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?”