Terrence Lagomorf shuddered nervously as he stepped onto the plane. He hated the idea of flight with a fevor that most saw as insane, and that he saw as sensible. Why any self-respecting race of people perfectly adapted to and content with living on the ground would suddenly decide to jettison themselves into the atmosphere with little more than air and sheer moxie to keep them afloat, he did not know. It wasn't the fear of falling that scared him, however, so much as the ineffible feeling that people and planes in air just shouldn't be.

He had begged his boss to let someone else go to the seminar on Internation Dentistry in Hong Kong, or at least to let him go by raft. They could have sent someone smarter, someone who spoke Chnese, someone who worked for a company that had any business going to a seminar on International Dentistry in the first place, all to no avail. His boss simply chuckled the easy-going multi-million dollar chuckle he'd spent years developing to put people in the right mood to give him their money, smacked Terrence on the back, and said that he was the man for the job and that this would help him get over his little phobia. The only trouble was, Terrence's brain-melting, bowel-cleansing, all-encompassing fear of flight was a "little phobia" in the same sense that Lucifer "was maybe" not the kind of guy you want watching your apple orchard, or the sense in which the ghost of Jacob Marley was "a little bit kinky" (come now, you didn't think those chains were just for show, did you?), and the whole situation had been made quite a bit worse by the fact that the airline had (despite his specific request that they not) sat him by the window. And the shade was stuck open.

Terrence tried desperately to convince someone to swap his seat, but much to his dismay he had the unlikely misfortune of sitting next to the world's only set of conjoined sextuplets (who also, it would happen, made up the world's most prestigious Olympic Red Rover team) and he was rather stuck where he was as a result. Sighing heavily several times in rapid succession as a result of trying to hyperventilate and keep his cool at the same time, Terrence strapped himself in his seat as tightly as he possibly could without cutting off the circulation to just about everywhere things could circulate to. He shuddered massively as the plane rocketted forth on the runway.

Forward and forward, faster and faster, like a New York taxi driver with 15 minutes to get to Mecca, the plane zoomed forth. Terrence could have sworn he heard the Wright Brothers muttering something terribly sinister sounding in Latin (which, given the nature of the language, may well have been a shopping list), when with a final horrible lurch the plane gave Sir Isaac Newton the metaphorical finger.

Terrence winced. He winced for a good, long time. Had there been an award for wincing, he would have been suspected of steroid abuse, before getting cancer in his wincing-gland and his face stamped on a box of Wincin' Wheaties. As he winced, he prayed that the plane would crash, or explode, or suddenly appear on the ground and reveal that the entire history of air travel was an elaborate prank, or SOMETHING other than hang there in mid-air and taunt every law of nature he'd ever wanted to abide by (which was most of them). And then Terrence did something very, very stupid. He looked. Just a peek. Just a tiny, eency weency little glance out the window. He had to do it, really. It was a simple matter of inevitability. He could no more not look out the window than a cow could provide a detailed and scholarly analysis on the origins of and deeper meanings behind "Baby Got Back", or William Shatner could sing Gilbert And Sullivan's "Modern Major General" in its proper tempo. To look was infused into Terrence's very being, as it is in every man or woman who has something they really, really, REALLY don't want to look at. His molecules and protons and quarks said "look", and when a quark says something by George, you do it.

Terrence looked, and Terrence saw. He saw the sky, and the clouds, and the wind. He thought "Hm. That's not too bad at all, really." Then he saw the miles and miles of earth that were currently not beneath the plane, and he fainted.

"Please make sure all carry-on items are attended to and noted. Thank you for flying United Airlines, have a nice day." The easy-going voice of the pilot said over the P.A., stirring Terrence up from his sleep. He looked about, and the plane was empty. He cursed. He cursed in the way that only a man who must have somehow missed his stop and stayed on a plane for countless hours and miles beyond his destination can curse. Customarily, this typically involves several mutterings of assorted sexual acts in conjunction with angered references to the mother of whoever fluybbed up badly enough to warrant this cursing in the first place. Since this was all soundly Terrence's own fault, this gave the whole affair a rather uncomfortable Oedipal varnish that caused him to demote his soul-rending curses to more generic irate mumbling.

As Terrence ran out of the plane, he wondered for a brief moment why no one else happened to be headed where he was headed, and why none of the Red Roving Hextuplets bothered to rouse him. As he rushed through the hallway into the airport, he made a note to care later, before an astonishing and horribly sight rolled around the circumfrence of his eyeball and then sittled in like a ball bearing down a spout.

In front of Terrence hovered a large, blank nothing. There was more nothing above him, still more below, and scads of it every way that he cared to snoop. Even the plane and ramp were gone, all replaxed by an infinite expanse of something that was not quite white and not quite not white, but very definitely nothing but not. He loudly exclaimed "Bugger!" As he floated off into an endless void that was probably not Hong Kong.