Crater Lake

by James Axler

  The only sound was a bubbling little giggle, like that of a tiny girl seeing her first fireworks, an obscene, crazed noise in that room of death.

  "Negative termination. We must examine him carefully and cherish him. A mutie beyond all muties, this one. No. Remainder of you can sleep peacefully. He comes." The voice hardened. "No more resistance, or megacull. You understand, strangers?"

  Ryan nodded. "Yeah. We understand, Doctor. Jak, you take care now. We'll be in to see you in the morning."

  In their supertech world, it was obvious the scientists had never come across anyone with the raw power and ruthless skill to off armed men with hands and feet only. Ryan's guess was that that should be enough to keep the kid alive for a while.

  That was his hope.

  The sec men wheeled clumsily around, circling the young boy. Jak brushed back his snowy mane of hair, pale face schooled into stillness. The crippled scientist went haltingly out first, followed by the patrol.

  "Hold your fucking head up, Whitey!" Finnegan shouted.

  "Sure, Fats. I'll do that," the boy replied.

  Dr. Tardy was last out, pausing in the doorway to turn and rake the six of them with her pebbled eyes. "Strange company for a man such as you, Dr. Tanner. We shall examine and test all of this. But it must wait. Central will become impatient if we do not proceed. And we are so nearly ready. So very nearly."

  The door hissed shut, and Ryan and his companions were left alone.

  Later, on his narrow bed, under the subdued lighting of the dormitory, Ryan found sleep difficult. The room still tasted of death, though the corpses had been removed and the floor cleaned.

  There were too many rules he couldn't understand. Too many pieces missing from the puzzle.

  "Fireblast!" he whispered to himself. He didn't even know what the game was called.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE SIGN ABOVE the door said: Information Storage and Retrieval.

  To Ryan's surprise they had been encouraged to visit Jak after they'd taken their first meal of the pallid sludge. The boy was safe and well, though in a closed security unit under a heavy guard of visored sec men.

  Later, they'd again split up, to explore the Wizard Island complex, Ryan and Krysty wandering far into an isolated wing, descending in a smaller elevator, finding themselves in a region that seemed totally unused.

  There were tiny heaps of dust in the corners of the corridors. All of the doors were locked, and few carried any sort of sign. It seemed as though it was a part of the complex that had drifted into disuse, possibly as the population decreased so rapidly.

  J.B. and Finnegan had gone in search of ways of getting through to the main entrance and exit elevators, checking out the levels of security coverage. Lori hadn't been feeling well, but she and Doc were going again toward the closed research areas, in the hope that Doc's name might find them a way through.

  "It's what they used to call a library," Krysty said, hands on hips, looking down at where her sneakers had become dirtied.

  "I've seen 'em before. Lots of redoubts had them. Books and vids an' mags. Micros and fiches. All old stuff. Most so far gone it's useless."

  "Shall we go in?"

  "Sure. Probably locked like the… No, it isn't."

  The door was stiff, the bronze handle reluctant to move at all. As it opened, they felt the faintest draft of stale air, which made the girl's vivid hair coil and shift.

  "Tastes like a well-kept grave," Krysty said.

  "Been long years since this was opened up. I know that smell from other places, other times."

  Hand in hand, like children, they walked in, their shoes squeaking on the dull floor.

  AFTER AN HOUR or more of wandering the endless rows of files, Ryan called out to Krysty, "This is madness, lover. There's all the history of the fucking world here. Everything, right up to January 2001. All from outside. But you scan anything after the bombs fell, and it's from Wizard Island."

  "Yeah. Post the nukes, it's all inbred stuff. Like the world outside stopped dead. Which it nearly did. But they didn't record anything after that. Like nobody ever left here."

  "That's what that poisonous scientist dwarf said. Nobody ever leaves Wizard Island. Not until us."

  Krysty stared around her, shaking her head. "There must be plans in here of how the redoubt was built. If'n we knew that, we could maybe find how to get out. Or how to wreck it."

  "Take forever."

  "I guess so. But I feel that—" She looked down at her feet.

