by David Drake
“Deith, you can’t let them jump into disaster on Vrage,” said the single remaining Contact Member, although he bowed his head in full subservience. Selve was not one to let hierarchy affect the survival of worlds. “Trust Astor’s judgment at least on that.”
“The assault force will be well on its way to destroying Vrage utterly, before you even rebound to explain your team’s actions,” Deith taunted.
Selve had thought Astor’s name might goad the Monitor to fury if it did not shock her into reason. Selve’s own death might have resulted from that fury. Death was blind. Selve saw Astor’s body when his eyes were open. He saw hundreds of thousands of other Skiuli dead uselessly on Vrage when his eyes were closed, his imagination free.
But Deith was as untouched by the memory, the flash of her hand and arm vaporized, as she was by the logic of what Selve said. Her smile was beatific as she and her fellows vanished. That smile soured air that reeked already with the burned residues of plastics, metal, and flesh.
* * *
With the Monitors and their weapons gone, Mike Gardner lunged for the pillar, though its total ruin had been obvious from twenty feet away. The thermoplastic covering was frosted and wrinkled a yard above and below a hole the size of a dinner plate.
Mike jerked the warped panel open. The metal’s high thermal conductivity had spread and dissipated much of the bolt’s effect, though not enough to avoid total destruction of the apparatus: the pit through the multiple layers of copper was conical, tapering down as it plunged deeper. For the first time, the implications of such energy release on a human target became real to Gardner. He turned and stared at Astor’s corpse. Lexie Market guided him away with a hand on the student’s wrist and another on his suddenly pallid cheek.
The equipment for which he had risked his honor was only part of a nightmare to Louis Gustafson now. He knelt at Astor’s side, hoping that the obvious was not real.
Dr. Hoperin looked at Selve and opened his mouth to speak. The Traveler had sunk into a crouch when the Monitors disappeared. He covered his face with his hands.
Hoperin swallowed and joined Professor Gustafson. Henry Layberg did not bother. The Monitor who thrust a gun in his face had moved him from Astor without argument. He knew there was nothing he or anyone on Earth could do for the victim. A day earlier, Dr. Layberg might have been more interested in the structure of an unusual corpse than he was in the fact that the corpse had been someone he knew. For whatever reason, he no longer felt that way. He put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and looked at Selve. The living Traveler might need help as the dead one did not.
“Selve,” said Sara Jean Layberg, “aren’t they going to—invade through here?” Nothing that had occurred or been spoken just now made any sense to her. She knew enough to be afraid. She knew also to keep the quaver out of her voice as she forced those around her to deal with the real problem and not its side effects.
“No one would have been appearing here anyway,” said the Traveler as he rose wearily to his feet again. “The drive coils at Portal Four command a volume beyond the capacity of this unit to accept when energized. What this will do is redirect the transport to the current focal point of this Portal. To Vrage.”
Professor Gustafson’s face was averted from the corpse by which he knelt. He was rubbing the flats of his hands against one another, although he had not actually touched the body. “There is no focal point,” he said. “The coils here have been destroyed.” He spoke without frustration. The old engineer had lived and taught too long to become exasperated when someone missed an obvious factor.
“Louis,” said Selve in the same tired voice as before, “the hardware isn’t the Portal, it opens the Portal. The planetary magnetic field does the real work. By destroying the apparatus, Deith has seen to it that the focus can’t be changed until it dissipates naturally.” The Traveler had been speaking audibly but toward an angle of the room with no one in it. Now he rotated his head to face Professor Gustafson. To do less would be cowardly. “By the time the Portal has closed, a Vrage counterstrike will almost certainly have rebounded along the transport column. To here.”
“Do the little coils upstairs still work?” Sara Jean Layberg asked unexpectedly. “The ones that—the other day, took Danny and me to the city?”
Selve was alert and fully alive for the first time since the Monitors had ended the moment of triumph. “Michael,” he said, “were the coils destroyed or just disconnected?” He thrust up a peremptory hand to still the gasps and inchoate words from the others nearby. This crisis was Selve’s meat.
