by David Drake
Selve reached out, either to steady her or to steady himself. “It’ll pass in a moment,” he said in what sounded like a voice of prayer.
The equipment locker just outside the docking area was open. Near it lay the guns which Astor and Keyliss dropped when the transport system sucked them back. The guns had not been transported initially, so they fell to the floor instead of rebounding through the catalog of Portals. The air was hot. A splotch of the cast flooring, ten feet by twenty raggedly, still bubbled and smoked.
The guns had no low-power setting, so Astor and Keyliss had flared the muzzles to their widest apertures as they enveloped the body in fire. Narrower beams would have scored too deeply into the building’s heart, eviscerating other chambers and their contents. Even the energy scattered with a broad brush had darkened half the chamber by cutting a cable. The door of Astor’s room had crumpled as one gun or the other jiggled.
Local atoms had combined with those ripped from the corpse under the cascade of energy. The rebound left those atoms nascent. The bitter tinge of ozone began to join the less identifiable products sublimed from the building’s structure. Black feathers the size of thumbnails floated in heat-spawned convection currents and the desperate attempts of the ventilation system to deal with the circumstances. Still nauseous, Astor began to stumble toward the outer door. The feathers which brushed her made sooty, indelible stains on her orange suit.
The door opened as she reached for the latch plate.
For a moment, the big woman thought she saw in the doorway a hallucination born of disorientation and combustion products. She bowed anyway and said, “Pray enter,” because even a mirage of the Directorate deserved honor.
The two women and the man in their suits of coronal white entered the room. Outside the door, the air crackled and flashed with a temporary force screen and the silver-shot vehicles of the guards.
Keyliss had begun to step out of her atmosphere suit. She was too logy and wretched to have bothered to seek the privacy of her room. Now she gaped and whimpered at the Directorate. The conscious part of her brain reasserted itself. She straightened and stood with quiet dignity, draping the tangled suit over her arm. The situation transcended normal modesty. All she could do at this point by trying to scramble back into the garment was to make herself absurd. Selve, for his part, smoothed the glove portion of his suit down over his left hand. The fabric slipped back over his fingers and sealed seamlessly.
“A confusing situation has been reported by Portal Four Base,” said the male Director mildly. They had names, the Directors, but probably no one was intimate enough with them to use those names.
“We don’t want you to think that we are concerned about your abilities or dedication,” said one of the female Directors as she tactfully lifted her eyes from the blasted patch of the floor and the guns beside it, still hot from firing.
“We came ourselves,” said the other female; she had started to close the outside door, but the fiery reek within caused her to swing the panel open again, “rather than send to you or call, to make it clear that we are not interfering. We are offering you whatever of the world’s resources you think you may need.”
“Because,” the male concluded, “the world’s survival depends on you.”
As soon as there was a target, the Directorate had put any number of parallel projects—perhaps a thousand of them—into development. Most of the groups had not found a suitable host Portal. Even those which found such a portal were beset with problems—perhaps greater than the problems of the Contact Team, perhaps just less adequately surmounted.
The three of them had been certain for a week that no other group was close to coming on line. They had been chosen from the scores, from the thousands of their recent peers, to be the group which programmed Portal Four for use. But what that fully meant had not been clear until this moment and the personal appearance of the Directorate.
“There have been problems,” Keyliss agreed. She nodded toward the floor, which had provided a burning ghat for Barry Rice. The nod was the wrong motion to have made. Surprise had overcome memory of nausea, but that nausea was ready to reassert itself. Swallowing back the lurch of her stomach, Keyliss continued, “One of them was there, yes. We think we’ve taken care of it.”
Astor cleared her throat and said, “There’ll be more trouble, Your Worships. The project is attracting more local attention, involving more people. We didn’t want that, but it’s happened and it was going to happen. Your Worships.” She had drawn herself up very stiffly. Feelings of respect made Astor almost more willing to fail the world than to fail its Directorate. The same respect forced her to be candid about the difficulties. It would have been irrational to try to gloss over the blast-scarred flooring; but the whole situation was irrational, and another personality would have tried to hide the obvious.
