fluorescent bulbs flickered erratically.
Bell yarded the intubation hose from his throat and let it drop, hissing, to his feet. The sickly sweet taste in his mouth was from trehalose, a sugar that was the key to successful reanimation from cryodeath. Prior to his immersion in deep cold, his tissues had been infused with this naturally occurring antifreeze. Trehalose kept the water in his body from turning to ice crystals, which would have ruptured his every cell, turning him upon defrost into two hundred pounds of slunky garbage.
Bracing his arms and back against the wall, Bell used his legs to slowly straighten, fighting the cramps that seized his thighs and buttocks. When he looked down at his corpse-white body, he saw wasted muscles, every rib showing, tendons standing out like load-maxed cables. Red starbursts of exploded capillaries dotted his skin. Galaxies of them.
Freezer burn.
The first stirrings of memory returned—the jumble of terrifying images and sensations sent Bell’s heart racing. Lurching stiffly forward, he grabbed one of the rungs in the wall and started pulling himself out of the cylindrical coffin. He moaned as he climbed, panting hard between steps.
As Bell straddled the rim of the cryomodule, he was slammed by a wave of vertigo. He shut his eyes while the deserted laboratory spun around him. He held on with both hands until the dizzyness passed, then crawled onto the attached steel platform.
The cryotank on the other side of the access gantry had not opened, yet. Rivulets of condensation peeled down the module’s gleaming sides, and its defrost unit gave off a steady hum. Reanimation in progress. From where Bell lay, he could read the tank’s LED indicators. The internal temperature was 89.9 degrees Fahrenheit, and rising. Heart restart was still fourteen minutes, sixteen seconds away—a delay due to the fact that there was more of Dr. Antoine Kirby to thaw. Fifty-two pounds more, to be exact.
Still dazed, Colonel Bell dragged himself down the gantry stairs on his behind, dropping from one tread to the next, until he reached the lab floor. When he tried to get up, a stabbing pain in his gut doubled him over. Falling to hands and knees, he threw back his head and projectile vomited. Expelled trehalose syrup drew a ten-foot-long stripe on the polished concrete. He heaved until his stomach knotted and blood mixed with bile dripped from his chin.
The cryolab’s computer control consoles were twenty feet away. Unable to stand, he crawled hand over hand until he reached the nearest desktop, then hauled himself into an ergonomic chair. On the counter before him were framed photos, color portraits of two beaming families, both of them his. Five children, ages six to sixteen, produced by two marriages. The boys and girls had inherited their father’s firm chin, wide-set brown eyes and extraordinary intelligence. They were the joy of his life, the wellspring of his inspiration. When Bell looked up at the mission chronometer, the atomic clock that measured elapsed time to hundredths of a second, an icy hand pushed into the center of his chest and gripped his heart. Suddenly he was shivering again, teeth chattering, bones clicking, vibrating like he was going to shake apart. He pulled a thermal blanket from a drawer and clumsily wrapped himself in it.
Chronologically, Graydon Bell was 135 years old.
Everyone he had ever loved was dust.
And they had died unaware of his desperate all-or-nothing sacrifice to save them. Bell had thrown himself upon the anvil of death, anonymously, selflessly, unsure of resurrection, but confident that the threat facing all of humanity required nothing less.
In the world of pure science, in Bell’s world, confidence was a mathematical construct, a numeric of probability that separated fact from speculation. By the first week of January 2001, he and Dr. Kirby were ninety-five-percent certain that a disintegration of global defense systems was imminent, a cascade of incremental failures leading inexorably to Armageddon—an all-out nuclear missile exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Their elaborate and ingenious computer models had revealed the near future, and it was a dead end. But their warnings had fallen on deaf ears.
Things might have been different if they’d had some kind of quick, cheap fix to offer the directors of the ultrasecret Operation Chronos, which was responsible for the first successful experiments in time travel. Kirby and Bell’s research on the structure of supra-time/space had started out as theoretical and abstract, but had soon become vital to the black budget program’s main thrust. Time-trawling had mindbending military and economic potential. It opened the possibility of effective social engineering on a global scale, the permanent rewriting of history in favor of those who controlled the technology. For any number of practical reasons it was easy to dismiss Kirby and Bell’s conclusions out of hand. The idea that Operation Chronos had already accidentally triggered a chain reaction at the most fundamental level of reality was nothing short of heresy.
As Bell struggled numb fingers to log on to the redoubt’s computer, logic told him that what he and Kirby feared most had come to pass. Otherwise they would have been discovered and reanimated by their Chronos colleagues a century ago.
With faint hope, he enabled the encrypted redoubt-to-redoubt com links. The global network was offline; he could not call up the date, time or text of the last coded transmission. Communication satellites had either fallen out of orbit or been fried by a colossal EM burst. The redoubt’s conventional radio mast pulled in a hiss of static across all bands, all frequencies. Sensor indicators showed high radioactivity levels topside, and superelevated air temperatures that suggested radical local climate change.
There was no way around the evidence: buried deep in a mountainside in a nuke-hardened site, he had survived Armageddon. There was no satisfaction in having been proved right. Bell sagged back in the chair, overwhelmed by grief and guilt.
He and Dr. Kirby were at least partially responsible for the destruction of civilization, and for millions, perhaps billions of deaths, including those of his own children. In the beginning their interest had been as selfish and blind as the would-be landgrabbers and slave masters. Supra-time/space was a mathematical perspective outside the biologically hard-wired, human experience of time. Kirby and Bell wanted to be the first scientists to map this new, overarching dimension, and the only way to do that was to evaluate and interpret the results of successful time-trawling experiments. Had their ongoing research, code-named Project Undo, not been critical to the directors’ goal of controlled manipulation of the time stream, it would never have been so lavishly funded. Analyses of the handful of Operation Chronos triumphs had revealed few facts about the boundaries of s-t/s, and even less about its apparent congruencies and paradoxes, but had convinced Kirby and Bell that time-trawling, in and of itself, could disrupt present reality in unforeseen and ultimately catastrophic ways.
With no support from their superiors, the researchers faced the most difficult of moral and professional choices. They could either sit back and watch the inevitable, dying alongside their family and friends, or they could attempt to do something to change the outcome, which meant abandoning the still-intact present to its terrible fate. In the end, they’d decided they had to act. No one alive knew more about the implications of temporal alteration than they did; for that reason, they had used cryogenics instead of time-trawling to reach the future.
The colonel rested his forehead on the desktop. He would have wept had he been able to produce tears. It felt like fibers of steel wool were embedded in his throat, his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, cramps gripped his bowels. Reanimation and the subsequent vomiting had caused severe dehydration. After unlocking the wheels of the ergochair, he slowly rolled himself a yard or so to the left, to the vacuum-sealed intravenous bags suspended from a stainless-steel pole. Finding an injection site was easy—the veins stood out like soda straws on his emaciated forearms. He connected driplines of saline and nutrients, and adjusted the flow rates.
Graydon Bell was a physicist, not a medical doctor, but he understood as well as anyone
