Bridgehead (11 page)

“Split-tails?” Mustafa whispered in puzzlement.

“Women,” Sue Schlicter translated with the shadow of a smile.

“Pointing guns at us and shouting,” Cooper said. “Ready to shoot, you bet your ass. Ready to rub us away like we never were.…” The secretary stood up with more coordination than he had shown since the second glass of whiskey. “I need a drink,” he said clearly; and as he crumpled at the knees, all three of the others caught him and lowered him safely to the couch.

“You know,” said Charles Eisley as he looked down at Cooper, “he's got a point. If the future really is so peaceful, what are the armed guards doing?”

*   *   *

Astor slung the gun on its hook again after she had taken her atmosphere suit from behind it. Keyliss had already removed her orange garment from the locker, but Selve's still hung in back of his weapon. The tall female stared at her male colleague with disapproval. As he continued fiddling with something in the center of the docking area, the disapproval hardened to outright anger. “You'd better get ready, you know,” she said. “All three of us are to be present to check the programming.”

“The programming at Four, yes,” Selve agreed coolly. “I'll be ready. I've set our unit for a preliminary transport to Eleven, however—before we go. Tight focus, but let's both get well out of the way, shall we?” He beckoned the woman with a gesture which took account of the tiny parcel he had aligned for transport.

“What?” blurted Astor. She started directly across the docking area to Selve, but the mounting hum of the pillars warned her. The coils were already cycling at a far higher rate than they should have been if they were accumulating for the scheduled transport. “Keyliss, come here,” she called as she skirted the docking area quickly.

“What's the matter?” demanded Keyliss as she flung open the door of her room. She was mostly into her atmosphere suit, but one sleeve and shoulder dangled and her left breast was bared. “The unit—is it running away?”

“This one,” Astor snarled at Selve, “had the bright idea of doing a preliminary run. I suppose you realize that you've destroyed the whole schedule? You've maybe destroyed the whole world, the timing's so close?”

The three members of the team were in simultaneous but varied motion. Keyliss was running from her room with the loose sleeve flapping. Astor, closer to Selve, was scuttling around the area that might be affected by the transport. And Selve himself was walking nonchalantly back toward the instruments, which were already well into the course of guiding the unscheduled run. The trio met at the consoles with a timing which could not have been choreographed more precisely.

“But Selve,” Keyliss said as she peered toward the docking area, “what are you trying to send?”

“A bud,” her male colleague answered. He recognized and appreciated the fact that Keyliss spoke from concern rather than anger. “It'll grow into a bowl. Not an exceptional one, I'm afraid, but I think it will give Sara Jean some pleasure.” With a challenging glance at his colleagues, he added, “I think we owe them that, don't you? Some pleasure.”

Astor had taken the time to check the current settings before she spoke. “We'll go in on the damping curve of this run,” she said, half in approval—and half for reassurance that she had correctly interpreted the instrument readings.

“Yes, that's right,” Selve agreed calmly. “There'll be a balance surge at the other end, but it won't affect the schedule.” Keyliss had surreptitiously begun recalling data from the memory of the console she ordinarily ran. Selve noticed her and added, “I've already programmed it, but of course check my values.”

The coils reached drive frequency and flashed their fierce, soul-filling glare. Though the team were as experienced with transport as anyone else in the world, it was unusual for them to watch an operation of which they were not themselves a part. The flash, coupled with the continuing solidity of their surroundings, induced a sense of failure and disquiet in the three spectators. The tiny bud and its globe of nutrients were gone from the edge of the docking area. Nothing else had changed.

“I've shrunk the area of our transport slightly,” said Selve. He spoke quietly. Without the raw buzz from the pillars behind it, his voice seemed preternaturally clear. “Wouldn't do to pick the bud up and shift it here before I could give it to Sara Jean, would it?”

