The Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel was still a royal pain to get through. Not even the newly inaugurated air-cushion ferry had helped much; people still wanted the sensation of being in control of their own cars, however spurious that sensation was when stuck in endless traffic jams.
Derek knew this full well, and he'd briefly considered trying to hop a commuter flight from Washington Dulles airport. But in the end he didn't regret his decision to rent a car instead—not when he finally emerged from the tunnel into the sunlight at the tip of Willoughby Spit, with Norfolk Naval Base spread out before him and the big carriers tied up at Sewell's Point across the water. He took a deep breath of salt air and knew he was home.
The traffic got no easier as he proceeded. His grandfather, whose adolescence belonged to the near-mythic 1960s, claimed to remember a time when Norfolk and Virginia Beach had been distinct cities, with only innocent-seeming tendrils of sprawl beginning to creep into the countryside between them like the first shoots of some poisonous plant. Derek was skeptical. Was it really possible that everything from Hampton Roads to the Atlantic had gotten paved over in less than half a century? Glenn Secrest had chuckled at the question, and reinforced his grandson's skepticism by asserting that it had taken a good deal less time than that.
The driving got less frenetic after he turned off the main arteries onto Princess Anne Road. By the time he worked his way around to the south of Oceana NAS and caught Sandbridge Road, he was in country that came as close to rural-looking as it got around here any more. He could occasionally take his eyes away from the traffic and cast wistful glances at the F-39s wheeling overhead.
Sheer inaccessibility save by secondary and tertiary roads was probably what had kept Sandbridge so very nearly unchanged. That, and the residents' determination to keep it that way. They hadn't altogether succeeded, of course. But as Derek turned onto Sandfiddler Road and proceeded past the beach houses, it was like driving backwards in time.
Those houses tended to be in remarkably good condition considering their age and the difficulty of keeping them up in the teeth of everything the Atlantic could throw at them. But people who wanted to live here at all were prepared to make the effort. The house that was Derek's destination was typical, built of sun-bleached timber in a low rambling style, with a cathedral-ceilinged great room opening through sliding glass doors onto a V-shaped deck that jutted out over the dunes.
As Derek turned into the graveled driveway, his grandfather emerged, waving. After initial greetings and the removal of Derek's limited luggage to his old room, Glenn Secrest announced that the sun was over the yardarm. They adjourned to the deck, where Derek stood at the rail for a moment and scanned the panorama of beach: sea oats waving in the late afternoon breeze, occasional dilapidated remnants of fencing, the tide ebbing to reveal the flats.
His grandfather emerged with bourbon. They sat down and yielded to the illusion that the deck was that of a ship, with only the ocean horizon showing beyond the bow. The sky began to darken a bit, and Derek's feeling of homecoming deepened. In all his time in the Florida panhandle, he'd never adjusted to the sun setting into the sea. Unnatural.
Glenn Secrest sighed. "It's a sure sign of old age," he philosophized, "when your grandson can drink with you legally!"
Derek snorted, disinclined to fulsome sympathy. At sixty-nine, his grandfather was in even better condition for his age than was the house: tall, erect and active, with hair that was still offensively thick. (Derek had already detected, under bright direct lighting, the first slight but undeniable thinning at the upper corners of his own temples, and had felt an icicle stab through his gut.) Save for a lightening of that hair's shade of gray against his darkly weathered skin, Glenn seemed practically unchanged since the day a certain orphaned thirteen-year-old had arrived at what was to be his new home.
"You'll probably last long enough to be a bad influence on your great-grandchildren," Derek predicted, sinking deeper into his deck chair and letting the ocean breeze wash over him. "Hey, listen, I'm sorry I couldn't give you any more notice."
"Forget it. This visit is like a bonus. I wasn't expecting to see you until I flew down to Pensacola."
"For my commissioning ceremony," Derek added, avoiding his grandfather's eye.
The older man noted, but did not comment on, the undertone of bitterness. He spoke in a carefully neutral tone. "I must admit I was surprised at where you said you were calling from. What were you doing up there in northern Virginia? You mentioned something about tests."
"I'm not supposed to talk about it."
"Oh. Classified, is it?"
"Top secret." Derek instantly wondered if he should have said even that much.
Glenn raised his eyebrows, and stroked his gray mustache reflectively. "Well, then, I won't try to pump you. But just for purposes of airline reservations, how does this affect—?"
"I'll have to join another class after I get back to Pensacola. I can't give you an exact date." The mention of airline tickets brought Derek to a sudden realization, and intensified his misery. "Oh Christ, Granddad, it must be too late to cancel your reservation! I'm sorry."
