Bridgehead (6 page)

Keyliss did something with a control, and the barrel of her weapon flared into a twenty-degree cone. “We don't really need these for, for the period, but we certainly don't need tight focus.”

“For water,” Astor said to Mike and Arlene, who were noting the suits remaining in the locker. Mustafa, whose home city was now patrolled by soldiers with Thompson submachine guns, was more interested in the weapons. Head-covering suits of slick orange fabric hung from the three walls. The face-pieces were amber and as flexible as the remainder of the garments.

“All right,” said Isaac Hoperin, “I want to go along.”

“Isaac,” said Professor Gustafson, “I really don't—”

“Well, it may cut a few minutes off the planned duration,” said Selve, “but I suppose we could recalibrate.…” He frowned as he looked toward the linked circuitry extending almost a hundred feet into the distance of the enclosure.

“What possible difference does twenty minutes or fifteen make?” Astor said sharply. “We could make two separate transports in the time it would take us to adjust that mess without affecting the preset.”

“Shut up, you idiot,” said Keyliss in the Travelers' common language. Use of the birth tongue while on Contact duties was a serious violation of protocol. Keyliss had been shocked into the outburst. Similar shock had frozen both her colleagues when their minds caught up with Astor's tongue.

“It's not what happens to the experiment,” Gustafson said, unaware in the crystal stillness. “It's what might happen to you, Isaac. There's no need to risk—”

“Louis,” said Selve with a rare touch of asperity, “the risk is technical—that everything will sit and buzz. Not physical. There is no physical risk.”

“You know,” said Mike Gardner to the floor, “nothing's going to change until we do it. So I think we may as well do it.”

Everyone looked at the young man. He had retrieved his parka. He held it with tense fingers which belied the calm of his face.

Astor banged shut the locker. She slid the shackle back through the hasp but did not bother to relock it. “Yes,” she said neutrally. “Those who are taking part in the transport, please stand near the center of the docking area. Others please stay beyond the line.”

Hoperin put a friendly arm around Gustafson's shoulders. As an afterthought, the physicist tossed away the unlighted cigarette he held. The two faculty members walked farther into the circle.

Arlene Myaschensky smiled brightly and squeezed Mike's hand. Somewhat to the surprise of everyone else, Mustafa Bayar seized Mike and kissed him on both cheeks. He then pounded the American on the arm and said, “Go with God, brother.”

While the locals positioned themselves as Astor had directed, Selve said softly to Keyliss, “Do you think it wise to take the technical person?” He spoke in his birth tongue, both for secrecy and to express approval for what the woman had done a moment before.

Keyliss continued to stare at Astor's back. The taller female had not met the eyes of either colleague since her rebuke. “Yes, I think it's all right. They're very narrow, that sort, ours as well as here. Isaac will be observant only in his field: and there's far too much detail available there for him to correlate it in the time he has.”

“Yes,” agreed Selve, “there is very little time. For any of us.”

*   *   *

“Good morning, Bob, can I grab a little of your time before the students get back?” said the determinedly cheery voice before Robert Shroyer was fully into the central office.

“Oh, hello, Barry,” the department chairman said with considerably less enthusiasm. “Well, let me get my coffee first. Will you have a cup?”

The coffee maker in the side office was just gurgling to a halt. Shroyer's mug was set out with sugar and creamer already spooned into it. The mail today included the two fat volumes of the latest
Fisher Scientific
catalog and a letter from a former colleague at MIT. Shroyer wondered what Rice would be complaining about this time. Good mind, but …

“I think your secretary went off with a Mrs. Layberg,” Rice volunteered so that he did not have to refuse the chairman's offer. About the last thing his blood pressure needed was that he start slurping coffee, for Christ's sake! But it wouldn't do to—

“Sara Jean?” Shroyer said with more interest than he had displayed to Rice thus far. “Oh, yes, I'm having dinner there tonight. What did she want?”

Barry Rice trailed his superior across the center office again. “Oh,” he said, “I—to tell the truth, I thought she was visiting Danny. You know her, then?”

