HL fic: More In Heaven and Earth (Part 1)
Title: More In Heaven And Earth (Part 1)
Author: slazersc
Fandoms: Highlander/Dead Zone
Character: Michael Klein/?
Summary: Live long enough and there are few things you haven’t seen.
Notes: Written for the
hl_flashfic challenge “Immortality: Actors in dual roles”. Heavily references the Dead Zone episode “Cabin Pressure” and Highlander in general. Didn’t name the Immortal, but I think he’s easy enough to guess ;) Finally, major thanks to hitokiri_k for answering questions on aircraft and piloting again and again and again …
For Captain Michael Klein, his first inkling of something out of the ordinary comes from the warning of a gun on his plane. The anxiety of the air stewardess delivering the news is real enough and his co-pilot, Colin Black, assures him that he can handle things. The captain quickly agrees to see the man, a Reverend Gene Purdy, who is waiting for him outside the cockpit. The thing is, neither the Reverend nor his companion, John Smith, have actually seen the gun. John only knows that a passenger in row 26 has it.
It gets better from here, always does with these crackpots, the captain tells himself as he scans the passenger list. Sure enough, Rev. Purdy beckons for his friend to join them and starts explaining that John has the gift of second sight, that he saw the gun in a vision. Klein snaps his head up at the words, looks John hard in the eye. This one has the gleam of determination, the ‘whatever it takes’ look he’s seen in many a fanatic. The man could be dangerous. They will need to keep an eye on him, possibly even separate him from the other passengers. Klein is already making a mental list of various contingency measures when his eyes come to a stop on the passenger names in row 26. One catches his attention at once.
Kelly Park. The air marshal on the flight. John has no business knowing this and yet he has singled her out from among the forty-odd rows in this aircraft. Coincidence, perhaps, but Klein can feel the hairs prickling on the back of his neck. He keeps his expression neutral, however. Neutral, that is, until John starts babbling about the plane going into a dive at 10:54 that night.
“I thought this was about a gun,” the captain mutters, just loud enough for the others to hear. Telling him about a gun is one thing, but predicting, to the pilot’s face, that his flight will go down is another thing altogether. When John insists that they have less than forty minutes to figure out what will go wrong, Klein loses his patience.
“Nothing is going to go wrong,” he snaps, then softens his tone to add, “Whether I believe that you have visions or not Mr Smith, on this plane, I deal in facts.” With the craft experiencing increasing turbulence, he needs to monitor the situation in the cockpit and insists that the two return to their seats.
“Why does it have to be my plane?” he grumbles to his co-pilot as he returns to his place and straps in. Colin, ironically enough, seems to believe that John Smith is the real deal, an actual psychic. Guy was in the news, apparently.
Turning to the controls, Klein lapses into silence as he checks the status readouts. Then, with one eye on the panels, his mind ticks back over recent events, analysing more out of habit than anything else. This John Smith is an unknown quantity. He picked out the air marshal with the gun, yes, but his claim of the plane going into a dive is, of course, unsubstantiated. And, although he was determined to discover what would go wrong, he made no other demands.
Uneasy, Klein reaches absently around behind him, then catches himself and pretends to stretch the kinks out of his arms and back. Up till a few years ago, he almost always had at least one weapon on his person. It doesn’t surprise him that he still misses the weight of the small dagger and its shoulder harness against his back. Fortunately for him, an aircraft is a relatively safe place to be, perhaps even safer for him than anyone else. After all, there’s little chance that he’ll die permanently, short of a catastrophic explosion or some freak accident parting his head from his shoulders.
As an added bonus, he’s safe from the Game, at least when he’s flying. No Immortal would be foolish enough to challenge him in front of so many witnesses. And even if one was crazy enough to try, it’d be almost impossible to get at him. He is the pilot, after all, cocooned by layers of security in the cockpit. A bonus he fully appreciates, certainly worth all the jet-lag and sleep debt he has to endure.
“Wanna try a different altitude? The stat’s dropped three degrees in the last minute.” Colin’s voice breaks into his thoughts and he checks the altitude, temperature and fuel readings again. They’ll stay put, he decides: fly lower and the air resistance will cut into their fuel usage, any higher and the plane will start losing lift in the thinner air. However, he does notice that the turbulence is getting worse and makes a note to change altitude soon if there’s no improvement.
The door warning sounds as Colin unlocks it to admit another stewardess. Klein shakes his head at the news of John’s latest vision of the starboard engine exploding. Colin, clearly concerned now, suggests an instrument check, but he reassures his co-pilot that the engine is fine.
