something wrong with the air conditioner in here, that was why he’d been in the bedroom in the middle of the day. Even the broad-leafed fern in the corner was limp, yielding to the force of the claustrophobic heat. Jeff pulled open the door just as the bell began its urgent chime once more. Linda stood there, smiling, the golden streaks in her waves of russet hair highlighted by the sun behind her. His wife, once-wife, his wife-not-yet: Linda, beaming with the undisguised extravagance of her fresh-born love for him, and in her outstretched hand a bunch of daisies. All the daisies in the world, it seemed, and on that sweetly unforgotten face shone all the ardent bliss and generosity of youth.
Jeff felt his eyes brim with tears, but he couldn’t look away from her, couldn’t even bring himself to blink for fear of losing one precious instant of this vision that had lived in his memory for so many decades and now stood recreated in all its loving radiance before him. So long, it had been so goddamned long …
'Aren’t you gonna ask me in?' she asked, her girlish voice at once coy and inviting.
'Ahh … sure. Yes, I’m sorry, come on in. This is … wonderful. The flowers are great. Thank you. So unexpected.'
'Have you got something to put them in? God, it’s hotter in here than it is outside!'
'The air conditioner’s broken, I—Just a minute, let me see if I can find something for the flowers.' He glanced distractedly around the room, trying to remember if he’d owned a vase. 'Maybe in the kitchen?' Linda said helpfully. 'Yeah, that’s a good idea, let me just check in there. You want a beer, a Coke?'
'Some ice water would be fine.' She followed him to the cramped little kitchen, dug out a vase for the daisies as he poured her a tall glass of water from a pitcher he found in the refrigerator. 'Thanks,' she said, fanning herself with her open hand as Jeff took the flowers. 'Could we open some windows or something?'
'The air conditioner’s working fine in my room; why don’t we go in there?'
'O.K. Better put the flowers in there, too. They’ll wilt in this heat.'
In the bedroom he set the daisies on a nightstand, watched her pirouette before the vents of the air conditioner, her bare skin in the backless sundress gleaming with jewels of perspiration. 'Oooh, this feels nice!' she said, raising her slim arms above her head, her small, firm breasts rising beneath the thin white dress as she did so.
They’d done exactly this before, Jeff recalled: found the vase for the flowers, come into his room to stay cool, she’d twirled and posed in just that way … how long ago? Lifetimes gone, worlds past.
Her wide brown eyes, the liquid warmth in them as she looked at him: Jesus, no one had looked at him that way for years. Pamela had secluded herself on the top floor of the government house in Maryland as she’d threatened, had coolly averted her gaze from him on the rare occasions when she’d joined the rest of them for dinner. The eyes Jeff best remembered from the past nine years were the dangerous blue orbs of Russell Hedges, staring at him with increasing malice as the world slid into its hellish morass of terrorist attacks and border skirmishes and U.S.-Soviet confrontations of which Jeff knew nothing, could predict nothing.
What would become of that drastically altered world now, Jeff wondered, if it continued on its own divergent time line, followed the course he and Pamela had, with all good intentions, inadvertently set for it? A state of martial law had existed in the United States for three years already, in the aftermath of the November Squad’s destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the massacre at the United Nations Building. The 1988 presidential election had been indefinitely postponed because of the newly imposed restrictions on large public gatherings, and the heads of the three major intelligence agencies were effectively in control of the country 'for the duration of the emergency.'
It had seemed likely that a fascist American state was in the making, which of course had been the goal of the international terrorist underground from the beginning. Its members had wanted nothing more than to bring on a genuinely oppressive regime in the United States, one that even ordinary citizens might consider fighting to overthrow. Unless, of course, the militantly anticommunist CIA/NSA/FBI troika that ran the interim government first decided to bring on the worldwide nuclear conflict that had been threatening to erupt since the late seventies.
Linda stood with her naked silken back against the cool rush of air, her eyes closed and one hand holding her hair high on her head to expose her slender neck to the soothing flow. The shafts of light from the blinds showed the stretch of her dancer’s legs through the sun-sheer white dress.
Pamela had been right to turn on him, Jeff thought with anguish; right to denounce them both for what they’d set in motion, however unwittingly or altruistically. In making themselves known to the world and in dealing with the government in exchange for the paltry information they had received, they had sown the seeds of a vicious whirlwind that some other world must now reap. It remained to be seen whether she—or either of them, for that matter—would ever be able to forgive themselves for the brutal global violence they had wrought in the name of benevolence and understanding … And it would be years, perhaps a decade or more, before he would even have the opportunity to try to talk to her again, to attempt some reconciliation of their personal estrangement and to come to terms with the tragic totality of their failure to improve mankind’s lot. That world was lost, as surely as Pamela was now lost to him for unknown years to come, perhaps forever.
'Tickle me,' Linda said in her sweet, clear voice, and for a moment Jeff didn’t know what she meant. Then he remembered the delicate touch she once had relished, the slow, gentle trailing of his fingertips across her skin, so lightly it was almost not a touch at all. He took a daisy from the bunch that she had given him, used its feathery petals to trace an imaginary line from her ear along her neck and shoulder, down her right arm, and then back up her left.
'Ooh, so good,' she whispered. 'Here, do it here.' She loosened the thin shoulder straps of her dress, let it fall away from her youthful breasts. Jeff caressed her with the flower, bent to kiss each nipple as it came erect. 'Oh, I love that.' Linda sighed. 'I love you!'
And on this perfect, twice-lived day he took his needed solace in the unquestioning passion and affection of this woman with whom those feelings had been so long denied. In her love for him, his refound love for her, he lived again.
The citrine streaks in Linda’s hair had been lightened to an even paler yellow by the days in the Moroccan sun, making it seem as if her hair were reflecting the imagined light from the great gold sunburst tapestry behind the lengthy bar. She clutched at the bar’s railing, laughing, as the ship rolled gently in the North Atlantic swells. Her gin and tonic began to slide across the tilting oaken surface, and she caught it with a deft move, the ice in the glass tinkling with her laughter.
'Encore, madame?' the bartender asked.
Linda turned to Jeff. 'Do you want another drink?'
He shook his head, finished his Jack Daniel’s and soda. 'Why don’t we take a walk out on the deck? It’s a warm night; I’d like to look at the ocean.' He signed the bar tab with their cabin number, handed it to the bartender. 'Merci, Raymond; a demain.'
'A demain, monsieur; merci.'
Jeff took Linda’s arm, and they walked through the slightly swaying Riviera Bar and out onto the Veranda Deck. The striking red-and-black smokestacks of the S.S. France jutted above them into the night sky, their sleek horizontal fins like the immobile flippers of two gigantic whales frozen in mid-leap. The great ship rose into an oncoming swell, dipped smoothly into the trough between the immense but steady waves. The stars above were unobscured by clouds, but far to the south a line of thunderheads lit the horizon with constant bursts of lightning. The storm was moving this way, though at thirty knots they’d be clear of the tempest before its violent winds and pelting rain reached this stretch of ocean.
Heyerdahl, Jeff thought, wouldn’t have the luxury of escaping such a random fury; he’d see the coming storm with different eyes, wary and concerned at the tiller of his little papyrus boat, so far from land. It was just such a storm that had stopped him last year, forced him to abandon his damaged craft in heavy seas, six hundred miles short of his goal.
'Do you really think he’ll make it this time?' Linda asked, staring at the jaggedly illumined clouds in the distance. She’d been thinking the same thing, wondering about the fate of the affable bearded Norwegian with whom they’d shared the labors and accomplishments of the past three weeks in the ancient
