“Closing in on hot,” Krysty observed.
“Too late to leave ‘fore dark,” Jak said, moving back from the rim. “Be night in less than an hour. Better wait and find a way down in the morning.”
Ryan wasn’t sure that it was going to be that easy to get off the sheer plateau. When you found a redoubt that hadn’t been entered since the long chill had begun, it meant it was hard to get at. Which generally meant it was also damned hard to get out of.
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“Sure,” he agreed. “Krysty says Doc’s sick. We’ll all go back in and scout for some food. I saw a shelf of self-heats. Reckon its soy meat.” He grinned at the look of revulsion on J.B.’s face. “Know what you mean, friend,” he said. “Can’t say I like that tepid sludge myself. Let’s get in and close off the rad doors. We’ll make a clean start in the morning at first light.”
the jump had nearly killed them all.
All over the Deathlands, which had once been the United States of America, there were a number of hidden fortresses. These redoubts had been known to Ryan Cawdor from his earliest days with the traveling guerrilla leader they called the Trader. But only in the past few weeks had Ryan learned of the other, secret uses of these redoubts.
Many of them concealed a small security fortress within the main complex, which was called a gateway.
The key to these installations had been Dr. Theophilus Tanner-Doc, a scrawny old man in tattered clothes who seemed to have come from the prenuke era. Doc’s brains had been scrambled by some horrific experiences, but every now and again he came out with pearls of arcane wisdom that puzzled and fascinated Ryan Cawdor. And the most bewildering concerned something called Project Cerberus.
Eventually Ryan and Krysty had stumbled upon the secret of Doc Tanner. Back in the late 1990s, only a few years before the civilized world vanished in the war that ended all wars, American and Russian scientists were working on ways of moving human beings through space and through time. In the United States this was Project Cerberus. In max-sec labs attempts were made to trawl a
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living person from the past. Many attempts were made, and some of the results were ghastly. But one succeeded.
Doctor Tanner was born in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14, 1868. He married in 1891 and had been successfully time-trawled and brought forward, alive, to the fading end of the twentieth century. Doc proved so unstable and difficult that he was eventually sent for-ward on a chron-jump, this time ending up in the heart Of the Deathlands. His mind constantly tottered on the brink of madness, with only the occasional shard of crystal-clear memory remaining.
But slowly things had improved. His memory had grown stronger, and he had been able to give Ryan infor-mation about Cerberus, about the gateways and how they could be set for mat-trans jumps.
But the secret of time travel was still locked somewhere in the back of Doc’s ravaged mind.
With his help the group had been able to make a num-ber of mat-trans leaps, going from Alaska to Louisiana in the blink of an eye. But not all of the gateways remained undamaged. Doc had warned that their operation was completely unpredictable and that there remained the possibility they might jump to a gateway that was under a thousand feet of rock, or be drowned at the bottom of a California lagoon.
This last leap had brought that prediction frighten-ingly close.
The glass walls of the mat-trans chamber had been a deep red. The six friends had all entered the small room, sitting down on the floor of polished metal disks, ready-ing themselves for the jump. All the references for con-trolling where the destination was had long been lost. All any of them knew was that the act of closing the gate-
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way’s inner door triggered the mechanism and sent them hurtling on a trip into the unknown.
ryan had been the first to recover .consciousness, awakening with the familiar feeling that his brains had been splintered and put through a mixer, then hastily reassembled. His stomach churned and his eye pained him. For an instant everything felt like all the other mat-trans jumps.