“Keyliss separated the coils so that they couldn’t harmonize with the big pair,” Gardner said. He was already striding for the gate. There was a toolkit in the bottom drawer of the desk on which the test unit sat.
“Wait, we’ll need communication between there and here,” the Traveler snapped.
“Well, the phone,” said Professor Gustafson. “The labs all have phones.”
“I’ll get it,” said Lexie Market. She did not run directly after the engineering student. Instead, she ducked from the enclosure into Gustafson’s office to check the number on the phone dial there. It was faster than trying to find a university directory in an unfamiliar lab. Only then did she dart up the stairs calling, “Mike! Which lab?”
Selve was at the computer terminal. A quick pass cleared the settings in force. He began to key in new ones from memory. “Louis, disconnect the main coils, even the damaged one,” said the Traveler as his fingers flashed. “They won’t function properly, but there are infinite ways they could malfunction enough to interfere.”
The phone in Gustafson’s office began to shrill. Isaac Hoperin exchanged glances with the Laybergs before scurrying into the office. A moment later, he stuck his head out the door again, holding the phone at the limit of its cord. “It’s Dr. Market,” he called. “Mike is hooking up the equipment and she’s standing by to give him the phone when necessary.”
“This is done,” said Louis Gustafson, rising from between the pillars. He held the socket wrench with which he had just disconnected the bus joining the two sets of concentric coils. “I’ll go up to the laboratory to help Michael.”
“No,” said Selve without looking up from his own work at the instrument console. “I need you here on the phone, Louis. When I give instructions, I want them passed on by someone to whom they’re more than gibberish. Michael knows more about the unit upstairs than you do, anyway.”
Henry Layberg was bending back his interlaced fingers to have something to do with his hands while others worked. “I’ll go upstairs,” he said abruptly. “In case they need somebody to, to hold a retractor or something.” The big man moved at an accelerating pace, as though he feared that if he hesitated, Selve would call him back to further nervous inaction. In fact, Selve had no present use for the doctor and therefore no concern about where he went.
The slim Traveler completed his own task by loading the program he had just written. He did not throw the switch. Selve’s body was dried comfortably by his body suit, but sweat had beaded at his hairline. He wiped his face with both hands as he called, “Isaac, are they ready yet?”
Eisley and Schlicter were outside the enclosure now, uncertain but ready to be directed. Hoperin and Professor Gustafson stood together in the office doorway. The physicist still held the phone. “No,” he said without having to relay the question. “Dr. Market will tell us when they are.”
“They’re going to have to modify the cyclic rate at which the signal is fed,” Selve said. “We’ll start at thirty hertz, but they’ll have to vary from that depending on what readings I get here from Skius. Tell them that.”
Isaac Hoperin pursed his lips. He handed the phone to Professor Gustafson. The physicist could not imagine what terms Selve trusted only the engineer to transfer correctly, but there was no time now to argue about absurdities. The Traveler seemed to think he could save Earth. As much as it offended Hoperin’s personal code, the stakes this ti
me were too high to refuse to bow to authority. It was at least possible to believe that Selve, unlike human soldiers and politicians, had the world’s best interests at heart.
Louis Gustafson murmured distantly into the handset while the Traveler rubbed his face again.
“Selve,” said Sara Jean Layberg, “won’t it already be too late? They left here before we … even started, after all.”
“That crew,” Selve scoffed. “You saw how long it took them to align this.” He caressed the raggedly functional instruments before him. “They’re no more familiar with the main unit that they’ll have to set also. These aren’t”—he gestured with his palm up and fingers splayed—“plastic cups from an extruder. Each set of Portal controls is as truly unique as anything you create, Sara, or I do.”
“He’s connecting the lines from the signal synthesizer,” called Isaac Hoperin. The engineer still held the phone. “That will be the last.”
Selve watched a dial quiver. He snorted as it moved a quarter of the way around the scale and hung there. “All this time and they’re only now tuning the carrier,” he said.
