James Axler – Freedom Lost

“What’s on your mind, Doc?” he allowed himself to ask.

“Might I suggest we take yon chariot into the redoubt with us?” the oldish-appearing man said. “While this installation is much smaller than the usual military installations we’re used to taking refuge in, I think we can spare the room this once.”

Ryan and J.B. exchanged embarrassed glances their combined years of training in tactics had been dulled enough by near exhaustion so that they completely overlooked the obvious. The dome’s portal was plenty wide enough to pull the vehicle inside once the door was fully open.

“Damn straight, Doc,” Ryan replied. “Good thinking.”

“Naturally,” Doc Tanner replied modestly. “I am a college graduate.”

DOCTOR Theophilus Algernon Tanner was more than a mere college graduate, much, much more. In fact, despite his elderly appearance, he was beyond mere agehaving lived within the constraints of three lifetimesa reluctant time traveler plucked from the year 1896 and drawn forward to 1998 as part of a secret government project known as Operation Chronos.

“Hell of a lot of candles to stick on a birthday cake,” Ryan had once said.

“I never cared for birthdays,” Tanner had replied.

The concept behind Operation Chronos was simple to describe and impossible to truly understand in terms of what passed for so-called current day physics. Whitecoat scientists might toss jargon around about using a quantum interface in conjunction with a matter-transference booth to pierce the space-time continuum to pluck random subjects from the past or future and bring them safely, intact, whole and breathing, to the current day, but when the veneer of scientific babble was stripped away, they really had no idea of how the setup worked since the builders of this magical device were compartmentalized. Technicians might never even see the engineers.

The military leaders of the operation referred to the time travel process as “trawling,” since there was no visual or physical confirmation available on what they picked up during the experiments. The work was dangerous and crude. The Chronos scientists had no idea whoor whatthey might latch on to and bring back into their midst, and all involved had heard stories and rumors of the fates of previous teams who had locked upon the whirlwind.

Doc was one of the few living “trawling” success stories. At first, his captors were elatedif they were able to pluck a man from one hundred years in the past, surely they could go back even further.

However, as months passed, they discovered their transport of Doc had been a fluke. Virtually all of their other trawling expeditions had failed horribly, bringing back nothing but hunks of wet meat mixed with shredded flesh and splintered bone into the hexagonal mat-trans chambers. The temporal storms of time weren’t forgiving to their crude attempts to shuttle living tissue from one era to another, and even the rare living creature brought back physically intact was always a fragmented mess mentally.

Doc, who had been isolated for study in a cell in the sprawling Chronos laboratory, found his jailers to be more insistent than ever. No longer was he allowed to lie idle, watching television and reading books as he struggled to acclimate himself with his new world. Now he was constantly questioned, prodded, hypnotized and drugged.

What was different about this one man? What made him appear intact and sane, while other humans and animals were brought into the present as unrecognizable masses of gore, or with their bodies relatively intact but their minds forever twisted into knots of insanity? Even non-living tissue was disrupted by the time jumps, although there was a higher rate of success in beaming back simple objects and hunks of rock and metal.

Perhaps what none of the Chronos scientists could bring themselves to admit aloud was that Doc Tanner possessed an unstoppable desire to live. Even then, they knew that physically, Doc’s body had accelerated due to the forces he endured during the journey. But there was a bright fire burning within his weakened frame. His life, his world, all had been stolen, and Tanner had rolled with the punches and still asked for more.

He retained his antiquated speech patterns, and clung to his out-of-date attire and identity, defying the scientists who questioned him to figure out how he still lived. He clung with a parent’s possessiveness to his memories of his long-dead wife, Emily and his two young children, Rachel and Jolyon, and their faces and names kept him sane. Tanner wasn’t an old man when they had first latched upon his body and ripped him away screaming into the void, but the shock of transport had altered him somewhat. His very skin seemed to tighten on his skeletal frame, his entire gaunt physique always sunken down inside his faded academic frock coat.