Astor cleared her throat uncomfortably. Selve's behavior had put the project at risk to a greater degree—not, perhaps, a measurably greater degree—than it would have been without his antics. While Astor could not have verbalized that thought, it was a subconscious component of her unease. She said aloud, “You'd better get your suit out of the locker now.”

Selve nodded. He walked across the docking area. It was safe, although the pillars were already beginning to sing with the next charge.

Keyliss fed her arm through the sleeve and sealed the torso of her suit. She did not bother to close her hood as yet. “What duration did you send the pot for, Selve?” she called.

Her male colleague had begun to strip off his ordinary clothing at the locker. Time was short, and the three of them lived too closely for the normal ceremonies of modesty. “About thirty-seven days,” he replied as he stepped into his orange suit. “I was more concerned to get the damping curve right than I was that the initial transport be precise, of course.”

“We can't be absolutely sure that we've cured the ghosts and backflows,” Astor said with a partial return to her normal hectoring demeanor. “That could throw everything off.”

“If we still have anomalies,” Selve snapped back, “then we've got to cure them before we report the project is operational, don't we?” His hand brushed closed the seam of his suit forcefully. “The system will work or not work independently of any change I made today in the pattern of testing.”

Keyliss touched her bigger colleague's elbow to silence the useless argument. “We'd better take position,” she said. Then, louder, she added, “Yes, thirty-seven days should be adequate. A great deal more than adequate.”

*   *   *

“I don't think you've got an adequate program, Gustafson,” said Henry Layberg, “without a medical adviser.” He gestured with the rabbit scapula from which he had just sucked the meat. “Think of the situations you could get into, hey, Shroyer?”

“Barring a failure of the entire system,” said Louis Gustafson with a puzzled frown, “I can't see that we're any more prone to injuries than”—he shrugged—“anyone else who climbs stairs to their work place. These aren't lengthy excursions, at least at present. No one's going to become seriously dehydrated in twenty minutes, even in the midst of a desert. For instance.”

Robert Shroyer laughed and thumped Layberg on the arm. “What my old roommate's trying to suggest, Louis,” he said, “is that he'd like to watch things tomorrow.”

“To go along, actually,” the MD corrected with a grin.

“Oh, dear God,” whispered Sara Jean Layberg. She lowered the tumbler she held to the table with a thump and a slosh of water onto the cloth.

Everyone stared at her in concern. She looked around with a brief smile, then patted her husband's wrist. “I'm sorry,” she said to the watching men, “but it was such—such a disorienting experience—that I can't imagine anybody wanting to do it to themselves. Not you, Henry.”

“Ah,” said Professor Gustafson, “it was very kind for you to feed me so wonderfully, Mrs. Layberg, when I just appeared with Robert. But—”

“Well, don't worry about that,” said Henry Layberg. He did not realize that the engineer's statement was an apology in advance for disagreeing with his hostess. “You tried to call, after all, and if the calls hadn't been shunted to my office, we would have told Shroyer of course to bring you. This whole business has fascinating possibilities. Haven't you ever wondered how an additional three hundred generations would affect modern man through microevolution?”

“But—” Gustafson had noticed the interruption only to the extent of not trying to talk over it. When Layberg stopped, the engineer took up at his original point. “I think your disorientation was caused by the circumstances rather than by the process itself. Those of us downstairs were apprehensive to begin with, but the actual event did not cause problems.”

“But you knew you were going into the past,” said Chairman Shroyer, pointing with his finger, “and she had no idea she was going into the future. I think it bothered Danny very greatly indeed.” He frowned, then added, “I should really have paid more attention to Danny, but of course I was primarily interested in what had been going on. I think I'd better look him up.”

“They must be able to totally replace internal organs,” Dr. Layberg was saying in something close to a reverie. “They must have a society without clumsy half measures like dialysis machines and insulin injections.”

“What they have, Henry,” said his wife in a low voice, “is women with guns. And they have pottery,” she added, studying the ceramic tumbler she had made herself. “They have that.”

