Bridgehead (18 page)

“No, we're forgetting the extra unit, the one they'd built upstairs,” Keyliss was saying calmly. She was holding back her own fear of failure with a sheet of icy reason. So long as she did not have to dip beneath that surface for data stored deeper in her mind, she could perform with mechanical precision even now. “It's out of the system now, but it wouldn't have been during the previous tests. Mightn't have been. That could throw us off.”

“A little over two miles,” Astor said to the locator. She grimaced around a quarter circle of their surroundings. “I can't believe that short a distance could—go from mostly bare rock to mostly this.” She snatched at a dangling frond. After considering it, she stripped the leaflets between her thumb and palm, more in frustration than for any reason.

From far away, but from no particular direction because of the foliage, came a sound that could have been thunder or a rock slide. At the end of its tremble, the sound rose into a fluting warble—bird or animal, surely distant … and surely huge.

Keyliss swallowed. “A watered valley, a valley that isn't … It doesn't matter now, surely?”

Louis Gustafson had knelt down. He was peering at a stem some feet from the point to which he had been initially transported. “Robert, come look at this,” he called. “You, too, Dr. Layberg. I think you'll be interested.”

The other two men were looking about them with pursed lips and a feeling of growing concern. The sound—the bellow, distance-weakened though it was, had given point to the Travelers' nonspecific warnings. A cow would have sounded much the same, of course. In fact, the bellower was probably just that—a very large, very harmless equivalent of a cow. But the surroundings whose close sameness had been as boring as the interior of a rhododendron thicket now regained a degree of interest unconnected with their immediate physical presence.

Layberg and Shroyer did move closer to Gustafson, however. The engineer bent at the waist after throwing an openly nervous glance toward the Travelers, who were still arguing among themselves. Dr. Layberg squatted instead—bobbed up to tug his trousers higher over his knees—and squatted again. He had to put one hand on the loamy soil to keep from overbalancing, and the extensor muscles in his thighs began to burn immediately.

“You see?” said Gustafson. There were tiny yellow flowers hanging from the underside of the stem. Gustafson jiggled one from beneath, then drew his forefinger away. On the pad of the finger were orange specks. The others assumed the color was pollen until they saw the specks were beginning to move: mites or larvae of some sort, living in the cup of the flower.

Layberg squinted and leaned forward against his balancing hand to see if there was anything of particular note about the specks. That was not Gustafson's point, however. The engineering professor had already wiped his fingertip on the opposite cuff. He then tapped another flower, one farther along the stem and thus closer to the area into which the group had been transported. “Now, see this,” Gustafson said as he displayed his fingertip again.

“There are no insects in that flower,” Chairman Shroyer said, limiting himself to facts and not the interpretations of which he had not a clue at the moment.

“From here on up, nothing,” Gustafson agreed. He nicked the stem about a yard from the base with his square-cut thumbnail. “Farther back, they all do. Our transportation field took the little bugs out of all the flowers within it, but it left the flowers themselves and the plants—even the ones right in the middle.” He waved, but the other men did not bother to glance at what they knew was behind them. “Quite a sharp line, really. And you see, Robert—just as they said it was.”

Beaming, Gustafson gestured again. This time all three of them turned to stare toward the fiercely arguing Travelers.

“No,” said Selve, hunched over the answer he had just drawn from the calculator and control unit on his wrist. “Modulation by the small unit at that point couldn't have thrown us off by this amount, not twice and so precisely. The period of the coils is too different whatever point you start at. Once, perhaps, though I doubt it. Not—”

“Do we know it was twice?” Astor demanded as the tip of an explanation intrigued her. “We don't know exactly when the small unit came on line, do we? Or if they made modifications to it between our first test and our second?”

“Right,” said Keyliss, not because it was the answer but because it might be the answer. She straightened from the huddle into which the three of them had merged. “Arlene!” she called. “Arlene! Would you please come over here for a moment?”

There was no sound but the susurrus of air across the tips of the high, spiky flora.

