Brian asked Bob sternly. "A little more turbulence and this bitch would have broken into about ten thousand pieces."
"Can I talk through that thing?" Bob asked, pointing to the switch marked INTERCOM.
"Yes, but"
"Then let me do it."
Brian started to protest, then thought better of it. He flicked the switch. "Go ahead; you're on." Then he repeated: "And it better be good."
"Listen to me, all of you!" Bob shouted.
From behind them came a protesting whine of feedback. "We"
"Just talk in your normal tone of voice," Brian said. "You'll blow their goddam eardrums out."
Bob made a visible effort to compose himself, then went on in a lower tone of voice. "We had to turn back, and we did. The captain has made it clear to me that we only just managed to do it. We have been extremely lucky... and extremely stupid, as well. We forgot the most elementary thing, you see, although it was right in front of us all the time. When we went through the time-rip in the first place, everyone on the plane who was awake disappeared."
Brian jerked in his seat. He felt as if someone had slugged him. Ahead of the 767's nose, about thirty miles distant, the faintly glowing lozenge shape had appeared again in the sky, looking like some gigantic semi-precious stone. It seemed to mock him.
"We are all awake," Bob said. (In the main cabin, Albert looked at the man with the black beard lying out cold in the aisle and thought, With one exception.) "Logic suggests that if we try to go through that way, we will disappear." He thought about this and then said, "That is all."
Brian flicked the intercom link closed without thinking about it. Behind him, Nick voiced a painful, incredulous laugh.
"That is all? That is bloody all? What do we do about it?"
Brian looked at him and didn't answer. Neither did Bob Jenkins.
22
Bethany raised her head and looked into Albert's strained, bewildered face. "We have to go to sleep? How do we do that? I never felt less like sleeping in my whole life!"
"I don't know." He looked hopefully across the aisle at Laurel. She was already shaking her head. She wished she could go to sleep, just go to sleep and make this whole crazy nightmare gone - but, like Bethany, she had never felt less like it in her entire life.
23
Bob took a step forward and gazed out through the cockpit window in silent fascination. After a long moment he said in a soft, awed voice: "So that's what it looks like."
A line from some rock-and-roll song popped into Brian's head: You can look but you better not touch. He glanced down at the LED fuel indicators. What he saw there didn't ease his mind any, and he raised his eyes helplessly to Nick's. Like the others, he had never felt so wide awake in his life.
"I don't know what we do now." he said, "but if we're going to try that hole, it has to be soon. The fuel we've got will carry us for an hour, maybe a little more. After that, forget it. Any ideas?"
Nick lowered his head, still cradling his swelling arm. After a moment or two he looked up again. "Yes," he said. "As a matter of fact, I do. People who fly rarely stick their prescription medicines in their checked baggage - they like to have it with them in case their luggage ends up on the other side of the world and takes a few days to get back to them. If we go through the hand-carry bags, we're sure to find scads of sedatives. We won't even have to take the bags out of the bins, judging from the sounds, most of them are already lying on the floor... what? What's the matter with it?"
This last was directed at Bob Jenkins, who had begun shaking his head as soon as the phrase "prescription medicines" popped out of Nick's mouth.
"Do you know anything about prescription sedatives?" he asked Nick.
"A little," Nick said, but he sounded defensive. "A little, yeah."
"Well, I know a lot," Bob said dryly. "I've researched them exhaustively - from All-Nite to Xanax. Murder by sleeping potion has always been a great favorite in my field, you understand. Even if you happened to find one of the more potent medications in the very first bag you checked - unlikely in itself you couldn't administer a safe dose which would act