“I’ve read about this guy,” the stewardess breaks in, coming to John’s defence.
“Yeah, I’m sure he loves to be in the headlines,” Klein replies, a touch sarcastically. “As in ‘Pilot makes emergency landing based on psychic prediction.’”
“Just the opposite,” Colin tells him. “I heard this guy hates publicity.”
“And yet you both know this shy fellow’s name,” the captain retorts, glancing at the two of them as they fall silent. He sighs inwardly and Colin motions for the stewardess to go before radioing the Washington tower about their landing.
And then the call comes. From the airline’s CEO, no less. Encouraging him to hear John out. Bloody unbelievable. Wonders who the tattletale is as he rises from his seat. He also knows that he utters something in English, but in his mind, he’s swearing in a language long dead and gone.
Finds John at the back of the plane, handcuffed to the air marshal. Feels just a tiny smidgeon of satisfaction that the man has annoyed someone else just a little too much. Kelly Park, however, looks unnerved. He makes no claim to reading minds (confessed it to someone once, actually), but Klein knows enough of reading human expression to know that John has somehow shaken the air marshal.
Every sense comes instantly alert, instinct thrumming a warning through his veins.
John asks him to check the starboard engine, but he has already run a diagnostic back in the cockpit, everything coming back green-and-go. Besides, he reassures the man, engine damage is rarely catastrophic.
“Yeah. Well, tonight something will be.” John’s tone is of utmost certainty, a man who has no doubts of what he is saying.
No harm in playing along, Klein decides. Reassure him, calm him down enough so he won’t be a problem for the rest of the flight.
“I promise you I will do anything within my power to get us down safely,” he tells the man with as much sincerity as he can muster. John does not reply, just looks at his watch like a man condemned.
“Sorry about these,” Klein continues as he leans forward to touch the man’s handcuffs. John spasms as if electrocuted, then snaps his head up to stare at him, expression dumbstruck. Klein notes his reaction, but there is nothing else he can do, has no more empty reassurances to offer. He returns to the cockpit.
As he and his co-pilot prepare for landing, the aircraft jerks sharply to the sound of a loud crack.
“Okay, that wasn’t turbulence,” Colin mutters, glancing around.
Klein checks. “Autopilot’s acting up.”
The intercom chooses that moment to buzz. “It’s Kelly Park.” They let the air marshal in and she silently indicates that she wishes to speak with Klein. Once he has left his seat, she asks him to turn command of the plane over to Colin, who can land the passenger jet on his own. Klein refuses, politely requests that she return to her seat. Instead, she draws her gun.
As he takes in this sudden turn of events, part of his mind wonders idly if he can press charges once this fiasco is over. Forcibly removing a pilot from his duty without hard evidence against him. Wonders if he can make the charge stick. Probably. The facts are on his side after all. He almost feels better.
Another part of his mind is screaming. The air marshal’s composure is clearly shaken, her actions unpredictable. He is not afraid of death; the prospect of being shot is far more terrifying. If he sustains a gunshot wound in the closed confines of the cockpit, they will surely see him heal. If she actually kills him, they will see him revive. Either way, his cover will be blown. Out of options, he can only agree to her demands.
They exit the cockpit and she indicates a seat for him just outside. He maintains the outraged air of a pilot wrongfully evicted from his own cockpit, but it is only an act. Inside, he is struggling against the surge of adrenaline, the fight or flight instinct that he has honed to a razor’s edge over millennia. He can’t run and he can’t lash out and the forced inactivity makes him tense and restless.
To distract himself, Klein searches for answers. How did John manage to convince a disciplined air marshal to take such drastic, almost reckless action? And just what did he tell her? Klein suspects she would only have taken such action if there was a possibility of someone endangering the plane. In other words, he tells himself wryly, I’ve just been framed as a terrorist.
When he finally comes down from the adrenaline high, he resigns himself to sitting out the rest of the flight under custody. Then that bastard shows up again, this time demanding to know the reasons why a pilot would put an aircraft into a dive.
“Go to hell,” he growls, but John merely regards him silently. He sighs inwardly, tells himself there is nothing to be gained by being uncooperative. Working with the guy, on the other hand, might actually get some of his own questions answered. So why would a pilot make a plane dive other than for a landing? “There is no good reason,” he finally answers.
