by Ann Williams
She was still pondering the advancement of modern technology when she re-entered the lab.
“You found everything?”
Marina gave a slight start and spun to face the man. Straight and slender and somewhat shorter than he’d first appeared, her host stood near a work island a few feet away. At this distance she could fully see the startling contrast made by coffee brown eyes, dark eyebrows and eyelashes against pale skin and light hair.
“Yes,” she murmured warily, “I found everything. But I have to admit I’ve never seen anything like your bathroom—what’s wrong?” He was staring at her as though she had two heads.
“Nothing.” Sammell tore his glance from her face and the sight of those startling blue eyes to indicate the glass sitting at his elbow. “I brought water.”
Marina moved a little closer, her eyes narrowing on the delicately shaped blue glass. Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t convinced it was smart to eat or drink anything he offered her. What if the water was drugged?
She had no idea where she was or why she’d been brought here. And she didn’t know a single thing about this man, except that he was very handsome and very weird.
Sensing her hesitancy, Sammell picked up the glass and offered it to her.
“How do I know it’s only water?” she asked suspiciously.
“Is that not what you wanted?” he asked with a puzzled air, keeping his glance directed on something other than her face.
Marina lifted an eyebrow and asked, “How do I know you didn’t put something into it?”
“What?” He spared her a fleeting glance.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “But after all this…” She indicated the room around them. “Am I supposed to trust you?” The place looked like the set of a sci-fi movie from the 1960s.
Sammell’s dark eyes locked with hers. Lifting the glass, he took a deliberate sip from it. Swallowing, he held it out to her.
Marina stared at the rim of the glass a long time before reaching for it. He gave it up hastily, withdrawing his hand before it could make contact with hers, as though her touch might somehow contaminate him.
Once the glass was in her hand, Marina lost little time tilting it to her lips. It tasted like ambrosia. The water at home tasted so bad that she bought bottled water for drinking and cooking, and even that sometimes left a bad taste in her mouth.
When she’d drunk the whole glass, she gave a guilty start and remembered her little companion. “Monday—”
Sammell held up a hand and pointed toward the other side of the room. Marina turned to see a basin of water on the floor near the small creature.
“Thank you,” she murmured softly, giving him the first genuine smile.
Sammell reached for the empty glass without an answering smile. Being in this woman’s presence made him very uncomfortable. She confused him.
Marina’s stomach growled. Placing a hand against it in embarrassment, she murmured, “I’m sorry, but I haven’t eaten in a while.”
In fact, she should have been angry with him, because he was the reason she hadn’t eaten. But something in his attitude made it almost impossible to be angry with him. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was about him… He was so…what was the word…sterile?
Actually, the word that came to mind was virginal, but that was a ridiculous idea. She doubted that any man in this day and age reached adulthood still in that chaste state, unless he lived a monastic life. And she just couldn’t see a priest kidnapping her and keeping her a prisoner in a laboratory.
This man reminded her of one of those people who wouldn’t say dirt if they had a mouth full of it. But she still didn’t trust him. He hadn’t given her an explanation for bringing her here. And besides, she was hungry and being hungry always made her feel cranky.
“Look, I don’t want to seem ungrateful for the water, but I really need some nourishment.”
Sammell picked up a small rectangular object from the table and nodded. “I know,” he said, adjusting something on the back of it. “I will only give you a small dose the first time—”
“What are you talking about?” Marina interrupted hastily, backing away.
Sammell was still making his adjustments and didn’t see the panic sweeping over her face.
“You aren’t giving me a dose of anything,” she warned, reaching for something to defend herself with. Her groping fingers found a heavy metal object on the counter behind her. She lifted it and brandished it in his direction threateningly.
Sammell glanced up as she raised it above her head. “What are you doing?” he asked instantly, his eyes on the object in her hand. “Put that down!” he shouted.
Marina’s eyes widened. He’d fooled her by pretending an equanimity that was obviously only skin deep. But she had his number now. If he came one step closer, she’d…
“Put that down,” Sammell repeated in a quieter voice, realizing he must have frightened her. “Please,” he murmured softly, “put it down—very gently—on the rack where you got it.”
Marina looked at the cylinder. He seemed awfully concerned that she was holding it and not the fact that she was threatening him with it.
“What is this?” she asked with a curious dread.
“A very compact tube of fuel. Please, lay it on the table—gently.”
“Fuel?” Her eyes widened in alarm. “Y-you mean as in gas?”
“I mean as in meltanium, a benign material that becomes highly volatile when exposed to air. Put it down—please, I will not give you the injection if you do not want it.”
She eyed him narrowly. “Are you lying to me?”
Withdrawing his eyes as though with great difficulty from the cylinder, he met her glance. “Why should I lie? If you do not want the nutrient injection, I will not give it to you.”
“Nutrient?”
“Yes,” he answered, his eyes again on the cylinder in her hand. “We nourish our bodies with injections of nutrients.”
“What about eating?”
