Doc had promised that no harm would come to her, as long as he was alive to be her champion, and Sukie had smiled weakly in return.
The humming grew louder and the light of the chamber became brighter and Doc closed his eyes, hoping he wouldn’t dream, and if he did, that Sukie would be in whatever mental confabulation his slumbering mind conjured.
“No.”
A simple word, said very clearly and distinctly came from the woman at his side.
The transitional phase of the mat-trans jump was almost complete, and Doc had to struggle to open his eyes to focus on what he’d heard and the implications of the single spoken syllable. Across from Doc and Sukie, Ryan saw what was happening, even as he battled to keep his own eye open. J.B., his vision dulled by the removal of his specs, also tried to react, but found his body numb and impossibly slow to respond to the mental commands he was issuing.
Sukie Smith, who’d buried a quartet of husbands during her rough struggle to survive in Deathlands, who’d endured all the hell an attractive woman faced in a lawless land of cruel men and still managed to retain the capacity to love, who’d encountered a curious older man with a lilt in his voice and the flowery speeches of a true romantic and for a week of her hard life bought into the fantasy of being swept off her feet, now stared into the unfathomable face of the unknown and was frightened to death.
Fear pumping into her lithe body, she was already up into a crouch and lurching clumsily toward the closed mat-trans chamber door, her mouth working soundlessly with only a few words escaping to the ears of those sitting around her, and all could hear and make sense of only two: “Doc” and “sorry” and “sorry” and “Doc.” They were spoken over and over like a tape on auto-loop, even as her very atoms were scattered to the four winds on a subatomic level.
The future Doc Tanner watched all of this from outside the gateway, saw the door open a crack, saw the world erupt, saw Sukie die from the other side.
This time, when he felt the tugging of the temporal leash trawling him to yet another locale, he was more than relieved.
Doc OPENED HIS EYES and realized he was slumped on his feet against the side of a wooden wall. His legs were tingling with needles of pain, and he could barely stand. Flakes of chipped white paint stuck to his jacket and the side of his face as he leaned for support, his presence hidden away by the shelter of an empty doorway, and struggled to fight back grief for Sukie, grief and guilt that were already intermingling with new emotions brought on by what he was now viewing from the span of a single muddy street away.
He gave an audible gasp when he first saw himself, his wife, his children.
“So young,” he whispered to himself. “Too young.”
There was no stopping the tears now, and his vi- sion blurred and the scene ran like melting paint. The out-of-body experience was taking a great toll physically, but mentally he felt numb. Dead.
He wanted to run to them, to grab up Rachel in his arms and spin her in a circle and never stop holding her, spin her as she laughed and laughed, like she always did-like she always had-until she squealed for him to stop.
But he knew there would be no such reunion, for how could he confront himself? The Theo Tanner walking down that wooden sidewalk with his wife and children had no clue, no concept of the disaster soon to befall, and even if he was forewarned, how would it change the future?
Then, with the clarity of old, the acute mental sharpness he’d once possessed, he recalled words he’d once read on a monitor screen during his captivity with Operation Chronos, words that had haunted him greatly with their implication then, and even more so now as each syllable came rushing back with the fury of a hurricane:
Temporal anomalies are not clearly understood, nor easily explained. Evidence is limited as experiments have not proceeded far or fast. Most experts hypothesize that time is multistranded. There is at any one second millions upon millions of time possibilities, an infinite choice of parallel futures, any or all of which will persist. Thus, it is believed that the classic example of a person traveling back into the past to alter his own present is false. He will alter only one of the parallel streams, but his own present will not change. He could be killed in the past, but his own time stream will not be sullied by the disturbance. But in one universe, he will cease to exist. That is all that is known.