*   *   *

“Well, I've got as much notion of what it is,” said Barry Rice as he turned over the bud and nutrient container, “as I do of how in blazes it got here. Which is none.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” said Lexie Market. She shined her own flashlight down the long expanse of equipment with them in the enclosure. “It looks to me like a rooting bulb of some kind. You know, for plant shoots. It doesn't have anything to do with the process, that's for sure. Not if these do.” She jogged her field of light from one massive, nonbiologic piece of hardware to another.

The key to the enclosure was where Rice had expected it. The two of them had entered and had been shocked by the extent of the task they faced. Even though Rice had glanced at the experimental array earlier, its size magnified when he looked at it in the need of understanding each individual part so that he could synthesize the purpose of the whole.

The Layberg woman had babbled about the noise and a bright blue flash when whatever it was had happened to her. There was no noise at all tonight, and there was not enough light to warn Rice directly as he jotted notes beside a bank of instruments. Market had suddenly turned off her flashlight and called, “Barry—look by those columns.”

There was a nimbus, vaguely green and very faint indeed, forming in the air between the huge vertical coils and the instruments closest to them. The light was more like the ghost of a fluorescent fixture than a real illumination. It would have been invisible by day or even with the overheads on.

There had been a stir of air too slight to be a pop. The glow was gone. On the floor beneath its memory now sat a … well, as Lexie said, a rooting vase, if it were anything of normal attributes.

“It may have been there when we came in, and we just didn't notice it,” the physicist said. “I don't see how it could have anything to do with—”

“Turn out your light,” Rice rasped in a desperate whisper. His skin had begun to tingle. With the flashlights off, both of them could see that they were bathing again in the nimbus. It was as if they had been enclosed in a fish tank whose crystalline walls were too pure to be seen.

Rice put down the clear bulb with more haste than care. It slipped and bounced back from the concrete, unharmed and ringing like metal rather than plastic. Lexie reached over to right the object so that it stood more or less as it had when they first noticed it. Then both of the intruders darted back into the shadowed interior of the enclosure.

The three Travelers wearing orange coveralls puffed into sight. Their arrival made no more of a stir than had that of the bud. There could be no doubt that they
had
just appeared, however. Barry Rice shifted behind a rack of coupled transformers so that he could see the figures more clearly. He was cursing under his breath. If it was an illusion, it was a damned good one.

Selve and Astor both flicked on their belt lights as soon as the glare of transport had faded from their retinas. A thirty-degree wedge of light glowed in front of each in the darkened basement. The light was balanced farther into the yellow-orange portion of the spectrum than an ordinary incandescent bulb would have thrown it. Astor strode to the instrument banks beside the marked-off docking circle. Selve's sole apparent concern was the globe which had preceded him. He carried it from the floor to the top of an oscilloscope—nearby, but beyond the present focus of the transport system.

Lexie watched through a cabinet whose edge-on circuit boards shielded her like the louvers of a Venetian blind. She noticed with interest that the lights, though apparently point sources, did not glare as the Travelers moved. The lenses provided a sharp demarcation at the upper edge of the illumination, so that the user did not blind his fellows as he turned toward them. Further, that upper edge remained parallel to the floor even though the wearer's motion must surely have flashed it upward on occasion.

Keyliss latched and sealed her hood. “Ready?” she called. Her voice through the chestplate of the suit was thickened, slurred.

Selve stepped back briskly into the docking circle. “Yes, all right,” he said as he closed his own hood. The last word extended itself as his speaker, too, cut in automatically.

“I'm going to trust your calculations, Selve,” grumbled Astor from the control panel. The voids in the console and the ribbons of communications wire made her uncomfortable every time she had to depend on local equipment; but the key was function, and they did function, had to function, or the world would … She threw the main switch. The residue of their own transport had already acted as an exciter field for the coils looming against the chain-link enclosure. As the system began to hum, the tall woman walked to her waiting colleagues.