Bridgehead (27 page)

The blank, black plate filling the doorway went translucent. It cleared in a vortex like that of a toilet flushing. The interior of the vehicle became visible through a network of shadows. Charles Eisley had been logically certain that the Vrage who spoke to him in normal English had to be human—had to be an American, in fact, although the purple-suited creatures with the guns were neither.

It was no subconscious surprise, however, that the creature which sprawled behind the screen was a grossly distorted version of those in atmosphere suits. The eight limbs of what had called itself the Vrage were approximately the size of those of the others; the thorax to which both legs and arms attached was bulkier but still basically the same.

There parity ended. The abdomen of the suited aliens, each approximately the size and shape of a basketball, hung in the midst of the four legs and did not appear to affect the creatures' ability to run quickly. The abdomen of the creature speaking to Eisley was the size of a boar's carcass and contorted rearward. It must have weighed several hundred pounds, several times as much as the remainder of the Vrage's body. The creature could have moved itself unassisted only by dragging that dead weight like a broken-backed snake.

It wore no clothing within the sealed environment of its vehicle. The ellipsoidal pucker in the middle of its chest must have been the mouth which was missing from the low-domed head. The skin, baggy at the joints, was a variety of mottled colors with red predominating, giving it somewhat the effect of a fall woodland. On an animate creature the pattern looked diseased.

The Vrage was inhuman, but more or less as expected. The brain in a transparent vat beside the Vrage was not expected, and it looked quite human.

“We already met a couple of your friends, you see,” said the alien. “This one was named Thurmond.” No part of the creature from which the sound could have come was moving, neither head nor presumed mouth. One of the creature's arms did reach out to stroke the vat, however. The brain within stirred sluggishly. Transparent tubes running across its pink-white surface were barely visible because the fluids they carried had indices of refraction different from that of the supporting bath.

“We would have had to sacrifice them anyway,” the voice continued, “to learn enough to be able to deal with you this way. It didn't matter, since somebody transported them to our homeworld, not here.” Laughter, deep and resonant, rolled from the horrible tableau. “Not a good thing to do if you need to breathe oxygen, no. Somebody played them for fools. Played you for a fool, too, dumping you here for a decoy. You'd better tell me just what happened.”

Charles Eisley stared at the scene. He was trying to pretend that what he saw was distanced by fiction, that it was a television picture. The shadowed clarity betrayed him and tightened his vocal cords.

The Vrage caressed its human remnant again. “You'll tell me what we need to know, Eisley,” the alien said. “Either now or after we've sent you home—to our home—for more extensive treatment. And you'll still be alive, but you won't be quite as handsome, hey?”

The floating brain nodded in its trembling vat.

“So tell me, why did the Skiuli sent you here?”

Charles Eisley gave a grim smile. He had fantasized in Viet Nam and in the Moslem countries in which he had served later about how he would hold up under questioning by ruthless fanatics. He realized now that he really
was
willing to die rather than betray his country.

But he had absolutely nothing to protect in this situation, except his life—and Sue. Unfortunately, his very inability to tell the Vrage anything useful was apt to cost at least his own life.

“I've never heard of the Skiuli,” the diplomat said aloud. “So far as I know, I was sent back in time because of a mistake by, by a Professor Gustafson. He was … His experiment may have been aided by time travelers from—I was told—ten thousand years in the future. Ah, the future of our present.”

The statement, which was as truthful and circumstantial as Charles could make it, sounded absurd to him. It sounded more, not less, unlikely because he was speaking to something with four arms, four legs, and a human brain floating in a vat by its side. The least that he expected was another scorpion-tipped blast of noise. Only slightly deeper in Eisley's awareness was a vision of his flesh sloughing and then the bone itself being eaten away, until all that was left of Charles Eisley was a bundle of nerve tissue in a bowl of heavy fluid.

To Eisley's surprise, there was no gout of punishment when the Vrage stroked instruments below its prisoner's sight. Instead the alien said, “Describe the beings who told you they were time travelers.” There was a flicker of lights reflecting within the vehicle as some hidden process took place.