“But there has to be,” John insists. “A good reason, captain, something that makes sense. Because your co-pilot is going to try the very same thing in nine minutes …” The man pauses, as though realising something. “There’s only one good reason why both pilots would do that … You aren’t trying to destroy the plane, you’re trying to save it.”
Klein disdains to answer. His glance towards the cockpit speaks for him.
“Everything okay now?” Colin asks anxiously as he renters with John and the air marshal in tow.
“I’ve made a bargain to get my plane back,” Klein tells him, noting that the shaking of the plane is almost continuous now. No mere turbulence, but a potential problem with the wing steering flaps.
“Mr Smith is going to tell us exactly what he saw,” Klein continues. “He believes that we will respond to some emergency condition in seven minutes by taking the plane into a rapid descent.” The captain has decided that hearing John out, letting him walk them through his ‘vision’ is the best way to tell if he could have foreseen a real aircraft emergency or is just making things up.
He listens attentively as John describes his vision, of seeing Klein pushing the throttles forward, channelling full power to the engines, at which point the starboard engine explodes and the cabin depressurises.
John leans forward again, requesting permission to touch the controls. Touch only, no moving anything, Klein warns as John reaches forward and sweeps one hand over the dials and switches. The captain watches, half curious, half wondering as the man searches, the hair prickling on his neck again. Finally, John reaches out with both hands and touches one of the air inlets at the side of the cockpit.
“There’s ice on the wing, a lot of it,” he tells them.
Klein responds by checking the readouts, but the wings read clear and Colin adds that the anti-ice system is on. John insists that the instruments are wrong, even as another violent judder shakes the plane.
Thinking aloud again, the captain allows John to talk him through the scenario. Ice buildup would affect the aerodynamics of the wings, reducing lift, which could cause the plane to stall.
“How would you fix it?” John prompts.
And realisation hits. This is what John saw in his vision. The plane in a dive, losing lift. And the solution … Klein sees the same realisation on Colin’s face as he says, “First I’d go to max power on both engines.”
It would explain a lot of things. But first, they have to verify the ice problem. Colin heads for the main cabin immediately to get a visual on the wings while he instructs John and the air marshal to return to their places. But John stands his ground, saying that the captain will have a lot of decisions to make in the next few minutes and wants to help him choose the right ones.
“Psychic navigator,” Klein mutters, and actually believes it. John takes the co-pilot’s seat and soon after, Colin confirms that the starboard wing is iced over.
“I need to take it down to a warmer altitude,” he tells John. “The heat and friction will break up the ice …” Warning beeps interrupt him and the manual steering controls disengage from their locked position, slamming into his hands. The autopilot has failed. He sends out a mayday to the Washington air control tower requesting immediate landing clearance.
He fights the controls, nosing the plane down as it shudders. A higher pitched warning starts up, the stall warning. He needs more speed or the plane will lose lift and fall. Klein reaches for the throttle to push the engines to full power, but John warns him of this. Has been warning him since that first vision. If he throttles to max power, the starboard engine will explode.
He could lower the flaps, which will get him some lift. He places his hand on the controls, but John grabs them as well and tells him that the starboard flaps are frozen. If he attempts to lower both sets of wing flaps, only the port ones will function and the plane will roll.
“I need airspeed, godammit,” he snarls. He reaches for the throttle again, it’s the only viable option he can think of.
“We can’t!” John screams. Klein compromises, channelling full power only to the port engine. For the longest minute, they fight the plane down, the aircraft shuddering all the way. They can see the lights of Washington DC below them now, through the thinning clouds. The port engine roars, labouring at full power. Finally, there’s a gut-wrenching jerk, the ice suddenly melting off the wing, and the plane’s flight smoothes out.
Both men heave a sigh of relief, savouring the hard-won peace. Finally, John rises on unsteady feet and exits the cockpit. As Colin retakes his seat, he notices the readings for the starboard engine. Normal when they were last checked, now they are anything but. Low oil pressure, Colin notes and Klein understands immediately. With the loss of lubricating oil, the engine could have seized at max power, ripped itself apart. Then an explosion, a hull breach …
If he has had any residual doubts, they are obliterated in the light of this last revelation. He might not have believed in abilities like John Smith’s, but this episode has once again shown that what you don’t see might still exist. As Shakespeare so eloquently put it: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
And this is one of them, this man who can see into the future, tell you what will conspire as a direct result of what you do. Methos has seen things like this in his five long millennia. Things that defy explanation, that are beyond imagination. And, should he continue to survive, he knows that there will be still more to see.
