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their wide-
eyed gawking.
Ryan pointedly turned his back to them and looked around. Definitely not a
gateway, he decided. There was no armaglass, and the distant gray walls were
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covered with gray pipes, hoses and conduit. Because the huge room was too wide
for its height, there was a crushing oppressiveness to it. He stood in the
center of a large rectangle painted on the concrete floor. A matching
rectangle was in the flat, concrete ceiling just overhead, and it made Ryan
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feel as if he were about to be smashed flat.
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."
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"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
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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
realities and futures veered apart."
"Sounds to me like a great big load of bullshit," Ryan said.
"If you have a question, I'd be glad "
"My question is, why are you bothering to make up this crap?"
"Ryan, if I may call you that, to convince you of the truth of my words, all I
have to do is take you out of this chamber. The proof is there. It is
absolute. I just want to prepare you for what you will see. To minimize the
shock. Believe me, this is not your Earth."
"Not Deathlands, but somewhere else?" Huth shook his head. "In this place, the
Earth you know is the faintest of faint shadows, only visible under the most
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intense light imaginable."
"I want to talk to your baron."
"Baron?" Huth repeated, momentarily puzzled by the term. Then he smiled. "Oh,
I
see. After the holocaust your democratic society devolved into feudal
associations.
I'm sorry, Ryan. We have no such single authority figure here."
"Assuming for the moment that what you say about this place is true, that it
isn't
Earth, what do you want from Deathlands? Why have you sent your people there?"
"We want to help you recover from the disaster."
Huth told him. "To use our century of progress to bring light back to your
Earth." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
