worst they've ever been." He looked around fearfully. "The bugs come next... where's the motherfuckin bugs?"
No bugs, Albert thought, but wait till you see the balls. You're going to love those.
"Buckle yourself in, mate," Nick said, "and shut u - "
He broke off, staring down incredulously at the airport... or where the airport had been. The main buildings were gone, and the National Guard base at the west end was going. Flight 29 overflew a growing abyss of darkness, an eternal cistern that seemed to have no end.
"Oh dear Jesus, Nick," Laurel said unsteadily, and suddenly put her hands over her eyes.
As they overflew Runway 33 at 1,500 feet, Nick saw sixty or a hundred parallel lines racing up the concrete, cutting the runway into long strips that sank into emptiness. The strips reminded him of Craig Toomy:
Rii-ip.
On the other side of the aisle, Bethany pulled down the windowshade beside Albert's seat with a bang.
"Don't you dare open that!" she told him in a scolding, hysterical voice.
"Don't worry," Albert said, and suddenly remembered that he had left his violin down there. Well... it was undoubtedly gone now. He abruptly put his hands over his own face.
2
Before Brian began to turn west again, he saw what lay east of Bangor. It was nothing. Nothing at all. A titantic river of blackness lay in a still sweep from horizon to horizon under the white dome of the sky. The trees were gone, the city was gone, the earth itself was gone.
This is what it must be like to fly in outer space, he thought, and he felt his rationality slip a cog, as it had on the trip east. He held onto himself desperately and made himself concentrate on flying the plane.
He brought them up quickly, wanting to be in the clouds, wanting that hellish vision to be blotted out. Then Flight 29 was pointed west again. In the moments before they entered the clouds, he saw the hills and woods and lakes which stretched to the west of the city, saw them being cut ruthlessly apart by thousands of black spiderweb lines. He saw huge swatches of reality go sliding soundlessly into the growing mouth of the abyss, and Brian did something he had never done before while in the cockpit of an airplane.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were in the clouds.
3
There was almost no turbulence this time; as Bob Jenkins had suggested, the weather patterns appeared to be running down like an old clock. Ten minutes after entering the clouds, Flight 29 emerged into the bright-blue world which began at 18,000 feet. The remaining passengers looked around at each other nervously, then at the speakers as Brian came on the intercom.
"We're up," he said simply. "You all know what happens now: we go back exactly the way we came, and hope that whatever doorway we came through is still there. If it is, we'll try going through."
He paused for a moment, then resumed.
"Our return flight is going to take somewhere between four and a half and six hours. I'd like to be more exact, but I can't. Under ordinary circumstances, the flight west usually takes longer than the flight east, because of prevailing wind conditions, but so far as I can tell from my cockpit instruments, there is no wind." Brian paused for a moment and then added, "There's nothing moving up here but us." For a moment the intercom stayed on, as if Brian meant to add something else, and then it clicked off.
4
"What in God's name is going on here?" the man with the black beard asked shakily.
Albert looked at him for a moment and then said, "I don't think you want to know."
"Am I in the hospital again?" The man with the black beard blinked at Albert fearfully, and Albert felt sudden sympathy for the man.
"Well, why don't you believe you are, if it will help?"
The man with the black beard continued to stare at him for a moment in dreadful fascination and then announced, "I'm going back to sleep. Right now." He reclined his seat and closed his eyes. In less than a minute his chest was moving up and down with deep regularity and he was snoring under his breath.
Albert envied him.
5
Nick gave Laurel a brief hug, then unbuckled his seatbelt and stood up. "I'm going forward," he said. "Want to come?"
Laurel shook her head and pointed across the aisle at Dinah. "I'll stay with her."