“Not hungry?”

She shook her head again, more firmly this time. With a shrug, Cal plucked a fork from a drawer and dug in.

“I know how you feel.”

“No, you don’t.” She took his advice, belatedly, and sucked in three long breaths. “You’re not sitting in what looks like a spaceship having a conversation with a man who claims to be from the twenty-third century.”

“No, but I’m sitting in my ship talking to a woman who’s a couple of centuries older than I am.”

She blinked at that, then found laughter—only slightly hysterical—bubbling out. “This is ludicrous.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I’m not saying I believe it.”

“Give it time.”

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

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.