by David Drake
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 an
y 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.
She recognized nothing in the silent room except Danny Cooper. His goggled-eyed wonder was almost certainly a mirror of her own expression. “Danny,” she said, “I don’t know where the cover went.” She could speak about the tarpaulin while her brain still refused to deal with anything else.
They were in a large room. It had walls of pastel green with faired edges like the front of a squash court rather than right-angle meetings. There were four doors but no windows. The style of furnishing and decoration was as alien to Sara Jean as the equipment in Mike’s lab had been a moment before.
“Those,” said Danny Cooper. He pointed toward the black pillars at the end of the room. “That’s what did it, Sara. It’s like the ones down in the basement and the little ones we…”
He walked gingerly toward the paired objects. They were coldly silent and, so far as Sara Jean could tell, were architectural rather than mechanical contrivances. They certainly had none of the wire-wound busyness of the coils which had hummed and …
The two of them had to be in the laboratory.
If they weren’t, where in God’s name were they?
The curved and scalloped objects in the center of the room could be instrument consoles. She tapped one with her blunt fingers. The units had a plasticity of line that was far more surprising to Sara Jean than the fact that they appeared to be made of synthetics and not metal. A display on the wall caught her eye. She walked over to it. Danny called something as he inspected the pillars. The thirty-yard distance and Mrs. Layberg’s own bemusement kept Cooper’s words from registering.
It was a rack of pottery. Not a rack, precisely, because the peg supports seemed to be integral to the wall. There were several bowls, but most of the dozen objects were narrow-necked vases. Their curves were as perfect and delicate as those of a swimming otter. The basic color was brown, but their surfaces were marked by black striations which twisted instead of angling as surface crazing would have done.
“Sara Jean,” Danny called loudly. “I’m going to open this door.”
The brown-haired woman turned. Danny was pointing at the door beyond the pillars. The other three doors were in the wall on which the pottery was displayed, but there did not seem to be any distinctions among them. Mauve crescents at waist height were presumably the latches.
“All right,” Sara Jean replied. She picked up one of the vases. At once she decided that she had been wrong. It had to be plastic and not pottery at all. The vase was about ten inches high and very slim overall. Even so, it should have weighed far more than it did. The closest equivalent in mass to what she held was a single long-stemmed rose; a comparison which occurred to Sara Jean because she had been thinking how well such a rose—a white one—would have set the vase off.
“Sara, come here!” Danny shouted from the open doorway. “Sara!” There was more pure excitement in his voice than fear, but the fear was there as well.
Sara Jean ran to her companion as quickly as her high heels and the vase in her hand permitted. The vase was not as fragile as its paper-thin walls made it appear. The surfaces were not synthetically slick; rather, they had the texture of weathered fir. She should have put the object down, but it was too lovely to be broken by haste—and Danny’s summons required haste.
Cooper still clung to the door with one hand. It opened inward from a road or extended balcony. That surface was ten feet wide with no railing … and she and Danny looked out at midheight on the buildings across from them, every one of them a thousand feet high or more.
“We can’t really be…” the woman said. She walked toward the edge of the balcony. The slick underside of another layer projected above her like a roof. Danny was following now, a pace behind. The buildings Sara Jean could see were no more uniform than so many termite mounds studding the Serengeti Plain. As she walked forward, her wedge of vision broadened vertically. All the buildings were tall; but she could look down on a few, while the spires of the highest were hidden by distance even now that the upper balcony did not block her view.
“There aren’t this many people on Earth,” Danny whispered. The air that should have boiled through these artificial canyons was still. It had a metallic taste, which had been present inside but seemed more noticeable in the context of a landscape.
The implications in terms of human numbers had not occurred to Sara Jean before her companion spoke. There was motion visible, though the distance hid details and the very scale made it difficult to think of the quivering activity as having anything to do with men. All the buildings were stratified by balconies like the one on which she and Danny stood. Vehicles and smaller blurs which must have been individuals scudded brightly across the faces of mountainous structures. Nowhere was there a crowd or even an apparent grouping, but the total number of figures in the panorama would have populated a small town.
