if it's drifted to one side, or if its altitude has changed. Finding a needle in a haystack would be child's play in comparison."
"What about radar?"
Brian pointed to the RCA/TL color radar monitor. "Nothing, as you can see. But that's not surprising. If the original crew had acquired the damned thing on radar, they never would have gone through it in the first place."
"They wouldn't have gone through it if they'd seen it, either," Nick pointed out gloomily.
"That's not necessarily true. They might have seen it too late to avoid it. Jetliners move fast, and airplane crews don't spend the entire flight searching the sky for bogies. They don't have to; that's what ground control is for. Thirty or thirty-five minutes into the flight, the crew's major outbound tasks are completed. The bird is up, it's out of LA airspace, the anti-collision honker is on and beeping every ninety seconds to show it's working. The INS is all programmed - that happens before the bird ever leaves the ground - and it is telling the autopilot just what to do. From the look of the cockpit, the pilot and co-pilot were on their coffee break. They could have been sitting here, facing each other, talking about the last movie they saw or how much they dropped at Hollywood Park. If there had been a flight attendant up front just before The Event took place, there would at least have been one more set of eyes, but we know there wasn't. The male crew had their coffee and Danish; the flight attendants were getting ready to serve drinks to the passengers when it happened."
"That's an extremely detailed scenario," Nick said. "Are you trying to convince me or yourself?"
"At this point, I'll settle for convincing anyone at all."
Nick smiled and stepped to the starboard cockpit window. His eyes dropped involuntarily downward, toward the place where the ground belonged, and his smile first froze, then dropped off his face. His knees buckled, and he gripped the bulkhead with one hand to steady himself.
"Shit on toast," he said in a tiny dismayed voice.
"Not very nice, is it?"
Nick looked around at Brian. His eyes seemed to float in his pallid face. "All my life," he said, "I've thought of Australia when I heard people talk about the great bugger-all, but it's not. That's the great bugger-all, right down there."
Brian checked the INS and the charts again, quickly. He had made a small red circle on one of the charts; they were now on the verge of entering the airspace that circle represented. "Can you do what I asked? If you can't, say so. Pride is a luxury we can't - "
"Of course I can," Nick murmured. He had tom his eyes away from the huge black socket below the plane and was scanning the sky. "I only wish I knew what I was looking for."
"I think you'll know it when you see it," Brian said. He paused and then added, "If you see it."
12
Bob Jenkins sat with his arms folded tightly across his chest, as if he were cold. Part of him was cold, but this was not a physical coldness. The chill was coming out of his head.
Something was wrong.
He did not know what it was, but something was wrong. Something was out of place... or lost... or forgotten. Either a mistake had been made or was going to be made. The feeling nagged at him like some pain not quite localized enough to be identified. That sense of wrongness would almost crystallize into a thought... and then it would skitter away again like some small, not-quite-tame animal.
Something wrong.
Or out of place. Or lost.
Or forgotten.
Ahead of him, Albert and Bethany were spooning contentedly. Behind him, Rudy Warwick was sitting with his eyes closed and his lips moving. The beads of a rosary were clamped in one fist. Across the aisle, Laurel Stevenson sat beside Dinah, holding one of her hands and stroking it gently.
Wrong.
Bob eased up the shade beside his seat, peeked out, and slammed it down again. Looking at that would not aid rational thought but erase it. What lay below the plane was utter madness.
I must warn them. I have to. They are going forward on my hypothesis, but if my hypothesis is somehow mistaken - and dangerous - then I must warn them.
Warn them of what?
Again it almost came into the light of his focussed thoughts, then slipped away, becoming just a shadow