“I should have known better than to take you to a science-fiction movie.” She sipped the brandy. Then, because she decided it was as much her fault as his, she poured another snifter. “It was fiction, Hornblower. Fantasy.”
“Rot.”
“All right.” She passed him the snifter. “But there were people in the theater who had paid to watch it.”
“How about that nonsense with the creatures sucking all the water out of the human body? Then there was the way that space jockey zipped around the galaxy shooting lasers. Do you have any idea how crowded that sector is?”
“No, I don’t.” She sampled more brandy. “Tell you what, next time we’ll try a Western. Remind me not to let you turn onStar Trek.”
“Star Trek’s a classic,” he said, and sent her into a fit of giggles.
“Never mind. You know, I almost think I’m losing my grip. I spent the morning in a spaceship and the afternoon eating pizza and not watching a movie. I don’t seem to be able to make sense of it all.”
“It’ll come clear.” He touched his glass to hers before settling his arm around her shoulders. It was comforting, the glow of the lamplight, the warmth of the brandy, the scent of the woman. His woman, Cal thought, if for only a moment. “I like this better than the movies. Tell me about Liberty Stone.”
“There’s not much.”
“Tell me, so I can take it with me.”
“I was born here, as I told you before.”
“In the bed I sleep in.”
“Yes.” She sipped her brandy, wondering if it was that, or the image of him in the old bed, that warmed her. “My mother used to weave. Blankets, wall hangings, rugs. She would sell them to supplement what my father grew in the garden.”
“They were poor?”
“No, they were children of the sixties.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s difficult to explain. They wanted to be closer to the land, closer to themselves. It was their part of a revolution against material power, world violence, the entire social structure of the time. So we lived here and my mother bartered and sold her work in the surrounding towns. One day an art buyer on a camping trip with his family came across one of her tapestries.” She smiled into her brandy. “The rest, as they say, is history.”
“Caroline Stone,” he said abruptly.
“Why, yes.”
With a laugh, he downed the brandy and reached for the bottle in one smooth motion. “Your mother’s work is in museums.” Bemused, he picked up the corner of the blanket beside them. “I’ve seen it in the Smithsonian.” He poured more brandy in her glass while she gaped at him.
“This gets stranger and stranger.” She drank again, letting the brandy influence her sense of unreality. “It’s you we need to talk about, you I need to understand. All these questions.” Unable to sit any longer, she cupped the snifter in both hands and started to pace. “The oddest ones pop into my mind. I keep remembering you spoke of Philadelphia and Paris. Do you know what that means?”
“What?”
“We made it.” She lifted the snifter in a toast, then recklessly drained it. “It’s still there, all of it. Somehow, no matter how close we came to blowing everything, we survived. There’s a Philadelphia in the future, Hornblower, and that’s the most wonderful thing I can imagine.”
Still laughing, she spun in a circle. “All these years I’ve been studying the past, trying to understand human nature, and now I’ve had a glimpse of tomorrow. I don’t know how to thank you.”
Just looking at her left his stomach in a knot. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement. Her body was long and slim and wonderfully graceful as she moved. Wanting her was no longer an urge, it was an obsession.
He drew a long, careful breath. “Glad I could help.”
“I want to know everything, absolutely everything. How people live, how they feel. How they court and make love and marry. What games do the children play?” She leaned over to pour another inch of brandy in her glass. “Are hot dogs still the best bet at a baseball game? Are Mondays still the hardest day of the week?”
“You’ll have to make a list,” he told her. He wanted to keep her talking, moving, laughing. Watching her now, animated, bursting with enthusiasm and humor, was as arousing as being in her arms. “What I can’t answer, the computer can.”
“A list. Of course. I make terrific lists.” Her eyes glowed as she laughed at him. “I know there are more important things for me to ask. Nuclear disarmament, world peace, a cure for cancer and the common cold. But I want to know it all, from the inconsequential to the shattering.” Impatiently she pushed her hair back from her face. Her words couldn’t seem to keep up with her thoughts. “Every second I think of something new. Do people still have Sunday picnics? Have we beaten world hunger and homelessness? Do all men in your time kiss the way you do?”
The snifter paused halfway to his lips. Very slowly, very deliberately, he set it down. “I can’t answer that, because I’ve only practiced on women.”