“Tanner!” Jamaisvous called out as he unlocked the single handcuff manacle left on his aching wrist. “You alive, Tanner?”
Of the temporal-skipping Doc Tanner there was no sign, save a few splatters of fresh red blood near the door to the chamber. Stepping over lightly to the gateway door, Jamaisvous rubbed a finger across one of the drips and it came back smeared with the crimson fluid.
“Still fresh. I’d say somebody’s got a bloody nose,” Jamaisvous said easily, the target pistol held loosely in one hand, ready for firing at the instant Doc might be stupid enough to reveal himself. Although he wasn’t about to admit it, Jamaisvous was impressed. He’d expected Tanner to have been a mewling, puking wad of skin and bones hunched in the fetal position in the center of the gateway, already dead or wishing to be out of his misery. That the old man had instead possessed the stamina to stagger out of the gateway chamber and find a place to hide increased his respect for his fellow time traveler.
“I must thank you for allowing me to track and observe your vital signs during the trawls, Dr. Tanner,” Jamaisvous continued as he scanned the room, eyeballing the banks of comps and debating whether there was enough room for a man to conceal himself behind them, his back pressed tight against the wall. Jamaisvous stepped closer, but saw nothing.
“Details of your resiliency were the final components required before I attempted my own return trip into the past, and I must say that your survival now tells me that with the proper usage of drugs I can make my own time jaunt without fear of being ripped apart in the temporal matrix once my molecules have been reassembled in the final stage.”
Still peering warily at his surroundings, trying to deduce where Doc had gone to ground, Jamaisvous walked to the central comp console. Within the combination of control room, observation lounge and actual mat-trans gateway, there were a dozen places Tanner might have chosen to secure himself. Jamaisvous was loath to fire his weapon indiscriminately, not wishing to damage any of the sensitive operating gear in the room.
‘ ‘You see, Tanner, it all boils down to takeoffs and landings,” he said to the room, turning and speaking to all directions, since he didn’t know where his audience of one was secluded. “In my experiences when trawling, we usually succeeded in picking up our living subjects, but where we consistently failed was in handing them off safely in one piece at the other end. Made for most messy landings.”
Jamaisvous now wondered if Tanner hadn’t just slunk off into a corner somewhere and died, like a wounded animal. However likely that possibility might be, he didn’t want to take the chance, so he continued to speak as he stared at one of the comp monitors that had been tracking Doc’s temporal processes.
“The same thing applied in our attempts to send back living matter to select times in the past. We’d break apart whatever living tissue we were sending down the line-monkeys, chupacabras, humans-it didn’t matter, either way. We would disassemble them in the gateway using the same process designed for safely traveling from one locale to another, shoot their atoms into a quantum field, steer it to the precise instant in the past and bring them back to their corporeal forms-only during rematerialization they never held their shape.”
Jamaisvous paused, then smacked one fist into his other open hand with a smack. “Pow! Instant disruption. It would have made for a most effective weapon if we could have taken the time to channel the stream somehow and direct it, but I digress.”
Taking his eyes from the monitor screen and back to the control room, Jamaisvous typed in commands one-handed, pausing either to check what the screen revealed or to push the compact mouse control located next to the comp keyboard. Despite his unease of where Doc might be lurking, and over whether
Ryan and his band of thugs would come busting down the door with blasters blazing, the gray-haired man smiled at the readouts the comp was presenting to him in a rush of numerals and codes.