Bridgehead

by David Drake

  “Then the party,” said Keyliss without quite shouting but making sure that all those affected could hear her, “will consist of Louis, Isaac, Robert, and Henry.”

  Sara Jean stood just at the edge of the group, waiting for a moment to talk to Selve. She found herself grinning. The Traveler’s use of given names made the catalog sound like a preschool function of some sort.

  Arlene Myaschensky said shrilly, “And me. Arlene.” The plump student had been helping shove against the locker transported with the Travelers. Now she wiped the sweat and dust from her palms onto the sides of her corduroy slacks. She picked up the purse she had set down for the task. “I’m to go on this, too. We agreed.”

  Professor Gustafson looked at the woman in some surprise. Her face appeared more flushed than her physical efforts required, and she was clearly upset about something. It wasn’t like Arlene to act that way. “Well, yes, we did, earlier,” Gustafson said in a doubtful voice. “Ah, I don’t think it’s really necessary that I—”

  “No, no, Louis,” said Isaac Hoperin from beside the open locker. “I don’t even want to go again. This time, I mean. I want to watch the process occurring instead of being a part of it, this time.”

  “The numbers really don’t matter,” said Selve with a touch of frustration of his own. “We simply have to know what they are to set the controls.” He walked toward the instrument panels as he spoke.

  “What’s this about a chlorine chamber?” Isaac Hoperin demanded with his head thrust forward. He did not touch Astor’s sleeve, but his voice plucked the big Traveler’s ear as she lifted out the shoulder weapons.

  “This isn’t the time—” Astor began. She was more irritated at the interruption than she was concerned by its subject.

  “No, it’s a good time,” Hoperin broke in. His voice rose. The guns dangling before him by the tops of their slings would have subdued another man. They put the spark to the fuse of the physicist’s temper. “Why are there parts of this—apparatus”—he waved in a controlled, chopping fashion—“that you haven’t told us about? That aren’t even here or when or whatever? Why have you been lying, and what are you covering up?”

  “There are—scores of ways to achieve the same desired end; that is, time travel,” said Keyliss. Astor was gaping, searching for a pattern of response. The most likely response to such an attack at home would have been violence, inappropriate here, but never buried very deeply in Astor’s personality. Keyliss’s interruption was as much on behalf of the mission as it was for her startled colleague.

  Now she stepped a little apart from the group of transportees so that her motion would help to draw all attention toward her. “Like a car, Isaac,” she continued. “Once the principle is determined, the details of, say, power source or suspension are fluid. This is a self-standing unit. There are other units of different design for other uses. That makes random testing very dangerous—but it’s not something anyone is hiding from you.” She reached out her hand to the physicist.

  The graduate students traded glances about the twenty-foot triangle their locations described. All the tests of the great coils here in the basement had been successful—under the direction of the Travelers themselves. The same tests applied without the Travelers’ knowledge to the tabletop unit upstairs had no effect whatever on the objects the students had attempted to project temporally.

  And yet the small unit worked, the previous day had proved that. There was a connection. It might be as innocent as a safety device, to save people like Professor Rice from their own ignorance … but there was a connection somewhere that only the Travelers themselves knew to make.

  Mustafa Bayar stood with military stiffness, chin raised; certain in his assumptions but very doubtful about where his duty lay at this juncture. Mike Gardner opened his mouth to speak, to show what he knew rather than from any feeling that the truth needed to be published. Astor’s lowering countenance and the guns she now seemed to grip with more than a bearer’s affection chastened Gardner as it had inflamed Hoperin only moments before.

  Paramount in Arlene Myaschensky’s mind was the heavy purse she clutched to her side and the task her husband demanded she perform. Well, he did need the pictures, she could see that. And they would do no harm. And—though this was not even visualized, much less verbalized mentally—Arlene had always been fat, had always been raised as an unattractive child, though bright. Dave Myaschensky had been the first man to take notice of her. At a very deep level she doubted her ability to get through life without him. If the choice were losing Dave or losing her career through some scandal connected with this project, then she would take the photographs for her husband and she would not raise any objections which might delay the test.

  Hoperin looked at Keyliss’s hand in puzzlement, as if he were trying to fit it somehow into a puzzle: the inexplicable hardware around him, and beyond that, a world where napalm incinerated infants. He took the hand in a combination of ordinary courtesy and scientific wonder at an offered datum. Keyliss was shorter and far slighter than the balding physicist. His anger was at authoritarian lies. It would have been absurd to direct that feeling against Keyliss’s gentle reasonableness. And yet …

  Selve had made the last entry at the terminal fed by the mainframe computer on the first floor. He studiously refused to look at his colleagues, either Astor’s honest anger or the false, pellucid believability of Keyliss at this moment. He turned his head to take himself out of the tableau of which he was a part.

