Played right, the United States would be the victor no matter what happened. Hopefully, the situation would take care of itself, with a little guidance from the president.
Oh, what a night. Dan forced himself to sit up in bed, even though his head felt like a lead balloon. There was the stale smell of alcohol in his room. First things first. He had to pee. There was nothing more important than that because his penis was rock hard, and it wasn’t because he was excited. He stumbled into the bathroom and managed to bend far enough over to get it pointed down to hit the water. His mind went over the night, and he remembered beginning with dinner at a small restaurant, Sharon his only company.
Dinner had been nothing special. Dan wanted more than anything else to relax. He sucked down two beers before they ordered and three more during the dinner itself. Sharon drank an equal amount in wine. By the time dessert arrived, they were in a good stupor and sitting quite close to each other as they conversed in their intimate booth.
Conversation had been hard going until the booze kicked in. Then everything spilled out. Sharon asked questions about Dan’s life, and he responded by saying that he was basically happy but somewhat lonely. His job never allowed for very many good times, and he felt that it was improper to burden a woman with a commitment when he was hardly around. Sharon had even been so bold as to dig deeper into his personal life, and Dan had obliged.
She giggled as he let her know that more than once he’d gone to one of the local massage parlors and paid women for sexual favors. Those instances happened mostly when he was a junior in the company and working twenty hours at a stretch. Now in the day of AIDS, he frequented less often and always used a condom. In the end, Dan couldn’t believe that he was telling her this and even laughed at the fact.
Sharon had absorbed every word. She could see that Dan again trusted her. Such personal thoughts and actions she knew were only revealed to people who were considered friends. This made him more appealing. He was sharing secrets about his life, and she liked that. She even found many of the stories stimulating. Then Dan grinned and remarked that it was her turn to reveal everything. She gladly did.
She knew what he wanted to know. It was what every man wanted to know when they found out she was gay. Why? To Sharon, it had never really been anything physical. It was emotional. She had been raised in a strict Seventh Day Adventist home and never given a sex talk. At the age of twenty-one, her first real boyfriend had gotten too drunk to get an erection on the night she was to lose her virginity. Of course she blamed herself as being inadequate and inexperienced, and her self-confidence was destroyed from the beginning.
She finally did have sex, but the experiences were a debacle. Often she’d cry, and eventually she gave up trying at all. She found a sympathetic ear in a female friend, and after many long nights of trying to hash out the problems, they began experimenting with each other. The tenderness of the situation and the nurturing she found satisfying. Physically she was pleased because she had always been attracted to shapely bodies of both sexes. Women just seemed to be more tender emotionally, which translated into a healthy sexual relationship. But there was doubt in the back of her mind of what sex she’d finally found herself drawn to. Whenever she dreamed or envisioned herself with another in a passionate moment, it was always a man, not a woman. Perhaps now she was ready to cross back.
Dan listened as if the world was being revealed to him. Men don’t often get such detailed, credible information about things like this. He was astonished at how forthcoming Sharon had been about her lifestyle, and he did not press the issue. He sat in amazement as she went on. She spoke of being gay and the sex itself. She described in drunken detail about many a night decked out in leather and chains and the playful pleasures derived from that type of physical activity.
Then the evening became even more relaxed. They decided to be a couple of clowns and walk down to Dave and Buster’s and play video games. Most of the kids looked at them as if they were crazy as they drunkenly pumped quarters into an outdated pinball machine. Half the games they tilted, and the manager asked them to leave. Then it was on to a lounge where they sat at the bar and made bets on how many men would try to pick up Sharon. A dollar a man. Dan, being a member of the ever-scheming male gender, left the establishment with twenty dollars of Sharon’s money.
Dan shook himself off in front of the toilet and remembered that since he was too drunk to drive Sharon home, they had rationalized that they could drive to Dan’s house because it was close. That was stupid. He remembered that Sharon had passed out on the couch almost as soon as they had gotten in the door, and he had gone straight to bed. He hoped she wouldn’t be embarrassed.
The water heated up nicely, and Dan hadn’t been in the shower longer than a minute when he heard Sharon’s voice. “Dan?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go pee real bad.”
“Go ahead. I won’t look. Don’t flush the pot, though. I’ll get scalded.” He heard her giggle as the seat clinked against the tank.
“Did you have fun last night?” she asked.
“I haven’t partied like that in a long time.”
“I wanted to thank you for not taking advantage of me when I was drunk.”
“Ah, I was there to unwind. I had nothing else on my mind.”
The shower curtain parted, and a naked Sharon Dailey stepped in to join him. He was startled and somewhat shocked. “Hungover?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said cautiously.
“I know the best cure for a hangover.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Like I said, I wanted to thank you.” She pressed her body hard against his and her lips to his mouth. It was exactly like the dream she had been having.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Big Bang Theory
The War Eagle passed the point where they had last recorded the Saratov.
Josh sat in the RRCC fiddling with ODIS’s orbit, trying to figure some way to increase the capability of the thermal scan. McLeary had been helping. He had gone to the ship’s digital library and pulled data on the French SPOT satellite. That satellite was nowhere near the sophistication of ODIS, but he hoped he could find something that might be helpful on the transmitter arrays. He found nothing of any significance. “Hey. This says there’s a picture of Noah’s ark in here.” McLeary pointed to a black-and-white picture of what amounted to small squares. To the untrained eye, the ark was not visible and eluded the ensign. “I don’t know what they were thinking when they took this. I couldn’t find a boat on this picture if you paid me.”
“SPOT is shit,” said Josh. “Those French bastards are kidding themselves if that’s the best they can do.” He dropped ODIS’s screen to black and went into the computer files. “If you want to see Noah’s ark, ask me. I’ve seen it a couple of times over the years. Sections of it become visible on Ararat, mostly between July and September.” The screen came up with the picture of Mount Ararat in Hungary. Using the pointer, Josh clicked on the picture several times, increasing the resolution. On a small glacier, a square wooden object began to appear. Josh zoomed in so far that the planking on the top of a large wood corner was clearly visible. “I took these years ago before we really nailed the resolutions in the pictures we get today; but it’s still pretty good. Any closer and the screen begins to distort.”