And through all the endless years of bleakness, Mildred Wyeth slept dreamlessly on. Gradually a form of civilization crept back to what had once been the United States of Americawhat was now Deathlands.
There were isolated communities called villes, many with their own rulers, who named themselves barons. It was a world of violence, ruled by the gun and the knife; a world where science and industry were almost gone; a world with virtually no airplanes and few motorized vehicles, adapted to run on crudely processed gasoline; a world with only rudimentary power, no television or telephones.
Ryan and his friends had finally awakened Mildred from her long sleep, and she was now an integral member of their small group.
“I don’t remember feeling so well after a jump,” she said. “Not ever.”
Her right hand reached down for the comfort of the butt of her ZKR 551 Czech target revolver. The 6-shot revolver had been chambered to take a Smith amp; Wesson .38-caliber round. Mildred, other than being a specialist in cryogenics, had been a member of the U.S. pistol-shooting team in the last-ever Olympics, in Atlanta in 1996.
She was, quite simply, the finest shot that Ryan had ever seen.
“Doc hasn’t even got his usual nosebleed,” she observed, standing up a little unsteadily. “And where in the name of Mary and Joseph did all the water go? Even my clothes are dust dry.”
Ryan shook his head. “Don’t know. Must’ve sort of drained away during the jump. Who knows?”
The truth was, nobody knew.
All they knew was that in the last months before skydark, the government had poured billions of dollars into what was memorably called an aggressive defense. The master plan was christened the Totality Concept, of which the Strategic Defense Initiative had been one small part. Operation Chronos had been ultrasecret research into time-trawling, which plucked people from their own past and dragged them helplessly forward into the militaristic present.
Then there had been Overproject Whisper; and a crucial segment of this had been code-named Cerberusmatter transfer.
Highly secret installations had been buried deep within a number of military complexes, which were called redoubts. Most were built in the last five years of the previous century, many in isolated parts of national parks to the pointless disgust of the conservationist lobby. Opposition to the siting of the many redoubts was ruthlessly crushed, with most of the leading protagonists mysteriously disappearing.
But the system worked.
You entered a gateway in Portland, Maine, for example, pressed in the code and woke up sometime later in say, Portland, Oregon.
Ryan and his companions had stumbled on one of the gateways many months ago, and triggered the start mechanism by simply closing the door. But they had no idea of how to control the system. As far as was known, all of the intricate coding instructions for the mat-trans units had been destroyed during the skydark and the long winterswhich meant that you got into a gateway to make a jump from Portland, Maine, for example, and you might end up anywhere Florida, Montana, west Texas, Oregon, New York, Moscow, Louisiana, the Amazon jungle, Pocatello, Bucksnort….
Anywhere.
Five of them were up on their feet now, stretching, waiting for the sixth member of the group to lurch back out of the mind-crushing numbness of the jump.
Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was the only surviving subject trawled forward in time during Operation Chronos.
He’d been born in the beautiful hamlet of South Strafford in Vermont on Valentine’s day in 1868. Highly intelligent, successful, traveled and cultured, he had been married in June of 1891 to Emily Chandler. In the next four years they had two adorable children, Rachel and little Jolyon.
In November 1896 Doc Tanner was trawled forward in time to 1998. During the next two years, he made himself intolerably awkward, constantly trying everything he could to return to his own time and to his wife and children, or to sabotage the detested Chronos operation. In the end he became such a running sore, the whitecoats got rid of him by pushing him forward nearly a hundred years, into Deathlands where he met up with Ryan Cawdor. It was an event that almost certainly saved the old man’s life.
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