“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.”