“Takeoffs and landings. There are no mat-trans chambers in the past, and we can only guess if they exist in the future, and believe you me, those of us who knew what was coming down early in the year 2001 weren’t counting on the future’s hospitality,” Jamaisvous said with a chuckle. “So, more tests were needed, but we ran out of time…thanks to you. If you’d agreed to go back like a good little boy, and if we could have delivered you safely, all of this might have been moot and you’d be considered one of the architects of a brave new world.”
Jamaisvous touched a key on the panel of the comp and nodded as the screen flickered and changed. “At least, in a perfect world,” he added softly. “Only, if.”
The stone walls of the room remained silent.
“I imagine you’re not feeling so hot, Tanner. That’s to be understood,” he said, continuing to speak even as he dropped his guard, stepping closer to the comp. “I honestly did doubt you’d make it back alive, although I hoped there was something about your stubbornness that carried you through safely from past to present to future. Now I know. Even if you did make it you’d arrive here in pieces, but from what this screen is saying to me my adjustments to the quantum phase interface and time-trawl bubble matrix were a success. I appreciate your willingness to lend a hand, so let’s deal. You stay tucked away in your shell until I’m out of here, and I won’t blow your brains all over the room. Then you can enjoy this brave new world as much as you like.”
As a response, Jamaisvous felt a white-hot needle pierce deeply into his upper thigh. He shrieked in stunned surprise, staggering back in time to see the tip of Doc’s swordstick pull free from his flesh. The blade had been thrust outward from beneath the desk where the comp system rested, beneath the desk in the alcove where Doc had been hiding.
Doc had been forced to crawl into the nook, knowing Jamaisvous would undoubtedly want to check any temporal readings from his journey, and while there he’d listened and waited.
Doc had struck blind, aiming his jab by the sound of his foe’s voice, but the angle was awkward and the old man wasn’t up to delivering any kind of real force behind the assault. He’d hoped to land his rapier into the soft gut of the long-winded lord of El Morro, but the blow landed low.
Still, the blade sunk deep, and the sharp bite was ample to send Jamaisvous spiraling backward, the blaster sailing away from his outstretched hand as he fell against an empty swivel chair and completely lost his footing, flipping over the piece of wheeled furniture and crashing to the heavy stone floor, his lab coat tangled around his body.
“I have read Huxley’s book, Jamaisvous, and found it lacking. And you, sir, are entirely too much in love with the sound of your own voice,” Doc said, his rich baritone a cracked whisper of its usual self, like the unearthly dry rustling of fall leaves as stiff October winds whipped through gathered piles. A mad sepulchral whisper was what came out of Doc as he hunched his way out of hiding, crawling stiffly from his lair like some crazed angular spider.
The lower half of his face was a smear of vermilion where the final chron jump had caused something in his septum to burst in protest, and when combined with his high forehead, his long silver-white hair coiling about his shoulders and the glistening white of his perfect teeth shining like pearls within the red smear coating his lower face, he looked utterly, irreversibly, mad.
Jamaisvous had been shocked into a frightened silence, and he scrambled to his footing as quickly as possible, logic replaced by blind terror. The only sound he made came from the numerous phlegmy intakes of air his body was requiring as it struggled to control the flight response.
An expression of complete and total hate transformed Doc Tanner’s bloody visage as he wrapped spindly fingers around one of Jamaisvous’s feet and pulled the stunned overlord of Chronos closer.