“We have evolved past using food for consumption. It is really only the vitamins and minerals that our bodies need and they are in the injection.”
Marina was even more puzzled by this than by the nightmares she’d had on her arrival. Was this guy for real?
“Please,” he said again, “put the cylinder in the rack and we will continue our conversation.”
Not really certain she believed the object in her hand to be dangerous, yet wondering in these strange surroundings if anything was what it seemed, she decided to humor him. Placing the cylinder carefully in the rack where she’d found it, she moved away from the counter.
“What would have happened it I had dropped it?” she asked skeptically, watching as her host hurried to pick it up and painstakingly examine it.
“The end seals are thin so it can be used as an injection fuel. You could have destroyed the entire population of this city sector,” he answered solemnly, securing it in the rack with several others like it and placing the rack out of reach in a cabinet.
“Are you serious?” Marina asked with a dubious frown.
“Absolutely.”
Clenching her hands against a sudden attack of nerves, she began to shake all over. What if she had accidentally dropped the cylinder? How could anything so harmless looking be so lethal? And what was it doing here, where anyone could pick it up?
Was he a criminal? A terrorist?
“What are you doing with that?” She indicated the cabinet where he’d secured the fuel, with a nod. “Aren’t there laws governing the use of such dangerous material?” She was becoming angry, holding him responsible for what might have happened if she had unwittingly dropped the thing.
“I use it in my work.”
“You’re a rocket scientist, right?”
“No, I am a physicist. I am working on the feasibility of traveling in time.”
Marina shot him a withering glance. “And I’m Dorothy, the squirrel is Toto and this
is the land of Oz.”
“No,” he answered slowly, “this is the Western Hemisphere of the World State Government. And the year is 2393 A.D.”
Chapter 3
“I’m supposed to believe that I went to sleep in the twentieth century and awoke in the twenty-fourth?”
“Did you go to sleep?” Sammell asked curiously. “When? Right away, or later?”
Marina’s blue gaze narrowed on his averted face. “I don’t think we’re on the same wavelength here,” she muttered, suddenly at a loss. Obviously the man had a screw loose somewhere—oh! why did she feel so…
“What is it?” Sammell asked anxiously.
Marina frowned, knees shaking, and reached for the counter behind her, doing her best to keep his face in focus. “I don’t feel very well,” she said, putting a hand to her forehead as the floor suddenly rose up to meet her.
Sammell caught her before she fell. Picking her up awkwardly, he carried her to the Recep and placed her on the floor. She was such a mystery to him. As he knelt beside her, his gaze slowly traveled over the whole of her. He noted the shape of her pale lips, the fine blue veins on the lids of her closed eyes, the delicate bones of her shoulders and the hollow of her neck, the rounded curve of her hips and the long shapely thighs.
She looked fragile, and for the first time since her arrival, Sammell really began to feel the weight of responsibility that was his for bringing her here. Was this sudden faint a result of her trip through the barriers of time, or due to lack of nourishment?
If anything happened to her, it would be his fault for bringing her here. And her presence couldn’t have come at a worse time for him. He needed all his powers of concentration for the work ahead, both in his secret work at home and his work at the government lab.
If he was under investigation as he suspected, he could be arrested and charged at any time. If that happened they’d soon ferret out all the material he’d appropriated from the state archives for his own use. And if they discovered that his MDAT was a working machine and not a mock-up of the machine in the state lab, they couldn’t help but realize that he’d been sabotaging their project from the start.
Arrest meant termination. There were no prisons on planet Earth. It would be even worse for the woman. The government would have a live subject to study and experiment on. Not even the color of her eyes would be able to save her.
The thought caused him no little discomfort and that surprised him. He felt protective toward her. Just as she felt protective toward her small traveling companion.
This was a new experience for him. He’d never felt responsible for the safety of another. He’d always felt an obligation to try to save his people from the tyranny under which they existed—that’s why he was willing to risk his life by building a machine to travel back in time and try to save them. But he’d never taken on the responsibility of one person’s safety.
His was a society that didn’t encourage closeness in its people. Physical contact was forbidden. Yet he found himself fascinated by the differences between this woman’s physical appearance and those of the women of his own time.
He didn’t know what to make of her. She acted in a manner completely foreign to him, distrusted him and disrupted his life, but she fascinated him. And in the time it took to get MDAT ready to send her back to her own time, he hoped to learn more about her and more about her society.
He’d learned about her society from the Government Archives, but he’d learned very little about the people themselves. And one of the things he didn’t know was how often they needed to take nourishment. By his reckoning it had been about thirty hours since she’d arrived in his lab. But he didn’t know how long she’d gone without nourishment before getting caught up in the Recep. Before losing consciousness she’d mentioned that she hadn’t eaten in a while. How long was a while?
He glanced at the nutrameter on the table, wondering if he should go ahead and give her the injection. The one thing stopping him was the realization that he knew nothing about her physiology. What if something in the nutrient didn’t agree with her system? He was a physicist, not a biologist. He had known enough about biochemistry to isolate, identify and remove the substance the government added to the injections to induce obedience in its people, but that was all. The nutrients themselves could be poisonous to her system.
