’s career, there are thirty or forty seconds when he might actually make a difference. They pay us not to freeze when those seconds finally come.”

It was all very well for your brain to tell you that you had to go down, clouds or no clouds, that there was simply no choice; your nerve-endings just went on screaming their old warning, telegraphing the old high-voltage terror of the unknown. Even Nick, whatever he was and whatever he did on the ground, had wanted to back away from the clouds when it came to the sticking point. He had needed Brian to do what needed to be done. He and all the others had needed Brian to be their guts. Now they were down and there were no monsters beneath the clouds; only this weird silence and one deserted luggage train sitting beneath the wing of a Delta 727.

So if you want to take over and be the captain, my nose-twisting friend, you have my blessing. I’ll even let you wear my cap if you want to. But not until we’re off the plane. Until you and the rest of the geese actually stand on the ground, you’re my responsibility.

But Nick had asked him a question, and Brian supposed he deserved an answer.

“Now we get off the airplane and see what’s what,” he said, brushing past the Englishman.

Nick put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Do you think—”

Brian felt a flash of uncharacteristic anger. He shook loose from Nick’s hand. “I think we get off the plane,” he said. “There’s no one to extend a jetway or run us out a set of stairs, so I think we use the emergency slide. After that, you think. Matey.”

He pushed through into first class... and almost fell over the drinks trolley, which lay on its side. There was a lot of broken glass and an eye-watering stink of alcohol. He stepped over it. Nick caught up with him at the rear of the first-class compartment.

“Brian, if I said something to offend you, I’m sorry. You did a hell of a fine job.”

“You didn’t offend me,” Brian said. “It’s just that in the last ten hours or so I’ve had to cope with a pressure leak over the Pacific Ocean, finding out that my ex-wife died in a stupid apartment fire in Boston, and that the United States has been cancelled. I’m feeling a little zonked.”

He walked through business class into the main cabin. For a moment there was utter silence; they only sat there, looking at him from their white faces with dumb incomprehension.

Then Albert Kaussner began to applaud.

After a moment, Bob Jenkins joined him... and Don Gaffney... and Laurel Stevenson. The bald man looked around and also began to applaud.

“What is it?” Dinah asked Laurel. “What’s happening?”

“It’s the captain,” Laurel said. She began to cry. “It’s the captain who brought us down safe.”

Then Dinah began to applaud, too.

Brian stared at them, dumbfounded. Standing behind him, Nick joined in. They unbuckled their belts and stood in front of their seats, applauding him. The only three who did not join in were Bethany, who had fainted, the bearded man, who was still snoring in the back row, and Craig Toomy, who panned them all with his strange lunar gaze and then began to rip a fresh strip from the airline magazine.

6

Brian felt his face flush — this was just too goony. He raised his hands but for a moment they went on, regardless.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please... please... I assure you, it was a very routine landing—”

“Shucks, ma’am — t’warn’t nothin,” Bob Jenkins said, doing a very passable Gary Cooper imitation, and Albert burst out laughing. Beside him, Bethany’s eyes fluttered open and she looked around, dazed.

“We got down alive, didn’t we?” she said. “My God! That’s great! I thought we were all dead meat!”

“Please,” Brian said. He raised his arms higher and now he felt weirdly like Richard Nixon, accepting his party’s nomination for four more years. He had to struggle against sudden shrieks of laughter. He couldn’t do that; the passengers wouldn’t understand. They wanted a hero, and he was elected. He might as well accept the position... and use it. He still had to get them off the plane, after all. “If I could have your attention, please!”

They stopped applauding one by one and looked at him expectantly — all except Craig, who threw his magazine aside in a sudden resolute gesture. He unbuckled his seatbelt, rose, and stepped out into the aisle, kicking a drift of paper strips aside. He began to rummage around in the compartment above his seat, frowning with concentration as he did so.

“You’ve looked out the windows, so you know as much as I do,” Brian said. “Most of the passengers and all of the crew on this flight disappeared while we were asleep. That’s crazy enough, but now we appear to be faced with an even crazier proposition. It looks like a lot of other people have disappeared as well... but logic suggests that other people must be around somewhere. We survived whatever-it-was, so others must have survived it as well.”