Male, height of seventy-five inches and weight of around one hundred and fifty pounds. Very skinny for his height. Hair, grizzled and shoulder length. Eyes, pale blue. Face, deeply lined. Oddly perfect teeth. Deep voice.
The clothes weren’t a problem. Old-fashioned frock coat, faded and stained coppery green with age. Cracked knee boots. White denim shirt.
And the weapons weren’t common, but they could be found in the infinite data base of the mat-trans system.
His blaster was a reproduction of a famous handgun from the days of the Civil War. The J. E. B. Stuart commemorative Le Mat, engraved and inlaid with gold. Peculiar for a pistol, the Le Mat had two barrels. One fired a single round of 18-gauge grapeshot. A quick adjustment of the hammer accessed nine .44-caliber rounds, on the cap-and-ball system.
The other weapon that Doc always carried was a long ebony swordstick, with a silver lion’s-head hilt. The black wooden cane concealed a rapier of superb-quality Toledo steel that bore the engraved message No Me Saques Sin Razon; No Me Envaines Sin Honor Do not draw me without good reason and do not sheathe me without honor .
It was when the computer came to Doc’s age that the powerful comp nearly blew its fuses.
Data does not compute was its message to itself, seeking to find some way of rationalizing the contradictory information that it received.
Doc’s actual birth date was February 14,1868, which made him something like two hundred and thirty years old. He had married pretty little Emily Chandler on June 17, 1891. They had two children Rachel, who was three years old, and Jolyon, who was just one when their father completely vanished.
Operation Chronos had been working in ultrasecret conditions to try to achieve time travel with a view toward utilizing it against the Russians. Assassinating Joseph Stalin was just one of the aims of the project.
Sadly the whitecoats could never get it right.
They began by trying to trawl people from the past. Judge Crater was one of their spectacular failures. The writer Ambrose Bierce was another. They disappeared from their pasts, but what emerged in the secret laboratories in Virginia bore scant relationship to anything human. After they had thrown up at the hideous abortions of humanity that they had trawled into the present, the horrified whitecoats ordered that the remnants be hastily burned.
Their successes could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And the prize of them all was the eminent scientist and philosopher, Dr. Theophilus Tanner, one of the leading academics of the Victorian era.
They dragged him forward to 1998, where he proved so difficult and uncooperative a study that they were glad to get rid of him by pushing him forward again in December of 2000. The scientists, who had destroyed his life, died days later in the nightmare of skydark, and Doc found himself stranded in the heart of Deathlands, nearly a hundred years in the future.
For reasons that nobody could understand, this man, who was only in his midthirties, resembled a man in his sixties.
The experiences had also taken their toll on his mind. Doc wasn’t always in absolute control, but then no one was in control when consigning the body’s particles to the mat-trans process.
But eventually all the physical elements were resolved and the process of reassembling the six humans in the redoubt in Tennessee began.
A NORMAL JUMP, under the best of circumstances, was extremely trying for the participants, always leading to a period of mental blackness and, not unusually, some degree of trauma.
That happened in even the best of jumps. And the jump from the burning house in Japan to the redoubt in Tennessee wasn’t the best.
Not by a country mile.
The interruption to the process of matter transfer compounded the usual nightmares.
It was bad.
Chapter Three
Jak Lauren was walking through the heart of a huge, sprawling ville. He didn’t recognize it, though it reminded him a little of the outer suburbs of ruined Newyork. It was an endless tangle of rusting metal and rotted concrete, the streets littered by old cans and broken glass, so that every step crunched under the heels of his combat boots.