He walked to the foot of the catwalk, where the concrete ended, and looked down. The chasm he faced was hundreds of feet deep, maybe even thousands; Ryan couldn’t see the bottom. The concrete pad on which he stood was poised above it, a towering platform. He could see that the man-made canyon’s walls were covered with more pipe, hose and conduit. Miles and miles of the stuff.
Standing there, looking over the abyss, Ryan had a momentary lapse of confidence. In his heart, he sensed the truth, that home and loved ones were impossibly far away, a distance beyond his comprehension. Perhaps he would never see them again. Perhaps there was no way home. Perhaps he was forever lost. He tasted his own rising panic, as bitter as gall at the back of his throat. With sheer willpower, he forced the torrent of negative thoughts from his mind. He had taken many hazardous journeys to unknown places; he had countless times allowed himself to be deconstructed and hurled forward at the whim of century-old machines; he had faced dangers larger than life, and no matter where he’d ended up, or what enemies awaited, he had always managed to battle through them and find his way home. Ryan vowed to take this strange twist of fate not as tragedy, but as challenge.
The bulkhead door reopened behind him. When he turned, he saw a jam of people in white lab coats on the other side. He recognized Nara in the front of the pack. No longer in black armor, like the others she wore the uniform of a scientist. However, she wore the military insignia of captain on her breast pocket, just above a badge bearing the word FIVE.
Nara didn’t step forward. A tall, lanky whitecoat walked through the door, instead, and advanced onto the catwalk. He had a high forehead, thick brown hair and very long legs.
“Mr. Cawdor, my name is Dr. Huth,” he said. “I’m in charge here. I want to make your adjustment to these new circumstances as quick and painless as possible.”
“I’m all for that.”
Huth waved at the door, and it was pulled closed and sealed. They were alone.
“I will take a moment and answer some of your questions now.”
“Where is this place?”
Huth smiled. “You started off with a good one,” he said. “No simple answer there, I’m afraid. Do you have any scientific training?”
“I thought I was going to be the one asking the questions.”
“I have to know how much to explain. Where to start.”
“I know a little of predark science.”
“By ‘predark’ do you mean before the apocalypse on your world?”
Ryan nodded.
“Ever hear of something called the Totality Concept?”
Ryan considered whether to admit his knowledge and decided that it didn’t matter.
“I’ve heard of it.”
“The time-trawling mission?”
“Yes.”
“That’s excellent. Then what I’m about to tell you won’t come out of the blue. Please feel free to stop me if any part of my explanation isn’t clear.” After a pause Huth said, “Where we are at this moment is not the Earth you know. It’s another Earth.”
“There’s only one Earth.”
“That’s what we thought,” Huth said, “until we made a freak discovery while experimenting with time-trawling technology. We uncovered the existence of parallel universes, and with that revelation came the possibility of constructing a corridor between your apocalyptic Earth and our own.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It turns out that both your world and ours exist simultaneously in real time and space. In our world there was no nuclear holocaust. No end of civilization, of science, of humanity. Our world lived on, progressed and thrived.”
Ryan scratched his chin, but said nothing. For the first time he noticed the cuffs of the man’s coat, how frayed they were. A button was missing, too. Curious, if he was the bigwig scientist he claimed to be. Huth went on, “We believe that our parallel existences were virtually indistinguishable, exact duplicates until the moment of divergence, which we calculate occurred on January 20, 2001. The day of your nuclear holocaust. After that date, our realitiesand futuresveered apart.”
“Sounds to me like a great big load of bullshit,” Ryan said.