Berry leaned over her and stroked her hair. "Yes, I know. I know." He straightened up. He was not very good at this. He remembered other occasions of bereavement in his own family. He'd never had the right words, was never able to bring comfort. He turned and walked back toward the cockpit. He took Terri O'Neil firmly by the shoulders and pushed her away from the door.

The glow of his technical triumphs was dying quickly against the cold realities of the personal tragedies around him.

Berry entered the cockpit.

Sharon Crandall was on the interphone. "Hold on, Barbara. John's back in the cockpit." She looked up at Berry. "Barbara's all right. How's everything back there?"

Berry sat heavily in his seat. "Okay." He paused. "Not really. The passengers are getting a little . . . troublesome." He cleared his throat and said, "The Captain is dead."

Sharon Crandall closed her eyes and lowered her head. She said softly, "Oh, damn it." She felt a deep sadness, a sense of loss over Captain Stuart's death. The signs were becoming ominous again.

"Sharon?"

She looked up. "I'm all right. Here. Barbara wants to talk to you about some wires."

Berry took the phone. "Barbara? What's up? Where are you?"

"In the midsection." Her voice sounded distant, and the whistling of the rushing air and the jet engines was louder. "There's a bundle of wires hanging down from the ceiling near the bigger hole. Some of the passengers brushed against them and nothing happened. There doesn't seem to be any electricity in them."

Berry thought for a moment. Everything in the Straton seemed to be working except the voice radios. Severed cables might account for that. He hoped the wires had nothing to do with the flight controls. "They might be antenna wires." It was logical that on a supersonic jet, the antennas would be mounted in some low-drag area like the tail. He suspected that the data-link utilized a different signal and a flat-plate antenna, which would be near the noise. That was why the link worked while the radios didn't.

"Do you want me to try to reconnect them?"

Berry smiled. In a technical age, everyone was a technician. Still, it was a heads-up suggestion and a gutsy one, too. "No. You'd need splicing tools and it would take too long, anyway." If those wires were involved somehow with the controls, he'd have to go down eventually and try to connect them himself. "They're not important." Something else was bothering him, and Barbara Yoshiro was in a position to clear it up. "Listen, Barbara, did you see any signs of the explosion? Anything like burnt seats? Charred metal? You know?"

There was a pause. "No. Not really. No." There was another silence. "It's odd. There is absolutely nothing that looks like an explosion-except for the mess and the holes."

Berry nodded. That had been his impression. If the holes had been in the top and bottom of the fuselage, he would have suspected that they'd passed through a meteor shower. He knew that it was an infinitely rare phenomenon, even at 62,000 feet. Could a meteor travel horizontally? Berry had no idea, although it seemed unlikely. Should he put something out about this on the data-link? Did it matter? "Barbara, how are the passengers?"

"About half of them are still pretty quiet. But some of the others are wandering around now. The turn stirred them up, I think. There's been some fighting."

Berry thought that her voice sounded cool and uninvolved, like a good reporter's. "Watch yourself. Work your way slowly. No abrupt movements."

"I know."

"There are people congregating at the bottom of the stairs," he informed her.

"I can't see the stairs from here, but I can see part of the crowd on both sides of the forward galley and lavatories."

"When you get to the interphone in that galley, call me. Or shout to Stein. One of us will help you back up."

"Okay."

"Take care of yourself. Here's Sharon."

Barbara Yoshiro didn't feel like talking much longer. As she looked out of the flight-attendant station in the midsection galley, she saw that the passengers were beginning to pay too much attention to her. The station was a cul-de-sac, and her only advantage with these people lay in her mobility.

"Barbara?"

"Yes, I'm coming back now."

"Is it very bad? Should I come down?" Sharon Crandall asked.

"No." Yoshiro put a light tone in her voice. "I've been a flight attendant long enough to know how to avoid groping hands." The joke came out badly and she added quickly, "They're not paying any particular attention to me. See you in a few minutes." She replaced the interphone and stepped into the aisle. She kept her back against the bulkhead of the lavatory and stared into the cavern that lay between the front of the airliner and herself, then looked back toward the tail.