Next: Moving On
The ROG looking spiffy in his pilot stripes
Author: slazersc
Fandoms: Highlander/Dead Zone
Character: Michael Klein/?
Summary: Live long enough and there are few things you haven’t seen.
Notes: Written for the
hl_flashfic challenge “Immortality: Actors in dual roles”. Heavily references the Dead Zone episode “Cabin Pressure” and Highlander in general. Didn’t name the Immortal, but I think he’s easy enough to guess ;) Finally, major thanks to hitokiri_k for answering questions on aircraft and piloting again and again and again …
For Captain Michael Klein, his first inkling of something out of the ordinary comes from the warning of a gun on his plane. The anxiety of the air stewardess delivering the news is real enough and his co-pilot, Colin Black, assures him that he can handle things. The captain quickly agrees to see the man, a Reverend Gene Purdy, who is waiting for him outside the cockpit. The thing is, neither the Reverend nor his companion, John Smith, have actually seen the gun. John only knows that a passenger in row 26 has it.
It gets better from here, always does with these crackpots, the captain tells himself as he scans the passenger list. Sure enough, Rev. Purdy beckons for his friend to join them and starts explaining that John has the gift of second sight, that he saw the gun in a vision. Klein snaps his head up at the words, looks John hard in the eye. This one has the gleam of determination, the ‘whatever it takes’ look he’s seen in many a fanatic. The man could be dangerous. They will need to keep an eye on him, possibly even separate him from the other passengers. Klein is already making a mental list of various contingency measures when his eyes come to a stop on the passenger names in row 26. One catches his attention at once.
Kelly Park. The air marshal on the flight. John has no business knowing this and yet he has singled her out from among the forty-odd rows in this aircraft. Coincidence, perhaps, but Klein can feel the hairs prickling on the back of his neck. He keeps his expression neutral, however. Neutral, that is, until John starts babbling about the plane going into a dive at 10:54 that night.
“I thought this was about a gun,” the captain mutters, just loud enough for the others to hear. Telling him about a gun is one thing, but predicting, to the pilot’s face, that his flight will go down is another thing altogether. When John insists that they have less than forty minutes to figure out what will go wrong, Klein loses his patience.
“Nothing is going to go wrong,” he snaps, then softens his tone to add, “Whether I believe that you have visions or not Mr Smith, on this plane, I deal in facts.” With the craft experiencing increasing turbulence, he needs to monitor the situation in the cockpit and insists that the two return to their seats.
“Why does it have to be my plane?” he grumbles to his co-pilot as he returns to his place and straps in. Colin, ironically enough, seems to believe that John Smith is the real deal, an actual psychic. Guy was in the news, apparently.
Turning to the controls, Klein lapses into silence as he checks the status readouts. Then, with one eye on the panels, his mind ticks back over recent events, analysing more out of habit than anything else. This John Smith is an unknown quantity. He picked out the air marshal with the gun, yes, but his claim of the plane going into a dive is, of course, unsubstantiated. And, although he was determined to discover what would go wrong, he made no other demands.
Uneasy, Klein reaches absently around behind him, then catches himself and pretends to stretch the kinks out of his arms and back. Up till a few years ago, he almost always had at least one weapon on his person. It doesn’t surprise him that he still misses the weight of the small dagger and its shoulder harness against his back. Fortunately for him, an aircraft is a relatively safe place to be, perhaps even safer for him than anyone else. After all, there’s little chance that he’ll die permanently, short of a catastrophic explosion or some freak accident parting his head from his shoulders.
As an added bonus, he’s safe from the Game, at least when he’s flying. No Immortal would be foolish enough to challenge him in front of so many witnesses. And even if one was crazy enough to try, it’d be almost impossible to get at him. He is the pilot, after all, cocooned by layers of security in the cockpit. A bonus he fully appreciates, certainly worth all the jet-lag and sleep debt he has to endure.
“Wanna try a different altitude? The stat’s dropped three degrees in the last minute.” Colin’s voice breaks into his thoughts and he checks the altitude, temperature and fuel readings again. They’ll stay put, he decides: fly lower and the air resistance will cut into their fuel usage, any higher and the plane will start losing lift in the thinner air. However, he does notice that the turbulence is getting worse and makes a note to change altitude soon if there’s no improvement.
The door warning sounds as Colin unlocks it to admit another stewardess. Klein shakes his head at the news of John’s latest vision of the starboard engine exploding. Colin, clearly concerned now, suggests an instrument check, but he reassures his co-pilot that the engine is fine.