"Again, forget it. I'll just deduct it from your inheritance. Seriously, what the hell use have I got for money anymore? But that's not really what's bothering you, is it?"
"Well . . . I'd sort of hoped that the next time you saw me, I'd be getting my commission." Derek avoided his grandfather's eyes, staring fixedly out to sea.
Glenn Secrest gave an unseen smile. "I know you did. I also know what you've been through down there. I went through it myself, a long time ago, and I understand they've somehow managed to buck the trend and avoid watering it down too much. Believe me, Derek, I'm already so proud of you I can barely see straight. So what if some boondoggle causes you to miss graduating with your class? Believe me, nobody in the fleet is ever going to give a damn about it. And I don't give a damn about it, for whatever that's worth."
"Actually, Granddad, it's worth quite a lot." The winter that had settled over Derek's soul melted in a smile, and they clinked glasses.
"Of course," Glenn resumed with a nonchalance that might have fooled some people, "I must admit you've piqued my curiosity. Blame it on my background—"
"About which I've never been entirely clear," Derek interjected pointedly. He knew his grandfather had gone through Pensacola four and a half decades ago, but in the Intelligence offshoot of the flight officer pipeline. After that . . . Well, one wall of the study—the "I-love-me wall" as Glenn called it—held the plaque and group pictures of a squadron to which he'd been assigned at the tail end of the Vietnam war. But after that he'd somehow departed from the conventional career track, never having served as Intelligence officer for an air wing, much less a carrier. What had he spent his time doing? He'd always been a master at smoothly deflecting questions about it.
He displayed that same mastery now, letting Derek's interjection slide away into oblivion as though it had never been uttered. "I know you can't tell me any actual facts. But guesswork, speculation and scuttlebutt have never been classified and never will be. Have you heard any of those? Or generated any yourself?"
Derek considered. The ban of secrecy, as he understood it, applied only to what had happened in the nameless installation just outside the Washington beltway. He recalled the connection Lieutenant Rinnard had drawn with some of the odder elements of the physical he'd undergone as a poopie. Nobody had said anything about that being classified.
"Well, I don't know if it means anything, but some of us were wondering about the stuff that got done to us in connection with our induction at Pensacola—and, apparently, to other people as well." He described it, appeasing his conscience by sticking to generalizations.
As he spoke, his grandfather's reactions were interesting to observe. First came a flash of startlement that would have been imperceptible to anyone who didn't know the old man very well indeed. Then, after the merest shutter-click of time, the bogus blandness was back in place, possibly even more bogus—at least to someone with years of experience at looking for the signs.
"Well," Glenn finally chuckled, "that's something new—especially that helmet you said they put over your head. In my day, the worst part of the physical involved the other end! But now it's time to get started on dinner. I was deep-sea fishing off Hatteras earlier this month, and I've got some tuna salted away. Come on inside. I can use all the unskilled kitchen help I can get."
The last days of the perfect spring fled past, like a final afterglow of Derek's youth.
He felt oddly at peace, for he implicitly believed what he'd been told: the Navy had his immediate future mapped out for him, and would tell him the details in its own good time. His life would resume its expected course after an annoying but not catastrophic postponement.
So he helped his grandfather around the house, rode the waves on the somewhat elderly but still functional Chris-Craft moored at Rudee Inlet, paid ritual visits to some of the old night spots, looked up some of the relatively few old friends still in the area . . .
And, most of all, he took long walks on the beach.
He'd always enjoyed that. But now it held an added element, something resembling urgency, for this would be his last opportunity for he knew not how long—his last opportunity, indeed, before his life changed in many ways. Besides, it gave him a chance to sift over the things that still puzzled him about what had passed in northern Virginia.
His grandfather's house was well situated for such solitary walks—uniquely so, near the southern end of Sandbridge itself but north of Sandbridge Beach with its limited and inoffensive commercial development. At low tide, one could walk out onto the sandbars and, gazing north into the hazy distance past the Atlantic Fleet Combat Training Center, glimpse the towers of the Virginia Beach resort strip—the southern end of the nearly unbroken battlement of high-rises that the Tidewater area presented to the sea. Here, there was nothing behind the dunes and the occasional beach house save the marshes fringing Lake Tecumseh and the northern reaches of Back Bay.
On a certain breezy day, though, Derek found himself wanting more solitude than even that familiar stretch of beach afforded. So he drove south through Sandbridge Beach to the Little Island recreation area.
There were surprisingly few people about. Soon Derek was alone with the sea-birds and a group of dolphins in the middle distance. He smiled as he observed those cavorting cetaceans—the smile that the sight of them always seemed to awake in his species. It was as though he had passed backward in time to an age when all the Atlantic seaboard was like this. For an instant, he allowed himself to imagine that if he stared at the eastern horizon intensely enough he would spot the topsail of the very first English ship to raise this coast.