It was a moment before Sara Jean realized that the Traveler was not referring to Mike and that woman with him upstairs. Varied thoughts drifted through Mrs. Layberg’s mind, some of them involving relief. Aloud she said, “Selve, you—are you going to be in serious trouble because of what you’re doing here?”
The Traveler stared at her. Sara Jean’s lips were pressed firmly together and her hands were folded, one over the other, across the cloth-covered buckle of her skirt. He doubted that Sara Jean knew exactly what she was suggesting, and exactly what the consequences would be for Earth if Selve abandoned his present course. Though perhaps she did.
“My duty is to Skius,” Selve said. “Certain decisions were our responsibility to make, the Contact Team’s; others were not. If the fate of the war and our planet rests on a difference of opinion between Deith and Astor … Sara, I will not sacrifice a half million lives and our chance of winning the war simply because the Directorate accepted Deith’s judgment.”
“Michael is ready now,” said Professor Gustafson. “Should he engage?”
“Don’t let them touch it!” Selve said sharply. “I’ll control that. Michael is to stand by at the oscilloscope to beat the signal at his end. When I direct him.”
Gustafson spoke quickly into the telephone, his eyes still focused on Selve, twenty feet away and separated by the heavy mesh. “They’re clear now,” the professor called almost as soon as he finished talking to the phone.
Selve threw the main switch. His whole control panel was by now alive with signals from Skius and the beginnings of his own attempt to control the Portal. The Traveler stepped to the other half of the panel. “Sara,” he said, because she was near and his soul ached to tell someone, “it won’t have enough power. It won’t be able to stand the strain.”
He looked through the fence and across the aisle. “Louis, divide the signal at twenty-eight hertz. The fools can’t even plot synchrony with their own programmed transport!” Selve glanced at another gauge and moaned again. “Sara,” he whispered with no sign of his earlier official harshness, “they mustn’t close down upstairs no matter how badly the coils overload. No matter what.”
“Twenty-eight hertz,” Gustafson relayed.
“Louis, twenty-eight five!” ordered the Traveler.
Selve’s words to her had been a prayer, not an order. Sara Jean nodded and ran out of the enclosure anyway. The eyes of the other humans tracked her briefly. She had nothing to tell them. Their heads rotated back toward Selve even before the woman disappeared into the stairwell.
* * *
The air outside the basement proper was cool and a surprise to Sara Jean. She did not notice the undertone of vibration until the fire door closed behind her, either: in the basement, the sound of the coils had been lost in the noise of other equipment and the general atmosphere of tension. Small as it was, the tabletop unit was making the whole building sing to its note. “It’s enough,” the woman muttered. “It took Danny and me to Skius.” The difference between that accident and an army of a half million or more was too obvious to bear consideration.
The fluorescents in the upper hallway were on, the ballasts of some of them harmonizing with the buzzing of the drive coils. The result was less nerve-racking than the sound of the coils unaugmented. Sara Jean’s cork-soled sandals were loose enough to slap her heels as she ran to the open doorway of Laboratory Three.
The tinny noise was so obtrusive within that Dr. Market held her hand cupped between her mouth and the receiver when she spoke into it. Henry Layberg stood between her, at a desk along the side wall, and another desk in the center of the lab on which the apparatus was running. When his wife appeared in the doorway, Layberg looked surprised but went to join her. The room was hot. The insulation odor, unpleasant in itself and for its associations, was already a burden on breathing.
Mike Gardner leaned forward in a heavy wooden chair, one finger and thumb teasing a control knob in gentle fractions of arc. The oscilloscope before him was in series with the feed from the signal generators in the basement. A grid was etched across the instrument’s small, circular screen. Mike was eyeballing the peaky saw-edge which the phosphor bead traced across the grid. It was faster than any other method of matching cyclic rate to the relayed orders. He hoped to God that it was also accurate enough.
“Twenty-nine five,” Lexie Market shouted against the background of white noise. “They may rise to thirty again.”