  Sara Jean Layberg shyly held out to him the small box she carried. Their eyes met and he was at once grinning, in relief at the change of mental subject as well as in pleasure.

  “It’s not—” the woman began, but she stopped herself. It was much of a gift; she knew it, and Selve was artist enough to see that himself. “The bowl you gave me is already beautiful,” she said, “and it’s fascinating to see it happening that way, too. I wanted you to have this.”

  It took Selve a moment to realize that the box was a top friction-fitted to a bottom, each portion being five sides of the six-sided prism they formed together. The goblet was incredibly delicate for its material and manner of construction. How fingers could know the thickness just the safe side of cracking in a high-fire kiln was beyond him, utterly beyond. “This is beautiful,” said Selve. “I will treasure it.”

  He would. He would use the focused power of the unit at home to stabilize the goblet, even if they executed him as a result for misuse of the equipment.… But that would be afterwards, after the project was complete and its effects were completely irreversible.

  “Take this, Selve,” Astor demanded in a low, angry voice. She was holding out a gun to the male Traveler. She glowered equally at him and the local woman with whom he chose to talk at this time. “Are we ready? We have a very narrow entry window on this one, you know.”

  “I’ve done my work, yes,” Selve replied with a sullen harshness. He gripped the weapon at its balance but deliberately refused to pull it out of Astor’s hand. “Sara,” he said, “I’ll have to ask you to hold your vase until we return. It’s—very important to me. Thank you.”

  Astor started to say something further. Either she thought better of it, or she was interrupted by Keyliss calling, “Will all those who are being transported please join me in the docking area? Selve, you may start the timing sequence now.”

  From that announcement on, the preparations were a matter of mechanics for Gustafson and the three Travelers. The professor walked to the center of the docking area with the bemusement of a man entering an elevator while thinking about other things. The Travelers checked their weapons in more than cursory fashion and positioned themselves equidistantly, just within the circle on the floor.

  The locals on their first transport reacted with far more variety. Henry Layberg rubbed his hands and patted Chairman Shroyer solidly in the middle of the back. “By God, Bob,” he said aloud. “By God.”

  Shroyer was stepping toward the marked circle with the hes
itation he would have shown approaching an unfenced excavation. Layberg’s arms and enthusiasm were both of them offensive to the chairman’s hesitance. He twisted his head back toward the propelling arm, trying to smile good-naturedly but achieving something between a scowl and a fearful rictus. His friend did not notice, though Sara Jean, watching through the wires, did.

  Arlene Myaschensky walked with a careful stiffness suggesting fear of another kind: that of a child still erect and awaiting the final round of a spelling bee. Mike Gardner nudged Mustafa Bayar as they took their places at the control panel. Both of them watched their fellow student with narrow-eyed concern. Arlene’s rigidity had a drugged look to it, very unlike the woman’s normal personality even when an endeavor was going wrong. She stopped, facing in the direction she had been walking to enter the docking area. There was no reason to turn toward the control panel, but the rest of them had done so naturally enough. Myaschensky stood close to the three men, but her mind was in another level of existence.

  The reflectors of the overhead fluorescents, then the wires of the enclosure, blurred as the coils rose through their harmonies. Henry Layberg’s look of wondrous excitement faded. His arm on the chairman’s back tensed in something more than camaraderie. Professor Gustafson leaned toward Shroyer from the other side and shouted, “I’ve been a little worried about mechanical damage to the coils. We gave each layer a coat of epoxy paint before we wound the next one, but that may have been too brittle to st—”

  It was not too brittle to stand up to at least this further use. The flash, invisible to those it served, intervened to thrust Gustafson and his companions out of their present world while in midsentence.

  * * *

  “Oh!” said Robert Shroyer. He placed his feet and hands as if to take up the shock of a long fall.

  “Uh!” echoed Henry Layberg beside him. The MD stared around in renewed wonderment.

  “It is a strange feeling,” Professor Gustafson said, “but it seems to pass away as quickly as it occurs.” He paused, remembering what Selve had said the previous night. “I suppose multiple, ah, twistings of the same sensation could be more than disorienting, however,” he added.

  “We’ve drifted!” Astor snarled to her companions and the world about them. They should have been in a clear, rocky area. Instead they were in a forest of huge spikes like nothing so much as bamboo with stems ten feet in diameter. That in itself was not of great concern, but there was also a great deal of undergrowth. Mostly it was of soft-stemmed bushes with blackish, multilobed leaves. The leaves were as effective as so many bead curtains in hiding the members of the party from one another—and hiding also any of the extremely dangerous life forms which might be lurking nearby.