Then, even as he stared at it, the horizon began to waver. . . .
Derek blinked, and felt his skin prickle with something he didn't yet recognize as fear. He became aware that the wavering was really between him and the horizon—only a short distance offshore, he knew without really knowing how he knew. And it was confined to a circular area, no more than a few yards in diameter if his estimate of the distance to it was correct.
Some kind of heat inversion, Derek told himself.
But then the circle somehow solidified, and behind it the ocean and the sky dissolved into—what?
There is a single, tiny corner of the mind that insists on calling up trivial bits of useless knowledge at the most inappropriate moments. Standing rooted to the sand, suspended in unreality, Derek found himself taking refuge in that corner. And he recalled having read, God knew when or where, that when Magellan's ships had first appeared off Patagonia, the local Indians couldn't see them. Not because there had been anything wrong with their eyes, but because their minds had been unable to process what their eyes were reporting. Their Stone Age reality-structure had simply not included anything like those ships.
Derek wondered if that was why he couldn't comprehend what he was seeing through that circle.
All at once, the solidifying process came to abrupt completion—and an explosion of light swept out from the circle's rim. It was a silent explosion; but in place of sound came something worse than a thunderclap, on a level and of a nature for which Derek's native language had no words. It battered not his eardrums but the inside of his brain. He staggered backwards, dazzled and stunned.
Then the light died away, leaving only a glow. As Derek watched, blinking away the cartwheeling galaxies of stars that filled his eyes, a black silhouette appeared against that glow: a female figure running toward him with long hair flying.
With a final leap, the figure came through the circle like a dolphin soaring through a hoop. She landed with a mundane splash in the shallows, and collapsed to her hands and knees.
Other running silhouettes appeared behind her in the strange, perspective-defying depths of the circle.
With obvious effort, she heaved herself partially erect and turned back to face her pursuers, as Derek somehow knew them to be. Her body seemed to convulse with some terrible effort, although she took no apparent action.
Derek's paralysis shattered. Plenty of time later to worry about his sanity. At this instant, all that mattered was coming to the woman's aid. He sprang toward her, splashing through the waves.
There was another outflowing of light from around the circle's circumference. Once again, something that was not sound sent Derek reeling back. This time he lost his balance and fell backwards into the surf.
As he was falling, the circle vanished, along with the figures that hadn't quite made it through.
All was as it had been before, with the addition of the woman—the only concrete evidence that it had all really happened. She sagged down into the water and lay there, motionless, the surf washing through her long, streaming dark tresses.
Derek stumbled to his feet and splashed the rest of the way to her side. He knelt beside her and turned her face-upward lest she drown in a few inches of water.
She was wearing nondescript clothes—jeans, sneakers and a checked shirt—but Derek noticed nothing of that. All he saw was her face. It was a face he'd seen before, just once. Her eyes flickered open. They were a luminous light gray, as he'd known they would be.
Her mouth opened, but speech seemed to require an effort presently beyond her. Whatever she'd just been through must have exhausted her beyond common conception.
"No hospitals," she finally managed to breathe.
Derek blinked. Was she in trouble with the law or something? "I know you—or at least I've seen you. What . . . what . . . ?" He found he couldn't even frame a coherent question about what had just happened, or seemed to happen, on this lonely stretch of coast. "Who are you?" he finally settled for asking.
Incongruously, her lips trembled into the ghost of an amused smile. "Sophia," she whispered. On that less-than-informative note, she lost consciousness again.
For a few moments, Derek knelt in a limbo of futile indecision, looking up and down the beach for someone he could ask for help. Then he pulled himself together. He slid one arm under her back and another under her knees, and picked her up—not without difficulty, for she was not a small woman and she'd gone unhelpfully limp. Carefully keeping his footing in the surf, he carried her toward the beach and his car.
"Who is she?" asked Glenn Secrest as he helped maneuver the unconscious woman inside.
"Says her name's Sophia," gasped the exhausted Derek. "That's all I know—except that I saw her last week, up in northern Virginia."
"So what's she doing here?"
"I don't know. It's . . . well, it's kind of a strange story."
Glenn lifted an eyebrow, but didn't pursue the matter. "I guess we'd better call the rescue squad."
"No!" Derek surprised himself with his vehemence. "She said she didn't want to go to a hospital."
"Why not?"
"I don't know, I tell you!" Derek took a deep breath and lowered his voice. "Look, can't she just stay here for a little while?"
"Hmm . . . Listen, Derek, if the police are after her—"
"I don't think that's it. But she's in some kind of trouble—a kind I don't understand." Derek drew another breath. "Please, Granddad?"
