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Eight: Detours

Turbine engines were fascinating.

Marc still couldn't quite figure out how they worked. He'd thought at first that they were just many-bladed propellers, that all those extra blades simply pulled air past them much more swiftly than a standard three- or four-bladed propeller could, but Brandon had assured him that that wasn't the case. How, then, were the engines able to drag something as big as this Boeing jet through the sky? Did they work something like the way rockets were launched into outer space? Marc thought he remembered learning that it had something to do with condensed air in a chemistry class back in his sophomore year of high school, but he wasn't sure how all those innumerable fan blades could condense air, if that was even the case.

He sighed, gazing out the little porthole window at the top of the jet's huge wing with his chin resting in his hand. He couldn't hope to understand it. He didn't even know how the engines made those big fans spin so quickly. Cars used piston engines to turn their wheels, he knew, but for some reason, he didn't think that was how jets worked.

Maybe they used magnets. Marc knew how magnets functioned, at least, a positive and negative pole that each attracted the opposite poles of other magnets and repelled the same. So if a large magnet was set up with its positive pole at an angle to the fan blades, and each blade had its own magnet with a positive pole pointing back at the big one, that repelling force would move the smaller magnets away from the larger, and make the fan spin, wouldn't it? All that would be needed to make the fan spin faster or slower would be a mechanism that brought the main magnet closer or farther from its blades.

But no, that couldn't be how jet engines spun. It made him think of wind farms, and electric generators that used rotation to produce energy. If magnets could be used like he was imagining to spin something as big as a turbine engine, they would be able to spin electric generators, too, wouldn't they? All someone would have to do is move that main magnet as close to the fan blades as possible and leave it there, and the electricity would just start pouring out of it. That sounded too much like perpetual motion, though, and Marc did remember his chemistry teacher telling the class that no one had discovered true perpetual motion yet. At least, he thought he remembered the teacher saying that. Surely, if something as simple as what he was dreaming up could work, someone else would have already thought of it.

Maybe in order to power a turbine engine, such a magnet would have to be an electro-magnet, in which case it might need more electricity to charge it than such a generator would be able to produce. Otherwise, he couldn't think of any reason for the newscasters on T.V. to always be complaining about the world's energy crisis.

"Hey, Brandon," he said, turning to his friend, who sat beside him with a large, hard cover book held in front of his face. Brandon was really into science. Maybe he could tell Marc if such a generator was even possible.

"Just a sec," Brandon said, finishing whatever paragraph he was on. He'd been reading that novel through most of the overseas flight so far. "There," he said, closing the book and setting it on his lap with a finger holding his place between the pages. "What's up?"

Now that he had his friend's attention, Marc couldn't think of exactly what it was he wanted to ask. Was perpetual motion possible? How did planes fly? He felt blood rush to his cheeks, and turned to look back out the window to hide his blush, feeling stupid. "Um, nothing. Never mind."

"Okay." That quickly, Brandon's nose was back in the book. It must have been a good story.

Staring out at the white haze that surrounded the airplane, Marc tried to reassure himself that he didn't need to bother Brandon with his random musings. After all, he reminded himself, if it was possible and useable, someone else would have thought of it already.

Still, it wouldn't be hard to test. All he'd need was a few magnets, a pinwheel, and some glue. Maybe he'd visit a hobby shop once they were stateside again and see how long the magnets could keep a pinwheel spinning, if they could even turn it in the first place. He doubted he'd have time to experiment while they were in Australia.

Marc grinned. He still couldn't get over the fact that he was flying over the North Atlantic Ocean to the other side of the world. As far as he knew, he was the first member of his family to set foot outside the United States since their ancestors had immigrated from...well, from whatever country his family's ancestors had come from. Germany, he thought. Sometimes the gravity of this vacation swept over him with the same amazement he'd felt when he'd first stepped into the plane in Columbus's airport, making butterflies dance in his stomach. He'd been looking forward to the trip to Australia so much over the last two weeks that a pessimistic corner of his mind had kept trying to convince him that some unthinkable disaster would arise and prevent him from going. Yet here he was, ninety minutes out from the pit stop they'd taken in Atlanta, Georgia, flying over the Atlantic somewhere east of the southern tip of Florida.