There was no way around it. He would have to go out and get her some food.
Marina opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, no, not again,” she muttered testily. This was becoming a habit she would dearly have loved to break. Why couldn’t she have awakened at home in her own bed to find that this whole scenario was nothing more than a particularly nasty nightmare?
A slight sound interrupted her unhappy musings and she sat up, hunting for Monday. But he was nowhere in sight. Her jailer had neglected to turn on the energy field—or whatever he’d called it—and he’d left the room, except where she sat, in darkness.
Marina had no idea where the sounds she’d heard had originated, but all at once she was frightened. Yet she couldn’t work up enough nerve to cry out. She didn’t want to know any more about this bizarre place and its inhabitants than she already knew. She just wanted to go home.
The sound came again, closer this time. And she finally recognized it as a scraping noise, like metal against the walls or floor.
“Is someone there?” she asked haltingly. She was on her hands and knees, working her way to her feet, when something was shoved into sight on the floor. It looked like a hubcap turned upside down and filled with colored balls.
Inching closer, she realized the colored balls were actually a variety of fruits and vegetables. The metal object still resembled a hubcap, but the fruit looked real.
“Is that you?” she called softly. “Why are you sneaking around like this in the dark? I already know what you look like, so this isn’t going to help you when you’re caught—” She broke off, recalling the strange conversation they’d had earlier before she’d…passed out?
Pulling the hubcap quickly toward her, she sat down and crossed her legs. “Don’t think this is going to put you in my good books,” she warned, contemplating the array of fruit. “Just because you’ve decided to feed me,” she added, mouth watering, “won’t get you off when you’re arrested for kidnapping.”
She picked up in one hand one of the largest reddest apples she’d ever seen and in the other a tomato of the same size and beauty. Her mouth filled with saliva and her jaws ached as she tried to decide which one to eat first.
She had never seen fresh fruit or vegetables equal to these in any of the stores she’d frequented at home. Her stomach growled. She rubbed the apple against her blouse, preparing to take a bite, then hesitated. This was interesting fare from a man who said the people around here didn’t eat real food.
Monday stepped suddenly into view. “Where have you been?” she asked curiously. “Oh, well,” she said, shrugging, “I guess it doesn’t matter. See what our host has provided for our enjoyment?” She picked up a handful of acorns and placed them on the floor near the squirrel. “I think these were meant for you.”
Again she lifted the shiny apple to her lips and again she hesitated. Her ears detected another sound. She turned to see another object had appeared within the circle of light. This time it was a glass of water.
“I won’t ask you to join us,” Marina said with a hint of vexation, “since you seem determined to make this as impersonal a meal as possible. But nevertheless I do thank you for the food and drink.”
She listened hard, but got no reply, nor did she hear the patter of footsteps as her provider walked away. But then, she thought wryly, if this was indeed the age of time travel as he’d indicated earlier, he probably induced the food and water to appear on their own without human assistance.
She tasted the apple, closing her eyes and savoring its sweet juicy flavor. So much for a place with inhabitants that grew food they never intended to eat. As if she really be
lieved that. Why would they go to the trouble of producing something so delicious if they were simply going to let it rot on the tree?
On the other side of the laboratory wall, Sammell sat watching her small white teeth tear into the tender skin of the apple. He expected to feel repulsed by the sight. She did it with such primitive enthusiasm that down deep inside some small part of him did indeed respond with passion, but the sentiment was not recognizable as revulsion.
Juice ran down her chin, and Sammell watched the tip of a small pink tongue dart out to capture it. What she missed with her tongue, she used the back of one hand to wipe away. The small white teeth continued to bite and chew, bite and chew, and with every bite she took, something inside Sammell responded to the act. In no time at all only a narrow core remained of the apple. And the uneasiness without a name inside the man watching her had grown to uncomfortable proportions.
He’d thought it was her fragrance causing this disruptive feeling inside him. That’s why he’d decided to keep her at a distance. But now he realized it wasn’t only that. He was fully aware of her in every facet of his body. It seemed as though she touched him, despite their being on different sides of the same wall.
What was it about her that disturbed him so? The length and color of her hair? It was of a color and texture he’d never seen in his world, but he had tested its softness once. So why did he feel compelled to run his fingers through it each time she was near?
And her scent. It weakened him. It took away his will. Made him feel less a free man than the restrictions placed on him by his own government. Why was that? Would she reveal its secret to him if he asked?
There was of course the color of her eyes, but… Marina had picked up a tomato and taken a bite. Juice and seeds slid down her chin and again the pink tongue darted out to capture them and return them to the dark secret of her mouth.
Sammell’s palms itched. He stared at them, at the moisture collected on them, and felt again a strange tightness in his lower abdomen. He’d never felt like this before. With one hand clutched against his middle and the other clenched in a tight fist, he stared at the woman.
