Ten seconds. Warning repeats. Security caution in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven...
"It's E, then Mand 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 some 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."