James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

“Or their leader does,” Krysty suggested.

“That’s what it looks like it to me,” Mildred replied.

“What do you think. Doc?” Ryan asked. “You’ve had more experience with mat-trans units than any of us. You saw the whitecoats actually running the system. Could she be right?”

The old man screwed up his face as he tried to remember. The act was painful for him. He had endured too many dematerializations, too many re materializations, not just from one point in space to another, but

from one time to another. Connections between facts and ideas, and between fantasy and reality, blurred as they all swirled around in the muddle of his mind. Did he know the answer? Had he known it once?

“I fear I cannot say for certain,” he admitted finally. “What the whitecoats did to me in the time before Armageddon, I recall only vaguely and in scattered bits and pieces. I believe they transported me hither and yon just to test their ability to puzzle my atoms back together again. How and where they traveled themselves is beyond my ken. In truth I was nothing more than their prisoner. However, I can tell you this-what the good Dr. Wyeth has postulated is grounded in the logic of Aristotle and the geometry of Pythagoras. To build a conveyance that could only take the most circuitous of routes makes no sense whatsoever. The shortest distance between two points is invariably a straight line.”

“If the stickies can run the system and we can’t,” Ryan said, “it’s a disaster.”

“It gets worse,” Mildred told him.

“Go on.”

“I’m worried about the nightmares we had when we jumped this time,” she said. “In my dream I bowed down to a mutant who looked exactly like the guy back there on die highway. I recognized his name because I was yelling it in the dream.”

“Like I knew the stickies were mating from my dream,” Krysty stated.

“That’s right,” Mildred said. “Look, we’ve all had

nightmares during jumps before, but never, ever have we had the same kind of nightmares. The coincidence seems unlikely. There has to be a causal factor.”

“Have you formed any conclusions as to what it might be?” Doc asked.

“My understanding of the scientific principles of matter transfer is weak,” Mildred said, “but I know one thing for sure-the system has never had any trouble telling us apart before. I mean, I’ve never ended up with Krysty’s hair or Jak’s red eyes or J.B.’s memories. I think that’s because we always start out together, in the same chamber. If things happened the way I think they did, if reassembly instructions and source atoms arrived simultaneously from another gateway, there could be a serious problem.”

“You’re going to have to make it simpler than that,” J.B. said.

“Okay, listen. A very long time ago I saw a film. It was about a scientist who invented a kind of crude mat-trans machine. Everything was working fine until a house fly slipped into the machine with him. When he transported, his body parts got confused with the fly’s. He ended up with a fly head, and the fly ended up with his. It’s a tragic story that might apply to us.”

“Are you saying we could have traded something with the stickies during the transfer?” Krysty said.

“I’m saying it’s possible. If not something visible, then something on a molecular level.”

“We mebbe turn stickie?” Jak said.

“Before I’d let that happen,” J.B. stated grimly, “I’d eat the blaster.”

“Jak, J.B., it doesn’t work that way,” Mildred said. “We’re fully reformed by the mat-trans system. Whatever stickie traits we received would already be integrated into us. Pointy little teeth aren’t going to pop out of our gums without warning. And whatever we received, if anything, it wasn’t lethal or we’d already be chilled.

“Even if our physical structures weren’t compromised,” she continued, “a mix-up in the chamber could explain our similar dreams, which, I remind you, appear to carry some element of truth. At the very least we might have exchanged memories of real experiences with the stickies.”

“Memories that aren’t going away,” Krysty said. “I keep having flashbacks.”

“What can we do about it?” Ryan asked Mildred.