Glenn sighed. "You owe me an explanation of what you do know, and how you happened to show up with her. But in the meantime, the first thing we need to do is get her out of these wet clothes and into bed." The sight of Derek's expression brought another sigh, this time one of exasperation. "Come on and lend a hand! I doubt if you'll be seeing anything you haven't already seen."
"Of course not!" Derek declared with the indignation of the post-adolescent male.
There were no women's clothes in the house—Derek's grandmother had died while he'd been in college. But they wrapped the gray-eyed mystery woman in a bathrobe and put her in the guest bed. Glenn examined her with what he cheerfully admitted were long-rusted first aid skills.
"Well," was his verdict, "she doesn't seem to be suffering from anything more than really extreme exhaustion. Let's just let her sleep—best thing for her. You, on the other hand, look like you could use a drink."
Glenn started a fire, partly because the evening was turning unseasonably chilly but mostly as an excuse for giving Derek time to collect his thoughts. Then they settled into the great room's leather-upholstered chairs and sipped their drinks in silence.
"Well?" Glenn finally inquired.
Derek took a fortifying pull on his bourbon. "As I told you, I saw her up in northern Virginia, apparently involved in the same stuff I was going through. We never spoke. But she seemed to know me. And . . . I haven't been able to forget her."
"Isn't she a little old for you?" Glenn inquired with a twinkle. "But on second thought, maybe she's not. It's hard to tell just how old or how young she really is. Funny."
"Yeah," said Derek shortly. Women were a mildly sore subject. Jane Craddock had proven unreasonable about his upcoming months-long absence at Pensacola, to be followed by even longer overseas deployments, and since the breakup he'd been unattached. He dragged his mind back to the task of explaining himself in a way that didn't cause his grandfather to have him committed to the rubber room.
As matter-of-factly as possible, he recounted what had happened earlier that afternoon. "And before you even ask," he concluded hastily, "the answer is: no, I am not on any kind of drugs!"
"Actually, I wasn't going to ask," his grandfather said mildly. "I don't believe I need to, in your case."
"Thanks, Granddad," said Derek, ashamed of himself for his defensiveness. But then the unpleasant alternative occurred to him "So do you think I'm crazy?"
"Of course—but no more so than is to be expected at your age."
"Be serious, Granddad! I know, with absolute certainty, that I saw what I've just described to you. But it makes no sense! What conclusion can I draw from that?"
"Well," his grandfather said judiciously, "nobody can say that the whole thing was purely a figment of your imagination. The lady giving out ladylike snores in my guestroom is proof that something happened. But it's hard to know what to make of her. I went through her pockets after we undressed her—hey, I never claimed to be a gentleman—and there was no ID in them. We'll have to wait until she wakes up to find out who she is. Maybe she can shed some light on what you saw." (Not, Derek noted gratefully, "what you claim you saw.") "In the meantime, though, I can't help wondering if there's some connection with whatever super-secret stuff you—and, according to you, she—were involved in. It reminds me of—" Abruptly, and without his usual smoothness, Glenn clamped an iron gate down over his past.
This time, however, Derek was resolved not to let him off the hook. "Granddad, what did you do in the Navy that I don't know about? And . . . did it have anything to do with what happened to Mom and Dad?"
For the first time in Derek's memory, Glenn Secrest looked every day of his age. "Derek, let me take that second question first. As you know, I'm not a conventionally religious man. But I swear by everything that is—if you insist on the word—holy to me that your parents died just as you've always been told they did, in a tragic but perfectly normal auto accident. You must believe that."
"I do, sir," said Derek in a small voice.
"And as for your first question . . . You're a smart boy, and you've probably noticed that what you told me about what you've recently experienced struck a chord in my memory. A long time ago, when I wasn't too much older than you are now—" Glenn shook his head. "No. I can't talk about it, even now—any more than you can talk about what happened to you last week. And I don't even know, really, if there's a connection. I will say two things, though. First, the technology seems to have gotten more sophisticated since then, judging from what you did tell me. And second . . ." He gave his grandson a long look. "There's an old saying that inherited traits tend to skip a generation."
Derek blinked. Was the old guy finally entering his dotage? He tried to drag the conversation back to something relevant. "Aside from what I said earlier about drugs . . . Well, I can't help wondering. I did get a lot of them last week. Could there, well, be some kind of delayed reaction?"
"You may find out soon."
"Huh?"
"In all the excitement, I forgot to tell you. While you were out, I got a call for you—a Captain Morrisey. He's coming here tomorrow to see you, on official Navy business. He's also bringing a civilian named Doctor Kronenberg. He indicated that you've already met her."