"I'm sure you can," Brian said, "but I still see no need of scaring them unnecessarily. And we will find out, eventually. We can't stay up here forever, you know."
"Too true, matey," Nick said dryly.
"I might do it anyway, if I could be sure I could get under the cloud cover at 4000 or 5000 feet, but with no ATC and no other planes to talk to, I can't be sure. I don't even know for sure what the weather's like down there, and I'm not talking about normal stuff, either. You can laugh at me if you want to - "
"I'm not laughing, matey. I'm not even close to laughing. Believe me."
"Well, suppose we have gone through a time-warp, like in a science-fiction story? What if I took us down through the clouds and we got one quick look at a bunch of brontosauruses grazing in some Farmer John's field before we were torn apart by a cyclone or fried in an electrical storm?"
"Do you really think that's possible?" Nick asked. Brian looked at him closely to see if the question was sarcastic. It didn't appear to be, but it was hard to tell. The British were famous for their dry sense of humor, weren't they?
Brian started to tell him he had once seen something just like that on an old Twilight Zone episode and then decided it wouldn't help his credibility at all. "It's pretty unlikely, I suppose, but you get the idea - we just don't know what we're dealing with. We might hit a brand-new mountain in what used to be upstate New York. Or another plane. Hell - maybe even a rocket-shuttle. After all, if it's a time-warp, we could as easily be in the future as in the past."
Nick looked out through the window. "We seem to have the sky pretty much to ourselves."
"Up here, that's true. Down there, who knows? And who knows is a very dicey situation for an airline pilot. I intend to overfly Bangor when we get there, if these clouds still hold. I'll take us out over the Atlantic and drop under the ceiling as we head back. Our odds will be better if we make our initial descent over water."
"So for now, we just go on."
"Right."
"And wait."
"Right again."
Nick sighed. "Well, you're the captain."
Brian smiled. "That's three in a row."
4
Deep in the trenches carved into the floors of the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, there are fish which live and die without ever seeing or sensing the sun. These fabulous creatures cruise the depths like ghostly balloons, lit from within by their own radiance. Although they look delicate, they are actually marvels of biological design, built to withstand pressures that would squash a man as flat as a windowpane in the blink of an eye. Their great strength, however, is also their great weakness. Prisoners of their own alien bodies, they are locked forever in their dark depths. If they are captured and drawn toward the surface, toward the sun, they simply explode. It is not external pressure that destroys them, but its absence.
Craig Toomy had been raised in his own dark trench, had lived in his own atmosphere of high pressure. His father had been an executive in the Bank of America, away from home for long stretches of time, a caricature type-A overachiever. He drove his only child as furiously and as unforgivingly as he drove himself. The bedtime stories he told Craig in Craig's early years terrified the boy. Nor was this surprising, because terror was exactly the emotion Roger Toomy meant to awaken in the boy's breast. These tales concerned themselves, for the most part, with a race of monstrous beings called the langoliers.
Their job, their mission in life (in the world of Roger Toomy, everything had a job, everything had serious work to do), was to prey on lazy, time-wasting children. By the time he was seven, Craig was a dedicated type-A overachiever, just like Daddy. He had made up his mind: the langoliers were never going to get him.
A report card which did not contain all A's was an unacceptable report card. An Awas the subject of a lecture fraught with dire warnings of what life would be like digging ditches or emptying garbage cans, and a B resulted in punishment - most commonly confinement to his room for a week. During that week, Craig was allowed out only for school and for meals. There was