the better the violin sounds. It's the air that's wrong, not the instrument. It's not conducting the sounds the way it should, and so what comes out sounds the way the beer tasted."
"Flat," Brian said.
Albert nodded.
"Thank you, Albert," Bob said.
"Sure. Can I put it away now?"
"Of course." Bob continued as Albert replaced his violin in its case, and then used a napkin to clean off the fouled latches and his own fingers. "Taste and sound are not the only off-key elements of the situation in which we find ourselves. Take the clouds, for instance."
"What about them?" Rudy Warwick asked.
"They haven't moved since we arrived, and I don't think they're going to move. I think the weather patterns we're all used to living with have either stopped or are running down like an old pocket-watch."
Bob paused for a moment. He suddenly looked old and helpless and frightened.
"As Mr Hopewell would say, let's not draw it fine. Everything here feels wrong. Dinah, whose senses - including that odd, vague one we call the sixth sense - are more developed than ours, has perhaps felt it the most strongly, but I think we've all felt it to some degree. Things here are just wrong."
"And now we come to the very hub of the matter."
He turned to face them.
"I said not fifteen minutes ago that it felt like lunchtime. It now feels much later than that to me. Three in the afternoon, perhaps four. It isn't breakfast my stomach is grumbling for right now; it wants high tea. I have a terrible feeling that it may start to get dark outside before our watches tell us it's quarter to ten in the morning."
"Get to it, mate," Nick said.
"I think it's about time," Bob said quietly. "Not about dimension, as Albert suggested, but time. Suppose that, every now and then, a hole appears in the time stream? Not a time-warp, but a time-rip. A rip in the temporal fabric."
"That's the craziest shit I ever heard!" Don Gaffney exclaimed.
"Amen!" Craig Toomy seconded from the floor.
"No," Bob replied sharply. "If you want crazy shit, think about how Albert's violin sounded when you were standing six feet away from it. Or look around you, Mr Gaffney, just look around you. What's happening to us... what we're in... that's crazy shit."
Don frowned and stuffed his hands deep in his pockets.
"Go on," Brian said.
"All right. I'm not saying that I've got this right; I'm just offering a hypothesis that fits the situation in which we have found ourselves. Let us say that such rips in the fabric of time appear every now and then, but mostly over unpopulated areas - by which I mean the ocean, of course. I can't say why that would be, but it's still a logical assumption to make, since that's where most of these disappearances seem to occur."
"Weather patterns over water are almost always different from weather patterns over large land-masses," Brian said. "That could be it."
Bob nodded. "Right or wrong, it's a good way to think of it, because it puts it in a context we're all familiar with. This could be similar to rare weather phenomena which are sometimes reported: upside-down tornadoes, circular rainbows, daytime starlight. These time-rips may appear and disappear at random, or they may move, the way fronts and pressure systems move, but they very rarely appear over land."
"But a statistician will tell you that sooner or later whatever can happen will happen, so let us say that last night one did appear over land... and we had the bad luck to fly into it. And we know something else. Some unknown rule or property of this fabulous meteorological freak makes it impossible for any living being to travel through unless he or she is fast asleep."
"Aw, this is a fairy tale," Gaffney said.
"I agree completely," Craig said from the floor.
"Shut your cake-hole," Gaffney growled at him. Craig blinked, then lifted his upper lip in a feeble sneer.
"It feels right," Bethany said in a low voice. "It feels as if we're out of step with... with everything."
"What happened to the crew and the passengers?" Albert asked. He sounded sick. "If the plane came through, and we came through, what happened to the rest of them?"
His imagination provided him with an answer in the form of a sudden indelible image: hundreds of people failing out of the sky, ties and trousers rippling, dresses skating up to reveal garter-belts and underwear, shoes falling off, pens (the