Bridgehead

by David Drake

  Dismounted soldiers stabbed and ran and cried for support from their fellows. The carnivore rushed like a dog tormented by gadflies from one splotch of armor to another. Sometimes a victim dodged; sometimes the beams of a victim and his fellows drove the beast in some less painful direction; and sometimes the jaws crunched on a tormenter. The claws and black teeth dripped with ichor as blood bubbled from the animal’s own mortal wounds.

  * * *

  The interlacing tree trunks were an effective baffle for the high-frequency sound of the Vrage weapons. By the time the humans had run a hundred yards or so, the shrieks had muted to hissing; but that hissing had the emotional overlay of whips cutting toward flesh. The sound goaded Schlicter and Eisley onward. The carnivore they had flushed was a phantom from nightmare. The eight-limbed aliens were by contrast a part of continuing reality despite their strangeness.

  The forested core of the valley was as flat as the bowl of a spoon. The slight rise in the ground did not increase the difficulty of escape. In fact, when the slope sharpened abruptly, the wider spacing of the trees made it easier to move. The sunlight had not been a problem to the humans under the canopy of black leaves. Where the tree trunks became short, individual pots instead of starbursts of respectable height, it was possible to see the sky again. The sun was lower than its brilliance suggested. Twenty minutes should find it behind the hills from which the valley debouched.

  Beneath a stubby tree of the last fringe, the two fugitives caught their breath and took stock. Both of them were panting. Eisley was surprised to see that Sue’s face was as red as it got during particularly strenuous bouts of lovemaking. The incongruity made it possible for him to smile.

  “We wait half an hour and it’ll be dark,” Schlicter said, nodding up the grassy slope.

  “I think we better keep moving,” Charles replied after he had cleared the phlegm from his throat. “They must have some way of tracking us besides sight. I think we ought to keep moving, hope they lose us in all the other stuff.”

  Massive herbivores were grazing placidly on this side of the valley, just as they had been on the other. Perhaps at nightfall they would troop down to water; the predator there had been built for victims that big. The fear that the grazers had engendered when Eisley first saw them now seemed to him to have been ridiculous. The beasts were potentially dangerous, just as urban traffic was dangerous. That was innocent in comparison to what had happened down at the creek.

  Charles turned to face back the way they had come, his shoulder braced against the tree’s horny bark and his legs splayed out like those of a corpse. It was impossible to see anything but the immediate treetops. He had thought that they could perhaps spot a surveillance post on the crest over which the vehicles had come. They would have to climb higher to do that … which meant being exposed against the grassy slope for at least some distance. Eisley could not tell whether there was still fighting going on at the watercourse, or if instead he was just hearing the breeze.

  “Right,” he said. He rolled to his belly again, then levered himself to a kneeling posture. “I’ll slip out a little ways to check the lay of the—”

  Schlicter started to get up also.

  Eisley laid his hand firmly across the woman’s buttocks and pinned her to the ground again. “Goddamn it, Sue,” he said. “If there’s one of us, there’s half the chance of being spotted. Right?”

  “Well, why don’t I—” Schlicter began.

  “Dammit!” the man repeated. “It’s my idea to go on, yours to stay. Will you for God’s sake let me go look things over without a stupid argument?”

  Sue dropped her eyes and nodded. “Be careful,” she said, looking away from her lover.

  Eisley began to crawl toward one of the patches of brush. At this level, the grass tickled his cheeks. The blades could cut, in fact. Sweat which the sun drew from his face stung fiercely. When the diplomat dragged himself behind the clump, he mopped his face with his handkerchief before he even bothered to scan the farther hillside.

  The brush grew in waist-high knots. The stems squirmed together like those of an ancient wisteria vine. It made a comfortable screen through which Eisley peered intently. The grassy slope was almost a mile away, but the magenta color of the aliens and their vehicles should have been obvious against a dun background. There did not seem to be an outpost. The group which had penetrated the valley’s forested bottom was blindfolded by the vegetation that screened it from Eisley. It seemed to him that the best course for the two of them was to make a break for the next ridge.