“Twenty-nine five,” Gardner repeated.
The coils themselves trembled, then froze; trembled again. Their lower ends were bolted to an aluminum chassis. When the harmonics were just right, the foot-high coils pulled enough play from their base that their tops described visible circles in the air around their axes. The electronic struggle going on within the apparatus was much more violent than what Sara Jean had seen the previous day. Even then it had been enough to frighten her—and the Travelers, when they learned of it.
Sara Jean put a hand on her husband’s forearm as she waited for an opportunity to relay Selve’s message. Henry was trying to say something to her. Her hand, while affectionate, was angled to fend him off.
Gardner took his right hand from the tuning knob and leaned back as if he feared his breath might disarray the stasis he had just achieved. Sara Jean stepped close and bent to her former lover. “Selve says not to shut down no matter what,” she said.
Mike risked a glance around. His long forelock was dark and plastered over his forehead by sweat. Taut cheek muscles had drawn his lips into something between a smile and a snarl. Nevertheless, there was a smile in Gardner’s eyes as he said, “He’s got it!” Fate had given the student an opportunity to act in a fashion for which he had been trained. He liked it, pressure and all.
“Thirty and rising!” the physicist shouted.
“Thirty!” Gardner shouted back, and touched his dial.
There was an active, palpable silence that gathered in all sound from the lab and heaven knew how much farther away. The room was a pool of light that owed nothing to the fluorescents. Everything glowed the lime green of light reflected from vegetation when the sun is low and its beams are polarized by a cloud layer. There were orange-suited figures in the soundless ambiance, superimposed on the reality of tables and hardware. They stretched far beyond the tiled walls of the laboratory, as if the green light were a hologrammatic simulation of a huge army. The tanks were too huge to be other than camera trickery … save that Mike Gardner had seen them roar like freight trains through the chlorine mist.
Looming over all, even the tanks, were cylindrical drive coils that could have been paired office buildings. They blazed with an effulgence which seared its reality through the matter of Earth.
The dial and front of the telephone disappeared in a spray of plastic. The small electromagnet in the ringer had explosively melted everything around itself. Congealing droplet
s gleamed against Lexie’s skirt as she threw herself to the floor.
Henry Layberg seized his wife and the graduate student from behind by the collars. Gardner had already started to get up, but haste jammed his knees between his chair and the top of the desk well. Layberg jerked back with as little ceremony as he would have shown in cutting clothing from an accident victim. Mike and Sara Jean flew backward as the drive coils vaporized.
The surge that sublimed the copper wire involved greater potential energy than could have been supplied by all the generating stations on the Southeastern Grid. The coils’ failure was so sudden that virtually none of that potential was actually released. The great coils in the basement would have gone gaseous just as certainly, and they would have taken most of the engineering school with them.
In Laboratory Three, copper vapor recondensed wherever the globular shock wave hurled it. From desk height upward, the walls and ceiling were gray with shadows in negative wherever some object had earlier blocked the gaseous metal.
Sara Jean was on the floor and protected by her husband’s bulk. The forearm Mike Gardner threw up to cover his eyes was black on the side facing the catastrophic overload. The copper was divided too finely to have any color but black. It glittered on the student’s hair and chin, but the wide swath including his eyes and nose had been protected.
There was sound again—normal sound to the extent that it is normal for small electrical fires to wheeze and sputter. There was a dry chemical extinguisher clamped to the laboratory wall. Lexie Market took it down and blew two short gusts into the chassis which had supported the coils. The spluttering died in a dance of white crystals.
Sara Jean Layberg was starting to get up again. Henry held her steady for a moment for a quick visual examination. He kissed the tip of her nose in dismissal before he turned to Mike Gardner.
“Jesus,” the young engineer muttered as he stared at his left arm. Cracks appeared in the sooty coating and the skin beneath when he tried to ball his fist.
“Wait,” said Lexie as she dropped the fire extinguisher and stepped toward Gardner.