The flimsy partitions of the Straton's interior had been swept away by the decompression. Its entire length, which she remembered being told was two hundred feet, lay exposed, except for the three galley-lavatory compartments. They rose, blue plastic cubicles in a row, from floor to ceiling-one near the tail, the mid-ship one she was standing at, and the one in the first-class cabin that blocked her view of the spiral staircase.

Dangling oxygen masks, uprooted seats, and dislodged wall and ceiling panels hung everywhere. Sixty feet from her, midway between the galley she was standing at and the first-class section, were two bomb holes-if that's what they were.

Barbara Yoshiro studied the possible routes she might take through the aircraft. She could see that she had two return routes to choose from. The aisle on the left-the one she had come down earlier-was now nearly packed with milling passengers. The aisle on the right had only a few people in it, but it contained more debris. Worse, it passed very near to the larger of the two holes in the fuselage. Even from where she stood, she could see the Pacific and the leading edge of the wing through the gaping hole. Perhaps, she thought, she'd travel up the right aisle, then cross over before she got to the open area of debris between the holes. While her eyes fixed on the scene in front of her, she failed to notice that a young man in the aisle next to her was watching her closely.

She drew a deep breath and took a few tentative steps up the aisle. The stench was overpowering despite the fresh, cold breeze, and she felt queasy. She looked up as she walked, her eyes darting quickly in all directions. About a hundred men and women still sat in their seats, blocking the spaces between the rows. Another hundred or so stood in groups or by themselves blocking the main aisles. Some were walking aimlessly, bumping into people, falling into the aisles or into the seats, then getting up again and continuing. Everyone was babbling or moaning. If they would only remain quiet she might be able to ignore them.

It was their clothes, too, she realized, almost as much as their faces or their noises, that gave them away. Their smart suits and dresses were tattered; some of them were half naked. Most people had one shoe or were shoeless. Almost everyone's clothes were stained with blood and splattered with vomit.

Yoshiro noticed that some of the passengers had been wounded in the explosion. She hadn't looked at them, she realized, as individual people who were injured, but as a great amorphous thing whose color was gray and whose many eyes were black. Now she could see a woman whose ear was grotesquely hanging, a man who had lost two fingers. A small girl was touching a terrible-looking wound on her thigh. She was crying. Pain, Yoshiro realized, was one thing that they could still feel. But why could they still feel that and not feel anything else? Why couldn't the sense of pain have died in them, too, and spared them that last agony?

She saw a body lying in the aisle in front of her. It was Jeff Price, the steward. Where were the rest of the flight attendants? She looked around carefully and slowly for the familiar white-and-blue uniforms.

Kneeling almost motionless in the shaft of bright sunlight in front of her, she spotted another flight attendant. The girl had her back toward her, but Barbara Yoshiro could see by the long black hair that it was Mary Gomez. The flight attendant appeared oblivious to everything around her, oblivious to the people stumbling into her, oblivious to the wind blowing her long hair in swirls around her head and neck. Barbara Yoshiro remembered that Mary Gomez had rung up the below-decks galley and asked if she could help. She remembered Sharon's words very clearly. No, thanks, Mary. Barbara and I are nearly finished. We'll be up in a minute. No, thanks, Mary. Barbara and I are nearly finished. We'll be up in a minute. It had actually been almost five minutes before they were ready to come up. Had they come up sooner . . . Her religion did not stress fate, but this kind of thing made one wonder about God's sense of timing. She turned away from Mary Gomez. It had actually been almost five minutes before they were ready to come up. Had they come up sooner . . . Her religion did not stress fate, but this kind of thing made one wonder about God's sense of timing. She turned away from Mary Gomez.

Someone came up behind her and grabbed her shoulder. She froze, then slowly moved aside. A boy of about eighteen stumbled past her. Someone in the seat she was leaning against grabbed her right wrist. Gently, she pulled it loose and continued up the aisle, her heart beginning to beat rapidly, her mouth dry and pasty.

Yoshiro got a grip on herself and began edging into a corner row of seats. She sidestepped past two seats, then stopped when she saw she couldn't squeeze by the two men who were sitting in the last two seats. Carefully, she climbed over onto the empty seat in front of her and made her way into the left aisle.