  He stood up. “I think—” he called to Sue, lost in a shadow fifty feet away.

  A rank of vehicles swept over the crest toward which Eisley had intended to flee.

  The ten vehicles in the middle of the line were stretched over a half-mile front. They were light cars like those which had originally pursued the fugitives into the forest. If the diplomat had not been erect and fully exposed to the view of this new party, he might have thought it worthwhile to try hiding from them in the grass.

  At either end of the search chain was a tank that dwarfed the trucks of the earlier party as thoroughly as those trucks dwarfed the individual vehicles they accompanied. There were no eight-limbed soldiers on the back of these tanks with hand weapons. Charles Eisley had done enough reporting of military vehicles in his career to recognize tanks, even reddish-purple tanks with yard-diameter disks instead of proper turrets on their flat decks.

  Eisley’s mouth was open to shout as he turned from his mistress. He was not sure what the words would have been. The aliens forestalled him with a sound like plates of the planetary crust rubbing.

  The tank weapons were not optically aimed, so no guide beams quivered from them across the landscape. Instead, the grass planed off in a downward slant and the swath drew in from either side toward a point between Eisley and Schlicter. The low sun wavered from the whirling disks of the tank armament in a dazzle that had nothing to do with the actual process of destruction. A grazer forty yards from the diplomat suddenly lurched and slumped soundlessly to the ground as grass fell beyond it: the huge beast had been sectioned through the torso with no more ado than its own teeth cropped vegetation.

  “Halt!” boomed the tanks in unison, the only noise in the valley but the rush of the vehicles’ passage now that the guns had ceased firing. Earth had rippled beyond the lines on which the beams intersected it. Where the beams themselves crossed between the two humans, the surface was humped and tumbled with displaced sod. Atoms had repelled one another violently along a plane of activity. The effect was geologically trivial, but it would take a century of rain, frost, and microshocks to undo it.

  Nothing could undo the liquidly raw portions of the grazer which chanced to have been in the way of the warning fired by the tanks now looping toward Charles Eisley at eighty miles an hour, their speed belied by their enormous bulk. A minuscule twitch in the line their weapons drew to separate Eisley from the forest would instead have split Sue like an axed melon.

  The diplomat, hands raised over his head, began to walk uphill toward the alien vehicles. “I surrender!” he shouted. He did not look behind him or suggest in any way that there might be anyone behind him. The aliens had shown that they wanted a living captive. There was no evidence that they wanted two.

  “I surrender until that damned machine brings me back!”

  * * *

  “Well, Jesus God, Arlene, where’s the camera?” Dave Myaschensky demanded as he looked up from the kitchen table.

  “Oh, I—” the woman said. She hefted uncertainly the purse she had just set on one of the chairs. “I must have left it in the car. I’ll get it.”

  Her husband pushed past her at a run. “For Chrissake, can’t you be a little careful?”

  Dave did not close the front door when he ran outside, but he achieved a satisfying slam with it when he returned moments later with the Nikon in his hands. He began to rewind the film even as he stamped toward the kitchen.

&nbs
p; Arlene had pulled off her torn sweater. The Myaschenskys’ apartment was one of four divided awkwardly from a 1920s-vintage frame house. The bathroom was off the kitchen, the location determined by the drains and water pipes. Arlene studied her injuries in the medicine chest mirror. The camera strap’s abrasions on her neck still hurt like fire, but they could not be serious. Bruises were already forming against her white skin, places where she had hit the ground or been groped by the struggling alien. Those, and the muscles pulled by unfamiliar strain, would be with her for at least a week. She loosed the shoulder straps of her bra to see if the ache in her left breast was from some evident cause.

  “Arlene, will you get out of the way?” Dave said. He made shooing motions with his hands and the camera. “There’s not room to process film in here even without you wallowing around. This is important.”

  The woman looked away from the yellowing mirror in surprise. Dave’s photographic chemicals were set out on the board with which he turned the bathtub into a workbench. There were not only the canisters for film processing, but the trays and enlarger for making prints. The apparatus struck Arlene’s awareness a blow that made her gasp.

