Ryan ignored them. His mind racing, he frantically moved the tape on fast forward, pausing now and again to try to absorb the mass of information about the old man who stood behind him.

An old man who was, if the machine was to be believed, some two hundred and thirty years old.

Married June 17, 1891. Wife Emily Louise, nee Chandler, deceased. Children, two. Rachel, deceased at age three in 1896. Jolyon, deceased at age one in 1896.

"Fireblast!" Ryan breathed, shaking his head in disbelief. "He was married with a coupla kids. But two hundred years ago. How?.."

He caught the faintest of sounds behind him, like a quickly muffled sob, then feet moving fast on the dusty floor and the door opening and closing.

He and Krysty were alone again.

The record raced by, and Ryan was able to absorb only the highlights of it. Doctor Theophilus Tanner had been a truly eminent scientist, tipped for greatness, doing research at both Harvard and Princeton.

First located and targeted by TT.

"What's that?" Krysty asked.

Ryan queried it. The answer came up on the screen that the initials stood for an exercise called "Time-Trawl." It seemed that scientist working at the very end of the twentieth century had been dabbling with temporal travel, and had been searching the Victorian times for a possible victim, or specimen, to be trawled forward.

There was no explanation on the disk of precisely how this would be done, not even the vaguest of hints, except for a cross-reference that was a jumble of letters and numerals.

"Chron-jumps," Ryan said. "Old doc's mentioned that a few times. Just a broken word or two. Thought he was raving, like he... you know."

"Sure," Krysty whispered. "We all did, lover, we all did."

Now a pattern of order began to make sense out of the chaos of jumbled ideas and half memories from the confused old man.

As the disk wound on, Ryan and Krysty sat, open-mouthed, hardly able to believe the evidence flashing up on the screen in front of them. Doctor Theophilus Tanner had been trawled in a time experiment operation in November 1896. Krysty pointed out that this was the year both of Doc's children had died and wondered if there could be any connection.

At one point Ryan noticed there was a passing reference to some other failed experiments in time-trawling, including a judge on the United States Supreme Court named Crater, a name that Ryan recalled had seemed to mean something to Doc Tanner when they'd first mentioned this lake.

It seemed as though Judge Crater had been lifted successfully, but had never arrived safely in 1998. The word used was "incomplete," which conjured up a horrific picture.

Doc Tanner's lift appeared to have been the only one that could reasonably have been called successful. He was trawled forward to only three years before the long winters began. Physically it seemed he had been in fair shape, but his mind had been tainted by the shattering experience.

Subject's refusal to become reconciled to temporal correction proved difficult. Several abortive attempts to bribe or cheat his way into the chron-chambers were undeniable evidence of his overwhelming desire to travel back to his own time and rejoin his wife.

One thing puzzled Ryan. "Krysty? What the chill would have happened if they'd returned him to his own time, but a day before they trawled him?"

"You mean, if he'd met himself?"

"Yeah."

She paused the disk, then entered a query concerning potential temporal anomalies. "It's the old one about going back in time and killing your own father before you were born. You wouldn't exist. So, you couldn't go back in time and kill your own father. So you would exist. So... and soon."

The machine whirred and clicked before it began to print an answer. In that dusty mausoleum, filled with the useless knowledge of an entire civilization, Ryan found himself sweating. He wiped at his forehead, but the salty liquid trickled down behind the patch over his left eye, making the puckered, raw socket sting. He eased the patch off and wiped at it with the end of the weighted silk scarf around his neck.

Temporal anomalies are not clearly understood, nor easily explained. Evidence is limited as experiments have not proceeded far or fast. Most experts hypothesize that time is multistranded. There is at any one second millions upon millions of time possibilities — an infinite choice of parallel futures, any or all of which will persist. Thus, it is believed that the classic example of a person traveling back into the past to alter his own present is false. He will alter only one of the parallel streams, but his own present will not change. He could be killed in the past, but his own time stream will not be sullied by the disturbance. But in one universe, he will cease to exist. This is all that is known.

"Thanks for fucking nothing," Ryan muttered.

"Move the disk on, or someone's going to get very suspicious about where we've gone and what we're doing. There'll be a sec patrol along here any time now."

Ryan took her advice and pushed the fast-scan control, reading the screen as the information poured out.

Subject's constant attempts to rejoin "Beloved Emily" and his own century became a considerable irritant. Doctor Tanner was taken by the appropriate responsible authorities and placed under restricted access and egress.

"Means he was a bastard prisoner," Ryan said.

Together they read through several more pages until Krysty paused the info disk. "So the old man became too damned difficult for them to control. Surprised they didn't just lose him out of a copter off the coast. But they found a better way."

Ryan shook his head. "The poor, mind-blown old... The cold-hearted icers sent him forward. Used a gateway in Virginia. End December, in the year 2000. Couple of weeks before the big one and the end of all that. Send him onward."

"To Mocsin and Jordan Teague and Kurt Strasser. And then on to join us."

Krysty walked away from the viewing console, burying her head in her hands as she leaned against a wall of the library.

Ryan also stood. "Nothing more on the disk. Stops with the information that they pushed him forward. Ends up saying there were no contingency plans for further trawling or return of subject."

"It hardly mentions that he worked for a time on Project Cerberus, and it doesn't mention this Project Eurydice anywhere."

It was true. There were passing references to redoubts and gateways. It looked as if all research into chron-jumps had more or less ended when they had pushed Doc Tanner forward into the unguessable future. One anomaly that still puzzled Ryan was whether they could have brought him back from the future. Would the old man have had knowledge of the nuclear holocaust that was to destroy most of the planet? Would they have believed him? Would he have changed things? Not if you credited the theory about there being parallel universes.

"But he worked on the chron projects, so he does know something about how to make the gateways function for time jumps as well as just for mat-trans." Krysty whistled between her teeth. "This is... If we found a redoubt still sealed and with its gateway functioning for chron-jumps, then we aren't just limited to going anyplace, are we, Ryan?"

"Nope. We can go anywhen as well."

Doc Tanner was waiting for them when they finally emerged from the echoing vault of the library. They closed the door carefully behind them, hearing tumblers click into place, locking it tight.

"You read it all?" the old man asked. His eyes were red and swollen, sore from weeping.

"Sure. Why didn't you tell us about it?" Ryan replied. "It can't hurt to tell someone."

"No. I suppose you are correct in that assumption. But I am so alone, my dear Ryan. A speck of infinity, two centuries old, with my wife and children long dead. Yet, in their world, they are all alive. I still cherish the hope that one day..."