That disaster had almost struck. When hurricanes and tropical storms had begun stirring the Pacific Ocean into an impassible mess over the last four days, taking every weather man and meteorologist in the country completely by surprise, Marc had been certain that he and Brandon would be staying in Ohio that summer. Their original plan had been to fly from Columbus to Los Angeles, then southwest to Brisbane, Australia, and from Brisbane to Sydney. All flights over the Pacific had been cancelled, though, after a couple of passenger jets had been overtaken by unexpected storms and crashed into the ocean two days before Marc and Brandon were scheduled to leave. Fortunately, they and Brandon's uncle had made a few calls to the airlines and worked out a new route over the Atlantic. They were flying now from Atlanta to an airport in eastern Brazil, where they would wait the better part of the day for a flight to South Africa, and from there would board a jet that would take them straight to Sydney.

It was a much longer route than flying west over the Pacific. They'd watched the sun rise that morning during their first flight's descent into Atlanta, when they'd originally planned to depart Columbus that afternoon, and after the long layover in Brazil, they wouldn't finally land in Australia until the day after their first route would have seen them there. Marc didn't mind the extra travel time, though. He'd been looking forward to riding in a jet almost as much as visiting another country. Of course, as they flew now through an endless white monotone of thick clouds, only a small fraction of the distance from the United States to Brazil, the novelty of flight was already wearing thin. He couldn't even tell they were moving, save for the rare dip as they hit an occasional air pocket.

He thought about plugging his head phones into the jack on his armrest and returning his attention to the in-flight movie, but it was an old drama about teenage romance that he really didn't have much interest in. There was a book waiting for him in his backpack, Marc's only piece of carry-on luggage, but he could never focus long enough to make much headway reading. It was a story about wizards and make believe politics that Brandon had recommended, and Marc had really only brought it along to humor his friend. He had enough trouble following real politics without adding fiction to the confusion, no matter how many assassinations or battles the book might include.

To give his hands something to do, Marc opened the small bag of pretzels a stewardess had offered him on her last trip down their aisle. He drummed his fingers idly on the little tray lowered from the back of the chair in front of him while he munched on the pretzels, until the passenger sitting in front of him let out a crisp, irritated sigh. Grimacing, Marc leaned back, letting his fingers fidget in his lap. He felt like he was in a library, where any noise above a whisper was taken as an offense. At least he could step out of a library for a cigarette if the quiet ever grew too oppressive. He had to stay on this jet for another ten hours or so.

If only it weren't so cloudy, he'd be able to watch the Florida Keys pass by below, or Puerto Rico, or the Dominican Republic, or wherever they were flying over. Marc snickered at himself. Two weeks after his geography final, and already he'd completely forgotten the layout of one of the only regions in which he'd scored well.

That was another point of astonishment that kept returning to his thoughts and making him shake his head in disbelief. Not only had he passed his geography final with a D, but he'd gotten two more D's and a C on his other exams, with a B in Phys. Ed. from an unexpectedly generous Mr. Monroe to top it all off. It had only been by the skin of his teeth, but he'd stood with the rest of Miller High's senior class at graduation. In all of the photos his mom had taken of him that day, he looked more bewildered than victorious. He still didn't know how he'd managed it.

Between the shock of graduation and the excitement for the upcoming vacation, Marc had barely thought about the bizarre hallucination he'd had during that last dodge ball game. Of course, sitting in the jet with nothing to occupy his mind, this wasn't the first time his thoughts had circled back to it. He'd mulled over the event while lying awake at night over the past two weeks, mentally examining the disembodied voice and the following vision from every angle, but the more time that came between him and that last day of school, the more unreal it all seemed. He was already beginning to forget the details of what he'd seen and heard, and when he looked back on it now, it seemed most likely that he had simply had a strange dream the night before finals, and that, for whatever reason, he'd remembered it all at once in the middle of Phys. Ed. He couldn't even think about it now without feeling embarrassed that he'd made such a big deal about it, raving like a lunatic to Brandon, who had just taken it all in stride.

