Apocalypse Unborn (22 page)

Doc Tanner fought his way up a curving, narrow passage. While the steeply angled floor had substance—it looked like black marble—the walls and ceiling did not. They were smoke, impenetrable gray smoke that churned around and under the free-floating platform. It was like being inside the belly of a tornado. He touched the wall with his hand and the smoke swallowed it up. Though the air appeared to be moving in a clockwise swirl, he could feel no wind.

Above him was the strange passage’s end. A single floor-mounted spotlight shone on a wooden door thickly painted apple-green. As he continued to climb toward that goal, the effort caused his legs and solar plexus to ache. Ignoring the pain, he put one unsteady foot in front of another.

When Doc reached the barrier, he turned the knob. The door slammed back on its hinges from a powerful suction, sending him skidding in reverse. He had to drop to his knees and put his hands flat on the marble to keep from losing all the ground he had gained. The wind through the doorway was blowing directly into his face, and it was so strong that it was difficult to breathe, so strong that he had to lean forward and drive with his legs to hold his own against it.

As he hung on there, things began blowing past him, swept downward by the rush of air.

Maple leaves in fall colors, red, gold, orange.

Shreds of paper.

Browned rose petals.

Dead birds, sparrows and robins somersaulted limp winged around his ears.

Dropping lower to his belly, he crawled forward, pulling himself to the door jamb. When he reached over the jamb, he could no longer feel the floor. It ended on his side of the jamb.

Before him, beyond the reach of the spotlight was pitch darkness. After a moment a pinpoint of brightness appeared in the center of the black, growing wider and wider, like the iris of a great eye opening.

Doc choked on a flood of tears, certain that he was looking at the backside of very same oculus that his daughter Rachel had glimpsed November of 1896, glimpsed more than once and could not forget. How it had frightened her. An eye hanging in space. God’s eye, she had called it.

At the time Doc had been very concerned by the girl’s reports. He had enough medical knowledge to realize that hallucinations were not always the result of an overactive, childish imagination. They could also caused by tumors of the brain or poisons in the environment. He had no way of knowing that what Rachel had witnessed were tests of the time-trawl machinery from the distant future, a maw opening and closing.

Through the iris he could see bright gray, but it wasn’t fog and it wasn’t smoke. It didn’t drip like a mist; it had no moisture to it. It didn’t burn his nose and eyes; it held no choking ash. When he turned his head, the blur of gray moved with it. It seemed to be something internal, like his own vision was failing, clouding over with cataracts.

More stuff was sucked or driven past him.

A St. Charles spaniel with leash.

A lady’s hat, widebrimmed with gray and white feathers. With a start, he recognized it as Emily’s.

Then came an open parasol.

A wicker baby carriage tumbled sideways over his back, followed by the spilled contents of a trash can: wads of greasy newspaper, half-rotted vegetable matter, empty tin cans, broken bottles, beef soup bones. All of it rattled past him.

Then something much larger shot by. Though he saw it only for a fraction of second, the image stuck in his consciousness. It was the image of himself sucked headlong down the churning tunnel. He saw the terror and disbelief in his own eyes, the long frock coat with small gold buttons, the diamond stick pin in his cravat. The hair not yet streaked with gray.

Gone.

To a future that didn’t want him.

To a landscape of pain and regret.

A moment or two later, the wind currents changed, like a tide going slack. As he rose to his feet and stood on the edge of the jamb, the fog parted and he saw his little family standing huddled before him on the misty Omaha street. They were just as he remembered them—Emily holding their infant son Jolyon, Rachel standing close to her.

Heart soaring, he stepped out of the doorway, out of the great eye of Chronos, and knelt with arms outstretched.

“Oh my darlings,” he said. “My dearest, most precious darlings.”

The faces of his wife and daughter radiated shock, absolute white-faced shock.

“Where’s my daddy?” Rachel cried.

“It’s all right, Rachel,” he said. “Daddy’s here. He’s back with you and safe.”

Rachel started screaming over and over again, “Where’s my daddy? Where’s my daddy?”

Emily drew her closer with a protective arm, her dark eyes full of anger and dread. “How do you know my daughter’s name?” she demanded. “Who are you, old man? What do you want? Where’s my husband? What have you done with him?”

Before he could frame an answer, Emily grabbed the little girl by the hand and, clutching Jolyon to her breast, took off in the opposite direction. As she ran she shouted, “Police! Help! Police!”

“Wait, Emily, dearest!” he cried.

Doc raced after her, but his legs had no strength left in them. He couldn’t catch her. Emily and Rachel vanished into the fog ahead. Doc took a few more steps, then stumbled and fell. The ache in his stomach suddenly became unbearable. His entire body convulsed. He vomited until he had nothing left, until he tasted blood.

When he raised his head, he saw that nothing was as it seemed. He was in a mat-trans chamber. Sitting on the floor across from him was Dr. Antoine Kirby. His tall topknot of dreads had completely flopped over to one side. Puke stained the lap of his BDU pants.

“God, that was awful,” the black man groaned. “Got to get some air or I’m gonna dry heave again.” He crawled to the door, opened it from his knees, then crawled out of the unit.

Doc looked around the chamber floor for his swordstick, then remembered he’d lost it at Magus’s redoubt. Without the help of the cane to get to his feet, Doc had to crawl out, too.

The gateway control room was one of the largest he had ever seen. It had three times the normal number of workstations. One wall was made up of massive, tape-drive computers, and another wall was line with what looked like power transformers and boosters. Everything was humming and clicking; the air smelled of ozone and warm plastic.

On the fourth wall were a pair of gasketed vanadium steel doors, side by side.

Doc pointed at them and asked, “Are those gateways, as well?”

Kirby looked over. “No, those are temporal transfer chambers.”

