Bridgehead (13 page)

The control room could be small, because it did not enclose the drive pillars in the usual fashion. That, and the dozen pairs of eyes watching with at least the hint of anger, made Keyliss feel more uncomfortable than she did when working with the unit at Portal Eleven. Base Four had been constructed in tiny, laborious stages. Men and equipment had processed local ores, interrupted at frequent intervals by their rebound. The quantity of simultaneous work needed made it impossible to extend the duration to more than a half hour, even using the heaviest practical drives. When materials from the portal region had themselves been formed into construction equipment, only the crews needed to be exchanged, and duration went up to a practical level.

Whatever is necessary becomes practical; and Portal Four Base was as necessary to survival as the simultaneous construction taking place at Portal Eleven.

Despite the fact that all the equipment at the base had been built to standard designs, there was a brutal crudity of execution to it. At every stage, the production machinery—and the machinery which produced the production machinery—had been used in haste and run to the widest-possible tolerances which would still permit functioning. Deith and her colleagues were indeed to be congratulated on their success; but the powers who decided the Portal Eleven Contact Team would be responsible for fine-tuning the entire system had evident reason for their choice.

The task at Portal Eleven had been parallel but very different in detail. It would have been impossible to move hundreds of technicians and their equipment in to begin stripping ores from the middle of an occupied area. The locals would have responded with a volume and quality of violence that would overwhelm any defense which could be conducted at long range.

The same scientific and industrial base which made open intrusion impractical permitted success through peaceful contact. Professor Gustafson could build from local components the apparatus which the ruthlessness of the Directorate could not impose. Nothing in the engineering school basement looked as it should. Everything was bulkier. That was not only because the builders were less sophisticated than Deith and her colleagues, but also because almost all of the components were off-the-shelf items adapted to their current use rather than being purpose-built for a limited task. In fact, the apparatus within Professor Gustafson's enclosure bulged and glittered with functions and load capacities greatly in excess of the transportation circuitry of which it was now a part. If the unit at Portal Four could be compared to a huge lawn, cropped to order, then what had arisen at Portal Eleven was a wild landscape no less functional for its leaps and vistas.

And it did function. That fact gave Keyliss a warm feeling toward the locals who had succeeded where rote would have failed. Their copper wire was too pure for the drive coils, for instance. Deposition-refined, the metal did not have the quarter percent of alloying silicon which set up the necessary internal resonances in a unit constructed at home. Gustafson's team had worked around the problem with banks of resistors on the output side of the signal generators and by skewing the centers of the—normally—concentric coils in each column so that they induced delays and accelerations within one another. That would have been Isaac's contribution, Keyliss now realized. They should have known that some such help would be necessary, that technicians—as they on the Contact Team were themselves—would not be adequate to solve all the problems which local circumstances involved.

Of course, Keyliss knew that her feeling toward the locals was really that of a person whose pet has learned a particularly involved trick. She was a decent enough person herself that self-knowledge of her attitude bothered her.

“Starting Column B,” said Astor. She rolled the shunt, a sphere with dimpled alternative settings, held by magnetic repulsion.

“Check,” said her colleagues together, not so much bored as thinking about matters of greater tension. The Portals were like beads on a wire. They were perfectly linear, although their array was of course non-Euclidean. Because any two points could define a line—even in transport physics—it was possible to interconnect columns of Portals. That required transfer points, however, and it was by no means a simple matter of a linear shift, as was transport within a column. The Contact Team had just traced and calibrated the Portals between Base Four and home. It remained to repeat the process on the intersecting column.

Large-scale displays glowed on the consoles when Astor transferred the scan. Normally, all the general display would have done was to indicate which Portals were uploaded for use or examination. In this case, the problem was of so gross a nature that it was obvious even at a glance.

“Eleven's off scale,” said Selve. Astor, with her judgment added to the facts, was saying, “You forgot to factor in our own transport!”