She approached the wide area of rubble where stark sunlight illuminated the grotesque dead shapes mingled with the debris. Passengers crawled and stumbled through the twisted wreckage. She watched in horrified fascination as a woman made her way toward the large gaping hole, brushed through the hanging wires and debris, and then stepped out into space. She saw the woman breeze past the cabin windows.

Yoshiro was too stunned to make a sound. Had the woman committed suicide? She doubted it. None of the passengers seemed to have enough intellect left to do even that. As if to confirm this, an old man began crawling toward the same hole in the fuselage. As he neared it, still oblivious to his surroundings, the slip-stream took hold of him. He was whisked outside. Yoshiro saw his body bump against the top of the wing before it fell beneath the aircraft. She turned abruptly away and looked down the aisle that would lead her to the safety of the stairs.

Some of the people on the port side had fallen down in the aisle. Others were bunched up, trying to move around and past each other, like wind-up dolls, their feet marking time, their bodies recoiling from the continuous encounters with each other. It was obscene, and Barbara Yoshiro felt as if a string inside of her was tightening, stretching, about to snap.

Barbara moved the last few feet down the aisle to where it opened up into the wreckage. She stepped carefully over the contorted forms on the floor. Less than fifty feet in front of her rose the blue plastic galley-lavatory cubicle, behind which was the spiral staircase.

People kept brushing and bumping her. The noise that came out of their mouths was not human. For some reason, it suddenly swelled into a crescendo of squeaking, wailing, moaning, and howling, then subsided like the noises in the forest. Then something touched it off again and the cycle began all over. An involuntary shudder passed through her body.

She forced herself to look into the faces of the men and women around her to try to determine if they were communicating with each other, telegraphing any movements, so she could act accordingly. But most of their faces showed nothing. No emotion, no interest, no humanity, and in the final analysis, no soul. The divine spark had gone out as surely as if they'd all sold themselves to the Devil. She could more easily read the facial expressions of an ape than the blood-smeared faces of these hollow-eyed, slack-jawed former humans.

There were a few, however, who showed signs of residual intelligence. One young man, in a blue blazer, seemed to have followed her in a parallel course down the right aisle. He was standing on the other side of the rubble area now, near the large hole, and staring at her. She saw him glance at the hole, then move away from it, toward her, pushing his way through the people near him. He stopped abruptly, then looked down at his feet.

Barbara Yoshiro followed his gaze. She noticed a dog in the twisted wreckage. The dog of the blind man, a golden retriever. It sat on the floor, poking its head between the two upturned seats. It was eating something. . .. She put her hand to her mouth. "Oh, no! Oh, God!"

The young man moved deliberately around the dog. A wave of panic began to wash over her. Her knees began trembling, and she felt light-headed. She grasped a section of twisted aluminum brace to steady her balance. The dog pulled something up from the debris. A bone. A rib. "Oh! Oh!" She felt a scream rising in her throat and tried to force it down, but it came out, long and piercing, then tapered off into a pathetic wail. "Oh, dear God."

The people around her turned toward the sound. The young man moved quickly toward her.

Barbara Yoshiro ran. She stumbled over the smashed bodies and seats, then fell. The floor between the holes was damaged and sagged slightly. Her arm plunged through it, into the baggage compartment below. She yanked it out and tore her wrist. Blood ran from the jagged wound. The dog picked up its head and growled at her, a strange growl that sounded more like a man choking or gagging. She rose quickly to her feet. The young man in the blue blazer reached out for her.

George Yates was normally a mild-mannered young man. He was in superb physical condition, a jogger, a scuba diver, and a practitioner of yoga and meditation. For a variety of physiological reasons, the results of decompression had left a large portion of his motor function unimpaired. The thin air had, however, wiped away his twenty-four years of acculturation and civilization, that part of the psyche that George Yates would have referred to as the superego. The ego itself was impaired, but partially functional. The id, the pleasure center of George Yates's brain, the impulsive drives, the instinctive energy, that part of the psyche closest to the lower forms of life, was left dominant.

It had been her movements that had first attracted his attention. When he had focused on those movements, they had begun to separate into perceptible components. A female.

