"Axler, James - Deathlands 021 - Twilight Children - Laurence James 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Axler James)

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.

She'd been frozen, deeply unconscious, not long before the missiles darkened the skies of the world and civilization came to a grinding halt.

Not with a whimper, but with a megabang. ' During the exploration of one of the concealed redoubts, Ryan and his friends had come across Mildred, sealed away, her life-support system powered by a long-running and reliable nuke generator. And they had brought her back to the land of the living.

"Feel sick, Dad."

"Hang on, Dean. Just try to sit up and keep your head still. If 11 pass."

J.B. was also coming around.

His first movement was to fumble his fingers over the stock of the Uzi, then reach down for the Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun on the floor.

"Not too bad, as jumps go," he said, his voice sounding hoarse. "You okay, Ryan?"

"Yeah. Wasn't a bad one."

Krysty sighed and opened her emerald eyes, turning to Ryan and giving him a lazy, jump-stoned smile. "Hi, lover. Once again we made it with nothing worse than a nauseous headache."

He stood, reaching a hand down to help her to her feet. The heels of her dark blue Western boots skidded a moment, but Ryan steadied her.

Dean and J.B. were also up, stretching, easing the kinks out of their spines.