SHOOTING STARS ONLY

“Is that... what we are?” he asked curiously, and now his voice came to him from some distant universe.

The darkness swallowed him.

29

Nick was alone now; the only person awake on Flight 29 was a man who had once gunned down three boys behind a church in Belfast, three boys who had been chucking potatoes painted dark gray to look like grenades. Why had they done such a thing? Had it been some mad sort of dare? He had never found out.

He was not afraid, but an intense loneliness filled him. The feeling wasn’t a new one. This was not the first watch he had stood alone, with the lives of others in his hands.

Ahead of him, the rip neared. He dropped his hand to the rheostat which controlled the cabin pressure.

It’s gorgeous, he thought. It seemed to him that the colors that now blazed out of the rip were the antithesis of everything which they had experienced in the last few hours; he was looking into a crucible of new life and new motion.

Why shouldn’t it be beautiful? This is the place where life — all life, maybe — begins. The place where life is freshly minted every second of every day; the cradle of creation and the wellspring of time. No langoliers allowed beyond this point.

Colors ran across his cheeks and brows in a fountain-spray of hues: jungle green was overthrown by lava orange; lava orange was replaced by yellow-white tropical sunshine; sunshine was supplanted by the chilly blue of Northern oceans. The roar of the jet engines seemed muted and distant, he looked down and was not surprised to see that Brian Engle’s slumped, sleeping form was being consumed by color, his form and features overthrown in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of brightness. He had become a fabulous ghost.

Nor was Nick surprised to see that his own hands and arms were as colorless as clay. Brian’s not the ghost; I am.

The rip loomed.

Now the sound of the jets was lost entirely in a new sound; the 767 seemed to be rushing through a windtunnel filled with feathers. Suddenly, directly ahead of the airliner’s nose, a vast nova of light exploded like a heavenly firework; in it, Nick Hopewell saw colors no man had ever imagined. It did not just fill the time-rip; it filled his mind, his nerves, his muscles, his very bones in a gigantic, coruscating fireflash.

“Oh my God, so BEAUTIFUL!” he cried, and as Flight 29 plunged into the rip, he twisted the cabin-pressure rheostat back up to full.

A split-second later the fillings from Nick’s teeth pattered onto the cockpit floor. There was a small thump as the Teflon disc which had been in his knee — souvenir of a conflict marginally more honorable than the one in Northern Ireland — joined them. That was all.

Nick Hopewell had ceased to exist.

30

The first things Brian was aware of were that his shirt was wet and his headache had returned.

He sat up slowly in his seat, wincing at the bolt of pain in his head, and tried to remember who he was, where he was, and why he felt such a vast and urgent need to wake up quickly. What had he been doing that was so important?

The leak, his mind whispered. There’s a leak in the main cabin, and if it isn’t stabilized, there’s going to be big tr—

No, that wasn’t right. The leak had been stabilized — or had in some mysterious way stabilized itself — and he had landed Flight 7 safely at LAX. Then the man in the green blazer had come, and

It’s Anne’s funeral! My God, I’ve overslept!

His eyes flew open, but he was in neither a motel room nor the spare bedroom at Anne’s brother’s house in Revere. He was looking through a cockpit window at a sky filled with stars.

Suddenly it came back to him... everything.

He sat up all the way, too quickly. His head screamed a sickly hungover protest. Blood flew from his nose and splattered on the center control console. He looked down and saw the front of his shirt was soaked with it. There had been a leak, all right. In him.

Of course, he thought. Depressurization often does that. I should have warned the passengers... How many passengers do I have left, by the way?

He couldn’t remember. His head was filled with fog.

He looked at his fuel indicators, saw that their situation was rapidly approaching the critical point, and then checked the INS. They were exactly where they should be, descending rapidly toward LA, and at any moment they might wander into someone else’s airspace while the someone else was still there.

Someone else had been sharing his airspace just before he passed out... who?

He fumbled, and it came. Nick, of course. Nick Hopewell. Nick was gone. He hadn’t been such a bad penny after all, it seemed. But he must have done his job, or Brian wouldn’t be awake now.

He got on the radio, fast.

“LAX ground control, this is American Pride Flight—” He stopped. What flight were they? He couldn’t remember. The fog was in the way.

“Twenty-nine, aren’t we?” a dazed, unsteady voice said from behind him.

“Thank you, Laurel.” Brian didn’t turn around. “Now go back and belt up. I may have to make this plane do some tricks.”

He spoke into his mike again.

“American Pride Flight 29, repeat, two-niner. Mayday, ground control, I am declaring an emergency here. Please clear everything in front of me, I am coming in on heading 85 and I have no fuel. Get a foam truck out and—”

“Oh, quit it,” Laurel said dully from behind him. “Just quit it.”

Brian wheeled around them, ignoring the fresh bolt of pain through his head and the fresh spray of blood which flew from his nose. “Sit down, goddammit!” he snarled. “We’re coming in unannounced into heavy traffic. If you don’t want to break your neck—”

“There’s no heavy traffic down there,” Laurel said in the same dull voice. “No heavy traffic, no foam trucks. Nick died for nothing, and I’ll never get a chance to deliver his message. Look for yourself.”

Brian did. And, although they were now over the outlying suburbs of Los Angeles, he saw nothing but darkness.

There was no one down there, it seemed.

No one at all.

Behind him, Laurel Stevenson burst into harsh, raging sobs of terror and frustration.

31

A long white passenger jet cruised slowly above the ground sixteen miles cast of Los Angeles International Airport. 767 was printed on its tail in large, proud numerals. Along the fuselage, the words AMERICAN PRIDE were written in letters which had been raked backward to indicate speed. On both sides of the nose was a large red eagle, its wings spangled with blue stars. Like the airliner it decorated, the eagle appeared to be coming in for a landing.

The plane printed no shadow on the deserted grid of streets as it passed above them; dawn was still an hour away. Below it, no car moved, no streetlight glowed. Below it, all was silent and moveless. Ahead of it, no runway lights gleamed.

The plane’s belly slid open. The undercarriage dropped down and spread out. The landing gear locked in place.

American Pride Flight 29 slipped down the chute toward LA. It banked slightly to the right as it came; Brian was now able to correct his course visually, and he did so. They passed over a cluster of airport motels, and for a moment Brian could see the monument that stood near the center of the terminal complex, a graceful tripod with curved legs and a restaurant in its center. They passed over a short strip of dead grass and then concrete runway was unrolling thirty feet below the plane.

There was no time to baby the 767 in this time; Brian’s fuel indicators read zeros across and the bird was about to turn into a bitch. He brought it in hard, like a sled filled with bricks. There was a thud that rattled his teeth and started his nose bleeding again. His chest harness locked. Laurel, who was in the co-pilots seat, cried out.