The diplomat rolled his lips between his front teeth to moisten them. “There's a man and two women,” he said. “One of them—the woman—is good-sized and very solid, like a Russian athlete.” The simile's pointlessness struck him as the words came out, but he continued anyway. “Mu—my informant calls them travelers, the Travelers.” Charles paused, then blurted, “I don't have any evidence to convince you, of course.”

The Vrage laughed its human laugh again. The mental effect on Eisley was almost as unnerving as the blast of white noise had been earlier. “I can't read the thoughts I get from your mind, Eisley,” the alien said, “but this can.” He stroked the vat of brain once more. “Keep on telling the truth. It's better for you.” Pale yellow light quivered again within the Vrage's vehicle. A bubble began to rotate up its helical path to the top of the tank in which the brain hung.

The Vrage thrust forward its flat, mouthless head. “They've been lying to you, my man,” said its voice. “They're travelers, all right—from Skius. They're just as human as I am.” The laughter rippled around Eisley and echoed in his cell. It peeled his doubt like the skin of an orange.

“Then I don't understand what's going on,” said Charles Eisley. Unconsciously, he had set his feet half a step apart with the toes pointing on ninety-degree axes. His shoulders were set and his hands were crossed behind his back again. It was the posture he would have adopted as a junior officer being chewed out by his ambassador.

“What's going on,” said the Vrage as it eased back against the support of its abdomen, “is that you're all being used as cannon fodder by the Skiuli. Worse. They're putting your whole planet out front to stop the lead we're going to fire at them.” The chuckle with which the Vrage punctuated his discussion was as humorless as a death rattle.

“The Skiuli know,” the Vrage resumed, “that we'll send hundreds of cobalt bombs along to rebound with their assault force. Not a World Wrecker like they'll try to implant in the crust of Vrage, but enough to make the sky glow at night and burn away every scrap of life that isn't protected for the next century by a mile of rock. And they don't want that to happen to Skius, so they're probably planning to launch their assault through your Earth instead of attacking directly from Skius. We'll do the same thing, of course—from here. But first, we'll see to it that the Skiuli's plans are delayed.”

There was a pause during which the Vrage dismissed Eisley as thoroughly as if the door to the cell had already slammed. The viewscreen went black and opaque again.

“Wait!” the diplomat shouted. He jumped forward and set his palm against the screen. Its material felt cool and waxy. “What are you going to do with me?”

The vehicle shuddered with incipient motion, then settled again into clifflike stability. Charles snatched his hand back as the blackness cleared from the viewscreen.

The eyes of the Vrage were nearly human. They stared at the captive with the interest of a laboratory assistant for a white rat. “I'm going to send you home, Eisley,” the Vrage said. “Right now we're holding you by using our drive coils to counteract the tendency of all the mass you were transported with to rebound. That creates a strong residual field. I'm going to ready a little present for your Skiuli friends. When we turn you loose, it'll ride along on the wave of that field. And I don't think the Skiuli'll be using the hardware they built on your planet ever again.”

The viewscreen went opaque. The Vrage vehicle backed an inch, then spun on its axis. The vehicle was huge, the size of the tanks which had captured Eisley. In shape and sleekness it was more similar to the small utility vehicles, though the egg had been planed flat on the front and bottom. The magenta armor shone almost wholly purple under the artificial light.

Even as the Vrage vehicle swung clear, the six alien soldiers thrust their weapons toward the path of the closing door. They were as silent as poised spiders.

But from the vehicle that slid away rang out a terrible simulacrum of human laughter.

*   *   *

Lexie Market's two-inch heels measured her paces down the aisle. The sound lost itself in the basement's volume and angles.

Mike Gardner was seated on a metal folding chair in front of the silent control panels, not so much staring at the dials as communing with them. He turned just his head when the door opened behind him, not even lowering his feet from a crosspiece among the instruments. As a result, he could not see who had joined him in the darkened room until she paused at the gate into the enclosure.

