For a moment, he lay stunned, unable to move. All he could see were the colors of the carpet, brilliant red, metallic gold and indigo a richly complex pattern, figured with dragons and stylized lions. Slowly, he pushed himself up and looked around.
He was in a large, circular room with a domed, observatory ceiling. The most dominant object in the room was a huge radio telescope. All around him were banks of computers and other electronic instruments he could not identify, with rows upon rows of blinking lights and dials and digital and video displays. Laboratory equipment vied for space with exquisite Victorian antiques and bronze sculptures and impressionistic oil paintings. Books were everywhere, crammed to overflowing in tall bookcases, stacked upon tables and piled high upon the floor. As Lucas slowly stood, he turned and saw a huge, curved bay window behind him. The landscape outside was rocky and desolate. And red-orange. The vermilion sands stretched out for as far as the eye could see, nothing but an unbroken vista of rock-strewn, reddish-orange desert. And there were three moons in the sky.
“What the hell?” said Lucas.
“It does rather look like hell, doesn’t it?” said a deep, vaguely continental voice from behind him.
Lucas turned to see a tall and slender man, with dark, unruly hair that came down to his collar in the back and a neatly trimmed moustache. He was gaunt, with dark, penetrating eyes and a sharp, prominent nose. He was dressed in a button-down white shirt, a silk tie with a regimental stripe, a dark brown waistcoat with a gold watch chain and a brown, tweed Norfolk jacket with dark wool trousers and expensive, handmade Italian shoes. He carried a hickory walking stick and wore a brown fedora. One moment, he seemed solid and the next, he was semitransparent. He seemed to flicker like a faulty hologram.
“Darkness!” Lucas said. “What the hell is going on? Where am I? What happened to the others? Where’s Churchill? Is he all right?”
Dr. Darkness raised his eyebrows. “Which of that plethora of questions would you like me to answer first?”
“How about where am I?”
“You are a guest in my home,” said Darkness.
“Your ... home?” said Lucas, feeling totally bewildered.
Darkness put the walking stick down on a table and then moved across the room toward a sideboard where he kept several bottles of whiskey, a gasogene and a decanter.
&n
bsp; Lucas stared at him with astonishment. He had never before seen Dr. Darkness walk. However, what he was doing wasn’t exactly walking. Darkness seemed to be moving in a series of extremely rapid, stop-motion frame, as if he were illuminated by a strobe light. As he made his way across the room, he left behind a series of blurred, ghostly afterimages of himself that faded out like contrails.
“I was once able to walk normally while I was here in my unprojected state,” he explained when he noticed Lucas staring. “However, it appears that the stability of my atomic structure is gradually degenerating. I’m having some anxiety over it, since there doesn’t seem to be anything that I can do about it.”
He poured himself a glass of single malt Scotch and then started to pour one for Lucas. He was at least twenty feet across the room when he held the glass out to Lucas, but in the next split second, he was standing right in front of him, close enough for him to take the glass. Lucas blinked. He never could get used to the way the man could project himself through time and space. It was… unsettling to say the least.
Lucas accepted the whiskey and took a hearty swallow from the glass. It felt good going down. “Why am I here? What happened, Doc?” he said.
“Nothing much,” Darkness replied. “I’ve only saved your life.”
Lucas stared at him. He felt confused. “But what about … God, what about Churchill?”
“Rest assured that Winston Churchill is perfectly all right,” Darkness said.
“But… how? He was right in the line of fire!” Lucas said. “I jumped to shove him out of the way and … and the Ghazi fired and ..” His voice trailed off. He had a horrible feeling that something was very, very wrong. “Doe, tell me what happened back there!”
“I simply tached you out of harm’s way,” said Darkness. “Otherwise that bullet would have struck you and you would have found it decidedly unpleasant. “
“But… then what kept it from hitting Churchill?”
“I merely interposed another mass between Churchill and the bullet.”
“What are you talking about? What mass?”
“Your twin.”
“My what?”
“Your twin from the parallel universe,” said Darkness. “He was already dead, you see. Your friend Delaney killed him, which was quite convenient. All I did was move at multiples of light speed, take your twin’s body and switch it with yours, taching you back here while I positioned your double’s corpse in such a way that the ball from the Ghazi’s rifle would enter at the exact same spot as Delaney’s bayonet had when he killed your twin. It was actually rather complicated and it took some careful timing, but— “
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Lucas said, staring wide-eyed at the scientist. “What the hell are you talking about? What twin from the parallel universe? And what’s this about Delaney killing him? When did all this happen? I don’t remember any of this!”
“Well, naturally. That’s because it all happened in a slightly different timeframe,” Darkness explained. He hesitated. “After you … uh … died.”
“After I what?” Lucas suddenly felt as if his stomach were trying to turn itself inside out.