“I did not forget—” retorted Selve furiously.

Keyliss spoke loudly to end a squabble that was bringing wolfish grins from the assembled Monitors. “That input was loaded correctly. We may have a fault in the test program.”

Several of the group from Base Four stepped away from the wall with expressions of shock and anger. Astor ignored them. Her own irritation had returned to an earlier cause. “Well,” she asked, “was it the scheduled transport or the one that really brought us here? That's probably the—”

“The test circuit's fine,” said Selve without emphasis. “Don't worry about the program, look at the operational record. There's a second peak, one just after our own transport.”

“But there wouldn't have been—” Keyliss started to object. Then she remembered and added aloud, “Oh, of course.… Because we transported to Eleven in a figure-eight instead of direct, there would have been a charge in the coils a few minutes after they drove us.”

“That pot you sent, Selve,” Astor muttered, but the emergency was too real for even her to use it to win an argument. She was sealing her suit even as she strode for the door to the passageway.

With the consoles still live and the test program unfinished, Selve and Keyliss trotted after their colleague. The Monitor Group burst into excited babbling. None of the Monitors understood the nature of the problem, nor were they wearing atmosphere suits. Presumably, the Contact Team was headed for the docking area.

And nobody without an atmosphere suit could visit the Portal Four docking area. And live.

*   *   *

“Good God, Louis, what are you doing down here?” Chairman Shroyer demanded as he followed Gustafson in through the basement-level door.

“It's bleach,” said Sara Jean Layberg.

“Well, it's chlorine at any rate,” her husband said. Though when he thought about it instead of simply reacting to a judgment couched in the form of fact, he realized that the chlorine probably had been liberated by bleach. Somebody trying to clean, to disinfect, a scene of—

A scene certainly not of bloody tragedy, after all, now that Layberg had a chance to look around. The open basement gave more nearly the impression of a furnace room than of electronics research and time travel. The scale was at fault. The pillars he had been told about stood near the door, just inside the fenced enclosure. To look at, the pillars were as featureless as a pair of water tanks. The precision with which they had been built from layers of fine wire, like huge vessels of lacquerwork, was hidden by its very delicacy.

Mike Gardner and a woman Louis Gustafson did not know stepped from the office when they heard the outside door. Mike's expression combined relief with a level of new apprehension. “He hasn't come back, Professor,” the student called. He thumbed toward the plastic-cased drive coils.

The young woman with Mike—well, she must be thirty; Gustafson had only two categories of women, under forty and over forty—stepped forward with a greater formality. Her gaze and a brief smile touched all four of the newcomers. It was to Gustafson specifically, however, that she extended her hand and said, “Mr. Gardner here tells me that this is actually your project, Professor. I'm Dr. Market from across the way, physics.” She gestured. “I seem to owe you an apology. I know Barry Rice and his wife socially, so when he said he had hardware he wanted a physicist to look at, I didn't make sure it was his hardware, as I probably should have.”

“Just what did you and Rice—” the chairman began. He paused when Lexie turned her friendly smile on him. “Pardon, I'm Robert Shroyer, I—”

Lexie took the hand which was only tentatively extended. “Of course I know you, Chairman Shroyer. We met at one of the chancellor's teas, didn't we?”

Thoroughly disarmed by now, Shroyer said, “Ah, I'm sure I would have remembered that. Ah, this is Doctor and Mrs. Layberg, they're concerned in this affair themselves. Can you tell us just what did happen here tonight?”

“Well, I met Barry here as arranged,” Lexie lied. “He had a set of keys to the gate—” She pointed.

Mike and Professor Gustafson had wandered back within the enclosure, talking in low voices. Mike now turned and called to Shroyer, “The keys are missing from the professor's office, sir.”

“He said something about people in orange suits using it,” Market continued very carefully, “but I didn't catch just what. And then he turned a switch.”

