“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. Soand 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 possibilitiesan 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 was 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.