The pressure of Lexie's hand swung the gate open, surprising her slightly. She had come back to the engineering building without any specific agenda. The diamond-patterned screen pivoted away, and she met the eyes and half smile of Mike Gardner. The physics professor froze in her tracks.

The woman's surprise recalled Gardner to society and recollection that the intruder was a professor, albeit in a sister discipline. He jumped to his feet in a clatter of chair supports. “Ah, hi, Mrs. Market,” he blurted. “Damn! Dr. Market, I mean. Will you…” The student's hand drifted, searching for hospitality to offer. The closest approximation was the single metal chair.

“‘Lexie' will do just fine,” the physicist said. She had started life as an ugly duckling; handsome men generally made her nervous. This one, however, managed to make her feel sophisticated, and that was more than a matter of the years she had on him. “It would be ‘Miss' if it weren't ‘Doctor,' anyway.”

“Ah, do you want the lights?” Gardner asked. He was standing with one hand on the chair back, like a debater clinging to the podium for support. Both of them were well aware of what had happened in this room the night they first met. Memories of confusion and death emphasized instead of hiding other emotions which stirred in both of them. “I was just sitting here, trying to figure out what I was.…” His tongue waited while his brain marshaled ideas and then made the decision to expose them to this stranger in dim light. “Sometimes,” Mike went on, “I think I've spent my first twenty-three years screwing things up so badly that I won't be able to make them right in the next however-long I live.”

Market laughed, and the silver beads of her earrings winked in the haze of street lighting through the windows. She was wearing a dark skirt and a matching long-sleeved blouse, its throat rolled loosely so that it gave the suggestion of a stole as the woman moved. She touched Gardner's hand where it rested on the metal. “I used to think that,” she said. “Now I think it's thirty-two, when I get in that mood.” Her face sobered. She dropped her eyes from the man's but did not remove her hand. “Which is a lot, lately,” she went on. “Has there been any news about Barry Rice?”

“Something's coming,” said Gardner. He lifted his hand and hers to point past the controls. There was a touch of paleness forming over the docking area.

“Oh, my God,” Lexie whispered, her right hand clenched at her throat. She was determined to wait for the Travelers and demand to be told about Rice. Perhaps that had always been the plan her conscious mind would not admit.

“Come on,” Mike said, grasping her raised forearm. The strength of the woman's resistance and the sudden taut look around her eyes were a shock to him. “No,” he explained, “we've got to get out of here.” He relaxed his grip.

“I need to talk to them,” Market said, and took a deep breath.

“You don't understand!” Gardner cried. “There's something else out there, spiders”—Professor Gustafson's shocked description made the misidentification inevitable—“and they
kill!
Hide in the office.”

Market nodded, then ran ahead of him with the care required by her skirt and footgear. The light infusing the docking area was not really perceptibly brighter, but heightened attention made it seem so.

Mike slammed the gate shut and locked it. The heavy wire would not stop the sort of weapons the returnees had babblingly described, but it would at least pose a delay.

Lexie waited in the office doorway. When the student joined her, they both instinctively crouched below the level of the windows and peered through the narrow crack the woman had left between the door and its jamb. She could feel the pulse in his thigh as they squeezed together to watch.

The glow winked out in a nonevent. The appearance of two figures and the angular bulk of the Travelers' locker in the docking area was less disconcerting than the eerie light had been. One of the figures spoke to the other. The words were only a murmur. Even the squeal of the locker was muted as the pair slid it beyond the painted circle.

“Selve and Astor,” Gardner mouthed, though the names would have meant nothing to his companion, even if she had heard them clearly.

The locker opened. Darkness and the conspiratorial silence in which they hid kept Lexie from greeting the Travelers, even now that their identity was certain. They were donning the atmosphere suits whose orange color was empurpled by the mercury vapor street lighting. Astor was sealing hers. Selve stepped to the control panels and began to bring up the system. Phosphorescence from the computer terminal gave his face definition if not color.