He had married Emily Chandler in June of 1891, and they had two childrenRachel in 1893 and little Jolyon two years later. With his doctorate of science from Harvard, and doctorate of philosophy from Oxford University, England, Doc’s academic career was already flourishing.
Until a bitter, leaden day in November of 1896.
In another time, the scientists of the United States government were laboring with a highly secret series of experiments. Code-named Operation Chronos, part of the Overproject Whisper, itself a small cog in the mighty machine of Totality Concept, they were trying to travel men and women from past to future.
And Doc was their star subject.
Some of their failures were horrific enough to make a man vomit blood, so ghastly and inhuman were what came through the temporal gateways.
You could count their successes on the fingers of both hands, and even some of them were of dubious merit.
Doc had been in Omaha, Nebraska, when his mind blurred and he collapsed, to awaken in a sterile laboratory in the year 1998, surrounded by a convocation of faceless scientists in masks and gowns.
At that moment you could have reasonably suggested that he was twenty-eight years old.
Nobody who’d ever encountered Doc Tanner would have said that he suffered fools gladly. Or, indeed, that he ever suffered them at all.
As soon as he found out what had happened to him, Doc devoted all of his considerable intellect to trying to make the chron jump back to his own time. But his keepers were too alert for that to happen.
But he consistently made himself a serious nuisance for the authorities.
Eventually, only a matter of days before the nuke holocaust of January 2001, the adminstration committee of Operation Chronos ordered Doc drugged and pushed forward in time. As far as they were concerned, the thorn in their side was gone forever. If he eventually made a temporal landing safely, a hundred years or so ahead, then he wasn’t likely to ever come back to haunt them.
As it happened, they saved his life. Within twenty-three days, they were all dead.
But it was that jump that changed Doc forever.
Nobody had ever quite understood how the process of trawling worked. Now he looked a sparky sixty-odd years old, with a mind permanently tipped by the horrific experiences that he’d suffered, experiences that made him totally unique in the history of the human race.
“Penny for your thoughts, my dear fellow?”
Ryan realized that he was holding an empty mug, and that he’d been miles away. “Just thinking about memories, Doc. Nothing important, though.”
“Things past, not worth forgetting, my friend. Things to come, not worth anticipating. You and John Barrymore Dix are ready for your journey?”
“Pretty well.”
Doc poured himself some of the bitter coffee sub, grimacing as he raised it to his lips. “I disbelieve that I shall ever find this turgid sludge acceptable to my palate. Oh, for a muse of fire to sing of finest Java and the Blue Mountain blend.”
“Wake others?”
Jak had come into the room so silently that even Ryan’s razored combat reflexes hadn’t detected him. The albino teenager was barefooted and wore only cotton pants and a short-sleeved shirt, open all the way down. His stark white hair blazed like a mag flare in the dim light of the oil lamp, and his red eyes glowed in sockets of wind-washed bone like the embers of a dying fire.
Ryan nodded. “Might as well.”
“Sure don’t want me come with you?”
“No, Jak. Not your fight, this time.”
“Wasn’t your fight, Christina and Jenny bein’ chilled. Didn’t stop you. Wouldn’t stop me.”
“I know that. But there’s work to do here on the spread, Jak.” Ryan lifted a hand. “I know that you keep telling me you don’t intend to stay here. Not now. When we move on, in a few weeks, after I find Trader, then you can decide. Stay or come. Whichever you want, Jak. But for now, there’s things to do here.”
“Yeah. Guess so.”
He went out as quietly as he’d entered, and they heard him going to rouse the rest of the household. Doc blew his nose on his swallow’s-eye kerchief.