“Arlene!” Astor bellowed. She slipped her hands back onto the stock of her gun in ready position. “Where are you?”

“Oh, dear goodness,” whispered Louis Gustafson as he scrambled to his feet. “I'll never forgive myself if something's happened to Arlene.…”

*   *   *

The camera was ill-balanced, but that made it easier to hold steady after a few trial shots. By supporting the weight wholly with the neck strap and her left hand on the lens, Myaschensky was able to trip the shutter with her right index finger. With luck, the images did not bobble at all in the viewfinder. The whick-clock sound of mirror and shutter shifting within the camera body startled the photographer every time it occurred, but it did not appear to concern her subjects.

It was still a frustrating business. Arlene was not trained to see insects. Dave had not encouraged her to—had savagely discouraged her from an interest in his chosen field. The shimmering wings that called attention to potential photographs also carried themselves blithely off into the foliage or the upper air again. Worse, as the woman bent cautiously to within the lens's ten-inch focal length, the blurred image would repeatedly flutter away before the shutter could be tripped. The insects flew either because of the looming bulk of a human; or because of the subject's own reflection in the objective lens … or from whim, their need to rest of shorter duration than Myaschensky's need to prepare to photograph them.

The task, though unfamiliar, was of no greater difficulty than, say, soldering cables to a ninety-six-post bus. The problem was that her time was limited: ultimately by the duration the Travelers had set for this test; and practically, because the others would surely notice before long that she had disappeared.

Partly with the idea of being searched for, Myaschensky tramped a further twenty feet into the glade. An unexpected splash of color turned out to be a thicket of vegetation whose every tendril seemed tipped with a red flower. They were the first flowers she had noticed. The tiny bells beneath the dark fronds had not caught her eye, and the insects they attracted were too small for her present equipment in any case. The clumped red flowers vibrated with the life feeding on them. In the air danced what might be the first butterflies Myaschensky had seen in these woods. She pushed her way toward them with more enthusiasm than she had felt in days.

There was a crash. A huge gap opened in the middle of the thicket. The gap, the tunnel through the flowers and the stems that waved them, was black and blotched gray green. It shifted. A clawed forepaw rotated to stuff more of the thicket, stems, flowers and all, into the great mouth. Only at that moment did it become a living thing rather than a fragment of an unfamiliar landscape.

It was too big to be alive. If it was no larger than an elephant, then Arlene had never seen an elephant only six feet away from her. The beast was darkly scaled, but large patches of fungus—the gray green—overlaid the facets as well as the color of the scales. The snout was beaked, but the head itself was almost houndlike in its hollows and overridged eyes. Though they could both face forward, the eyes were swiveling independently when Arlene accepted the reality of the creature. Her left hand had been holding the Nikon against her ample breast while she pressed her way through the foliage. Now she started to raise the camera while the rest of her body remained frozen.

The creature twitched, ramming within its mouth most of the rest of what it had bitten off. Some scraps fell to the ground. One chip of bark flew off as if to join the cloud of dismayed insects. The broad, whitish throat spasmed in a belch. An odor as sweet as that of crushed wisteria rolled over Myaschensky. Then the creature's eyes both locked on her.

The great herbivore had been eating its way through the thicket on its belly like a hog in slops. It whuffed with a vehemence that blasted scraps of the latest mouthful back through its nostrils. The beast scrambled to its feet, adding another yard to a ground-to-spine height that already overtopped Arlene.

The woman let her camera fall onto the neck strap and began backing away. There had been only a blur in the viewfinder. With the extension tubes behind the lens, the camera would no longer focus beyond arm's length. And what the metallic sounds of the shutter would bring was—

The creature squealed and stamped both forefeet. Myaschensky screamed with the abruptness of it. She did not panic, although she ran. Instead of trying to flounder back the way she had come, she dodged around the bole of the nearest of the giant trees. The oddly shaped tree was too big for even an elephantine creature to power through, and Arlene was confident that she could circle the trunk as fast as the monster could follow her. The foliage here did not include the vines and brambles of normal undergrowth at home, but it would have delayed her and not the lumbering beast which might pursue. She was terrified—too frightened to keep the camera from slamming her breast, too frightened even to shout for help and the Travelers' strangely shaped guns. Arlene's mind still worked in fine alliance with instincts honed in ages when such confrontations were the order of the day.

