“So now what?” Moreau asked.
Kazakhs squinted into the bright sunlight. The storm was disappearing in the void behind them. The ocean emerged in the void ahead.
“Rarotonga?” he said.
He looked out the side window at the battered swept-wing remnant of his old world. A gouged scar remained where the turmoil had torn away the engines, two of man’s useful tools. Next to the scar’s emptiness another of man’s tools, the sleek white missile he couldn’t shake, filled the vacuum. It held itself snug, a survivor like them.
“Bora Bora?”
The remaining engines held them precariously several hundred feet above the sea. He strained over the side, watching the past rush to the rear. He turned to look ahead at a horizon too low, the future unseen somewhere beyond its edge.
“Hiva Oa?”
He glanced at his watch. It read 2100 Zulu by a time that no longer had meaning. He ran his eyes across gauges and dials and switches that told him nothing.
“Papeete for the lady?”
“Kazaklis!”
“Two in a canoe?”
“Kazaklis!”
He squinted again into the sun, trying to relate it to the time he was abandoning and relate both to the gauges that had abandoned him. He knew only that they were somewhere near the equator and somewhere near the 180th meridian, the artificial line civilization used as its dateline, the artificial intersection man had marked as the very center of his earth. It was the place where yesterday became tomorrow and tomorrow became yesterday and today didn’t exist. As far as Kazaklis could see, nothing was there.
He reached for the first switch that had failed, as if something should change as they entered a new day. He flicked it aimlessly and felt a slight shudder. But the missile stayed with them.
So now what?
“I don’t know, Moreau.”
He reached toward Moreau’s thigh and took her hand instead. It shuddered but stayed with him, settling into his. Quietly they absorbed each other’s shuddering as they also absorbed the shuddering of the fragile craft that held them so precariously above the void.
“Welcome to tomorrow,” Kazaklis said.
Copyright
BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK
The author would like to thank the following for permission to reprint selections: Mayday Music/Benny Bird Music for excerpts from “American Pie” by Don McLean, copyright © 1971, all rights reserved. Colgems-EMI Music Inc. for the lyrics from “If’ by David Gates, copyright © 1971 by Colgems-EMI Music Inc., all rights reserved. Warner Bros. Music for lyrics from “Red Neckin’ Love Makin’ Night” by Troy Seals and Max D. Barnes, copyright © 1981 by Wamer-Tamerlane Publishing Corp., Face the Music, Blue Lake Music & Plum Creek.
PRINTING HISTORY
G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition/October 1983
Berkley edition/April 1985