“What in Christ's name is going on here?” Bailey screamed, and was stupidly amazed to see one of his front teeth fly out of his mouth, bounce off his airspeed indicator and fall on the floor.

The engine hitched again.

“Fuck,” he whispered. He was now sick with fright. Blood from the socket where his tooth had been trickled down his chin. A drop splashed on his Lacoste shirt.

The gleaming thing in the earth passed under his wings again.

The Hawk's engine ran choppily and stalled. It began to lose altitude. Forgetting all his training, Bailey hauled up on the wheel as hard as he could, but the silent plane didn't, couldn't, answer. Bailey's head pounded and thudded. The Cessna dropped to 4,000 feet… 3,500… 3,000. Bailey groped out with one hand like a blind man and thumbed the button marked EMERGENCY RESTART. Hi-test av-gas boomed hollowly in the Hawk's carbs. The propeller jerked, then stopped again. Now the Cessna had slid down to 2,500 feet. It passed over the Old Derry Road close enough for Bailey to be able to see the service board in front of the Methodist church.

“Motherfuck,” he whispered. “I'm gonna die.”

He pulled the choke all the way out and hit the restart button again. The engine coughed, ran for a while, then began to stutter.

“No!” Bailey screamed. One eye ruptured and filled up with blood. The blood sheeted thinly down his left cheek. In his panicky, terrorized state, he didn't even notice. He slammed the choke in again. “No, don't you stall, you ratshit plane!”

The engine roared; the propeller blurred into invisibility with a wedge of reflected sunshine in it. Bailey hauled up on the wheel. The overburdened Hawk began to lug again.

“Ratshit plane! Ratshit plane! Ratshit plane!” he screamed. His left eye was now full of blood and he was on some level aware that the world seemed to have taken on a strange pinkish aspect, but if he'd had the time or inclination to think about this at all, he would have thought it no more than rage at this idiotic situation.

He let off on the wheel; the Hawk, allowed to climb at an angle which was almost sane, began to buckle down to its job again. Haven Village passed beneath it, and Bailey was dimly aware of people looking up at him. He was low enough so someone could take his number if they thought of it.

Go ahead! he thought grimly. Go ahead, take it, because when I finish with Cessna Corporation, every goddam stockholder they have is gonna be standing in his underwear! I'm going to sue those negligent sons of bitches for every banana-skin they've got!

The Hawk was rising smoothly now, its engine smooth and sweet. Bailey's head was trying to tear itself right off his shoulders, but an idea suddenly came to him -an idea of such stupefying simplicity and such staggering ramifications that everything else was driven from his mind. He understood nothing less than the physiological basis of bicamerality in the human brain. This led to an instant understanding of race memory, not as a hazy Jungian concept but as a function of recombinant DNA and biological imprinting. And with this came an understanding of what the increased millierg generating capacity of the corpus callosum during periods of increased ductless gland activity, which had puzzled students of the human brain for thirty years, actually meant.

Peter Bailey suddenly understood that time travel-actual time travel -was in his grasp.

At the same instant, a large portion of his own brain exploded.

White light flashed in his head-white light exactly like the huge reflection that had winked at him from that object in the woods.

If he had collapsed forward, pushing the wheel in, the people of Haven would have had another mess on their hands. But instead he fell backward, head lolling on his neck, blood running from his ears. He stared up at the ceiling of the pilot's compartment with an expression of stupendous, terminal surprise printed on his face.

If the Cessna's autopilot had been engaged, it would almost certainly have flown serenely on until it ran out of fuel. Weather conditions were optimum, and such things have happened before. As it was, it flew along almost dead level at 5,500 feet for five minutes anyway. The radio squawked at the dead neurosurgeon, telling him to get his ass up to his assigned altitude right now.

Over Derry a wind current threw the plane into a gentle bank. It flew in a long, looping arc toward Newport. The bank grew steeper, turned into a spiral. The spiral became a spin. A kid fishing off a bridge on Route 7 looked up and saw a plane falling out of the sky, and whirling like a screw-auger as it did. He stared, open-mouthed, as it crashed in Ezra Dockery's north field and exploded in a pillar of flame.

“Holy jeezum!” the kid yelled. He dropped his fishing-pole and ran for the Newport Mobil up the road to call the fire department. Shortly after he left, a bass snatched his worm and pulled his pole into the water. The kid never found the pole, but in the excitement of fighting the grassfire in Dockery's field and pulling the crispy pilot out of the remains of the Cessna, he barely noticed.

Saturday, August 6th:

Newt and Dick were sitting in the Haven Lunch. The newspaper was between them. The lead story was another outbreak of hostilities in the Mideast; the story that most concerned them that morning was below the fold. NEUROSURGEON KILLED IN LIGHT PLANE CRASH, the headline read. There was a photo of the plane. Nothing recognizable remained of the once beautiful Cessna Hawk except its tail.

Their breakfasts were pushed to one side, mostly untouched. Molly Fenderson, Beach's niece, was cooking now that Beach was dead. Molly was a helluva nice girl, but her fried eggs looked like broiled assholes. Dick thought they tasted that way, too, although he'd never actually eaten an asshole, broiled or any other way.

Might have, Newt said.

Dick looked at him, eyebrows raised.

They put damn near anything in hot dogs. Least, that's what I read once.

Dick's gut rolled over. He told Newt to shut his fucking gob.

Newt paused, then said: Must have been twenty, thirty people see that ijit come low acrost the village.

All from town? Dick asked.

Yes.

Then we have no problem, do we?

No, I don't think so, Newt replied, sipping coffee. At least, not unless it happens again.

Dick shook his head. Shouldn't do. Paper says he was off-course.

Yeah. So it said. You ready?

Sure.

They left without paying. Money had ceased to hold much interest to the residents of Haven. There were several large cardboard cartons of cash in Dick Allison's basement, carelessly tucked into the old coal-hold-twenties, tens, and ones, mostly. Haven was a small town. When someone needed cash for something, they came and got some. The house was unlocked. Besides telepathic typewriters and water heaters that ran on the power of collapsing molecules, Haven had discovered a nearly perfect form of collectivism.

On the sidewalk in front of the Lunch, they stared toward the town hall. The brick clock tower was flickering uneasily. One moment it was there, as solid as the Taj Mahal, if not so beautiful. The next, there was only blue sky above the jagged ruin of the tower's base. Then it would come back. Its long morning shadow fluttered like the shadow of a window-shade blown by an intermittent wind. Newt found the fact that sometimes the shadow of the clock tower was there when the tower itself was not particularly disturbing.

Christ! If I looked at that sucker too long, I'd go batshit, Dick said.

Newt asked if someone was taking care of the deterioration.

Tommy Jacklin and Hester Brookline have had to go up to Derry, Dick said. They're supposed to go to about five different service stations, plus both auto-parts stores. I sent damn near seven hundred bucks with them, told them to come back with as many as twenty car batteries, if they could. But they're supposed to spread the buy around. There's people in some of the towns around here that think folks have gone battery-crazy in Haven.