In small flashes that were hardly more than thin sections of memory, George Yates recognized something in her form that he wanted. His last vivid recollection in his seat before things had come apart had been a long sexual daydream. The fantasy had included the women in blue and white who walked through the aisles. Vaguely, he remembered the woman with the long black hair, remembered that she had aroused him. He was aroused now. He reached out for her.

Barbara Yoshiro eluded his grasp. She ran across the remaining area of debris toward the first-class cabin. The forward galley and lavatories loomed in front of her. She slammed into the blue wall, then turned her back to it and began edging her way toward the corner where the wall turned toward the staircase.

People began coming at her, hands outstretched. She hit a woman in the face with her fist and sent her staggering back into the group behind her. Immediately, she realized she should not have done that.

People from all over the aircraft began migrating toward the focal point of the commotion. Some came out of curiosity, some were caught in the tide of bodies, some came to meet the perceived danger-Barbara Yoshiro.

She worked her way to the edge of the lavatory and peered around the corner. Less than twenty feet away she could see the spiral staircase winding upward. But the lower half was filled with people, and the intervening space between her and the base of the stairs was a solid mass of bodies. The open area around her was getting smaller. Hands reached out to her, and she slapped them away. A young boy caught hold of her blouse and pulled at it. The thin cotton tore and exposed her shoulder. Another hand caught hold of her blouse and tore it half off. Someone pulled at her hair. The young man who seemed to be normal was wedged inside the crowd that surrounded her, deliberately pushing his way through. She took a deep breath and screamed. "Help! Someone help me!"

Her voice sounded small against the wind, the roar of the four jet engines, and the excited howls around her. A hundred or more men and women competed with one another to make their sounds supreme in the jungle that was the Straton. She screamed again, but knew that her screams had become indistinguishable from those around her.

She slid around the corner of the bulkhead and groped with her right hand for the lavatory door. Her hand found the knob, and she turned it. The door gave way behind her. She turned her head and peered into the small enclosure, not knowing that it was the same one that had saved John Berry's life a few short hours before. Two men and a woman stood shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall, staring at her. She slammed the door. "Oh God. Jesus Christ." For a second she was reminded of the terror and disgust she had felt when she had opened her kitchen cabinet late one night and found it swarming with cockroaches.

Keeping her back to the wall, she edged farther down toward the staircase. The pressing crowd was only peripherally interested in her, and she found that if she altered between aggressive and passive behavior, she could slide by them. The young man in the blue blazer, however, was still purposefully making his way toward her.

Barbara reached the forward corner of the cubicle, close to the staircase. The press of bodies here was so thick she could barely push through. She called up again, but the din was so loud now that she could not even hear her own voice. She saw that the passengers had gone a few steps higher. One man staggered up the last few steps and disappeared into the lounge. A second later, he came crashing down and caused an avalanche of bodies to tumble over the winding staircase. Mr. Stein, she saw, was putting up a good fight. But he could not hear her, and even if he could, he would not be able to help her.

Yoshiro considered several alternatives. Playing dead was one, but there were so many people pressing around her that this was not possible, and she hadn't the nerve for it anyway. She could see now that she was not being singled out by the crowd any longer, but acts of random violence made it too dangerous to try to mingle with them. Besides, that young man had singled her out. She saw that her only chance was to get into the galley area and ride the elevator to the below-decks galley. She would be safe there and she could call the cockpit on the interphone. With this goal set, she calmed herself and began pushing harder through the crowd. She noticed as she moved that she was becoming light-headed and was tiring quickly. She looked down. The blood was still running from her right wrist. She grasped it with her left hand as she moved. She kept her back to the bulkhead and edged along the forward-facing wall opposite the staircase to the next corner. She made the turn and inched sideways, back in the direction of the tail. She lost sight of the man with the blazer.

Her back slid easily along the plastic wall, and her hand felt the open space of the galley entrance.

The elevator. Get to the elevator. Blood continued to seep between her clenched fingers, and her legs were trembling with fatigue. Faces and bodies squeezed against her, foul breath filled her nostrils. Her stomach heaved, and she began to gag on the taste of bile.

Her shoulder slid into the galley opening, and she moved with more force until only her left arm was still pinned against the bulkhead.

