Chapter 5 #3
“Stop it.” If she hadn’t needed both hands on the wheel, she might have slapped him. “I wish I’d never seen you. You literally fall into my life and make me care about you, make me feel things I’ve never felt before, and all you do is lie.”
He saw only one option. On impulse, he reached out and turned off the key. The Land Rover bumped to a stop. “Now listen to me.” With his free hand, he grabbed her sweater and yanked her around. “Damn it.” The oath came out as a murmur when he saw her face. “Don’t cry. I can’t stand it.”
“I’m not crying.” She wiped angry tears away with the backs of her hands. “Give me back the key.”
“In a minute.” He released her, holding his hand palm out in a gesture of truce. “I wasn’t lying when I said I was leaving this morning because I thought it was best for you.”
She believed him. And she hated herself because he could so easily make her believe. “Will you tell me what kind of trouble you’re in?”
“Yes.” Because he couldn’t resist, he trailed a fingertip across her damp cheek. “After we’ve found the—where I went down—I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“No more evasions or ridiculous stories?”
“I’ll tell you everything.” He lifted her hand, then pressed his palm to hers. “You have my word. Libby . . .” He linked his fingers with hers. “What do I make you feel?”
She drew her hand away to grip the wheel. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to think about it.”
“I’d like you to know that I’ve never had the same feelings for another woman as I have for you. I wish things could be different.”
He was already saying goodbye, she realized.
A rippling ache spread in her chest. “Don’t.
Let’s just concentrate on what needs to be done.
” While she stared straight ahead, he slipped the key back into the ignition.
“You were right up there,” she told him as she switched it on.
“At the curve. The best I could say is that you were coming from that direction. I got the impression when I saw you crash that you went down along that ridge somewhere.” With a frown, she lifted a hand to shield her eyes.
“Strange . . . it looks like there’s a break in that bank of trees up there. ”
Not strange, Cal thought, when you considered that a ship over seventy meters long and thirty across had come down in them. “Why don’t we take a look?”
Libby turned off the road and started up the rocky slope. The part of her that was still annoyed hoped the jostling ride gave Cal the willies. But when she glanced at him, he was grinning.
“This is great!” he shouted. “I haven’t done anything like this since I was a kid.”
“Glad you’re having fun.” She turned her attention back to driving and didn’t notice when Cal pushed a series of buttons on his watch. Excitement began to drum in him as he studied the directional beam on one of the dials.
“Twenty-five degrees north.”
“What?”
“That way.” He used his other hand to gesture with. “It’s that way. Two point five kilometers.”
“How do you know?”
He sent her a brilliant smile. “Trust me.”
They climbed the ridge to where the line of pines thickened. The scattered dogwoods were budded but not yet ready to bloom. Libby shivered once in the cool air before she shut the engine off. “I can’t drive through this. We’ll have to walk.”
“It’s not far.” He was already out and offering an impatient hand. “A few hundred meters.”
She kept her hand at her side as she stared at his watch. It was sending out a low, regular beep. “Why is it doing that?”
“It’s scanning. It only has a range of ten kilometers, but it’s fairly accurate.” Holding his wrist out, he moved in a slow circle. “Since I doubt there’s anything metallic as big as my ship around here, I’d say we’ve found it.”
“Don’t start that again.” Libby pushed her hands into her pockets and started to walk.
“You’re supposed to be a scientist,” Cal reminded her as he fell into step beside her.
“I am a scientist,” she muttered, “which is why I know that men do not bounce off black holes and drop into the Klamath Mountains on the way back from Mars.”
He slung a friendly arm around her shoulders. “You’re looking behind you, Libby, not ahead. You’ve never seen anyone who lived two centuries ago, but you know they existed. Why is it so difficult to believe that they exist two centuries in the future?”
“I hope they will, but I don’t expect to offer them coffee.” He wasn’t crazy, she decided, but he was clever. “You told me you’d tell me the truth—all of the truth—when we found your plane. I’m holding you to that.” She tossed up her head, then froze. “Oh, my God.”
Less than twenty feet ahead she saw a gap in the trees, the break she had spotted from beneath the ridge. Up close it looked as though a huge sickle had sliced through the forest, hewing down a swath of evergreen and undergrowth more than thirty feet wide.
“But there was no fire.” She had to quicken her pace to keep up with Cal. “What could have done all this?”
“That.” When they reached the break, Cal pointed.
There, nestling on the rocky, needle-strewn ground, was his ship.
Trees, some of them thirty feet high, lay like pickup sticks around it.
“Don’t go any closer until I check for radiation,” Cal warned, but he needn’t have bothered.
Libby couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to.
Using his wrist unit, he checked the level and gave a quick nod. “It’s well within normal limits. The time warp must have neutralized any excess.” He slipped an arm around her shoulders again. “Come on inside. I’ll show you my etchings.”
Dazed, silent, she went with him. It was huge, as big as a house, and like no plane she had ever seen. A military secret, she told herself. That was why Cal had been so evasive. But surely one man couldn’t fly something so large.
The front was its narrowest point, blunted, somewhat bullet-shaped, before it curved out into the body. There were no wings. That thought caused an uneasy lurch in her stomach. Its shape reminded her of a stingray that scuttled across the ocean floor.