  “I wanted to take a hot bath, Dave,” she said. “A long bath. It was—”

  “Later, dammit!” Myaschensky shouted. The tendons in his throat stood out like wires. “Will you get out of here!” The words were not a question except in grammatical formation.

  Arlene did not speak as she walked out of the bathroom, out of the kitchen. The bathroom door banged behind her, opened, then banged again. Her husband noticed the sweater. He flung it into the kitchen and out of his way.

  * * *

  When Schlicter lay with her head on the ground, she could feel the soil tremble as the grazers strolled into the forest. Twilight had been as brief as a kiss, the way Charles had described evenings in Nha Trang when he was there as political officer. Sue held her hand an inch above the ground. When she could no longer distinguish its shadow from the general darkness, she stood up.

  The last of the grazing dinosaurs were funneling toward a trail to water a few hundred yards from the woman. None of the herd—if that was not too collective a word for the loose agglomeration—paid any attention to the one of their number which the tank had halved. Smaller creatures had crept out with darkness, however. That part of the night now smacked and snarled in a dozen rasping voices. Schlicter carried her knife open in her right hand as she strode up the hillside.

  She had thought that at least the tanks would have left deep furrows in the sod, easy to follow even in the darkness. There were no signs at all of the aliens’ passage. The tank to whose deck Charles had been tied with black cord had disappeared with its consort and its convoy of utility vehicles. Sue’s mouth was dry. She gripped her knife hilt as if to make its brass and Micarta scream.

  The haze overhead had turned the sky unexpectedly pink at the moment of sunset. After only minutes of that luster, it had become an opaque barrier to any light the moon or stars might have offered. As she neared the hilltop, however, it became increasingly obvious that the night was not as black as it should have been. The other side of the ridge was not a valley like the one she was leaving. Instead it was a meteor scar, age-softened but huge, many miles across. From it glared enough artificial light to stain the sky.

  Sheltered in the crater was a bustling encampment of flat-roofed, circular buildings. The whole area was illuminated in pale yellow green by hedges of light standards. In the very center of the scar was a broad cleared area around a double structure, each portion of which was spherical—globes some eighty feet in diameter. Sue Schlicter lay flat to stare. There was no doubt in her mind that those huge units performed the function of the cylindrical drive coils Professor Gustafson had built.

  The scale of the encampment took Sue’s breath away. It robbed her of the hope she had not expressed even to herself: the hope that she, not the time machine, would snatch Charles from the things which had captured him. She could not even locate the diplomat in a maze more populous than any city in North Carolina.

  There was still traffic in and out of the crater. Though there were scores of vehicles, fans of light, moving at any moment, the area involved was so great that no aliens seemed to be anywhere near the human fugitive. Lights became cars and trucks as they entered the nucleus of general illumination. Perhaps some vehicles were the remains of the patrol which had initially flushed her and Charles. There must be outposts ringing this massive base … though how bleak would outpost duty be to creatures who found Earth as inhospitable as these did. That was obvious from the sealed suits, the closed vehicles, and the way all the buildings Sue could see clearly seemed to interconnect.

  God in heaven. There was a chance after all.

  On a distant fringe of the encampment was a tank park. Acres of tanks like the pair which had snared Charles rested silently. Light gleamed on the edges of their weapon disks. Those halos gave an angelic aura to vehicles whose lethality could not have been less in question. But though the absolute number of the tanks must be in the thousands, only two of them were currently in motion. As huge as any of the structures fixed to the ground, they slid together into the area cleared around the drive coils.

  The dark blotch against the magenta reflection of one of the tanks could be Charles Eisley. Logically, it could only be Charles Eisley.

  There was activity between the spherical coils even before the tanks reached them. Schlicter could not see the individual aliens, but an anthill can be viewed even when distance hides its builders. Sue found herself watching the hasty erection of a cylindrical building smaller than the thousands of similar ones which comprised the encampment. Twice the reddish guide beams of Vrage weapons slanted up from the pool of ambient light. The distance long delayed but could not wholly absorb their distinctive screech.