  "What is it?"

  Krysty grinned. "You know there's a kind of mutie streak in me, lover. I can feel some vibrations from in here."

  "What? Somebody in here? Can't be. We been clear round it, and there's only the one entrance."

  "No. Not that. Ryan?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Stay here, by this microviewer. Keep quiet. Don't move or speak."

  Ryan did as she asked. He already knew that Krysty had some strange powers—exceptional sight and hearing, as well as a doomie's sensitivity. He watched her, stepping light as a cat, eyes almost closed, head raised as if she were scenting the dulled air. She vanished behind a row of shelves, and he waited, patient, unmoving.

  He heard a wheeled ladder being moved, rusted casters squeaking, cabinets opening, drawers slamming shut. Once he heard her coughing as though dust had gotten into her throat.

  "This one."

  She held out a flat disk in a laser-scan envelope. There was a seal across it, with a tiny pattern of microcircuits dappled over the top. On the front were the letters: TT/ CJ/Ce.

  "Why?"

  "That's the one we have to view. I don't know why, lover. Just try it in the player."

  He took it and broke the seal, sliding the disk into the machine. The red light on the front remained steady, but the screen was stubbornly blank.

  "Malfunctioned?" Krysty asked.

  "I don't… Ah, here she comes."

  The screen glowed a pallid green, and finally lettering appeared.

  Access denied. Refer to subcode CJ, all sees. Go to mainframe on limit/inject. Enter code now for reading. Repeat NOW.

  Nothing more happened. The words disappeared off the screen, leaving it blank again. Ryan and Krysty looked at each other.

  "Don't like this," Ryan said.

  "Me, neither."

  Then the screen came to life again. Warning. If access reading code not entered in fifteen seconds from message end then all sec services will be notified. Warning ends. Fifteen-second delay begins now. Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen…

  "Time to move on out," Krysty said.

  "Never get beyond the door," Ryan said. "Looks like this is the time the piss floods the tubes."

  Ten seconds. Warning repeats. Security caution in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven…

  "It's E, then M and finally Y," a quiet voice behind them said.

  Without even looking around, Ryan punched in the three letters.

  Three. Two… Access open. Sec warning deleted. Proceed.

  "Thanks, Doc," Ryan said, finally swiveling in the seat to see the old man leaning up against the wall, looking indescribably ancient and bone-weary.

  "Pleasure. Didn't want those faceless goons on top of us."

  "Where's Lori?" Krysty asked.

  "Back in the dormitory. Wasn't feeling at all up to scratch. So I came wandering. I confess I had a most peculiar feeling I would find you in this place."

  "But what's…?" Ryan began. "And how did…?"

  "Just key it in," Doc said quietly.

  Krysty leaned over Ryan's shoulder, her hair brushing against his cheek in a subtle, caressing gesture. She pressed the button marked Run with her index finger.

  The code had opened up the secret file, and now the screen glowed once more. Subject. Tanner, Theophilus Algernon. Doctor of Science, Harvard. Doctor of Philosophy, Oxford University, England. There followed a whole string of further qualifications, degrees and honors, many from Europe. The screen scrolled through s
ome forty lines of them.

  "Fucking impressive, Doc," Ryan said. "But there haven't been any of these college places for a hundred years now. How d'you fake all this?"

  Ryan laughed, but Doc Tanner didn't. He simply leaned against the wall and watched the screen with blank resignation.

  Birth date and location. South Strafford, Vermont. February 14, 1868.

  Ryan laughed again. "There's a lot of things in this complex cracking up. 1868." He stopped. "But it's wrong all ways. Can't be 1968. Nor 2068. So… ?"

  Krysty pressed Query and Repeat.

  February 14, 1868.

  "Got to be a mistake," Krysty said doubtfully. "I'll punch up the portrait."

  It was unmistakably Doc Tanner.

  The long, thin face with bright eyes. The oddly excellent set of strong teeth. The picture on the screen was a man dressed in more or less the same kind of old-fashioned clothes Doc had been wearing when Ryan and Krysty had first met up with him.

