Page 53 of The Space Traveller's Lover
“You’re sweating,” Rothwen whispers in her ear as he pulls off her tunic and the straps wrapped around her body.
He caresses her wet naked skin with his bare hands, his fingertips drawing glowing lines as they slide up and down in swirls while his eyes follow her soft curves in an ecstatic gaze. Then he pushes her into the deep pool.
She plunges through the swathes of bursting bubbles, relishing in their airy fizzle refreshing her skin, but she can’t wait to reach out for the surface. As she swims up, a fast-moving jet of whirling foam thunders past her and then lifts her out of the water. Rothwen is holding her tightly against his muscled chest while smiling at her mischievously. She reprimands him with a sultry look.
“Do you feel dizzy now?” he asks teasingly.
“More than dizzy. I feel … lost …” She sighs, melting her lips into his while opening up his vest and sliding it down his broad shoulders.
They disconnect entirely from the brain network to be with each other, alone, together. As they succumb to their enthralling passion, feeling every cell in their bodies intertwine, their thoughts about future obstacles fade into nothing. Now they know, this final transition was the inevitable step to bring them closer than ever before.
PARTIV
CHAPTER 22
THE DAY BEFORE
THE FIRST MEETING
Oh yes, sir, I must be present at this meeting!
As dawn breaks, the last onlookers have finally started to move away from the farm fields after repeated calls by the police to clear the area. A murmur of protest and confusion spreads throughout the crowd as they gather and cross the surrounding waterlogged moat in the amphibious rescue boats.
An ARA search team, led by Air Marshal John Sanders, has flown in on helicopters and has set up its survey equipment in front of the farmhouse. They have sent in three remote-controlled rescue robots, equipped with high-definition cameras and contamination detection instruments. The robots advance, their tank-like wheels rolling onto every corner, photographing all areas and checking for booby traps, harmful chemicals, or radiation. Their telescopic arms pick up any item, however small, and insert them into the leakproof leaden boxes fitted on their tops.
As one robot reaches Erin’s room, its cameras transmit the image of a broad light beam coming from the top of her bed. Sanders instinctively sends the command to halt the robot and to sweep the entire room with its cameras. Like packed collimated torches, a bright multi-shafted light column emanates from a slimline one-metre-high glass pyramid standing on the bed. The brilliant light shafts hit a central point on the ceiling and then spread from there in concentric waves, shining in all the rainbow colours. The expanding waves spread from the top centre point, down thewalls, and over the floor and then crawl back up over themselves, dazzling with their pulsating interference patterns.
Professor Khan carefully inspects the fast-changing light display on his handheld pad. He is standing outside the farm gates with Sanders, Walker, and Sam, who sternly refused to return home with his family, insisting he could help.
Sam tries to get his head in front of Khan’s, and as he glimpses the images, he yells in excitement, “The bright light column!” Sam points at the collimated light shafts.
“Have you seen it before?” Khan asks in a dismissive tone.
“It is not harmful, by the way,” Sam quips.
“How do you know?” Walker asks sarcastically.
“I touched it. I went into it—the night she came into my cell.”
“Go on,” Walker orders Sam with an even deeper cynical tone.
“The night she came into my cell—before the hearing—images came out of thin air from within the light field, above the ground. They looked so real, like live holograms.”
“Images of what?”
“Their cities, their world, their planet.”
“What about this glass pyramid that seems to be creating the light column?” Khan asks.
Sam thinks hard, trying to remember if he ever saw any pyramid at that time.
“She didn’t have anything like that when she showed me the light column.” He ponders.
“Oh, this is nuts!” Walker sneers.
“I think … I think it must be another one of her gadgets,” Sam suggests.
Finally, as the bright reflections start to subside, Professor Khan can carefully inspect the glistening surface of the mysterious pyramid-shaped object coming into focus in his handheld pad. But he has no idea what it could be made of.