  The test had been necessary for final calibration of the system. The Contact Team had intended it also to be final proof to the locals—particularly the chairman—that the time machine was real and was safe, so long as it was operated under the team’s supervision. The result of this transport was by no means safe. It was to be hoped that the locals would not have reason to learn just how great the potential danger was.

  “Please, nobody wander,” said Selve in a nervously high voice. The dark suits that the Travelers wore made them invisible to one another and almost so to the locals, who were virtually within arm’s length of their guides. Selve’s face bobbed like a white blur behind a curtain. He spread the focusing muzzle of his gun for the broadest-possible coverage, then narrowed it again when he realized that the range was so short that only a beam of the highest intensity could ensure safety.

  The humidity was high in comparison to that in the basement from which they had just been transported. It was the healthy, cool atmosphere of vegetation transpiring rather than the peat-laden acidity of Professor Gustafson’s previous experience with the equipment he had built. Now the professor plucked one of the leaflets waving in his face and rubbed it between one thumb and forefinger. The leaf surface was too slick and firm to gall beneath his skin’s pressure.

  The Travelers were backing and sidling toward one another. They needed to talk in reasonable privacy, but they needed all the more to keep a lookout in every direction. “How long did you set this transport for?” Keyliss rasped over her shoulder to Selve as she neared him.

  “Please, stay close,” her male colleague called to the locals.

  * * *

  Arlene Myaschensky did not need to sneak away as she had expected. She walked through one spray of dark vegetation, then another, and around a bole of waxy smoothness. It was the size of a water tower. She relaxed as completely as if the wires holding her up had been clipped. She pressed her right palm and cheek against the tree trunk and drew long, silent breaths with her eyes closed.

  The tree was cool to Myaschensky’s touch, but the quivering it transmitted from the upper air made it seem animate and even friendly to her need. When she opened her eyes, she was an adult again—and an engineer with a task to perform. Nothing in her fellows’ chatter, muted by the foliage, suggested that Arlene’s absence had been noticed.

  There were plenty of insects, at least; she had been afraid she would have to search for them desperately over a barren landscape. Creatures ranging in size from dust motes to dragonflies glittered through the vegetation. Occasionally, one of them would land on the tree, generally where sunlight dappled the creamy bark.

  In order to give herself working space, Myaschensky trampled down several stems from a clump of the dark-fronded vegetation. In gross outline the plants reminded her of mimosa, though the color and texture of the leaves were quite different. With part of the spray crushed beneath her jogging shoes, she had ten square feet of the trunk clear as a background for her photographs. She opened her purse and lifted out the bulky unfamiliarity of the old camera which her husband had fitted with extension tubes. She could now concentrate on the task before her. That permitted her to forget about Dave on the one hand, and on the other about Professor Gustafson and the project—all the people she might shortly fail or betray.

  An insect as long as her forefinger landed on the bark in front of the woman. It had four wings and a pair of eyes like cabochon-cut sapphires. Arlene put her eye to the camera’s viewfinder and began to lean in to focus, the way her husband had instructed her.

  * * *

  “Well, what’s the problem, then?” Henry Layberg said. He spoke with the determined authority of a high official confronting an unruly group of his subordinates; but it was to the preoccupied Travelers that he spoke. Layberg stood with his hands on hips and his chin raised, just short of belligerence.

  “What?” demanded Astor as she glanced around abruptly. She made a pitchforking gesture toward the surrounding foliage with the muzzle of her weapon. “This is your Mesozoic, remember. There are animals here that can be quite dangerous, and we aren’t quite—”

  “Here,” said Keyliss an instant before her bigger colleague backed into her.

  “Right,” Astor muttered. The three Travelers were tightly together again. To Dr. Layberg, Astor completed her previous comment: “We seem to have transported a short distance from the clear area we had intended.”

  “It isn’t necessarily a fault in the hardware,” said Keyliss, now that she had taken time to think. She muttered to exclude the locals from her conversation, but she continued to speak in English. Her training was not to be overruled for such reasons as had appeared thus far.

  “The programming wasn’t at fault,” Selve said. He spoke crisply, to hide the suspicion that the fault was indeed in the programming—and in himself. “This is the third test, after all. It should be just the final cue-in.”

  Astor was glaring ferociously at the centrifugal locator built into her belt pack. She had dialed it to the absolutes for Portal Thirty-one. If that was correct—if they had not somehow exited through the wrong Portal entirely—then they really were within a few miles of their intended point of entry. It was inconceivable that two Portals would have such nearly identical intersections of
rotational moment and magnetic field that the location readings would correspond to that degree. On the other hand, the location of a Portal, once fixed, should be no more subject to change than would the wavelength of a beam of light. Something had to be wrong, either with Selve’s programming—which Astor did not believe—or with the hardware back at Portal Eleven. Either way, the situation meant delay and perhaps disaster.

  “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.”