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.”
Chapter 6
The eggs were bland, but they were certainly hot. Irradiated, Libby thought as she took a second bite. She’d heard of the controversial process for preserving food. Still, it was a far cry from a microwave TV dinner.
Somehow she’d woken up in the middle of a science-fiction movie.
“I keep telling myself there has to be another explanation.”
Cal polished off his eggs. “Let me know if you find one.”
Dissatisfied, she set her plate aside. “If all this is real, you seem to be taking it very calmly.”
“I’ve had some time to get used to it. Are you going to eat the rest of that?”
She shook her head, then turned to stare through the clear shield. She saw a pair of elk meander into the trees about a hundred yards away. A beautiful sight, she mused. Beautiful, and normal here in the mountains of Oregon. If the elk had wandered down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan they would still have been beautiful, and they would still have been real. But, for reasons of basic geography, they wouldn’t have been normal.
There was no denying that Cal was real. Was it possible that he and his incredible vehicle were a perfectly normal sight in another place? In another time?
If it were true... if she allowed herself for just one moment to believe it... How must he feel? She looked at the elk again. They were standing in a patch of sunlight. Mustn’t he be feeling as confused and displaced as any animal taken out of its natural habitat and tossed into a strange world?
She remembered the panic she had seen on his face the day he’d come to her with a paperback novel. A novel published this year, Libby reflected. She’d dismissed his pallor, his dazed confusion, as the effects of his head injury. She’d discounted his odd questions and remarks the same way.
Now there was the ship—and no matter how far she stretched it she couldn’t call the vehicle a plane. If she accepted that it was real and not part of some strange, vivid dream, then she had to accept Cal’s story.
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
“Hamlet.” He grinned at her quick, suspicious look. “We still read Shakespeare. Want some coffee?”
She shook her head. Dream or not, she needed answers. “You say you... bounced off a black hole?”
He smiled, immeasurably relieved. She believed him. Perhaps she didn’t fully realize it herself, but she believed him. “That’s right, or at least that’s what I think. I’m going to need my computer. My instruments went berserk when we hit the gravitational field, so I went to manual and managed to bank east. I remember the force. It must be what a fly feels like when someone gives it a good solid bat. I passed out. When I came to, I was free-falling toward Earth. I switched back to computer and thought my troubles were over.”
“That doesn’t explain how you ended up here—or should I say now.”
“There are a lot of theories. The one I lean toward deals with the space-time continuum. It’s like a curved bowl.” He cupped his palm to demonstrate. “Mathematically, the bowl isn’t space and it isn’t time. It’s a combination of both. Everything in it moves through space and time. Gravity’s the curve of the bowl, drawing everything down. Around the Earth it’s not much of a curve. You don’t really feel it unless you, say, fall off a cliff. But around the sun, and around a black hole...” He deepened the cup of his palm.
“And you’re saying you were caught in that curve?”
“Like a marble being spun around the lip of the bowl. And somewhere, somehow, along the spin, I was flicked off. The speed, the trajectory, sent me tunneling not just through space but through time.”
“It sounds almost plausible when you say it.”
“It’s the only theory I’ve got. Maybe if we look at it, it’ll sound more plausible.” Leaning forward, he turned a dial. “Computer.”
Yes, Cal.
Libby lifted a brow at the soft, sultry voice. “Since when do they make computers tall, blond and busty?”
He just grinned. “Intergalactic runs can be lonely. Computer, play back log date 02–05. On screen.”
Cal swiveled in his chair and leaned forward as a small viewing screen rose out of the console. Sound filled the cockpit. Impassive, he watched his own image flicker on. From her chair, Libby stared mesmerized, as the playback progressed. She could see him sitting precisely where he was sitting now. But there were lights flashing, buzzers sounding. While the cockpit vibrated, he reached up to secure a safety strap. She could see the sweat beading on his face as he fought the controls of the bucking ship.
“Widen image,” Cal commanded.