to our current business. Does anyone hold a view which runs counter to this?"
There was no reply. The other passengers who had been aboard Flight 29 looked at Nick uneasily.
"All right," Nick said. "Please go on, Mr Jenkins."
"I... I'm not used to..." Bob made a visible effort to collect himself. "In books, I suppose I've killed enough people to fill every seat in the plane that brought us here, but what just happened is the first act of violence I've ever personally witnessed. I'm sorry if I've... er... behaved badly."
"I think you're doing great, Mr Jenkins," Dinah said. "And I like listening to you, too. It makes me feel better."
Bob looked at her gratefully and smiled. "Thank you, Dinah." He stuffed his hands in his pockets, cast a troubled glance at Craig Toomy, then looked beyond them, across the empty waiting room.
"I think I mentioned a central fallacy in our thinking," he said at last. "It is this: we all assumed, when we began to grasp the dimensions of this Event, that something had happened to the rest of the world. That assumption is easy enough to understand, since we are all fine and everyone else - including those other passengers with whom we boarded at Los Angeles International - seems to have disappeared. But the evidence before us doesn't bear the assumption out. What has happened has happened to us and us alone. I am convinced that the world as we have always known it is ticking along just as it always has."
"It's us - the missing passengers and the eleven survivors of Flight 29 - who are lost."
7
"Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't understand what you're getting at," Rudy Warwick said after a moment.
"Neither do I," Laurel added.
"We've mentioned two famous disappearances," Bob said quietly. Now even Craig Toomy seemed to be listening... he had stopped struggling, at any rate. "One, the case of the Mary Celeste, took place at sea. The second, the case of Roanoke Island, took place near the sea. They are not the only ones, either. I can think of at least two others which involved aircraft: the disappearance of the aviatrix Amelia Earhart over the Pacific Ocean, and the disappearance of several Navy planes over that part of the Atlantic known as the Bermuda Triangle. That happened in 1945 or 1946, I believe. There was some sort of garbled transmission from the lead aircraft's pilot, and rescue planes were sent out at once from an airbase in Florida, but no trace of the planes or their crews was ever found."
"I've heard of the case," Nick said. "It's the basis for the Triangle's infamous reputation, I think."
"No, there have been lots of ships and planes lost there," Albert put in. "I read the book about it by Charles Berlitz. Really interesting." He glanced around. "I just never thought I'd be in it, if you know what I mean."
Jenkins said, "I don't know if an aircraft has ever disappeared over the continental United States before, but - "
"It's happened lots of times with small planes," Brian said, "and once, about thirty-five years ago, it happened with a commercial passenger plane. There were over a hundred people aboard. 1955 or '56, this was. The carrier was either TWA or Monarch, I can't remember which. The plane was bound for Denver out of San Francisco. The pilot made radio contact with the Reno tower - absolutely routine - and the plane was never heard from again. There was a search, of course, but... nothing."
Brian saw they were all looking at him with a species of dreadful fascination, and he laughed uncomfortably.
"Pilot ghost stories," he said with a note of apology in his voice. "It sounds like a caption for a Gary Larson cartoon."
"I'll bet they all went through," the writer muttered. He had begun to scrub the side of his face with his hand again. He looked distressed - almost horrified. "Unless they found bodies...?"
"Please tell us what you know, or what you think you know," Laurel said. "The effect of this... this thing... seems to pile up on a person. If I don't get some answers soon, I think you can tie me up and put me down next to Mr Toomy."
"Don't flatter yourself," Craig said, speaking clearly if rather obscurely.
Bob favored him with another uncomfortable glance and then appeared to muster his thoughts. "There's no mess here, but there's a mess