Pretzels devoured, Marc sipped at his small cup of water and chewed absently on the inside of his cheek until Brandon stifled a laugh beside him. Looking up at Marc self-consciously, Brandon explained, "It's the hero's husband. He always rags on her for leaving messes for him to clean up when she saves the world."

"Ah," was Marc's simple response. Brandon's eyes darted immediately back down to the page he was reading. "So," Marc said, "the hero's a girl in that one?"

"Yep." Brandon didn't bother looking up from the book.

"Is she pretty?"

"You're bored, aren't you?" Brandon said with a quiet chuckle.

Marc looked out the window on his other side again, trying to see anything beyond the plane's wing tip through the pale haze. "Maybe a little."

"Want to play twenty questions or something?"

"Nah." Giving up, Marc sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. "You can keep reading. I'll just try to get a little sleep."

He only had his eyes closed for a few minutes, though, before Brandon said, "Hey, Marc. All that bad weather was supposed to be off the west coast, right?"

"Yeah," Marc assured his friend, keeping his eyes closed. He shifted his weight and crossed his legs at the ankles, trying to get comfortable in his rigid seat. "My dad was watching the weather channel before we left last night. The Atlantic's supposed to have mostly clear skies all day today and tomorrow, at least along our route. That's all I was really paying attention to."

"You don't think the weather man might have missed something again? My mom always told me that green clouds were a warning for tornados."

Marc's eyes shot open at that, and he leaned forward to peer out the little window again. The clouds looked more yellow to him than green, though he supposed they did have something of a pale emerald tinge. He'd seen the kind of cloud Brandon was thinking of, though, and this didn't look anything like the murky gray-green storm clouds that sometimes preceded tornados. Of course, those clouds might look different when seen from inside them rather than from below, but he still didn't think they'd be this bright. "Weird," he finally said. "I don't think we need to worry about a tornado over the ocean, though. I mean, the plane's flying steadily enough, right?"

"Yeah." Brandon didn't sound very convinced. "Yeah, you're right. Still, I've never seen clouds that color before. They're even making the wing change colors."

Other passengers had noticed the unusual lighting outside, too, and the quiet murmur of half whispered conversations grew slightly louder as more voices joined in. Some people sounded a little uneasy, but most seemed merely curious or impressed. A pair of children on the other side of the jet were making "Ooh" and "Ahh" noises, as if they were watching a fireworks display.

"I'm sure if there was a hurricane or something in our path, the pilots would fly us around it," Brandon decided after staring across Marc out the window for a short while. He seemed to be reassuring himself more than trying to convince Marc.

Marc looked through the window for a moment longer before sitting back and rubbing at his neck. He didn't know what to make of the unusual clouds. Despite their brightness, they were a little bit eerie.

Then a disturbing thought occurred to him, and he leaned forward to stare out the window again. He'd only needed to know the names of the world's countries for his geography final, but while studying, he'd noticed a few other places of interest, one of which he'd completely forgotten about until now.

"Uh, Brandon?" he asked, turning to his friend. "Do you remember where the Bermuda Triangle is?"

Brandon blinked twice, then sat bolt upright and stared at Marc, exhaling slowly while biting his lower lip. For an instant Marc thought his friend was about to curse, but Brandon never cursed. The long haired adolescent sank slowly back into his chair, letting his teeth release his lip and shaking his head in mortified astonishment at the back of the seat in front of him. "Why didn't I think of that back when we were rearranging our flight plan?"

"You mean we're really flying over it?" Marc said. "Wow." He was more surprised that he'd remembered the Triangle's location correctly than anything else, really. "It probably doesn't mean anything, though. All that Bermuda Triangle stuff's just a bunch of superstition, right?"

"Maybe. But do you think those clouds are just coincidence?"

Marc opened his mouth to answer, but shut it again when, without any warning, a deep silence washed over the plane. Grimacing, he made himself swallow in an attempt to pop his ears, but the silence hadn't been brought on by a change of pressure. Suddenly reminded of the void from that last day of school, he looked sharply at Brandon, but his friend was still sitting beside him, his jaw working up and down as he tried to pop his ears as well.

"What just happened?" Marc asked, and though he spoke no more loudly than before, his voice pierced the silence so jarringly that Brandon jumped in his seat.

