Then, an alarm Klaxon went off, screamingly loud and disruptive. A metallic voice said, “Warning! Intruder alert within the matter-transfer control room.”
Doc knew the pair of scientists couldn’t have returned from their break so soon, and Allan’s unconscious body was hopefully still slumbering in his bed, the covers pulled high…so what had tipped them off? Doc looked up, craning his long neck and pointing his chin skyward, and saw the sec camera staring down at him, a small red activation light winking on and off.
At some point during his fight with Chan, the overhead video camera had seen the straggle.
Doc supposed he should be glad for his keepers and their lack of subtlety. If they hadn’t hit the alarm, he wouldn’t have heard them coming in time to try to make a stand.
He picked up the chair he’d been sitting in and ran over to the control keypad for the vanadium steel security door to the room, swinging up the solid metal legs in a sideways arc and smashing the plastic casing. The liquid crystal display went blank, and there was a smattering of white sparks from the inside wiring of the number keys.
Having retrieved the Glock, Doc fired a series of bullets into the door’s mechanism as well. The pistol had a slight kick, but he had braced himself instinc- tively before pulling the trigger. The gunshots were horrendously loud in the confined area of the control room, but when combined with the shrieking of the alarm, they seemed inconsequential.
Rolling the chair to the computer, he sat back down and began to type even faster, hoping in his haste he wouldn’t make a mistake. Recalling the commands from his scholar’s trained memory, which had observed, organized and stored away during previous stints watching and learning in the mat-trans rooms, he was able to bring up the proper entry screen for the time-trawl settings on the computer monitor.
Sweating now from the exertion and nerves and the double layer of clothing he wore, his brow glistening with perspiration, Doc typed in the destination date as that November day of 1896, along with the exact moment the “eye of God” appeared in the sky before his daughter. While Doc might not have been certain of the precise second, all of the essential information regarding bis trawl was already stored in the computer’s data banks, and as such he was able to time his planned reentry as best he could to the very instant he was first sucked away. In essence, he was attempting to superimpose himself upon the scene.
The date in place, Doc closed down the time-trawl data banks, retaining the translation code the computer had offered that he would need to program by hand for his destination when he entered the gateway site itself. The code was more complex than the ones he’d seen for using the gateways to travel from one location to another. He imagined that extending the process to include the opening up of a temporal doorway accounted for the extra series of numerals.
The intercom speakers crackled into life a second time, struggling valiantly to be overheard against the whooping of the alarm. ‘ ‘Tanner, this is Welles. Halt what you are doing immediately and open the control-room door or there will be terminal repercussions. If we have to blast our way inside, we might damage the gateway controls, and if that happens, you won’t ever be able to go back.”
Doc ignored the voice. “Lies,” he murmured to himself. “All lies.”
He raced into the anteroom between the armaglass gateway and the control room, stripping off the security uniform. He held the pistol he’d taken from Allan out from his body for a second, pondering whether to take it along or not, and finally thrust it down into the front of his trousers and belt, hoping the weapon’s safety would stay in place and he wouldn’t be blowing off the Tanner family jewels.
Pausing before the gateway keypad, Doc tapped in the needed code, bringing it up from where he’d stored it in his short-term memory and taking grim confidence in knowing he’d remembered the sequence perfectly. The small display on the control pad of the gateway blinked twice after he thumbed the enter key and began counting down. Doc looked away, knowing time was short, and lifted the rubber and metal handle of the heavy armaglass gate to the six-sided chamber.