Dark Rivers of the Heart

was coppery, and long morning shadows spilled westward across the badlands from every thrust of rock and impertinence of gnarled vegetation.
        His vision wasn't blurred. The sun no longer stung his eyes.
        Out at the edge of the shade that was provided by the tarp, Valerie sat on the ground, her back to him. She was bent to a task that he couldn't see.
        Rocky was sitting at Valerie's side, his back also to Spencer.
        An engine was idling. Spencer had the strength to lift his head and Turn toward the sound. The Range Rover. Behind him, deeper in the tarpcovered niche. An orange utility cord led from the open driver's door of the Rover to Valerie.
        Spencer felt dreadful, but he was grateful for the improvement in his condition since his most recent bout of consciousness. His skull no longer seemed about to explode; his headache was down to a dull thump over his right eye. Dry mouth. Chapped lips. But his throat wasn't hot and achy any more.
        The morning was genuinely warm. The heat wasn't from a fever, because his forehead felt cool. He threw back the blanket.
        He yawned, stretched-and groaned. His muscles ached, but after the battering he had taken, that was to be expected.
        Alerted by Spencer's groan, Rocky hurried to him. The mutt was grinning, trembling, whipping his tail from side to side, in a frenzy of delight to see his master awake.
        Spencer endured an enthusiastic face licking before he managed to get a grip on the dog's collar and hold him at tongue's length.
        Looking over her shoulder, Valerie said, "Good morning."
        She was as lovely in the earl sun as she had been in lamplight.
        He almost repeated that sentiment aloud but was disconcerted by a dim memory of having said too much already, when he had been out'of his head. He suspected himself not merely of having revealed secrets that he would rather have kept but of having been artlessly candid about his feelings for her, as ingenuous as an infatuated puppy.
        As he sat up, denying the dog another lick at his face, Spencer said,
        "No offense, pal, but you stink something fierce."
        He got to his knees, rose to his feet, and swayed for a moment.
        "Dizzy?" Valerie asked.
        "No. That's gone."
        "Good. I think you had a bad concussion. I'm no doctor-as you made clear. But I've got some reference books with me."
        "Just a little weak now. Hungry. Starving, in fact."
        "That's a good sign, I think."
        Now that Rocky was no longer in his face, Spencer realized that the dog didn't stink. He himself was the offending party: the wet-mud fragrance of the river, the sourness of several fever sweats.
        Valerie returned to her work.
        Being careful to stay upwind of her, and trying not to let the playful mutt trip him, Spencer shuffled to the edge of the shaded enclosure to see what the woman was doing.
        A computer sat on a black plastic mat on the ground. it wasn't a laptop but a full PC with a MasterPiece surge protector between the logic unit and the color monitor. The keyboard was on her lap.
        It was remarkable to see such an elaborate high-tech workstation plunked down in the middle of a primitive landscape that had remained largely unchanged for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.
        "How many megabytes?" he asked.
        "Not mega. Giga. Ten 'gabytes."
        "You need all that?"
        "Some of the programs I use are pretty damn complex. They fill up a lot of hard disk."
        The orange electrical cord from the Rover was plugged into the logic unit. Another orange cord led from the back of the logic unit to a peculiar device sitting in the sunlight ten feet beyond the shade line of their tarp-covered hideaway: It looked like an inverted Frisbee with a flared rather than inward-curling rim; underneath, at its center, it was fixed to a ball joint, which was in turn fixed to a four-inch flexible black metal arm, which disappeared into a gray box approximately a foot square and four inches deep.
        Busy at the keyboard, Valerie answered his question before he could ask it. "Satellite up -link."
        "You talking to aliens?" he asked, only half 'oking.
        "Right now, to the dee-oh-dee computer," she said, pausing to study the data that scrolled up the screen.
        "Dee-oh-dee?" he wondered.
        "Department of