“We are on schedule, Your Worships,” said Selve. Keyliss, having asserted her personal honor and dignity, was now deliberately donning her atmosphere suit. Selve reached out a hand to steady his colleague and proclaim their joint identity. Astor was sidling closer as well, though her eyes remained turned deferentially toward the Directorate. “The locals have minds of their own,” Selve continued. He pointed toward the gouge in the floor. “That means there are problems for us, for them. Somebody died because he had a mind of his own. But it also means that the project goes forward, as it couldn’t if we had to make all the decisions.”
“Your Worships,” Astor resumed, “there is no help you could give us now except time and troops. And there is no way to be certain of holding Portal Eleven by force; not undamaged, not even for the brief time we need to make the final calibration. Not even if you transferred the whole of Base Four there.”
“So you all agree?” said one of the Directors. A tiny smile modified the smooth contours of her face. “The freedom you have given your locals—or they have taken—that is necessary for success?”
“Yes, Your Worships,” said the members of the Contact Team in unison. They spoke without haste, but they spoke in mutual certainty despite the fact that they did not bother to look at one another before speaking.
A Director coughed. “As you say,” he said, “there are only two things that might help. You don’t need troops.”
“And unfortunately,” said another Director, “we can’t offer time, either.”
“But we are on schedule,” Keyliss blurted in surprise.
“We fear that others are, too,” said a Director.
“Anomalies in the magnetic envelope are recorded as a matter of course.”
“But it takes time to check them. Sunspots, Portal activity all over the planet.”
“Sometimes even a meteor can be responsible. Everything is recorded. It can be checked, can be eliminated, but it takes time.”
“Except that this time, there is an anomaly that couldn’t be explained. Except as a small-scale transport, a probe too tiny to call immediate attention to itself.”
The Directorate paused. Through dry lips, Astor said, “Your Worships, the locals at Portal Eleven built an ungoverned unit of their own. Perhaps…”
The male Director gestured negation with one finger. “The anomaly occurred almost six months ago,” he said. “Five months and twenty-seven days.”
“One day,” said Selve, who needed no one to help him with calculations, “before our project was put into effect. You think they discovered us simultaneously.”
The Director who had smiled now smiled again. “We did not wait a day to act,” she said. “We doubt that the Vrage waited, either, once they had the information. The day they lead us may mean nothing. There are so many variables, so many things to go wrong.…”
“Your Worships,” said Astor. Tears began to well from her eyes. She knelt, not only in reverence but because her knees suddenly quavered too much to surely support her. “We can’t make Portals Four and Eleven come in phase more often than they do, so we can’t speed up the schedule. But we won’t fail you.
Whatever it takes.”
The sun was setting past the open door. Its rays, diffracted by the force screen, bathed the Directorate in auroral splendor.
* * *
“‘Rise, shine, give God glory,’” sang Charles Eisley, very much under his breath. The Foreign Servive officer lay on his back, covered by the sheet in which his toes made two tented mounts. It was particularly easy to suck in his belly from this position. For the first time in Eisley’s life, morning was becoming something halfway to look forward to.
Not that gravity’s effect on his paunch had much to do with his relative cheerfulness.
Eisley slid a hand between the upper sheet and lower to pat Sue Schlicter’s haunch. The woman wore a pair of nylon briefs, but the flesh of her thigh below them was firm and dry and warm. “‘Rise, shine, give God glory,’” he repeated somewhat louder, with his lips caressing his mistress’s earlobe. His mind was on the last verse of the stanza, but no one could have determined the words, much less the tune, from his cracked mumble. “‘Soldiers of the cross.’” He licked the inner surface of her ear.
“Umm,” said Sue, turning so that she could slide both her arms around his neck. Her eyes were still closed, but her lips smiled as they kissed his. “It’s Saturday, silly.” Her right nipple began to harden as it brushed his hairless chest. “Or did I convince you that we ought to go watch this next experiment ourselves?” Her eyes were still closed.