“Her husband and I were roommates at Michigan,” Shroyer said as he seated himself. Returns on both ends made his desk a squared-off U. Stacks of paperwork were spaced across the entire surface, neatly organized despite their volume.

“Oh,” Rice repeated. He sat down in one of the upholstered chairs, but he did so gingerly. Shroyer had rather pointedly not swiveled his own chair to face the younger man. “Actually, what I wanted to see you about is a bit delicate. Do you have any idea of what Professor Gustafson and his students are doing?”

Shroyer sighed. He supposed he was about to learn.

*   *   *

“I don't understand how anybody can make sense of this, Danny,” said Sara Jean Layberg. She touched the tarpaulin which covered the apparatus on the desk in the center of the lab. Along the walls was additional equipment arrayed on tables, filing cabinets, and sometimes on the floor itself. Not all of it was interconnected; but a great deal of it was, and even the individual units were as meaningless as cuneiform tablets to Sara Jean. She was comfortable with her intelligence and with her education. She had taught young children with a level of success that never failed to net her praises from their parents at year's end. But this clutter in which Mike functioned with the certainty of a fish in water was simply and completely beyond her.

“Oh, there's not very much to that,” the secretary said. He moved the paint can—Solar Cold, a property rather than a color—which held down one corner of the tarp. “When I was sound man with a news crew in Washington, we used all sorts of hardware that was probably as sophisticated as any of this. You can get a long way knowing what happens and not worrying about the why.”

Grinning wryly, he raised the corner of the tarp. “That was a good job, you know? Probably the best one I ever drank myself out of.”

“So you understand this, then?” Sara Jean said in mild wonder. Her fingers idly traced a pair of cables from a floor duct toward the desk.

“No, but you could if you had any need to,” Danny explained. He pulled the tarp farther back. A pair of wire-wound tubes stood up from a base of aluminum sheeting. The tubes were no more than a foot high, shorter than the transformer and the rack of diodes feeding them. The strands of cables Mrs. Layberg had been touching were splayed colorfully onto connectors on the diode boards as well. “You know,” Danny went on, “what this does look like is the economy version of the thing they're building in the basement.” He laughed. “Whatever that is.”

There was a muted pop from the connection strip, although the switch marked POWER with a strip of red tapes was clearly off.

*   *   *

“Preparing to engage,” called Mustafa Bayar as he watched the dials rise toward their programmed levels. His deep voice could barely be heard in the docking circle over the hum of the apparatus.

“It's taking too long,” Selve shouted into Keyliss's ear. “We're getting a cross feed from our own unit, it's got to be!”

Astor was shouting in parallel rather than in reply, “Their equipment just has a high specific moment. The resistances are higher than we calcu—”

“Now!”

Arlene Myaschensky hiccoughed as the gauges dropped back. The blue flash from the pillars swallowed the noise and the daylight together. It poured over and through the figures in the docking area, dissolving them like mannequins in an alkahest.

Then they were gone. The air was bright with moisture condensing and the wings of insects, fluttering in the absence of the leaves on which they had rested moments before.

*   *   *

The vibration was making the pressure tanks of the oxyacetylene torch in the corner ring like a demented glockenspiel. “I don't see—” Danny Cooper cried as in desperation he rocked the power switch back and forth. The humming from the apparatus continued, and it continued to redouble itself through the sounding board of the reinforced concrete floor. “It can't be something we've done!”

Sara Jean was poised with her hand on the feed cables. The sheathing trembled. The burnt-cinnamon odor of hot insulation radiated from the coils. “Cover it up again,” the woman said suddenly. She snatched at the edge of the tarp Danny had folded back.

“That can't help!” Danny replied, but he grasped the other corner. He was no more willing than Sara Jean to rip connections loose; and despite his words, he was sure to the sick core of his belly that he had triggered the event by uncovering the apparatus.

As the two frightened outsiders raised the tarpaulin to throw it back over the buzzing coils, their world disappeared in a blue flash.

