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of this afternoon,” he added more quietly. “The truck’s tented too, on three sides.” Doyle was trying not to let Benner see his hands trembling.
    “Is there an actual blast?” he asked, forcing his voice not to quaver. “Will we feel any concussion?”
    “No, you don’t really feel anything. Just… dislocation.”
    Doyle could hear people whispering in the carriage below him, and from the other one he heard Darrow’s laugh. One of the horses echoingly stamped a hoof.
    “What are they waiting for?” Doyle whispered.
    “Got to give those men time to make it to the gate and get outside.” Even though the coaches were halted, Doyle still felt sick, and the oil and metal smell of the peculiar tent was becoming unbearable.
    “I hate to say it,” he whispered, “but that smell is—”
    Abruptly something shifted, violently but without motion, and the sense of depth and space was extinguished from everything he could see, leaving only a flat dimness in front of his eyes splashed with patches of meaningless light; the roof rail he was clutching was the only bearing he had—there was no north and south, or up and down, and he found himself back in the dream the stewardess had awakened him from last night, feeling the old Honda shift horrifyingly sideways on the wet pavement and then spill him into a horizontal tumble of shocking velocity, hearing Rebecca’s scream end instantly at the first punching impact of the asphalt …
    The wooden platform had dropped away from beneath them a short distance, and it shattered when the four horses and two coaches came down on it. The ground was no longer flat, and the poles toppled inward, burying everything a moment later under the heavy folds of the lead-sheathed fabric.
    Doyle welcomed the pain when one of the falling poles rebounded from the coach roof and banged his shoulder, for it established the here and now for him. If it hurts it’s got to be the real world, he thought dazedly, and he shook off the vivid memory of the motorcycle crash. The smell he so disliked was very intense, for a section of the collapsed tent was pressing his head down onto the coach roof. And, he thought, probably nothing unites you with surrounding reality more thoroughly than being wringingly sick.
    Just when he thought he had gathered the energy, though, the lead curtain was hauled off him, and the fresh night air he found himself breathing made the whole idea of vomiting seem self-indulgent and affected. He looked around at the moonlit field the coaches stood in, bordered by tall trees.
    “You okay, Brendan?” Benner said for, Doyle realized, the second time.
    “Yeah, sure, I’m fine. Jesus, what a jump, huh? Is everybody else okay? How about the horses?” Doyle was proud of himself for asking such unruffled, businesslike questions, though he wished he could talk more quietly and stop bobbing his head.
    “Take it easy, will you?” Benner said. “Everything’s fine. Here—drink.” He unscrewed the top of a flask and handed it to Doyle.
    A moment later Doyle was reflecting that liquor was even more effective than pain—or, probably, throwing up—in reconciling one to reality. “Thanks,” he said more quietly, handing it back.
    Benner nodded, pocketed the flask, vaulted to the broken platform, and strode off it to where four of the six other guards were spading up a patch of earth and, with gloved hands, folding up the lead tent cloth; in so short a time that Doyle knew they must have practiced it they had buried the folded-up bale of fabric and scrambled back up to their places on the coaches. “You should see the platform,” Benner remarked, hardly panting. “A good three inches was sheared off the bottom of it when we jumped. If we hadn’t been up on it the horses would have lost their hooves and the wheels would each have a section gone.”
    The drivers snapped the reins and the coaches moved unevenly forward off the crumpled boards and onto the grass. At a slow pace