An experiment, she told herself as she climbed over a fallen pine.
The body was a dull metallic color not glitzy enough to be called silver. There were scrapes and dents and dust all over it. Like an old, reliable family car, she thought giddily.
The damage had happened in the accident, she decided, but it worried her more than a little that several of the dents looked old. The Pentagon or NASA or whoever had built it would certainly have taken better care of something that had to be worth millions of taxpayer dollars.
“You came in this thing by yourself,” Libby managed when he leaped down the slight slope to run his hand over the side of the ship.
“Sure.” His fingers moved over the metal in an unmistakable caress. “She handles like a dream.”
“Who does it belong to?”
“It’s mine.” There was both pleasure and excitement in his eyes when he held up a hand to help her down. “I told you I didn’t steal it.”
As a wave of relief passed over him, he spun her in a circle, then kissed her hard on the mouth. Finding the taste alluring, he kept her feet an inch off the ground and lingered over a second kiss.
“Caleb—” Breathless, dizzy, she pushed away from him.
“Kissing you’s become a habit, Libby.” He circled her waist with his hand. “I’ve always had a hard time breaking habits.”
He was just trying to distract her, she thought. And he was doing an excellent job of it. “Pull yourself together,” she ordered. “Now we’ve found this . . . thing. You promised me an explanation. We both know very well that nothing like this is owned by a private citizen. Spill it, Hornblower.”
“It is mine,” he told her, still grinning. “Or it will be after ten more payments.” He pressed a button to open the hatch. Libby’s mouth dropped open as a door lifted up silently. “Come on, I’ll show you the registration.”
Unable to resist, she walked up the two steps and into the cabin. It was as large as her living room and was dominated by a control panel. There were hundreds of colored buttons and levers in front of two high-backed black seats shaped like scoops.
“Have a seat,” he said.
Staying close to the open hatch, she rubbed her arms to ward off a sudden chill. “It’s, ah . . . dark in here.”
“Oh, yeah.” Crossing to a panel, he touched a switch. Libby let out a muffled shriek as the front of the craft opened. “I must have hit the shields when I started down.”
She could only stare. Before her were the forest, the distant mountains and the sky. Strong sunlight poured through. You could hardly call it a windshield when it spanned twenty feet.
“I don’t understand.” Because she needed to, she moved quickly to one of the chairs and sat. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“I felt the same way a couple of days ago.” Cal opened a compartment, scanned through some material, then took out a small, shiny card. “This is my pilot’s license, Libby. After you read it, take a nice long breath. It might help.”
His picture was in the corner. His grin was as attractive and disarming as it was in the flesh.
The ID claimed that he was a United States citizen and licensed to pilot all A to F model ships.
It listed his height as 185.4 cm, his weight as 70.
3 kg. Hair black, eyes blue. And his birth date was . . . 2222.
“Oh, my God,” Libby whispered.
“You forgot to take that breath.” He closed a hand over hers on the card. “Libby, I’m thirty. When I left L.A. two months ago it was February, 2252.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Maybe, but it happened.”
“This is a trick.” She pushed the card back into his hand and sprang up. Her heart was racing so hard and fast that she could feel it vibrating between her temples. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, but it’s all some kind of elaborate trick. I’m going home.”
She rushed toward the hatch just as the door closed. “Sit down, Libby. Please.” He saw the wild, trapped look in her eyes and forced himself not to step toward her. “I’m not going to hurt you. You know that. Just sit down, and listen.”
Because she was angry that she had tried to run, she walked stiffly back and sat down. “So?”
He sat opposite her, steepled his fingers and thought it all through.
There were times, he supposed, when it was best to treat an abnormal situation as if it were normal.
“You didn’t have any breakfast,” he said abruptly.
Pleased with the inspiration, he opened a small door and took out a glossy silver pouch.
“How about ham and eggs?” Without waiting for an answer, he swiveled, opened another door and tossed the pouch inside.
He pushed a button, then sat smiling at her until a buzzer sounded.
Taking a plate out of another compartment, he opened the door and scooped out a heap of steaming eggs loaded with chunks of ham.
Libby locked her icy hands in her lap. “You’re full of tricks.”
“No trick. Irradiation. Come on, taste.” He held the plate under her nose. “They’re not as good as yours, but they’ll do in a pinch. Libby, you have to believe what’s in front of your eyes.”
“No.” Very slowly, she shook her head from side to side. “I don’t think I do.”
“Not hungry?”
She shook her head again, more firmly this time. With a shrug, Cal plucked a fork from a drawer and dug in.
“I know how you feel.”
“No, you don’t.” She took his advice, belatedly, and sucked in three long breaths. “You’re not sitting in what looks like a spaceship having a conversation with a man who claims to be from the twenty-third century.”
“No, but I’m sitting in my ship talking to a woman who’s a couple of centuries older than I am.”
She blinked at that, then found laughter—only slightly hysterical—bubbling out. “This is ludicrous.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I’m not saying I believe it.”
“Give it time.”
Her hand was no longer cold, but it was still unsteady when she pressed it to her head. “I need to think.”
“Fine.”
With a sigh, she sat back and studied him. “I’ll take that breakfast now.”