James Axler - Deathlands 43 - Dark Emblem

by Dark E

  Doc fixed Ryan with a look. "What was kept in that casket of Pandora's was hope, Mr. Cawdor. Hope. And to this day hope remains mankind's sole comfort in misfortune."

  "Is that what keeps your engine running, Doc?" the man with the eye patch asked. "Hope?"

  Doc didn't reply, but Ryan saw his long fingers wrap around one of the two small gray globes and hoist it up.

  "Hope, Ryan Cawdor, and a spirited game of catch," Doc said, his deep voice resonating as he underhanded the metallic orb to Ryan. "Catch."

  Ryan caught and examined the spheroid with his bright blue eye. There was nothing unusual about the ball at least, as far as he could tell. The younger man was unsure why his new friend was so fascinated with the pair, so he decided to ask Doc again what the big deal was over twin hunks of metal.

  "Oh, yes, yes, I have ignited your interest, yes," Doc said, losing the air of pomposity he'd been wearing and replacing it with the vocal inflections and smiling face of a young boy.

  "Damn straight. First, I thought your little eggs were some kind of grens, but the way you keep tossing them around cured me of that assumption."

  "These simple little objects, Mr. Cawdor. They were the first," Doc stated with a twinkle in his eye.

  "The first what?" Ryan asked, baffled as usual by the gaunt man's predilection for understatement and riddles. Ryan's moods in talking with Doc ranged from amazement at the knowledge the man possessed about predark artifacts and history to sheer unadulterated rage at having to play Doc's twisted version of his own private guessing game.

  "The first to make the trip, there and back again."

  Doc said, waggling his bushy white eyebrows on the last three words.

  "You mean to use the gateways?" Ryan asked.

  Doc smiled broadly, revealing a frightening array of perfect white teeth.

  "Ah, in a manner of speaking, yes. You are correct, sir. Like myself, these little balls were test subjects. Hurled back and forth, in and out. Unlike myself, they made the journey sane, whole, intact. No, uh, no added wrinkles. No moss on these rolling stones, no, sir."

  Ryan glared at the man sitting across from him before getting to his feet and tossing back the metal ball. "There are times, Doc, when I just don't get you," he said disgustedly.

  Doc shrugged, and idly switched the thrown sphere from one hand to another. "I know. There are times, friend Ryan, when I do not get myself."

  LATER THAT EVENING, Ryan and Krysty headed toward the depths of the massive information storage and retrieval room located within the walls of the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement.

  The leader of Wizard Island had called Doc Tanner by name when he first saw him, despite neither one of them ever having met.

  Why this was so, Doc couldn't-or wouldn't- say.

  So, Ryan had decided to take a trip to the island complex's library.

  And that's where Doc had come upon them later, as they huddled in front of a computer, ready to view the contents of a disc that came from an envelope with TT/CJ/Ce marked on the front. Now they were staring at a message on the screen: Access denied. Refer to subcode CJ, all sees. Go to mainframe on limit/inject. Enter code now for reading.

  "It's E, then M and finally Y," Doc said quietly from behind. "Spells 'emy.' Almost spells Emily, does it not? Ah, yes, the proper codes, I always lacked the proper codes. However, in this case, I can point you on the right path, since fate or a higher hand has decreed that you see a listing of all my fascinating past."

  Knowing the voice, Ryan didn't even turn from the monitor screen as he quickly tapped in the three letters and pressed enter, and was rewarded with a series of glowing green letters that laid out all the cards on the felt of the playing table.

  Subject. Tanner, Theophilus Algernon. Doctor of Science, Harvard. Doctor of Philosophy, Oxford University, England. Birth date and location. South Strafford, Vermont. February 14, 1868. Married June 17, 1891. Wife, Emily Louise, nee Chandler. Children, two. Rachel and Jolyon.

  "Can't be the same man," Ryan murmured as he navigated a cursor light down to tool bar on the comp screen and clicked on a visual button. In response, a mug shot of a sad-looking man in his early thirties popped up in a window. The portrait was unmistakably their own Doc Tanner, a much younger version minus the complex map of age that now lined his face, but the bright blue eyes that still held a wink of childhood, and the strong white teeth being shown for the camera were one and the same.

  Ryan clicked off the photo display and went back to the text of the file, reading farther down beyond the initial entry of biographical information. "No wonder they knew you when we showed up here, Doc. You were in their files, your pic, your bio- stored in here with all kinds of overlapping entries regarding time trawling and matter transfer," he whispered, as both he and Krysty read the secrets presented before their astonished eyes.

  "And do you believe what you read, Ryan?" Doc replied.

  "Yeah, I guess. Explains a lot. According to this, you were the only success in their entire time-trawling program."

  "There are varying degrees of success, Ryan Caw-dor," Doc said in a choked voice, before turning and exiting the library, running from the truths it housed.

  "I'll go after him," Krysty said. "He sounded pretty upset."

  Ryan held out a restraining arm. "Wait a sec, I'm about done here. We'll go together."