*   *   *

Mike Gardner had put out a hand reflexively to steady himself on Professor Gustafson's shoulder. Instead he touched a smooth-barked tree. Gustafson gasped in delight from the other side of it. The air was wet and warm and had a faintly acid tang.

“Astor,” the professor cried, “Isaac! We did it! Dear God, we really did it!” Tears were running down the old man's cheeks as he tried to clasp everyone around him.

Dear God, thought Mike Gardner, we did do it.

They all stood on land firm enough to be called dry, but the brown mud squelched beneath their weight. There was open water within a yard of Mike's shoes. It slapped in ripples as something slid off a fallen log before anyone's eyes could focus on it. Keyliss turned sharply, but she did not put the weapon to her shoulder.

Isaac Hoperin touched, then pushed hard against the scaly trunk beside him. It was thicker than he was tall, and the bole shot up over a hundred feet before it exploded into a fan of leaves like a gigantic feather duster. “We—” the physicist began. He turned more specifically toward Selve, the visitor nearest to him. “What would have happened if I had”—his lips pursed while he considered alternative words—“appeared within this tree instead of beside it?” he asked.

Astor replied, “You couldn't. The tree's too big to transport, so you couldn't replace its volume. This is a unit effect, not simply volume, and the control is in the sending apparatus, not the target.”

Everything was green and brown and black. The water was obsidian except where floating debris or the reflected sky gave it a color besides that of ebony. Mike had followed Hoperin's gaze up the column of the great tree. There was very little sky to be seen. None of the foliage spreading toward the sunlight looked like the leaves and needles with which he was vaguely familiar. Tendrils like those of weeping willows—or ferns, of course; or ferns—sprang directly from the top of many trunks and fell back toward the ground. There was no breeze to stir them. On their undersides gleamed jewels of water condensed despite the enervating heat. Back slightly from the rush-choked margin was a clump of slimmer trees whose stranded foliage hung thin and limp as a slattern's hair.

“I don't like that seven-second delay,” Selve said to Keyliss in English, but also in a whisper.

She frowned and did not face him directly. “I checked the linking circuits myself before the test,” she said coolly. “They were disconnected.”

“My goodness, is that a bird?” cried Professor Gustafson. He had taken off his steamed glasses to wipe them just as a great, bright shape drummed over the water, saw the standing figures, and reversed to disappear the way it had come.

Mike Gardner saw only a little more than his professor: a chitinous body; wings spanning a yard, their beats strong enough to leave a memory in the water's surface; eyes that were the same fiery orange as the tips of the mandibles beneath them. No bird, and if he had somehow suspected this was a stage set and not—

“Not a bird, Louis,” said Astor more sharply than the correction seemed to require. “There are no birds in this age. That must have been an insect.”

“I'm not blaming you, Keyliss,” said Selve. The pair of them were edging away from the others. Leaf mold covered the soggy ground beyond the circle cleared by the transport. “But it's like that backflow last night. There's something wrong with the system. We can't report it ready for use until we've found the fault.”

Keyliss swallowed. She stared at the landscape of marsh and giant trees, but she saw something very different in her mind's eye. “Yes,” she said, “we'll only get one chance. It's … I've come to like Louis and the others.”

“Our return isn't affected by where we are in the target age,” said Astor, “so there's no reason you shouldn't walk around.” Her colleagues were not her ostensible audience, but she shot a dirty look at their backs. “Try to keep at least one of us in sight, though, not that the animal life here is any real danger.”

Professional again, Keyliss turned and walked back to the main group. “Yes,” she said, “there should be more than five minutes before the—”

The air is humming, thought Mike Gardner. But it was not the air. It was a pair of worlds being superimposed upon one another at a frequency which slowed to a—

Blue flash.

*   *   *

Sara Jean knew she had to be falling because there was nothing around her except the blue light. Her hand grabbed for the cables she had let go of—the tarp had disappeared, draining out of her fingers like wave-sucked sand. The cable was not there, either. She stumbled on the solid floor, not because it had moved, but because panic had thrown her own body into motion.