The crowd around her seemed to part, and in the opening she saw the man with the blazer. He smiled directly at her. He looked so nearly normal that for a moment she considered calling for him to help her. But, she realized, he could not be normal. She was becoming irrational in her desperation. He stepped up to her.

She fell back into the galley and braced her hands against the door frame. She kicked out with her feet and caught the young man in the groin. He yelled out, and that guttural yell told her beyond any doubt that he was not among the saved.

She reached out and grabbed the accordion door and slid it shut. It bulged and began to give way almost immediately, but it gave her time to turn toward the elevator.

There were two men in the short narrow galley, both licking spilled food from the counters. She moved quickly, but calmly, past them into the open elevator.

Barbara Yoshiro steadied her trembling hand and slid the manual outer door closed. She frantically pushed against the elevator's control buttons. Finally, the electric inner doors began to slowly slide shut.

The outer doors suddenly parted. Barbara stood eyeto-eye with George Yates. Before the inner door could finish shutting, Yates slipped into the elevator. The electric doors shut behind him. The elevator started down.

Barbara bit her hand to keep from screaming. Tears ran down her face and a pathetic whimpering sound gurgled in her throat. The man in front of her was staring intently down at her. She could feel him pressing against her, feel his body making contact with hers, smell his breath. His hands probed her body, ran over her hips and up to her breasts.

She took a step backward into the corner of the descending elevator. The man pressed against her harder.

The elevator stopped and the doors slipped open, revealing a small, dimly lit galley.

George Yates pressed down on her shoulders until her knees buckled. He stood over her, his hands grabbing her long black hair, and pulled her head to his thighs.

She tried to pull loose and rise to her feet. "No. Please. No." She was bleeding badly now, and she felt very weak. "Leave me alone. Please." She was crying harder now. "Please don't hurt me."

Everything was spinning now, and the dark enclosure became darker. She felt herself being pulled forward by her hair. She lay prone on the floor, trying to feign death or unconsciousness, or anything that would make him lose interest.

But George Yates was still very much interested. From the moment he had singled her out of the crowd, from the second his instincts told him she was different, from that moment, his only thought was to capture her and make her yield. None of these words or abstractions were his to use, but the instincts remained. He turned her over on her back and knelt down with his knees straddling her.

Barbara brought her knee up and caught him in the groin.

George Yates yelled out and stood up. This was the second time she had caused him pain, the second time she had rejected him, and he was partly bewildered, but partly he now understood. She was no longer simply an object of his attraction-she had become a threat, become an enemy.

Barbara raised herself on one hand and lunged for the interphone on the wall. Her hand knocked it off the cradle and it fell to the limit of its cord. She grabbed at it as it swung by her face. She then felt a sharp pain in her eye, then another on her cheekbone. She fell backward. The plastic headset dangled above her. Through the haze of semiconsciousness, Yoshiro realized that the young man had hit her; he had hit her hard with his closed fist. He had hit her hard enough to cause a great deal of pain.

The ceiling lights of the galley were blotted out by the huge black shape hovering above her. There was no noise around her, no light entering her consciousness, and this produced a sense of unreality. She simply could not believe this was happening to her; it seemed too remote, so divorced from the world she had been part of just hours before. It was as if she'd stepped into a fog and emerged from it into a netherworld, a world almost like her own but not quite.

For the next few seconds, all Barbara could feel was the cool floor against her bare back and legs, and the steady throb of the engines as they pulsated through the airframe. Then she opened her eyes wider and focused on what was about to happen next.

After striking out at his enemy twice with his fists, George Yates had just enough of his mind and his learned reactions intact to know that a weapon was what he needed to ultimately protect himself from this perceived danger. On the floor to his left was a metal bar that had been used as a locking brace across the liquor supply cabinet. Yates grabbed the metal bar and, in one continuous motion, slammed it down hard against the upper body of his enemy.

The steel bar swept across Barbara Yoshiro's left shoulder and into her skull with a sharp crack. She blacked out immediately from the blow to her head. As it moved across her body, the steel bar had ripped open another and even larger bleeding wound-this one across the top of her left shoulder and neck.