  Going to the end of the document, Ryan and Krysty read the final entry:

  Subject's refusal to become reconciled to tern- poral 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 tune. Subject's constant attempts to rejoin "beloved Emily" and his own century became a considerable irritant. Dr. Tanner was taken by the appropriate responsible authorities and placed under restricted access and egress. When this proved to be an unsuccessful deterrent, subject was used in final-stage trawl and pushed along via temporal conduit to future setting, destination and chronological year, unknown.

  "The arrogant bastards," Ryan muttered.

  "There's a whole lot of names here, topped by some whitecoat named Herman Welles, who was apparently Doc's keeper during his years as a guest of this Operation Chronos," Krysty said.

  "Ancient history, I guess," the raven-haired man retorted as he turned the comp console off, leaving the information disc inside the drive.

  Outside the massive vault of the library, they found Doc waiting for them, his head hung low. The older man's eyes were red from crying, and he appeared even more downbeat than usual.

  "You read it all?" Doc asked.

  Ryan replied in the affirmative.

  "I am so alone, my dear Ryan and Krysty. A mere speck of infinity, two centuries old, with my wife and children long dead. Yet in their world, they are all alive. And waiting. Waiting for me to return. So you see, I still cherish the hope that one day I will be able to go back to them if the right gateway is found. Now, if you will excuse me, I think time alone might do my weary soul some good."

  Doc turned and left the couple in the hallway. They watched his back as he slowly made his way down to the bend in the corner and disappeared from sight.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Within the main control room of El Morro's secured matter-transfer gateway complex, the heavy steel and armaglass door to the six-sided unit was hanging open on twin counterbalanced hinges, waiting to be closed in order to start yet another chron jump.

  "Tanner!" Jamaisvous called out as he unlocked the single handcuff manacle left on his aching wrist. "You alive, Tanner?"

  Of the temporal-skipping Doc Tanner there was no sign, save a few splatters of fresh red blood near the door to the chamber. Stepping over lightly to the gateway door, Jamaisvous rubbed a finger across one of the drips and it came back smeared with the crimson fluid.

  "Still fresh. I'd say somebody's got a bloody nose," Jamaisvous said easily, the target pistol held loosely in one hand, ready for fir
ing at the instant Doc might be stupid enough to reveal himself. Although he wasn't about to admit it, Jamaisvous was impressed. He'd expected Tanner to have been a mewling, puking wad of skin and bones hunched in the fetal position in the center of the gateway, already dead or wishing to be out of his misery. That the old man had instead possessed the stamina to stagger out of the gateway chamber and find a place to hide increased his respect for his fellow time traveler.

  "I must thank you for allowing me to track and observe your vital signs during the trawls, Dr. Tanner," Jamaisvous continued as he scanned the room, eyeballing the banks of comps and debating whether there was enough room for a man to conceal himself behind them, his back pressed tight against the wall. Jamaisvous stepped closer, but saw nothing.

  "Details of your resiliency were the final components required before I attempted my own return trip into the past, and I must say that your survival now tells me that with the proper usage of drugs I can make my own time jaunt without fear of being ripped apart in the temporal matrix once my molecules have been reassembled in the final stage."

  Still peering warily at his surroundings, trying to deduce where Doc had gone to ground, Jamaisvous walked to the central comp console. Within the combination of control room, observation lounge and actual mat-trans gateway, there were a dozen places Tanner might have chosen to secure himself. Jamaisvous was loath to fire his weapon indiscriminately, not wishing to damage any of the sensitive operating gear in the room.

  ' 'You see, Tanner, it all boils down to takeoffs and landings," he said to the room, turning and speaking to all directions, since he didn't know where his audience of one was secluded. "In my experiences when trawling, we usually succeeded in picking up our living subjects, but where we consistently failed was in handing them off safely in one piece at the other end. Made for most messy landings."

  Jamaisvous now wondered if Tanner hadn't just slunk off into a corner somewhere and died, like a wounded animal. However likely that possibility might be, he didn't want to take the chance, so he continued to speak as he stared at one of the comp monitors that had been tracking Doc's temporal processes.

  "The same thing applied in our attempts to send back living matter to select times in the past. We'd break apart whatever living tissue we were sending down the line-monkeys, chupacabras, humans-it didn't matter, either way. We would disassemble them in the gateway using the same process designed for safely traveling from one locale to another, shoot their atoms into a quantum field, steer it to the precise instant in the past and bring them back to their corporeal forms-only during rematerialization they never held their shape."

  Jamaisvous paused, then smacked one fist into his other open hand with a smack. "Pow! Instant disruption. It would have made for a most effective weapon if we could have taken the time to channel the stream somehow and direct it, but I digress."

  Taking his eyes from the monitor screen and back to the control room, Jamaisvous typed in commands one-handed, pausing either to check what the screen revealed or to push the compact mouse control located next to the comp keyboard. Despite his unease of where Doc might be lurking, and over whether

  Ryan and his band of thugs would come busting down the door with blasters blazing, the gray-haired man smiled at the readouts the comp was presenting to him in a rush of numerals and codes.