  The tall woman bleakly considered the lighted concourses which she must traverse to reach Charles. There were vehicles moving intermittently, but no pedestrians. Certainly no two-legged, two-armed pedestrians.

  It struck her that the risk was pointless. They had already been stranded in this time for an hour and a half. They would surely snap back to the present at any moment. What she was considering meant danger from the aliens and danger from the dinosaurs, which would not notice crushing her beyond the momentary greasiness of one broad foot. For that matter, there was no certainty that the physical situation was what she suspected it might be.

  Screw them all. Sue Schlicter wasn’t going to give up the best chance life had handed her to become a hero. She began to whistle the “March of the Toreadors” under her breath as she strode back toward the forest and the watercourse. Her little knife winked like the sword of a vigilant Crusader.

  * * *

  The door of the workroom was open. Henry Layberg knocked on the jamb diffidently before he stepped inside. His wife looked up from her work table and the bud-formed bowl which Selve had given her, surprised. She was not sure how often Henry had bothered to enter the workroom. It was no more than a dozen times in as many years as she had been potting; it could have been as few as two or three.

  “I’ve been watching this, this pot from Selve,” Sara Jean said. There was a chair for guests in one corner, but its cushion was stacked with dusty volumes on kiln construction. Before she could stand up to clear the seat, her husband settled himself on an arm of the chair instead. He looked uneasy.

  Disquieted herself, Sara Jean babbled on, “It’s almost stopped now. Stopped growing. For a while I could see the, the edges expanding. Like a feather of clay on the wheel, only so much faster.”

  Dr. Layberg nodded. “That’s nice,” he said. His mouth made a grimace which was absentmindedly meant to be a smile. “Jeanie,” he asked as his eyes roved along the ranks of finished mugs and vases, “why didn’t we go to Bermuda?”

  “Well, we couldn’t really afford it after my dad died,” Sara Jean said. She could not have been more surprised if the world had fallen away from
her again as it had the morning before in the engineering laboratory.

  “No, no, not our honeymoon,” Layberg said. The sharpness in his voice was more familiar than the musing wonder had been. The wonder and gentleness were back as the doctor continued, “I know, we had to cancel the honeymoon plans for then. But we were going to go later, as soon as we could afford it, weren’t we? And I swear to God I even remember we’d booked the tickets, hell, years ago. But we didn’t go?” His brow was contracted with frustration at his lack of memory about something which was suddenly important to him.

  “We did book tickets, yes,” his wife said. She was frowning herself—not for memory, but from continuing doubt as to what was going on. If Henry had—But it didn’t matter, any more than the house mattered to her now, or the Mercedes. “The first time we were going to go by boat. Then we thought we’d fly. After the third time, I pretty well gave up, Henry. That must have been, well, ten years ago at least. After I’d begun potting seriously.” She reached out toward the clay-smeared wheel beside her.

  “Something came up,” Dr. Layberg said heavily. “For me, I guess. Each time.” The only flaw in his memory had been a deep unwillingness to retrieve the data. “Damn it all, Jeanie, I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t see that that matters now,” Sara Jean said. Her coolness was a preemptive defense rather than hostility, though the distinction was not apparent to anyone outside her mind. As she spoke, the shroud which had covered the bowl pinged and disappeared. The transparent material was briefly a rainbow of dust-mote prisms in suspension over the table. They drifted down and were lost without even a suggestion of themselves.

  “The Travelers aren’t our descendents,” said Henry Layberg. “They aren’t human at all, Jeanie. Too many ribs. I don’t know where they come from, but it isn’t Earth a few thousand years in the future.”

  The doctor had linked his hands together, palm to palm, without interlacing his fingers. Sara Jean got up, holding Selve’s bowl in her left hand. Layberg stared at her, expecting her to say something. “There couldn’t be any mistake,” he went on. “She was, Keyliss was sectioned like a plate from an anatomy text.”