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,