  "Takeoffs and landings. There are no mat-trans chambers in the past, and we can only guess if they exist in the future, and believe you me, those of us who knew what was coming down early in the year 2001 weren't counting on the future's hospitality," Jamaisvous said with a chuckle. "So, more tests were needed, but we ran out of time...thanks to you. If you'd agreed to go back like a good little boy, and if we could have delivered you safely, all of this might have been moot and you'd be considered one of the architects of a brave new world."

  Jamaisvous touched a key on the panel of the comp and nodded as the screen flickered and changed. "At least, in a perfect world," he added softly. "Only, if."

  The stone walls of the room remained silent.

  "I imagine you're not feeling so hot, Tanner. That's to be understood," he said, continuing to speak even as he dropped his guard, stepping closer to the comp. "I honestly did doubt you'd make it back alive, although I hoped there was something about your stubbornness that carried you through safely from past to present to future. Now I know. Even if you did make it you'd arrive here in pieces, but from what this screen is saying to me my adjustments to the quantum phase interface and time-trawl bubble matrix were a success. I appreciate your willingness to lend a hand, so let's deal. You stay tucked away in your shell until I'm out of here, and I won't blow your brains all over the room. Then you can enjoy this brave new world as much as you like."

  As a response, Jamaisvous felt a white-hot needle pierce deeply into his upper thigh. He shrieked in stunned surprise, staggering back in time to see the tip of Doc's swordstick pull free from his flesh. The blade had been thrust outward from beneath the desk where the comp system rested, beneath the desk in the alcove where Doc had been hiding.

  Doc had been forced to crawl into the nook, knowing Jamaisvous would undoubtedly want to check any temporal readings from his journey, and while there he'd listened and waited.

  Doc had struck blind, aiming his jab by the sound of his foe's voice, but the angle was awkward and the old man wasn't up to delivering any kind of real force behind the assault. He'd hoped to land his rapier into the soft gut of the long-winded lord of El Morro, but the blow landed low.

  Still, the blade sunk deep, and the sharp bite was ample to send Jamaisvous spiraling backward, the blaster sailing away from his outstretched hand as he fell against an empty swivel chair and completely lost his footing, flipping over the piece of wheeled furniture and crashing to the heavy stone floor, his lab coat tangled around his body.

  "I have read Huxley's book, Jamaisvous, and found it lacking. And you, sir, are entirely too much in love with the sound of your own voice," Doc said, his rich baritone a cracked whisper of its usual self, like the unearthly dry rustling of fall leaves as stiff October winds whipped through gathered piles. A mad sepulchral whisper was what came out of Doc as he hunched his way out of hiding, crawling stiffly from his lair like some crazed angular spider.

  The lower half of his face was a smear of vermilion where the final chron jump had caused something in his septum to burst in protest, and when combined with his high forehead, his long silver-white hair coiling about his shoulders and the glistening white of his perfect teeth shining like pearls within the red smear coating his lower face, he looked utterly, irreversibly, mad.

  Jamaisvous had been shocked into a frightened silence, and he scrambled to his footing as quickly as possible, logic replaced by blind terror. The only sound he made came from the numerous phlegmy intakes of air his body was requiring as it struggled to control the flight response.

  An expression of complete and total hate transformed Doc Tanner's bloody visage as he wrapped spindly fingers around one of Jamaisvous's feet and pulled the stunned overlord of Chronos closer.

  "You...were...there!" Tanner hissed in a spray of pink saliva, his words coming faster, the sentences breaking down into one long stream of slurred accusations as for a brief and shining moment his mind became clear and Jamaisvous's face shimmered into stark clarity and focus-but only in a memory, in a view Doc had snatched as he was hurled into the gateway by Welles and his security team, a glimpse of a solitary figure standing slightly back and watching the struggle to shoot the most unwilling subject into the future.

  "You were there," Doc repeated, trying to bring his foe down through fading brute strength. "Lurking in the shadows, observing when I was trawled from that pit of filth, another hundred years of my life stolen away in a single heartbeat! You were there, snickering when I was sent screaming into this future hellhole of a world, taken from the arms of my wife, my children, you were there, you arrogant son of a bitch, you were there!"

  "Of course I was t
here, you quote-spouting hayseed!" Jamaisvous gasped in response, finally finding his voice as he stomped down with his injured leg, trying to free himself from Doc's iron grip. "If I were not, how could I know anything of how Operation Chronos was designed? Sure, I read the manual, but hell's bells, man! I could never hope to master it without some prior knowledge!"

  "If you knew so much, why did you need me?" Doc asked as he continued to hang on, dragged across the floor as Jamaisvous moved closer to the dormant mat-trans chamber.

  "Even with what I knew then-and combined with what I know now-it's not enough! Not near enough, damn your eyes! We never fully understood how the matter-conversion array could be realigned for temporal transport! It was a working theory, goddammit! A fluke! And so were you!"

  "I do not accept such simple explanations, then or now."

  "Perhaps if you had been less inclined to sabotage and violence, and instead focused on doing as you were asked, you would have been returned to your wife and family. Instead, you made dealing with you a most unpleasant experience, and finally, tragically, they decided to cut their losses and get rid of you in a manner that best suited their immediate needs. They'd been peeping into the future and a few, a select few, saw what was coming."