‘Did you hear the difference?’ he asked when he had finished.
‘It sounds a lot better close up, if that’s what you mean,’ Gaffney said. He was looking at Albert with real respect. ‘You play good, kid.’
Albert smiled at Gaffney, but it was really Bethany Simms he was talking to. ‘Sometimes, when I’m sure my music teacher isn’t around, I play old Led Zeppelin songs,’ he said. ‘That stuff really cooks on the violin. You’d be surprised.’ He looked at Bob. ‘Anyway, it fits right in with what you were saying. The closer you get, 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 ones which weren’t back on the plane, that was) shooting out of pockets; people waving their arms and legs and trying to scream in the thin air; people who had left wallets, purses, pocket-change, and, in at least one case, a pacemaker implant, behind. He saw them hitting the ground like dud bombs, squashing bushes flat, kicking up small clouds of stony dust, imprinting the desert floor with the shapes of their bodies.
‘My guess is that they were vaporized,’ Bob said. ‘Utterly discorporated.’
Dinah didn’t understand at first; then she thought of Aunt Vicky’s purse with the traveller’s checks still inside and began to cry softly. Laurel crossed her arms over the little blind girl’s shoulders and hugged her.
Albert, meanwhile, was fervently thanking God that his mother had changed her mind at the last moment, deciding not to accompany him east after all.
‘In many cases their things went with them,’ the writer went on. ‘Those who left wallets and purses may have had them out at the time of The … The Event. It’s hard to say, though. What was taken and what was left behind – I suppose I’m thinking of the wig more than anything else – doesn’t seem to have a lot of rhyme or reason to it.’
‘You got that right,’ Albert said. ‘The surgical pins, for instance. I doubt if the guy they belonged to took them out of his shoulder or knee to play with because he got bored.’
‘I agree,’ Rudy Warwick said. ‘It was too early in the flight to get that bored.’
Bethany looked at him, startled, then burst out laughing.
‘I’m originally from Kansas,’ Bob said, ‘and the element of caprice makes me think of the twisters we used to sometimes get in the summer. They’d totally obliterate a farmhouse and leave the privy standing, or they’d rip away a barn without pulling so much as a shingle from the silo standing right next to it.’
‘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