“I’ve read about this guy,” the stewardess breaks in, coming to John’s defence.
“Yeah, I’m sure he loves to be in the headlines,” Klein replies, a touch sarcastically. “As in ‘Pilot makes emergency landing based on psychic prediction.’”
“Just the opposite,” Colin tells him. “I heard this guy hates publicity.”
“And yet you both know this shy fellow’s name,” the captain retorts, glancing at the two of them as they fall silent. He sighs inwardly and Colin motions for the stewardess to go before radioing the Washington tower about their landing.
And then the call comes. From the airline’s CEO, no less. Encouraging him to hear John out. Bloody unbelievable. Wonders who the tattletale is as he rises from his seat. He also knows that he utters something in English, but in his mind, he’s swearing in a language long dead and gone.
Finds John at the back of the plane, handcuffed to the air marshal. Feels just a tiny smidgeon of satisfaction that the man has annoyed someone else just a little too much. Kelly Park, however, looks unnerved. He makes no claim to reading minds (confessed it to someone once, actually), but Klein knows enough of reading human expression to know that John has somehow shaken the air marshal.
Every sense comes instantly alert, instinct thrumming a warning through his veins.
John asks him to check the starboard engine, but he has already run a diagnostic back in the cockpit, everything coming back green-and-go. Besides, he reassures the man, engine damage is rarely catastrophic.
“Yeah. Well, tonight something will be.” John’s tone is of utmost certainty, a man who has no doubts of what he is saying.
No harm in playing along, Klein decides. Reassure him, calm him down enough so he won’t be a problem for the rest of the flight.
“I promise you I will do anything within my power to get us down safely,” he tells the man with as much sincerity as he can muster. John does not reply, just looks at his watch like a man condemned.
“Sorry about these,” Klein continues as he leans forward to touch the man’s handcuffs. John spasms as if electrocuted, then snaps his head up to stare at him, expression dumbstruck. Klein notes his reaction, but there is nothing else he can do, has no more empty reassurances to offer. He returns to the cockpit.
As he and his co-pilot prepare for landing, the aircraft jerks sharply to the sound of a loud crack.
“Okay, that wasn’t turbulence,” Colin mutters, glancing around.
Klein checks. “Autopilot’s acting up.”
The intercom chooses that moment to buzz. “It’s Kelly Park.” They let the air marshal in and she silently indicates that she wishes to speak with Klein. Once he has left his seat, she asks him to turn command of the plane over to Colin, who can land the passenger jet on his own. Klein refuses, politely requests that she return to her seat. Instead, she draws her gun.
As he takes in this sudden turn of events, part of his mind wonders idly if he can press charges once this fiasco is over. Forcibly removing a pilot from his duty without hard evidence against him. Wonders if he can make the charge stick. Probably. The facts are on his side after all. He almost feels better.
Another part of his mind is screaming. The air marshal’s composure is clearly shaken, her actions unpredictable. He is not afraid of death; the prospect of being shot is far more terrifying. If he sustains a gunshot wound in the closed confines of the cockpit, they will surely see him heal. If she actually kills him, they will see him revive. Either way, his cover will be blown. Out of options, he can only agree to her demands.
They exit the cockpit and she indicates a seat for him just outside. He maintains the outraged air of a pilot wrongfully evicted from his own cockpit, but it is only an act. Inside, he is struggling against the surge of adrenaline, the fight or flight instinct that he has honed to a razor’s edge over millennia. He can’t run and he can’t lash out and the forced inactivity makes him tense and restless.
To distract himself, Klein searches for answers. How did John manage to convince a disciplined air marshal to take such drastic, almost reckless action? And just what did he tell her? Klein suspects she would only have taken such action if there was a possibility of someone endangering the plane. In other words, he tells himself wryly, I’ve just been framed as a terrorist.
When he finally comes down from the adrenaline high, he resigns himself to sitting out the rest of the flight under custody. Then that bastard shows up again, this time demanding to know the reasons why a pilot would put an aircraft into a dive.
“Go to hell,” he growls, but John merely regards him silently. He sighs inwardly, tells himself there is nothing to be gained by being uncooperative. Working with the guy, on the other hand, might actually get some of his own questions answered. So why would a pilot make a plane dive other than for a landing? “There is no good reason,” he finally answers.
“But there has to be,” John insists. “A good reason, captain, something that makes sense. Because your co-pilot is going to try the very same thing in nine minutes …” The man pauses, as though realising something. “There’s only one good reason why both pilots would do that … You aren’t trying to destroy the plane, you’re trying to save it.”
