Dinosaur Beach

18

“This time I won’t forget,” she whispered in my ear. In the dark; in the perfumed darkness…

“Don’t count on me to remind you,” I said.

“Did you—do you love her very much—your Lisa?”

“Very much.”

“How did you meet her?”

“In the Public Library. We were both looking for the same book.”

“And you found each other.”

“I thought it was an accident.” Or a miracle…

I’d only been on location for a few days, just long enough to settle into my role and discover how lonely life was back in that remote era; remote, but, for me, the present: the only reality. As was usual in a long cover assignment, my conditioning was designed to fit me completely to the environment: my identity as Jim Kelly, draftsman, occupied 99 percent of my self-identity concept. The other 1 percent, representing my awareness of my true function as a Nexx agent, was in abeyance: a faint, persistent awareness of a level of existence above the immediate details of life in ancient Buffalo; a hint of a shadowy role in great affairs.

I hadn’t known consciously, when I met Lisa, wooed and won her, that I was a transient in her time, a passer-through that dark and barbaric era. When I married her, it was with the intention of living out my life with her, for better or for worse, richer or poorer, until death did us part.

But we’d been parted by something more divisive than death. As the crisis approached, the knowledge of my real role came back to me a piece at a time, as needed. The confrontation with the Karg had completed the job.

“Perhaps it was an accident,” Mellia said. “Even if she was… me… she might have been there for another reason, having nothing to do with your job. She didn’t know…”

“You don’t have to defend her, Mellia. I don’t blame her for anything.”

“I wonder what she did… when you didn’t come back.”

“If I had, I wouldn’t have found her there. She’d have been gone, back to base, mission completed—”

“No! Loving you wasn’t any part of her mission; it couldn’t have been like that…”

“She was caught, just as I was. All in a good cause, no doubt. The giant brains at Central know best—”

“Hush,” she said softly, and put her lips against mine. She clung to me, holding me tight against her slim nakedness, lying in the dark…

“I’m jealous of her,” she whispered. “And yet— she’s me.”

“I want you, Mellia; every atom of me wants you. I just can’t help remembering.”

She made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “You’re making love to me—and thinking of her. You feel that you’re betraying her—with me—” She stopped to shush me as I started to speak.

“No—don’t try to explain, Ravel. You can’t change it—can’t help it. And you do want me… you want me… I know you want me…”

And this time as we rode the passionate crest, the world exploded and tumbled us together down a long, lightless corridor and left us in darkness and in silence.