“Can’t you see?” murmured Eisley. “I’m bursting with enthusiasm. You’ve wrapped me around your little finger, shameless wench, bent me to your will.” It was often easier to tell the truth when he made a joke of it. His whole working life had trained him for deceit.
Sue’s arm maneuvered under the sheet itself. “Dunno,” she said, “it doesn’t feel very bent to me.” She giggled, then opened her eyes and leaned back so that they could actually look at each other. “You really do want to go, Charles?” the black-haired woman said. “You were right last night, there’s nothing we could do there … like you can for Mustafa behind the scenes, I mean. I just thought it would be exciting.”
Eisley bent and gave the woman beside him a brief peck, as chaste a kiss as could have been bestowed on a nipple. “I thought it would be exciting, too,” he said, “and that was why I was against it. I’ve gotten used to never doing the interesting thing, because it might not be dignified.… And last night it struck me that in all the years I’ve spent in the Foreign Service, the two days I remember most—I don’t know, warmly, I suppose—are the day we destroyed the consulate records in Nha Trang, and the day I was ambushed west of Malatya.”
“You never told me about that,” the woman said. All her muscles had briefly tensed.
Schlicter’s hand was still on the man’s groin. She felt his penis shrink with the shock of what he had just admitted. “Didn’t I?” he said aloud. “Well, I don’t talk about it very much, I suppose.” He started to sit up.
Sue held Eisley’s shoulders down, gently but firmly, with her left hand. Her right swept the sheet down till her feet could kick it fully clear of their bodies. Her briefs were a bright crimson. “Right, we’re going to go off and do exciting things in a little bit,” she said. “But right for now, we’re going to stay here and do exciting things instead.” She bent over.
Eisley’s hand stroked the woman’s back, as bony and supple as a snake’s. Was this the heart of the allegory of the Garden of Eden? Aloud he said, “Well, I’ll just never forgive you—oh, God—if we’re late and I don’t get in. Never.”
The woman ran her tongue around the tip of his member, which had stiffened again instantly as her lips enfolded it. “First things first,” she said. She chuckled. “First this. Then you get in. And then we go off and watch time machines.” And her lips went back to what they had been doing a moment before.
* * *
The globe on the kitchen table was larger than it had been the night before. That was initially more of a surprise than what the bud within was doing. Buds were intended to grow, after all. Inanimate objects should retain their rigidity as well as their glassy perfection.
Sara Jean poked the—bubble. It had flattened and was no longer globular. There was noticeably less fluid within than there had been; the remainder rolled sluggishly. She carried the container over to the stove and turned on the light in the exhaust hood for a powerful, close-up illumination of what had been merely a bud.
“A bowl,” Selve had said, and it was clearly going to be one. The feathery petals of the night before had flattened and expanded into a surface six inches in diameter. The leading edges were still translucently thin, but the center of the hollow had taken on an amber solidity. There were coffee-colored veins swirling from that center toward the edges.
If the container had kept its original shape, the crystalline walls would have cramped the growing bud into their own upward curve. Sara Jean had in fact supposed that was the intent, that the external shape molded the growth like a living form of plaster of Paris. Instead, the edges drove the container at least a millimeter ahead of themselves, squeezing the crystal lower as it became wider.
“Oh, there you are, dear,” said Henry as he walked through the door. He was pulling on his tie from habit, although there was no need to be concerned with patient acceptance this morning. “I wonder if they’ll bring that fellow back today, Rice. I’ll believe they can deal with brain death and trauma that extensive when I see it, I must admit.”
“I won’t—I don’t intend to go anywhere,” the woman said. She turned out the light and turned to her husband with a wan smile. “Not that I did the first time. But I’d like to see Selve again, to take him this.”
On the kitchen table was the goblet Sara Jean had set out even before she went to bed. It was not her largest work, nor were its walls necessarily thinner than those of any of her other efforts. It was, however, as nearly a perfect rendering of her intent as she worked on it as anything she had ever created.
