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