file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/Axler,%20Jame.../021%20-%20Twilight%20Children%20-%20Laurence%20James%201.1b.txt
Mildred Wyeth was next. The black doctor was breathing very heavily, her mouth sagging open, her
left hand gripping J.B.'s right.
The last of the seven friends was Doctor Theophi-lus Algernon Tanner, who was stretched out next
to Ryan, flat on his back, his hands folded across his stomach, holding the gold-plated J. E. B.
Stuart Le Mat blaster.
Normally it was Doc who had the biggest problem in using the mat-trans system. Even at the best of
times his brain was a touch unreliable, and the pressures of jumping sometimes pushed him a few
inches closer to the edge.
On occasion it had even pushed him completely into the abyss of insanity.
Ryan looked at the wrinkled face, the silvery stubble showing through the leathery skin.
It wasn't that surprising that Doc often found h'fe in the last part of the twenty-first century
hard to bear.
He'd been born in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14 in the year of Our Lord, 1868, and was
married to Emily Chandler twenty-three years later on June 17. Had two children-Rachel, born in
the second year of their marriage, and little Jolyon, born to the happy parents two years later.
In November of 1896 Doc had been in Omaha, Nebraska. In a nanosecond he was transported to a
laboratory in a discreet and heavily guarded building somewhere in Virginia, one hundred and two
years later.
It was a time of extreme fragility and suspicion in international relations, and the United States
of America had poured limitless squillions of dollars into the ultrasecret Totality Project, which
explored arcane and esoteric possibilities for future warfare.
One of its subdivisions was Overproject Whisper, which, in its turn, had spawned numerous other
research missions. One, Cerberus, involved the transfer of matter from one location to another,
which became known as "jumping."
Another research mission was called Operation Chronos and focused on time trawling.
Chronos had some spectacular and hideously disgusting failures. Not many of their targets ever
arrived in the year 2000 either physically or mentally whole. Some simply disappeared.
But Doc arrived-mentally scarred, but he arrived and lived.
However, they had picked a bad subject. Doc wouldn't sit quiet under their battery of tests and
interrogation, insisting on trying by every means necessary to try to rejoin his wife and family.
In the end, the faceless military scientists got rid of him. They sent him forward in time, to the
heart of Deathlands, where he came close to death before being rescued by Ryan Cawdor.
Michael Brother was also one of the tiny number of successfully trawled victims of Chronos, helped
into the dubious future by Ryan and the others.
In the late 1900s he'd been taken as a baby into a closed-monastic order near Visalia in the
Sierras. He'd spent all of his life as an oblate within the serene community of Nil-Vanity, then
was sucked away by Chronos into the late part of the next century.
Mildred was also from the past.
But time trawling wasn't responsible for her being stuck in Deathlands.
Born in 1964, Mildred had become one of the country's leading experts on cryogenics and cryosur-
gery, the science of medical freezing. Ironically, at the age of thirty-six she'd gone into
hospital for routine minor surgery.
Which had gone wrong.
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