George Yates looked down at the growing pool of blood that surrounded the now motionless body of the person lying on the floor. As soon as he saw the new spurts of blood and her injury, he knew what it meant. The knowledge of her condition was too basic to be misunderstood: she was no longer a threat-this enemy of his had been totally defeated.

Now satisfied, Yates's interest faded and he turned his attention elsewhere. He looked around the galley area. Like a wary animal awakened from sleep, he cautiously stalked around the small area, but he could see no avenue of escape. Yates gave no more notice to the growing mass of blood on the floor, or to the body from which it had poured. As the last of her lifeblood drained onto the metal flooring of the galley, Barbara Yoshiro died.

9.

Edward Johnson strode briskly down the long corridor toward the blue door marked DISPATCH OFFICE DISPATCH OFFICE. He stopped abruptly, stuffed an unlit cigar in his mouth, and tried on several expressions in the reflection on a glass door. He picked one that he called disdain mixed with impatience. He stared at himself for a second. Good jawline, hair graying at the temples, cold gray eyes. An executive. Vice President in Charge of Operations, to be exact. He had enough of the exbaggage handler left in him to be considered salty and intimidating, yet he had cultivated a veneer to make him accepted by the people who were born into the white-collar world. Satisfied with the effect he would produce with the dispatchers, he strode on.

The windowless steel door at the end of the corridor loomed up before him. How many times had he made this walk? And for what purpose? After twenty-seven years with the airline, experience had shown him that nearly every one of these calls had been a false alarm. A real emergency had taken place more than three years before, and even that had been a waste of time. Everyone aboard that flight was already fish food long before he got the message.

So what the hell was it this time, he wondered. Someone in the Straton program probably lost his lunchbox, or some dispatcher couldn't find his pencils. He stepped up to the door and grabbed the knob.

He paused and ran through what he already knew. It wasn't much. Just a brief phone call that had interrupted an important management lunch in the executive dining room. A junior dispatcher named Evans or Evers. An emergency, Mr. Johnson. Flight 52. But it's probably not too bad. An emergency, Mr. Johnson. Flight 52. But it's probably not too bad. Then why the hell had he been called. That's what he wanted to say. Then why the hell had he been called. That's what he wanted to say. Junior Junior executives were supposed to take care of all the "probably not too bad" things. executives were supposed to take care of all the "probably not too bad" things.

Edward Johnson knew that Flight 52 was the Straton 797. The flagship of the Trans-United fleet. The Super-sonic Queen of the Skies. But as far as he was concerned it was a 412-ton piece of shit. At one hundred and twenty-seven million dollars per aircraft, any problem with one of their eight 797s was a pain in the ass. The aircraft itself was reliable enough and it produced a small fortune in profits. But as Operations Chief, the fiscal considerations didn't concern him. The god-damned airplane was too precious and too visible to the Board of Directors, and to the media. It made him him too visible, too vulnerable. To make matters worse, he was one of the people who voted to buy the 797s, and he was the one who had recently pushed through the huge cost-reduction program to cut back on lots of unnecessary maintenance and checks. too visible, too vulnerable. To make matters worse, he was one of the people who voted to buy the 797s, and he was the one who had recently pushed through the huge cost-reduction program to cut back on lots of unnecessary maintenance and checks.

Johnson pushed open the door and strode into the dispatch office. "Who's the senior man?" he demanded. He looked around the half-empty office. An awkward silence hung over the room, broken only by the sound of a loud telephone ringing. He took the cigar out of the corner of his mouth. Before the Corporate no-smoking policy, he was able to puff on it to good effect instead of keeping the damned thing unlit. Whimpy bastards Whimpy bastards. "Where the hell is everybody?" His intimidation techniques were working well today, he noticed, but he was not so insensitive that he couldn't read the signs of trouble, smell the stench of fear in this place. "Where is everybody?" he repeated, a few decibels more softly.

Jerry Brewster, standing a few feet from Johnson, surprised himself by speaking. "In the communications room, sir. Mr. Miller is the senior man."

Johnson moved quickly toward the glass-enclosed room. He stuck his cigar back into his mouth, pushed the door aside, and entered the crowded communications room. "Miller? You in here?"

"Over here," answered Jack Miller, his voice the only sound in the suddenly silent room.