"I don't know," Brandon said, wincing and reaching over his shoulder to rub his back. "Something's wrong with my chair, though. It got all stiff, all of a sudden, like it's made of metal. My seat belt locked up, too." He began prying unsuccessfully at his seat belt's latch. "Won't even budge," he grunted.

"Mine, either," Marc said, tugging at his own seat belt's clasp. The entire belt was unnaturally rigid; when Marc sucked in his breath, it arched unyieldingly an inch above his lap, even when he pushed down against it. "That's not right..."

"What happened to the engines?" Brandon exclaimed in sudden alarm. Marc turned to look out the window at the curves of the wing's turbines, but they seemed in good enough condition to him, even bathed in that greenish yellow light as they were. Then he realized that the barely noticeable vibrations in the floor under his shoes had stopped entirely, just like the other passengers' conversations.

"They must still be running," Marc muttered. "We'd be able to tell if we were falling." When he turned back to Brandon, though, his friend seemed to have forgotten about the engines entirely.

Brandon was staring away from Marc across the aisle to the rows of seats in the plane's center. When Marc followed his friend's line of sight, it took a moment for his mind to fully process what he saw. Then he shivered, a chill creeping up his spine.

In all the chairs that Marc could see, passengers sat completely motionless, like actors holding their positions on stage so that a lead role could deliver his inner feelings in monologue form. Everywhere he looked, cups were held half raised to their owners' mouths, lips were parted mid-conversation, and faces were turned to stare blankly toward the nearest windows. A seven or eight year old girl sat several rows ahead of Marc and Brandon with her finger stuffed motionlessly up a nostril, her head turned to the side to keep her mother from noticing. Across the middle section, a flight attendant was frozen mid-stride while pushing a beverage cart down the far aisle toward the back of the plane. It was as if Marc and Brandon had found themselves trapped in a movie that some invisible watcher had paused.

"I've never heard of anything like this happening over the Bermuda Triangle before," Brandon said, and began tugging again at his seatbelt, the unease creasing his forehead deepening into panic. "We have to get out of these chairs."

Before Marc could do or say anything to help his friend, an unexpected scene flooded his awareness, and for an instant, he was no longer sitting in a Boeing jet frozen in time over the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, his perception floated beside a large heron that soared over a sinuous river with thick forest on either side. Spotting a fish in the river below, the heron flexed its wings and waited for the best moment to dive.

"Prepare."

Marc was back on the plane, that single word summarizing the sudden vision of the heron in his mind. He groaned, overwhelmingly disoriented, and pressed the fingers and thumb of one hand against his forehead and temple.

Beside him, Brandon stopped struggling with his seat belt and exhaled a deep, shuddering breath. "What's wrong?" he asked hoarsely, planting his hands on his arm rests, evidently fighting an internal battle to stop himself from grabbing the seat belt again.

"It's the voice from the void," Marc said, wincing his eyes shut. "It's back." Had the vision been real, after all? Or was he hallucinating all over again?

"What did it say?" Brandon appeared ready to believe anything, captured as they both were in that impossibly motionless scene.

"It just told me to prepare." Marc opened his eyes, staring dully at the back of the chair in front of him. "Didn't say for what."

Then it was back. "Wanderer."_A man made of pure light stood in an empty void, wearing a featureless mask of iron. Reaching up, the figure removed the iron mask to reveal a second mask of bronze, as featureless as the first. Then a flurry of images swarmed through Marc's mind, each half imagined and half remembered. _"You must grant your consent if you wish to survive."

He was back in the jet, a lingering sensation of vertigo making him feel queasy. "My consent to what?" he asked out loud.

Brandon began to say something beside him, but he was swept away on the images of the other presence's response before he could hear his friend's words. "You must consent to travel," it told him, and though the half remembered scenes flew through his consciousness too rapidly to distinguish as separate thoughts beyond their collective, summarizing sentence, he gathered that the invisible presence meant a different kind of traveling than flying in an air plane from one continent to another.

"I don't understand."

Beside him, Brandon had time to throw his hands above his head and exclaim, "Neither do I!" before another barrage of foreign thoughts hijacked Marc's mind.