“Well, all right,” said Henry, a verbal nod of dismissal to the subject. “We’d better get moving, then.” He brought his car keys out of the side pocket of his coat.
“I’ll drive,” Sara Jean said as she set the goblet into a paper-lined box and covered it. “I’m parked behind you, remember. And I know the way to the school of engineering.” Her lips smiled in a hard face.
As they walked out the door together, Sara Jean asked, “Henry, do you ever notice me? As a person?”
“For God’s sake,” her husband said, “of course I do. If you want to drive, then drive. I just don’t want to miss this business.”
* * *
“It’s the doctor from last night and his lady,” called Mustafa Bayar. The Turk had opened it at the knock in the hope that Charles Eisley would be there. Instead of stepping aside, Mustafa now stood in the doorway opening and called for instructions.
“Well, of course let them in!” Chairman Shroyer retorted, breaking a sentence of his discussion with Louis Gustafson and two Travelers to do so. “Hank, over here! You’re still determined you want to go in on this?”
“Couldn’t be more so,” Layberg responded as he walked in without even the notice of Bayar that one gives a servant.
There had been no air circulation overnight. The air had cooled, but it still had an unpleasant undertone, as if a rat had died somewhere in the maze of equipment. Sara Jean’s nose wrinkled, though she had been subconsciously prepared for the bite of chlorine which had struck them the night before. There was no sign of that, and no one had explained enough about the—machine—to her for her to know whether either reek had anything to do with what was going on.
Isaac Hoperin was inside the fencing, but he had no task and no particular interest in the preparations going on. He strolled through the docking area, oblivious to the possible danger. He said through the wire to Lexie Market, “I hadn’t realized that Louis had gotten you into this, too. Do you have any sort of a handle on what really is going on? I certainly don’t, and I’
ve—well, been a part of it. Gone back.”
“Barry Rice got me in on this last night,” the woman said. She rubbed her hands together as if they were cold. Lexie had been very doubtful about coming this morning. When she finally decided to do so, she had dressed with particular severity: her blond hair in a bun; a dark brown dress with sleeves and a high neckline; no jewelry whatever. “I gather this project was none of his business, really, but … since I got involved, I thought I’d better see if there was any word about him. About Barry.” She didn’t owe that bastard anything, and she knew that … but human interactions are not on the basis of deserts, but rather on either side of the personality of the individuals. Lexie could not ignore her memory of Rice’s sprawled figure, even though the man had gone out of his way to bring himself to that pass.
“Rice?” Hoperin repeated. “I don’t think I know him. What went on last night?”
“One of the engineering faculty made an unsupervised transport,” Market explained. Scientific detachment made it possible to answer all the relevant questions in a very few words. “He landed in what those—others—say was a chlorine chamber that’s part of all this.” She gestured with two fingers toward the pillars behind Hoperin. “They also say that they can cure, can repair the damage to him. I—don’t know that I believe them, but it was the only choice. They took Barry off with them when they left last night.”
“Chlorine chamber?” the other physicist said. “And in the circuit.… But what on earth would that…?” Hoperin was turning to survey the apparatus while his mind struggled to convert what he saw into balancing forces instead of physical objects. A vessel of chlorine not on any of the circuit diagrams or hinted in the formulae. His eyes lit on Astor. He stepped toward the Traveler, leaving Lexie Market wrapped in her own thoughts behind him and almost equally oblivious.
Astor opened the locker which she and two grad students, as before, had slid out of the docking area. It was an invariable rule that the Contact Team not transport to Portal Eleven holding their weapons. The locals were civilized, but—as Astor herself had reminded the Directorate—they were by no means so peaceful that a perceived threat might not be met by force. The guns could be issued only when it was clear that no one in the basement would take them amiss. For the previous demonstration, the weapons had been superfluous. That was by no means the case on this coming transport to Portal Thirty-one.