The sleeping man.

He opened his mouth and tried to scream, but no sound came out. His throat was locked. Terror sat on his chest like an ape. He tried again to scream and managed no more than a breathless squeak.

Sleeping madonna, sleeping man.

They, the survivors, had all been asleep.

Now, with the exception of the bearded man, none of them were asleep.

Bob opened his mouth once more, tried once more to scream, and once more nothing came out.

15

“Holy Christ in the morning,” Brian whispered.

The time-rip lay about ninety miles ahead, off to the starboard side of the 767’s nose by no more than seven or eight degrees. If it had drifted, it had not drifted much; Brian’s guess was that the slight differential was the result of a minor navigational error.

It was a lozenge-shaped hole in reality, but not a black void. It cycled with a dim pink-purple light, like the aurora borealis. Brian could see the stars beyond it, but they were also rippling. A wide white ribbon of vapor was slowly streaming either into or out of the shape which hung in the sky. It looked like some strange, ethereal highway.

We can follow it right in, Brian thought excitedly. It’s better than an ILS beacon!

“We’re in business!” he said, laughed idiotically, and shook his clenched fists in the air.

“It must be two miles across,” Nick whispered. “My God, Brian, how many other planes do you suppose went through?”

“I don’t know,” Brian said, “but I’ll bet you my gun and dog that we’re the only one with a shot at getting back.”

He opened the intercom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve found what we were looking for.” His voice crackled with triumph and relief. “I don’t know exactly what happens next, or how, or why, but we have sighted what appears to be an extremely large trapdoor in the sky. I’m going to take us straight through the middle of it. We’ll find out what’s on the other side together. Right now I’d like you all to fasten your seatbelts and—”

That was when Bob Jenkins came pelting madly up the aisle, screaming at the top of his lungs. “No! No! We’ll all die if you go into it! Turn back! You’ve got to turn back!”

Brian swung around in his seat and exchanged a puzzled look with Nick.

Nick unbuckled his belt and stood up. “That’s Bob Jenkins,” he said. “Sounds like he’s worked himself up to a good set of nerves. Carry on, Brian. I’ll handle him.”

“Okay,” Brian said. “Just keep him away from me. I’d hate to have him grab me at the wrong second and send us into the edge of that thing.”

He turned off the autopilot and took control of the 767 himself. The floor tilted gently to the right as he banked toward the long, glowing slot ahead of them. It seemed to slide across the sky until it was centered in front of the 767’s nose. Now he could hear a sound mixing with the drone of the jet engines — a deep, throbbing noise, like a huge diesel idling. As they approached the river of vapor — it was flowing into the hole, he now saw, not out of it — he began to pick up flashes of color travelling within it: green, blue, violet, red, candy pink. It’s the first real color I’ve seen in this world, he thought.

Behind him, Bob Jenkins sprinted through the first-class section, up the narrow aisle which led to the service area... and right into Nick’s waiting arms.

“Easy, mate,” Nick soothed. “Everything’s going to be all right now.”

“No!” Bob struggled wildly, but Nick held him as easily as a man might hold a struggling kitten. “No, you don’t understand! He’s got to turn back! He’s got to turn back before it’s too late!”

Nick pulled the writer away from the cockpit door and back into first class. “We’ll just sit down here and belt up tight, shall we?” he said in that same soothing, chummy voice. “It may be a trifle bumpy.”

To Brian, Nick’s voice was only a faint blur of sound. As he entered the wide flow of vapor streaming into the time-rip, he felt a large and immensely powerful hand seize the plane, dragging it eagerly forward. He found himself thinking of the leak on the flight from Tokyo to LA, and of how fast air rushed out of a hole in a pressurized environment.

It’s as if this whole world — or what is left of it — is leaking through that hole, he thought, and then that queer and ominous phrase from his dream recurred again: SHOOTING STARS ONLY.

The rip lay dead ahead of the 767’s nose now, growing rapidly.

We’re going in, he thought. God help us, we’re really going in.

16

Bob continued to struggle as Nick pinned him in one of the first-class seats with one hand and worked to fasten his seatbelt with the other. Bob was a small, skinny man, surely no more than a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet, but panic had animated him and he was making it extremely hard for Nick.

“We’re really going to be all right, matey,” Nick said. He finally managed to click Bob’s seatbelt shut. “We were when we came through, weren’t we?”

“We were all asleep when we came through, you damned fool!” Bob shrieked into his face. “Don’t you understand? WE WERE ASLEEP! You’ve got to stop him!”

Nick froze in the act of reaching for his own belt. What Bob was saying — what he had been trying to say all along — suddenly struck him like a dropped load of bricks. “Oh dear God,” he whispered. “Dear God, what were we thinking of?” He leaped out of his scat and dashed for the cockpit. “Brian, stop! Turn back! Turn back!”

17

Brian had been staring into the rip, nearly hypnotized, as they approached. There was no turbulence, but that sense of tremendous power, of air rushing into the hole like a mighty river, had increased. He looked down at his instruments and saw the 767’s airspeed was increasing rapidly. Then Nick began to shout, and a moment later the Englishman was behind him, gripping his shoulders, staring at the rip as it swelled in front of the jet’s nose, its play of deepening colors racing across his cheeks and brow, making him look like a man staring at a stained-glass window on a sunny day. The steady thrumming sound had become dark thunder.

“Turn back, Brian, you have to turn back!”

Did Nick have a reason for what he was saying, or had Bob’s panic been infectious? There was no time to make a decision on any rational basis; only a split-second to consult the silent tickings of instinct.

Brian Engle grabbed the steering yoke and hauled it hard over to port.

18

Nick was thrown across the cockpit and into a bulkhead; there was a sickening crack as his arm broke. In the main cabin, the luggage which had fallen from the overhead compartments when Brian swerved onto the runway at BIA now flew once more, striking the curved walls and thudding off the windows in a vicious hail. The man with the black beard was thrown out of his seat like a Cabbage Patch Kid and had time to utter one bleary squawk before his head collided with the arm of a seat and he fell into the aisle in an untidy tangle of limbs. Bethany screamed and Albert hugged her tight against him. Two rows behind, Rudy Warwick closed his eyes tighter, clutched his rosary harder, and prayed faster as his seat tilted away beneath him.

Now there was turbulence; Flight 29 became a surfboard with wings, rocking and twisting and thumping through the unsteady air. Brian’s hands were momentarily thrown off the yoke and then he grabbed it again. At the same time he opened the throttle all the way to the stop and the plane’s turbos responded with a deep snarl of power rarely heard outside of the airline’s diagnostic hangars. The turbulence increased; the plane slammed viciously up and down, and from somewhere came the deadly shriek of overstressed metal.

In first class, Bob Jenkins clutched at the arms of his seat, numbly grateful that the Englishman had managed to belt him in. He felt as if he had been strapped to some madman’s jet-powered pogo stick. The plane took another great leap, rocked up almost to the vertical on its portside wing, and his false teeth shot from his mouth.