They slept, woke toward dawn, made love, slept again.
In the morning, she said, “I know one thing for sure.”
“What's that?”
“We were meant to be married.”
“Definitely.”
“No matter what, fate would've run us headlong into each other sooner or later.”
That afternoon, as they strolled along the beach, Jenny thought the waves sounded like huge, rumbling wheels. The sound called to mind an old saying about the mill wheels of Heaven grinding slowly. The rumble of the waves enforced that image, and in her mind she could see immense stone mill wheels turning against each other.
She said, “You think it has a meaning, then? A purpose?”
He didn't have to ask what she meant. “Yes. Everything, every twist and turn of life. A meaning, a purpose.”
The sea foamed on the sand.
Jenny listened to the mill wheels and wondered what mysteries and miracles, what horrors and joys were being ground out at this very moment, to be served up in times to come.
A Note to the Reader
Like all the characters in this novel, Timothy Flyte is a fictional person, but many of the mass disappearances to which he refers are not merely figments of the author's imagination. They really happened. The disappearance of the Roanoke Island colony, the mysteriously deserted Eskimo village of Anjikuni, the vanished Mayan populations, the unexplained loss of thousands of Spanish soldiers in 1711, the equally mystifying loss of the Chinese battalions in 1939, and certain other cases mentioned in Phantoms are actually well-documented, historical events.
Likewise, there is a real Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty. In Phantoms, the details of his development of the first patented microorganism are drawn from public record. Dr. Chakrabarty's bacterium was, as stated in the book, too fragile to survive outside of the laboratory. Biosan-4, the trade name of a supposedly hardier strain of Chakrabarty's bug, is a fictional device; to the best of my knowledge, no effort has been made to refine and improve Dr. Chakrabarty's discovery, and it remains a laboratory oddity of note, primarily, because of its role in the precedent-setting Supreme Court decision.
And of course the ancient enemy is a product of the author's imagination. But what if…