Nonsingular vacuum cosmologies with a variable cosmological term

We obtain a global existence result for the Einstein equations. We show that in the maximal Cauchy development of vacuum T2 symmetric initial data with nonvanishing twist constant, except for the special case of flat Kasner initial data, the area of the T2 group orbits takes on all positive values. This result shows that the areal time coordinate R which covers these spacetimes runs from zero to infinity, with the singularity occurring at R = 0.