Sara Jean leaned over to peer down without coming too close to the edge of the balcony. Danny said, “I—” in a gurgling voice and tugged at her arm.
“Don’t,” she said in irritation as she looked up. “I’ll drop this— Oh.” She saw the figure that swelled as it raced toward them down the surface on which they stood.
Sara Jean straightened. She started to run back to the door, but she realized that the figure was approaching very fast. Her free hand clamped Danny’s shoulder as if he were a grade-schooler at a street crossing. If they stood still, the figure could easily pass them. If they moved, they might merely dodge into its path. She felt like a squirrel on the highway. Danny gave a startled bleat. He did not try to move. The fingers that held him could extrude clay between them like the jaws of a hydraulic press.
For an instant, the figure was in sharp focus. Then it was a man-sized blur, decelerating from sixty or seventy miles per hour without a vehicle. The air roiled by its speed buffeted the teacher and secretary, making Danny gasp with memory of the drop a pace behind him.
There was a vehicle of sorts after all. The figure stood on a disk the size of a serving tray and gripped a T-shaped handle. With one hand the figure flipped up—her—face shield. Wisps of silky black hair fluttered at the edges of her helmet. She began shouting something. Danny stepped toward her with his hands out in contrition, but there was no sense at all to the sounds the local woman was speaking. Her garment was a puffy suit of cream-and-purple mottlings. When she had been moving, the fabric had molded her form without the fluttering that air resistance would have caused.
Doors popped along the balcony. They disgorged men—no, women most of them and most of them with guns pointed. Sara Jean felt that she was becoming dizzy. She still saw everything with diamond clarity. The women with guns wore uniforms of the same pale green as the walls of the room with the pillars. On them, the soothing color had a frog-belly wrongness. They were shouting also, past the muzzles of their weapons, and there were no words, only terrible noises.
Two men and a woman scurried out of the room in which Layberg and Cooper had themselves appeared. The new trio wore mauve and ocher. Their clothing appeared to be randomly printed until the identity of the three suits became apparent. One of the men pointed toward Sara Jean with his whole hand. He spoke as the other gabble stilled. With the wonder of a witness to a theophany, Sara Jean realized he was saying in English, “Why have you co
me here?”
“We haven’t come,” she cried. She held out the vase in her hand toward the speaker. “We don’t know—”
Like a nightmare repeating, the balcony began to shudder as the world had when it flung them into madness. Sara Jean crossed her forearms over her eyes, but there was nothing at all around her—
Except the blue glare.
* * *
“All right, Barry,” Chairman Shroyer said, “I’ll talk to Louis about the possibility—”
Rice leaned forward in his chair, opening his mouth to speak. Shroyer rode his own voice firmly over the coming protest, repeating, “The possibility that you can get into the basement when they have an experiment under way. But I don’t see—”
Rice had closed the door to the connecting office. Danny Cooper flung it inward so forcefully that it banged the corner of Rice’s chair. “B-Bob,” the secretary gasped, “something…”
“Now what the hell?” snapped Rice.
“Cooper, are you all right?” Shroyer demanded. Danny slumped against the chairman’s desk. He was disheveled and breathing hard. Shroyer offered an ineffectual hand over the width of the desk return. Then he pushed around the furniture and Rice as well to get to where he could support his secretary. “Rice,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “maybe you’d better phone the Rescue Squad.”
“Oh, no,” Cooper said. “I’m—” He shook himself, then straightened from the desk. “We touched a, a machine in Lab Three. Sara Jean was there. It wasn’t the— I mean, it wasn’t just me. It made us see things.” Straightening even more stiffly, Cooper added, “Dr. Shroyer, I think it sent us somewhere. The machine Professor Gustafson made.”
“Here, why don’t you sit down, Danny,” said Barry Rice. He toed one of the padded chairs and touched Cooper on the elbow to guide him down onto it. Chairman Shroyer pursed his lips in doubt as the secretary settled away from him. Giving his superior a knowing look, Rice continued, “I think you need to tell the chairman and me just what Gustafson’s experiment did to you.”