Toward the side of the tree on which she sheltered blundered another of the scaly monsters. This one was of significantly lighter body coloration than the first. From the pair of calves squealing at its flanks, it was probably a female. The adult saw Myaschensky and drew up with a steam-whistle screech. The very ground was quivering like a pond in a rainstorm. In the immediate area there must have been hundreds of clawed feet trampling with tons of weight above them.

The female slewed sideways to miss the tree and Myaschensky. The mother's shoulders turned the calf to her right. The pair of them angled off at a tangent from their previous, lethal course. The remaining calf danced in a bleating, half-ton circle of its own. The calf s tail, fully as long as its body, flicked at the waist of Arlene's corduroy trousers. She barely felt the contact, but the ridged scales were sharp enough to snatch parallel lines across the fabric.

For thirty seconds which seemed a lifetime, Arlene had not made a sound. She was not given to screaming, and the surrounding cacophony mocked any human attempt at sound. Now, as the calf bolted after its mother, the woman dodged back around the tree. The bark was smooth as a drumhead, the bole too broad for a dozen humans to clasp hands around it. Climbing was impossible. If scampering around the circumference was pointless, then at least it was something a body could do. Myaschensky ran now as a fish flops in a net. She was half-certain that she was running under the claws of the beast which had first startled her; that one, or a pair just as large.

There was no animal charging to trample her down like a squirrel which dithers in the roadway. The tangled thicket had sprung up again in surprisingly good condition, though most of the flowers that had led her to it initially were now stripped away. The general undergrowth still heaved as if in the aftermath of a windstorm, but the living thunder was settling away. The panic began to settle out of Myaschensky's mind, also. She let out her breath. Only then she realized how long she had been holding it. An insect with orange-and-purple wings fluttered by. Arlene's hands remembered the camera, still slung.

With no more sound than the whisper of leaves brushing it, something the size of the herbivore calves slid its way through the dark vegetation. The thing was magenta below and black above. Its skin was as smooth as a teardrop, with no projections to snag the foliage.

Arlene had consciously intended to look for the others of her group. She did not realize she had actually moved, however, until she backed away from the oncoming thing and it was a full step before the tree trunk slammed against her. She could hear human voices, not far away, but the blood in her ears was louder than the words.

The thing halted. It was in plain sight, though a spray of leaves and their shadows still blurred the back end. Arlene's tongue lifted to cover the tip of her upper lip. It was an unconscious gesture, meant as much as anything to silence her as she absorbed data. The thing did not touch the ground. Not at any point.

It was not hugely large, a side-lying cylinder six feet long and perhaps four in diameter. The front end had been bulged out into a half sphere. It was the top of this which was black instead of the incongruous hot pink of the rest; and it was the black portion which lifted up from the back like a clamshell. The creature inside stepped out of its conveyance.

Arlene began to sneeze so ferociously that she stumbled to one knee.

“Don't you move!” the creature demanded in excellent English. Sunlight pumped through wisps of the yellow-green atmosphere released from the conveyance when it opened. “You will be cared for properly, but if you try to run, I'll blow you away.”

The thing stepped toward Arlene. It was wearing what had to be a suit, a fabric of ceramic luster with the same magenta color as the body of the vehicle. The suit, even the black panel like an eyeslit across the bulbous helmet, was opaque. There could be no question but that the creature was inhuman, however.

One of its hands held vertically the axle of a translucent wheel the size of a pie plate. The device looked like nothing Arlene had ever seen, but its function could be guessed easily enough from the warning. The creature's other three hands were empty, and it was walking toward the woman on four spindly legs.