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By Root 863 0

His urbane surface was entirely gone for the first time; his voice vibrated with anger and urgency. 'You need waking up, fellows and girls, and I haven't the time to do it gently. That little girl Dinah - says we are in bad trouble here, and I believe her. She says she hears something, something which may be coming our way, and I rather believe that, too. I don't hear a bloody thing, but my nerves are jumping like grease on a hot griddle, and I'm used to paying attention when they do that. I think something is coming, and I don't believe it's going to try and sell us vacuum-cleaner attachments or the latest insurance scheme when it gets here. Now we can make all the correct civilized noises over this bloody madman or we can try to understand what has happened to us. Understanding may not save our lives, but I'm rapidly becoming convinced that the lack of it may end them, and soon.' His eyes shifted to Dinah. 'Tell me I'm wrong if you believe I am, Dinah. I'll listen to you, and gladly.'

'I don't want you to hurt Mr Toomy, but I don't think you're wrong, either,' Dinah said in a small, wavery voice.

'All right,' Nick said. 'Fair enough. I'll try my very best not to hurt him again ... but I make no promises. Let's begin with a very simple concept. This fellow I've trussed up -'

'Toomy,' Brian said. 'His name is Craig Toomy.'

'All right. Mr Toomy is mad. Perhaps if we find our way back to our proper place, or if we find the place where all the people have gone, we can get some help for him. But for now, we can only help him by putting him out of commission - which I have done, with the generous if foolhardy assistance of Albert there - and getting back 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