Mildred yawned in the seconds of silence after Jamaisvous spoke. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “Be- tween my drink and the meal, I’m asleep on my feet, and this sort of technobabble makes my mind ache. I think I’ll go back to bed for the night.”
Jamaisvous stood and took her hand, kissing it as he had kissed Krysty’s earlier. “Good night, Dr. Wy-eth.”
“Good night, to both of you.”
The stocky physician exited, and the den was silent for several moments before Doc spoke. “The gateway you have in this fortress-you are trying to go back, are you not?”
“Of course.”
“Even though by your own admission, time trawling was never perfected.”
“Until now.”
“How so?”
“I am at the final part of the secret. Tell me, Dr. Tanner. Man-to-man. No pressure,” Jamaisvous said, his voice becoming faster as he spoke, and the pronunciation of each word more clipped. “Wouldn’t you risk it all to go back home to your own time? To pop in seconds before your original disappearance?”
“Not long enough,” Doc protested in a murmur. “I could not alter the flow of history’s river in a matter of seconds.”
“Minutes then. An hour. Long enough to warn yourself-or, better yet, appear at the same time, replacing yourself in the confusion as your other self vanishes into the temporal doorway. Other than a freak storm front that blew up on a dusty Omaha street, no one ever need know you disappeared. You could alter your future. You could save your destiny.”
Doc paced, talking as he walked, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his frock coat. “To reclaim the life I should have lived…yes, damn you, yes, yes! Of course, I would!”
Jamaisvous smiled. “That’s what I thought you’d say. I’d do the same, and in fact, I plan to. I have no love of being trapped in a world such as this. No cable television. No pizza delivery. No world wide web. I am luckier than most, but I am also bored out of my mind. Screw fresh coffee, pretty sunsets and sweet-smelling flowers, Dr. Tanner. I want to go home.”
“But what of your disease?” Doc asked.
Jamaisvous gave Doc a baffled look. “Disease? What disease?”
“Why were you placed in the cryo suspension plan if not due to illness?”
Jamaisvous gaped at Doc for a long moment, before an explosion of grim laughter erupted from his chest. “Oh. That. I was placed in the freezer for my brain. Those in the know were aware of the impending holocaust. They also knew they would need men of vision after the bombs fell, and as such, I was put on ice until needed.”
“You agreed to this?”
“Like your own experiences with the Totality Concept, I wasn’t given much choice,” Jamaisvous replied. “I wasn’t conscious to experience the ex- citement, but from what I can tell, once the war began, it hit with ten times the destructive force expected. The new civilization they expected me and my brain to be a part of was wiped from the map, along with rest of the world.”
Doc sat back, his brow furrowed, staring across the candlelit room at his host.
“So why am I needed? What knowledge I held of how time trawling was accomplished has been long lost.”
Jamaisvous looked Doc in the eye. “I need a man who’s been exposed to trawling before and lived to tell about it, Dr. Tanner. Lesser intellects have no way of comprehending what they are exposed to in the temporal annex between past, present and future. Their puerile brains can’t handle it and once the mind goes, the body quickly follows. You have survived two trips. That’s two more than anybody else. While I have no explanation for what caused your physical deterioration in the forward trawl other than to say it might have been done purposely-”
“On purpose?” Doc replied, his face pale in the yellow light of the den.
“Yes. That is my theory. You should have arrived here in the future either intact or not at all. Instead, you made it safely, but with more than thirty years stolen. I think an acceleration process was used.”
Doc took a deep breath. “Could such a process be reversed?”