The suits were the only thing the trio shared in common. The man standing slightly in the lead was Caucasian, with a high forehead and thin lips. A pair of steely blue-gray eyes were sunk above high, almost regal cheekbones. It was a cruel face, Doc decided. Next to him was an older man, with dark brown coloring similar to Mildred’s, although Mildred had never sported shoulders as wide as the ones atop this man’s torso. He had a long, heavy-jawed face adorned with a thick black mustache and a frowning, suspicious expression.
The third member of the white bodysuit club was one of the most striking examples of feminine beauty Doc could remember ever seeing, rivaling Krysty for pulchritude. Her honey-blond hair was a tousled mane of wavy thickness atop the most delicate of features, and like Krysty she had eyes of deepest emerald. A graceful swanlike neck led to a slender body of curves, accented even more by the hug of the white clothing she wore.
None of them appeared to be armed with the usual plethora of weapons he was used to seeing on denizens of Deathlands, a fact that allowed Doc to release the deep gulp of air he’d taken by reflex when the door to the chamber had opened. As Doc exhaled, he noted they didn’t seem to be intent on inflicting or creating any immediate harm. For now, they merely gawked. Doc could handle gawkers. He decided to turn on the charm and allowed himself to grin nervously, revealing his perfect white teeth.
“By the Three Kennedys! Something tells me I’m not in Omaha,” he said by way of greeting.
Hearing the booming basso profundo voice echoing from within the chamber, a fourth man joined the others, also dressed in the tight-fitting white bodysuit, which Doc couldn’t help but note was nowhere near as flattering as it looked on the other three. The new arrival was in a wheelchair and didn’t appear at all happy to be so confined, the arm movements he used to wheel himself over impatient and quick.
The man in the wheelchair was much older than the other three, with decades on Doc’s own elderly appearance. A pair of thick-lensed glasses were perched on his long nose, and a small mechanical hearing aid was attached to the right earpiece. The man’s appearance and manner vividly reminded Doc of a perpetually annoyed old chemistry professor he’d been forced to suffer under during a long fall semester of his stay at Harvard.
Armed with blasters or not, Doc realized he was rapidly becoming outnumbered. He took a cautious half step back, quickly turning the lion’s head on the swordstick with a twist of a wrist, rewarded by the appearance of a half-foot of glittering, razored steel from the stick’s sheath.
At the same instant, the halo of light scurrying around his lean body exuded curling, crackling strings of pure energy, and the skin-crawling sensation was replaced with a much more uncomfortable jabbing feeling, as if ten thousand tiny needles were all being shoved into the upper epidermis of his skin at once.
“It’s cycling again!” a voice cried out. “We’ve got to seal the chamber! We don’t know the wavelengths of that radiation! It could be fatal, or could contaminate the redoubt if it’s not contained!”
By this time, Doc had no idea who was speaking, since his vision was starting to break down into streaks of multicolored light, followed by a sodden darkness all too familiar to anyone who’d previously traveled on the mat-trans express.
SILVER ARMAGLASS.
Silver, the color of betrayal. He knew the mat-trans chamber from a previous visit, and now, here he was again. Doc had felt the sting of betrayal that dark day, the cold flush of having one’s trust rejected because of suspicion or fear radiating out from his helpless body.
“What’s that panel of numbers and letters by the side of the door?” a woman’s voice asked him, mere moments before the event that he knew was soon to occur.
“Control codes,” Doc heard himself reply. “Sadly, at the time of what is called skydark, all of the relevant documentation and comp disks have been wiped clean or destroyed or have quite simply vanished. So we have no way at all of understanding what any combination might do.”