  Ryan pressed the Amplify key, using the cursor to underline the date of birth.

  Date confirmed. Day known as feast day of Christian saint called Valentine, in year of 1868 during the period in the history of the United States of America known as "Reconstruction," after the Civil War.

  "That was when they fought over slaves, wasn't it?" Krysty asked.

  "Slaves and much more, dear child," Doc said softly. "Oh, much more."

  Ryan ignored them. His mind racing, he frantically moved the tape on fast forward, pausing now and again to try to absorb the mass of information about the old man who stood behind him.

  An old man who was, if the machine was to be believed, some two hundred and thirty years old.

  Married June 17, 1891. Wife Emily Louise, nee Chandler, deceased. Children, two. Rachel, deceased at age three in 1896. Jolyon, deceased at age one in 1896.

  "Fireblast!" Ryan breathed, shaking his head in disbelief. "He was married with a coupla kids. But two hundred years ago. How…?"

  He caught the faintest of sounds behind him, like a quickly muffled sob, then feet moving fast on the dusty floor and the door opening and closing.

  He and Krysty were alone again.

  The record raced by, and Ryan was able to absorb only the highlights of it. Doctor Theophilus Tanner had been a truly eminent scientist, tipped for greatness, doing research at both Harvard and Princeton.

  First located and targeted by TT.

  "What's that?" Krysty asked.

  Ryan queried it. The answer came up on the screen that the initials stood for an exercise called "Time-Trawl." It seemed that scientist working at the very end of the twentieth century had been dabbling with temporal travel, and had been searching the Victorian times for a possible victim, or specimen, to be trawled forward.

  There was no explanation on the disk of precisely how this would be done, not even the vaguest of hints, except for a cross-reference that was a jumble of letters and numerals.

  "Chron-jumps," Ryan said. "Old doc's mentioned that a few times. Just a broken word or two. Thought he was raving, like he… you know."

  "Sure," Krysty whispered. "We all did, lover, we all did."

  Now a pattern of order began to make sense out of the chaos of jumbled ideas and half memories from the confused old man.

  As the disk wound on, Ryan and Krysty sat, open-mouthed, hardly able to believe the evidence flashing up on the screen in front of them. Doctor Theophilus Tanner had been trawled in a time experiment operation in November 1896. Krysty pointed out that this was the year both of Doc's children had died and wondered if there could be any connection.

  At one point Ryan noticed there was a passing reference to some other failed experiments in time-trawling, including a judge on the United States Supreme Court named Crater, a name that Ryan recalled had seemed to mean something to Doc Tanner when they'd first mentioned this lake.

  It seemed as though Judge Crater had been lifted successfully, but had never arrived safely in 1998. The word used was "incomplete," which conjured up a horrific picture.

  Doc Tanner's lift appeared to have been the only one that could reasonably have been called successful. He was trawled forward to only three years before the long winters began. Physically it seemed he had been in fair shape, but his mind had been tainted by the shattering experience.

  Subject's refusal to become reconciled to temporal correction proved difficult. Several abortive attempts to bribe or cheat his way into the chron-chambers were undeniable evidence of his overwhelming desire to travel back to his own time and rejoin his wife.

  One thing puzzled Ryan. "Krysty? What the chill would have happened if they'd returned him to his own time, but a day before they trawled him?"

  "You mean, if he'd met himself?"

  "Yeah."

  She paused the disk, then entered a query concerning potential temporal anomalies. "It's the old one about going back in time and killing your own father before you were born. You wouldn't exist. So, you couldn't go back in time and kill your own father. So you would exist. So…and soon."

  The machine whirred and clicked before it began to print an answer. In that dusty mausoleum, filled with the useless knowledge of an entire civilization, Ryan found himself sweating. He wiped at his forehead, but the salty liquid trickled down behind the patch over his left eye, making the puckered, raw socket sting. He eased the patch off and wiped at it with the end of the weighted silk scarf around his neck.

