“It’s us — the missing passengers and the eleven survivors of Flight 29 — who are lost.”

7

“Maybe I’m dumb, but I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” Rudy Warwick said after a moment.

“Neither do I,” Laurel added.

“We’ve mentioned two famous disappearances,” Bob said quietly. Now even Craig Toomy seemed to be listening... he had stopped struggling, at any rate. “One, the case of the Mary Celeste, took place at sea. The second, the case of Roanoke Island, took place near the sea. They are not the only ones, either. I can think of at least two others which involved aircraft: the disappearance of the aviatrix Amelia Earhart over the Pacific Ocean, and the disappearance of several Navy planes over that part of the Atlantic known as the Bermuda Triangle. That happened in 1945 or 1946, I believe. There was some sort of garbled transmission from the lead aircraft’s pilot, and rescue planes were sent out at once from an airbase in Florida, but no trace of the planes or their crews was ever found.”

“I’ve heard of the case,” Nick said. “It’s the basis for the Triangle’s infamous reputation, I think.”

“No, there have been lots of ships and planes lost there,” Albert put in. “I read the book about it by Charles Berlitz. Really interesting.” He glanced around. “I just never thought I’d be in it, if you know what I mean.”

Jenkins said, “I don’t know if an aircraft has ever disappeared over the continental United States before, but—”

“It’s happened lots of times with small planes,” Brian said, “and once, about thirty-five years ago, it happened with a commercial passenger plane. There were over a hundred people aboard. 1955 or ’56, this was. The carrier was either TWA or Monarch, I can’t remember which. The plane was bound for Denver out of San Francisco. The pilot made radio contact with the Reno tower — absolutely routine — and the plane was never heard from again. There was a search, of course, but... nothing.”

Brian saw they were all looking at him with a species of dreadful fascination, and he laughed uncomfortably.

“Pilot ghost stories,” he said with a note of apology in his voice. “It sounds like a caption for a Gary Larson cartoon.”

“I’ll bet they all went through,” the writer muttered. He had begun to scrub the side of his face with his hand again. He looked distressed — almost horrified. “Unless they found bodies...?”

“Please tell us what you know, or what you think you know,” Laurel said. “The effect of this... this thing... seems to pile up on a person. If I don’t get some answers soon, I think you can tie me up and put me down next to Mr Toomy.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Craig said, speaking clearly if rather obscurely.

Bob favored him with another uncomfortable glance and then appeared to muster his thoughts. “There’s no mess here, but there’s a mess on the plane. There’s no electricity here, but there’s electricity on the plane. That isn’t conclusive, of course — the plane has its own self-contained power supply, while the electricity here comes from a power plant somewhere. But then consider the matches. Bethany was on the plane, and her matches work fine. The matches I took from the bowl in here wouldn’t strike. The gun which Mr Toomy took — from the Security office, I imagine — barely fired. I think that, if you tried a battery-powered flashlight, you’d find that wouldn’t work, either. Or, if it did work, it wouldn’t work for long.”

“You’re right,” Nick said. “And we don’t need to find a flashlight in order to test your theory.” He pointed upward. There was an emergency light mounted on the wall behind the kitchen grill. It was as dead as the overhead lights. “That’s battery-powered,” Nick went on. “A light-sensitive solenoid turns it on when the power fails. It’s dim enough in here for that thing to have gone into operation, but it didn’t do so. Which means that either the solenoid’s circuit failed or the battery is dead.”

“I suspect it’s both,” Bob Jenkins said. He walked slowly toward the restaurant door and looked out. “We find ourselves in a world which appears to be whole and in reasonably good order, but it is also a world which seems almost exhausted. The carbonated drinks are flat. The food is tasteless. The air is odorless. We still give off scents — I can smell Laurel’s perfume and the captain’s aftershave lotion, for instance — but everything else seems to have lost its smell.”

Albert picked up one of the glasses with beer in it and sniffed deeply. There was a smell, he decided, but it was very, very faint. A flower-petal pressed for many years between the pages of a book might give off the same distant memory of scent.

“The same is true for sounds,” Bob went on. “They are flat, one-dimensional, utterly without resonance.”

Laurel thought of the listless clup-clup sound of her high heels on the cement, and the lack of echo when Captain Engle cupped his hands around his mouth and called up the escalator for Mr Toomy.

“Albert, could I ask you to play something on your violin?” Bob asked.

Albert glanced at Bethany. She smiled and nodded.

“All right. Sure. In fact, I’m sort of curious about how it sounds after.” He glanced at Craig Toomy. “You know.”

He opened the case, grimacing as his fingers touched the latch which had opened the wound in Craig Toomy’s forehead, and drew out his violin. He caressed it briefly, then took the bow in his right hand and tucked the violin under his chin. He stood like that for a moment, thinking. What was the proper sort of music for this strange new world where no phones rang and no dogs barked? Ralph Vaughan Williams? Stravinsky? Mozart? Dvorak, perhaps? No. None of them were right. Then inspiration struck, and he began to play “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah.”

Halfway through the tune the bow faltered to a stop.

“I guess you must have hurt your fiddle after all when you bopped that guy with it,” Don Gaffney said. “It sounds like it’s stuffed full of cotton batting.”

“No,” Albert said slowly. “My violin is perfectly okay. I can tell just by the way it feels, and the action of the strings under my fingers... but there’s something else as well. Come on over here, Mr Gaffney.” Gaffney came over and stood beside Albert. “Now get as close to my violin as you can. No… not that close; I’d put out your eye with the bow. There. Just right. Listen again.”

Albert began to play, singing along in his mind, as he almost always did when he played this corny but endlessly cheerful shitkicking music:

Singing fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh, Fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh-oh-oh-oh, Fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh, Strummin’ on the old banjo.

“Did you hear the difference?” he asked when he had finished.

“It sounds a lot better close up, if that’s what you mean,” Gaffney said. He was looking at Albert with real respect. “You play good, kid.”

Albert smiled at Gaffney, but it was really Bethany Simms he was talking to. “Sometimes, when I’m sure my music teacher isn’t around, I play old Led Zeppelin songs,” he said. “That stuff really cooks on the violin. You’d be surprised.” He looked at Bob. “Anyway, it fits right in with what you were saying. The closer you get, the better the violin sounds. It’s the air that’s wrong, not the instrument. It’s not conducting the sounds the way it should, and so what comes out sounds the way the beer tasted.”

“Flat,” Brian said.

Albert nodded.

“Thank you, Albert,” Bob said.

“Sure. Can I put it away now?”

“Of course.” Bob continued as Albert replaced his violin in its case, and then used a napkin to clean off the fouled latches and his own fingers. “Taste and sound are not the only off-key elements of the situation in which we find ourselves. Take the clouds, for instance.”

“What about them?” Rudy Warwick asked.

“They haven’t moved since we arrived, and I don’t think they’re going to move. I think the weather patterns we’re all used to living with have either stopped or are running down like an old pocket-watch.”