Klein disdains to answer. His glance towards the cockpit speaks for him.
“Everything okay now?” Colin asks anxiously as he renters with John and the air marshal in tow.
“I’ve made a bargain to get my plane back,” Klein tells him, noting that the shaking of the plane is almost continuous now. No mere turbulence, but a potential problem with the wing steering flaps.
“Mr Smith is going to tell us exactly what he saw,” Klein continues. “He believes that we will respond to some emergency condition in seven minutes by taking the plane into a rapid descent.” The captain has decided that hearing John out, letting him walk them through his ‘vision’ is the best way to tell if he could have foreseen a real aircraft emergency or is just making things up.
He listens attentively as John describes his vision, of seeing Klein pushing the throttles forward, channelling full power to the engines, at which point the starboard engine explodes and the cabin depressurises.
John leans forward again, requesting permission to touch the controls. Touch only, no moving anything, Klein warns as John reaches forward and sweeps one hand over the dials and switches. The captain watches, half curious, half wondering as the man searches, the hair prickling on his neck again. Finally, John reaches out with both hands and touches one of the air inlets at the side of the cockpit.
“There’s ice on the wing, a lot of it,” he tells them.
Klein responds by checking the readouts, but the wings read clear and Colin adds that the anti-ice system is on. John insists that the instruments are wrong, even as another violent judder shakes the plane.
Thinking aloud again, the captain allows John to talk him through the scenario. Ice buildup would affect the aerodynamics of the wings, reducing lift, which could cause the plane to stall.
“How would you fix it?” John prompts.
And realisation hits. This is what John saw in his vision. The plane in a dive, losing lift. And the solution … Klein sees the same realisation on Colin’s face as he says, “First I’d go to max power on both engines.”
It would explain a lot of things. But first, they have to verify the ice problem. Colin heads for the main cabin immediately to get a visual on the wings while he instructs John and the air marshal to return to their places. But John stands his ground, saying that the captain will have a lot of decisions to make in the next few minutes and wants to help him choose the right ones.
“Psychic navigator,” Klein mutters, and actually believes it. John takes the co-pilot’s seat and soon after, Colin confirms that the starboard wing is iced over.
“I need to take it down to a warmer altitude,” he tells John. “The heat and friction will break up the ice …” Warning beeps interrupt him and the manual steering controls disengage from their locked position, slamming into his hands. The autopilot has failed. He sends out a mayday to the Washington air control tower requesting immediate landing clearance.
He fights the controls, nosing the plane down as it shudders. A higher pitched warning starts up, the stall warning. He needs more speed or the plane will lose lift and fall. Klein reaches for the throttle to push the engines to full power, but John warns him of this. Has been warning him since that first vision. If he throttles to max power, the starboard engine will explode.
He could lower the flaps, which will get him some lift. He places his hand on the controls, but John grabs them as well and tells him that the starboard flaps are frozen. If he attempts to lower both sets of wing flaps, only the port ones will function and the plane will roll.
“I need airspeed, godammit,” he snarls. He reaches for the throttle again, it’s the only viable option he can think of.
“We can’t!” John screams. Klein compromises, channelling full power only to the port engine. For the longest minute, they fight the plane down, the aircraft shuddering all the way. They can see the lights of Washington DC below them now, through the thinning clouds. The port engine roars, labouring at full power. Finally, there’s a gut-wrenching jerk, the ice suddenly melting off the wing, and the plane’s flight smoothes out.
Both men heave a sigh of relief, savouring the hard-won peace. Finally, John rises on unsteady feet and exits the cockpit. As Colin retakes his seat, he notices the readings for the starboard engine. Normal when they were last checked, now they are anything but. Low oil pressure, Colin notes and Klein understands immediately. With the loss of lubricating oil, the engine could have seized at max power, ripped itself apart. Then an explosion, a hull breach …
If he has had any residual doubts, they are obliterated in the light of this last revelation. He might not have believed in abilities like John Smith’s, but this episode has once again shown that what you don’t see might still exist. As Shakespeare so eloquently put it: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
And this is one of them, this man who can see into the future, tell you what will conspire as a direct result of what you do. Methos has seen things like this in his five long millennia. Things that defy explanation, that are beyond imagination. And, should he continue to survive, he knows that there will be still more to see.
Next: Moving On
The ROG looking spiffy in his pilot stripes