Mike Gardner pressed back against the fencing in order to better hear what the physicist was saying. He half beckoned, half tugged Professor Gustafson along with an extended arm. “She means the Travelers,” the student whispered. “They had suits in the locker along with their guns.”

“I really can't explain what happened then,” Lexie said, able to be completely honest for the first time since she began her explanation. “Even though I saw it. Because it seemed to me that Barry just disappeared. There wasn't anywhere for him to go. And”—she turned, but because she did not raise her voice, the impact of what she was saying took a moment to register—“I think that sound was part of it.”

“Okay,” said Mike Gardner, “this'll be the rebound.” He walked quickly to the bank of instruments reflecting the performance of the pillar on the left. It was the position he had expected to watch during the scheduled run the next morning. The day's chaos—Sara Jean, Chairman Shroyer, and the test rig which had threatened the whole project—had just resolved itself into an engineering problem.

Louis Gustafson also walked toward the control panels, but he stood a pace behind his assistant. Gustafson could watch the other instrument array, but he was more interested at this point in the general performance of the apparatus. Specific data was being recorded. From what the Travelers had said, there was absolutely nothing which could affect the rebound once an object had been initially transported in time. “I think the question is what will be rebounding,” he said aloud. “Astor didn't tell me that they'd be running tests here without our presence, though I suppose there was no need to explain.…”

Shroyer and Dr. Layberg walked quickly to the enclosure gate, then back toward the controls. The hard click and raps of their soles were masked by the buzz of the apparatus, like rice grains being poured over a cache of arms. The two men were fascinated by the chance to watch an event which had seemed wildly unlikely in the telling.

Both Lexie and Sara Jean had reason to be more wary than curious about the details of transport. They eyed each other, both of them straightening and raising their brows unconsciously. Then they broke into simultaneous wry smiles. “I suppose we ought to watch,” said Sara Jean, “but I think I'm just as glad of having the wire between it and me this time.”

Lexie connected the woman in the tan silk dress with the woman Barry had mentioned in passing, supposedly transported to some monster city that afternoon. She touched Sara Jean's hand. Still touching, the two women turned toward the docking circle on the other side of the fencing. “Close your eyes now, I think,” Lexie suggested. Then the tingling flash swept them so intensely that they could perceive the woven-wire patterning through the skin of their eyelids.

Gustafson and Mike Gardner had known to duck their heads at the requisite moment also. The basement had seemed warm compared to the cool evening outside. It was warmer now with the fresh burst of energy liberated within it, but the chlorine was gone from the air as well.

Professor Rice sprawled on the concrete. His upturned face was twisted in a rictus of terror. There was more life in the fluorescents above than there was in his eyes.

Gardner was the first of the four men to reach Rice. The student had not been temporarily blinded, nor did he have Professor Gustafson's diffidence in dealing with a colleague under awkward circumstances. He touched Rice's cheek and looked up in disbelief. Dr. Layberg was kneeling beside him now, careless of grime on his suit as he reached for Rice's carotid pulse. Aloud, Mike Gardner said, “Christ, he's cold.” He was staring at Sara Jean over her husband's hunched back. “Christ, I think he must be dead.”

And then the coils began to purr as they readied themselves to act again.

*   *   *

The docking area at Portal Four was on the same huge scale as the rest of the base, but there was a translucent dome in the center of it. The dome was collapsible. It neither was nor was meant to be airtight. It could, however, be pressurized with neutral components of the local atmosphere. That gave the docking area a safe matrix of exchange with other portals.

The contents of the dome were never breathable. In any case, the Contact Team had just left when the second transport of the evening occurred. The influx of the chlorine-rich external environment had not been swept from the interior.

The man on the floor of the dome was as surely dead as the stone on which he lay. Selve nonetheless covered the blanched face with the emergency mask and feed from his own suit.

Keyliss touched her colleague's hand gently. “We need to see who it was,” she said. “Perhaps one of their maintenance division.…” She lifted the mask and hand.