Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [67]
'Get to the bottom line, mate,' Nick said. 'Whatever time it is we're in, I can't help feeling that it's very late in the day.'
Brian thought of Craig Toomy, Old Mr I've-Got-to-Get-to-Boston, standing at the head of the emergency slide and screaming: Time is short! Time is very fucking short!
'All right,' Bob said. 'The bottom line. Let's suppose there are such things as time-rips, and we've gone through one. I think we've gone into the past and discovered the unlovely truth of time-travel: you can't appear in the Texas Book Depository on November 22, 1963, and put a stop to the Kennedy assassination; you can't watch the building of the pyramids or the sack of Rome; you can't investigate the Age of the Dinosaurs at first hand.'
He raised his arms, hands outstretched, as if to encompass the whole silent world in which they found themselves.
'Take a good look around you, fellow time-travellers. This is the past. It is empty; it is silent. It is a world - perhaps a universe - with all the sense and meaning of a discarded paint-can. I believe we may have hopped an absurdly short distance in time, perhaps as little as fifteen minutes ... at least initially. But the world is clearly unwinding around us. Sensory input is disappearing. Electricity has already disappeared. The weather is what the weather was when we made the jump into the past. But it seems to me that as the world winds down, time itself is winding up in a kind of spiral crowding in on itself.'
'Couldn't this be the future?' Albert asked cautiously.
Bob Jenkins shrugged. He suddenly looked very tired. 'I don't know for sure, of course - how could I? - but I don't think so. This place we're in feels old and stupid and feeble and meaningless. It feels I don't know .
Dinah spoke then. They all looked toward her.
'It feels over,' she said softly.
'Yes,' Bob said. 'Thank you, dear. That's the word I was looking for.'
'Mr Jenkins?'
'Yes?'
'The sound I told you about before? I can hear it again.' She paused. 'It's getting closer.'
8
They all fell silent, their faces long and listening. Brian thought he heard something, then decided it was the sound of his own heart. Or simply imagination.
'I want to go out by the windows again,' Nick said abruptly. He stepped over Craig's prone body without so much as a glance down and strode from the restaurant without another word.
'Hey!' Bethany cried. 'Hey, I want to come, too!'
Albert followed her; most of the others trailed after. 'What about you two?' Brian asked Laurel and Dinah.
'I don't want to go,' Dinah said. 'I can hear it as well as I want to from here.' She paused and added: 'But I'm going to hear it better, I think, if we don't get out of here soon.'
Brian glanced at Laurel Stevenson.
'I'll stay here with Dinah,' she said quietly.
'All right,' Brian said. 'Keep away from Mr Toomy.'
"'Keep away from Mr Toomy."' Craig mimicked savagely from his place on the floor. He turned his head with an effort and rolled his eyes in their sockets to look at Brian. 'You really can't get away with this, Captain Engle. I don't know what game you and your Limey friend think you're playing, but you can't get away with it. Your next piloting job will probably be running cocaine in from Colombia after dark. At least you won't be lying when you tell your friends all about what a crack pilot you are.'
Brian started to reply, then thought better of it. Nick said this man was at least temporarily insane, and Brian thought Nick was right. Trying to reason with a madman was both useless and time-consuming.
'We'll keep our distance, don't worry,' Laurel said. She drew Dinah over to one of the small tables and sat down with her. 'And we'll be fine.'
'All right,' Brian said. 'Yell if he starts trying to get loose.'
Laurel