  Temporal anomalies are not clearly understood, nor easily explained. Evidence is limited as experiments have not proceeded far or fast. Most experts hypothesize that time is multistranded. There is at any one second millions upon millions of time possibilities—an infinite choice of parallel futures, any or all of which will persist. Thus, it is believed that the classic example of a person traveling back into the past to alter his own present is false. He will alter only one of the parallel streams, but his own present will not change. He could be killed in the past, but his own time stream will not be sullied by the disturbance. But in one universe, he will cease to exist. This is all that is known.

  "Thanks for fucking nothing," Ryan muttered.

  "Move the disk on, or someone's going to get very suspicious about where we've gone and what we're doing. There'll be a sec patrol along here any time now."

  Ryan took her advice and pushed the fast-scan control, reading the screen as the information poured out.

  Subject's constant attempts to rejoin "Beloved Emily" and his own century became a considerable irritant. Doctor Tanner was taken by the appropriate responsible authorities and placed under restricted access and egress.

  "Means he was a bastard prisoner," Ryan said.

  Together they read through several more pages until Krysty paused the info disk. "So the old man became too damned difficult for them to control. Surprised they didn't just lose him out of a copter off the coast. But they found a better way."

  Ryan shook his head. "The poor, mind-blown old… The cold-hearted icers sent him forward. Used a gateway in Virginia. End December, in the year 2000. Couple of weeks before the big one and the end of all that. Send him onward."

  "To Mocsin and Jordan Teague and Kurt Strasser. And then on to join us."

  Krysty walked away from the viewing console, burying her head in her hands as she leaned against a wall of the library.

  Ryan also stood. "Nothing more on the disk. Stops with the information that they pushed him forward. Ends up saying there were no contingency plans for further trawling or return of subject."

  "It hardly mentions that he worked for a time on Project Cerberus, and it doesn't mention this Project Eurydice anywhere."

  It was true. There were passing references to redoubts and gateways. It looked as if all research into chron-jumps had more or less ended when they had pushed Doc Tanner forward into the unguessable future. One anomaly that still puzzled Ryan was whether they could have brought him back from the future. Would the old man have had knowledge of the nuclear holocaust that w
as to destroy most of the planet? Would they have believed him? Would he have changed things? Not if you credited the theory about there being parallel universes.

  "But he worked on the chron projects, so he does know something about how to make the gateways function for time jumps as well as just for mat-trans." Krysty whistled between her teeth. "This is… If we found a redoubt still sealed and with its gateway functioning for chron-jumps, then we aren't just limited to going anyplace, are we, Ryan?"

  "Nope. We can go anywhen as well."

  Doc Tanner was waiting for them when they finally emerged from the echoing vault of the library. They closed the door carefully behind them, hearing tumblers click into place, locking it tight.

  "You read it all?" the old man asked. His eyes were red and swollen, sore from weeping.

  "Sure. Why didn't you tell us about it?" Ryan replied. "It can't hurt to tell someone."

  "No. I suppose you are correct in that assumption. But I am so alone, my dear Ryan. A speck of infinity, two centuries old, with my wife and children long dead. Yet, in their world, they are all alive. I still cherish the hope that one day—"

  "But these parallel streams? Doesn't that mean you can't return to that world ever again?"

  Tanner sniffed. "It's a theory, that's all. It may be right. Until we test it, we shall never know. Traveling with you gives me that tender shoot of hope. One day, in the right gateway, it might…"

  His voice faded away once more.

  Later that evening, somewhere between B and C in Green, Doc came to Ryan, who was lying on his bed alone.

  "Will you tell the others, Mr. Cawdor?"

  "About where you come from?"

  "Yes."

  "You mind if'n I do?"

  The old man smiled weakly. "Tell you the honest truth, Ryan, and nothing but the truth, I'm relieved it's all out in the open. Load off my mind."

  He reached out and shook Ryan firmly by the hand, then went to rejoin Lori.

  Chapter Eighteen

  "FUCKING LIAR!"

  "It's true."

  "You're a fucking liar, Ryan Cawdor."