"Grant consent, and you will be given the gift of understanding. You will cross the first Bridge of Babel. But you must grant it now."

Marc swallowed, suddenly parched, as the jet's interior seemed to spiral around him. He reached for his cup of water, but it didn't budge, of course. "And if I don't consent?" he croaked.

Suddenly, he found himself back in that same empty void that he'd fallen into during the dodge ball game two weeks ago, but realized it was just another of the strange images used by the invisible presence to communicate when the emptiness dissolved into three words: "You will die."

Marc clenched his eyes shut as soon as his senses returned again, beginning to feel nauseous. Those summarizing words had been delivered more as plain and simple fact than as a threat, which made them all the more terrifying. "Fine," he groaned. "Whatever. I grant my consent. Just stop--"

"Will you travel alone?" another blur of scenes interrupted him.

"Alone?" he repeated as soon as he regained control over his mouth. "What do you mean?"

"Others may travel with you, if you so wish. They, too, will die, if left behind. You must speak for them." A field mouse darted from the cover of a thick bush to a tiny den nestled between the roots of an old tree while the shadow of a large bird swept across its path: "Hurry."

That last image filled Marc with such a sense of urgency that he barely spared a thought to wonder who the "others" that the foreign presence referred to might be. The only person he could think of was Brandon. "Okay, okay. I won't travel alone." He hoped that was the right response.

A wild stag stood at the edge of a precipice, a waterfall beside it pouring into a pool of unknowable depth far below. At the stag's back, wolves gathered, too many for it to hope to fight off. The stag leapt, and tumbled weightless through the air.

"So be it."

Rather than finding himself back in his seat when the short vision finished flashing through his mind, Marc was returned to that uncomfortable emptiness again, the same one that the other presence had used to warn him of the consequence of refusing his consent to travel, only this time, he lingered in the endless nothing, just like he had before the strange vision two weeks ago. This time, though, the presence didn't keep him waiting. _"What is your name, sorcerer?"_The rapid images ended in a scene of a featureless man drawing water from a calm ocean with a wooden bucket.

Marc tried to speak, to protest that he was no sorcerer, but he had no mouth or voice in the void.

Before he could order his thoughts into a cohesive response, a rush of scenes and pictures danced through his consciousness too swiftly for him to grasp. "Your admission will be granted. The bypass will not be necessary. Make yourself ready. Those on Earth wait now to travel."

Marc didn't know what to make of any of that. Once the last of the images left him back in the void, his thoughts continued to swirl in disarray, like flotsam scattering in a speed boat's wake.

After a few moments of confusion, the flashing scenes spoke again. "None may travel against their will. Anyone caught awake in my borrowed time will not survive, unless they consent." There was a brief pause, a momentary return of Marc's sense of self, before the images overwhelmed him again. "Do not take long. The souls on Earth are already bodiless."

A mental silence permeated the emptiness, and by the time Marc regained enough control of his scrambled thoughts to try to make sense of the presence's summarizing words, he was too mentally fatigued to have any success at it. It seemed like the scenes had been flowing through his mind for someone else's benefit, or that he had been eavesdropping on one side of a conversation someone was having through a telephone, but beyond that, he couldn't begin to understand what the other presence was trying to say. His thoughts kept drifting away from him, as they did whenever he was on the verge of falling asleep, touching turbine engines and electric generators one moment, then Brandon and Australia the next. Was Brandon in the void, too? Maybe his friend had his own void that he was floating through. It took too much effort for Marc's mind to hold onto any one thought or question.

"My souls are fading, sorcerer," a flash of disturbingly bleak images said. "Make yourself ready to travel."_There was a pause, then Marc saw a man frantically trying to bail water out of a sinking row boat with a leaking bucket. The boat's rim was already at the same level as the lake's surface. _"Hurry."

That was odd. Didn't "hurry" have something to do with a mouse? Marc wished the other presence would make up its mind; he had enough trouble trying to follow its complicated sentences without it changing the scenes attached to its words. He'd had enough of being so confused. It would be so easy to just let himself drift away into the emptiness completely.

As soon as the notion came to him, he decided that was exactly what he would do.

Another flurry of images tried to swarm him, but he was gone before they reached their summary.