“Two of them?”

“You and I will be transferring simultaneously.”

“Why is that necessary?”

“It conserves energy. It takes a tremendous amount of power to get the system online. In fact, it will pretty much use up all of this redoubt’s nuclear reserves. We have to jump simultaneously. There won’t be enough energy left for another power-up. When the system’s operational energy level is reached, two jumps, perhaps even a hundred jumps are possible if they take place in the same instant. There’s another reason for simultaneous transfer, too. For us both to slip back into same time line, our jumps must be coordinated to a fraction of a nanosecond.”

Doc couldn’t help but notice that the mathematician’s grief over the loss of his colleague seemed to be under control.

On the verge of a great experiment, the culmination of a life’s work, the salvation of the known world, there was much to occupy and distract Kirby’s mind. “How do you know any of this for a fact?”

“It’s not fact. It’s predictions derived from our computer models of supra-time/space.”

“Do your models tell you what we will experience when we go back in time?”

“No. That’s something impossible to predict. We assume it will be similar to the mat-trans experience. Disorientation. Unconsciousness. Vivid dreaming. Nausea after the fact. What was it like when you traveled forward in time?”

“The lower depths of hell.”

“We can hope for better than that.”

Remembering a fragment of his mat-trans jump nightmare, Doc asked, “Will I see myself?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. The door you are about to exit through is not the same one you were drawn into two hundred years ago. It will be close, but the locations will not overlap.”

“What must I do?”

“All that’s required is that you open the door and step out of the chamber. You won’t be home until you leave it. You must exit within a minute or so of reaching the terminus.”

Doc had sudden awful suspicion, also fueled by his nightmare. “Will my family even recognize me? I am older than when I left. The trawling has aged me, too.”

“Say you were struck by lightning.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A joke. Pretend to be taken gravely ill. As far as they’re concerned you won’t have left at all, you will just have disappeared for a moment. Trust me, they will accept you with open arms.”

“But I am different,” Doc said. “It is going to be like stepping out of a room and returning a minute later scarred physically, and perhaps mentally. My young Emily will be suddenly be married to a sixty-year-old man.”

“Your teeth are still fine.”

For the first time, Tanner got the distinct impression that Dr. Kirby didn’t care what happened to him, as long as he stepped out of the time chamber on cue. Perhaps that was understandable. It wasn’t his problem.

“I have a lot of preparations to make,” Kirby said. “It will take twice as long to set up the computers without Graydon’s help. Why don’t you go have a wash? The showers are through the door and down the hall to the right. There are some clean clothes laid out for you.”

Doc found the washroom, stripped out of his clothes and got into the white-tiled stall. It was the first hot shower he had had in a long time. Using plenty of soap and a small brush he found, he scrubbed out the ground-in filth of Deathlands. When he toweled the steam off the mirror afterward and looked at himself, he decided that without the dirt, he looked even older. Late sixties, perhaps. The grime had plugged the seams in his face like Pancake makeup. There was a light in his haggard face, though. He was to be released from prison after serving an unjust, two-hundred-year sentence.

He thought better of changing his clothes. Appearing in a light blue, Air Force-issue jumpsuit would have been yet another shock for his loved ones. He pulled on the threadbare coat and trousers, the worn, patched knee boots.

When he returned to the control room, he saw that Kirby had washed and spruced up, too. Gone were the massive dreads. He had shaved and waxed his head and discarded his Deathlands’ clothing. He wore a sparkling white lab coat. Clipped to the pocket was a plastic photo ID from Livermore Labs.

“I’m still running system diagnostics,” Kirby told him. “We have time to eat.”

“My last meal in Deathlands.”

“The redoubt is well-stocked, equipped with subzero freezers. Government money paid for it all. Our tax dollars at work. What’s your pleasure, Dr. Tanner?”

He didn’t have to think about it. “A well-aged T-bone steak. Scalloped potatoes. Steamed, buttered asparagus. And an appropriate wine.”

“Been a long time, huh?”

“I have to admit, it has been a while.”

“I can provide everything but the wine. Colonel Bell popped a bottle of predark Cabernet Sauvignon after we came out of cryogenesis. There was stuff floating around in it that you wouldn’t believe. The cork had failed. All the corks have failed. I do have some interesting Scotch. One hundred fifteen years’ mellow.”

They retired to the redoubt’s fully automated mess hall. While the dinner was cooking itself, they drank liquid amber silk from crystal tumblers.

“Are you trying to get me lubricated?” Doc asked as the mathematician refilled his glass for the third time.

“Relaxed,” Kirby said. “And I’m drinking as much as you. A mat-trans and a time jump in the same day could be rough.”

“Is all that fine food I smell going to come out my nostrils?”

“Live for the moment, Tanner,” Kirby said. Then he raised his glass. “Here’s to Colonel Graydon Bell.”

For a second, Doc thought the man was going to lose control again, but he recovered, wiping his eyes with the back of his lab coat sleeve.

“To Colonel Bell,” Doc said. “And to my companions.”

“Salute,” Kirby said, downing his drink. He reached into his side pocket. “I have something I want you to take with you. It’s more important than you can imagine. The survival of our world depends on it.”

He put a tiny metal capsule and a neck chain onto Doc’s open palm. “Inside the capsule is information that must fall into the hands of the heads of Operation Chronos before the first time-trawl is performed,” he said. “You must find a way to insure that this happens, and that the contents remain intact.”

Doc slipped the chain over his head. “I will do my best to honor that request,” he said.

As they began to eat the food, Doc changed the subject to the trainers and their unique attributes and peculiarities. “How could a creature have evolved on this Earth?” he said. “Nothing about them makes sense.”

Although Kirby’s grasp of evolution was less than perfect, he saw the problem. “If they didn’t come from here, then where?”