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  Dedication

  For Bernadette Bosky, who helped with the book from before its inception.

  The blue glare flooded briefly through the ranks of basement windows.

  Officer Bus Robertson cursed, though it was what he had half-expected. Had been waiting for, really, for the past five minutes. He keyed his microphone and said, “Lieutenant, it’s happened again. Over.”

  The radio burped static and the voice of Lieutenant Thurmond asking, “You’re still at engineering, Robertson?”

  “Yessir. In front.”

  “All right,” said the radio after a hissing pause, “hold one. Over and out.”

  Robertson hung his mike on the dash hook. After a moment’s hesitation, he switched off the patrol car’s ignition. The night was already pouring through the open windows. Its softness took over the car completely when the whine of the air conditioner ceased. The lack of mechanical noise was a comfort to Robertson as he studied the building beside him.

  Engineering dated back to the original foundation of the campus in the 1920s. Here on Science Drive, however, there had been none of the neo-Gothic architecture which had turned the liberal arts and administrative center of the university into a showpiece. The engineering building was of red brick only mildly ornamented with concrete swags and casements. The windows were large, but each was made up of a dozen rectangular panes set in a common sash. The central mass of the building rose four stories above the street level, but the wings to either side were lower by a story or two. The hillside fell away sharply enough from the street that the south wall of the basement level was glazed for eight feet above the ground.

  It was through that wall that the night had been lit by a silent blue explosion.

  Bus Robertson got out on the curb side. He could reach his radio if it called him through the open window. When he had first joined the university police, the buildings on Science Drive had been pleasantly reminiscent of the high school from which he had graduated five years before—solid and unpretentious, a reminder that there were values beyond those of the preppies … whose tuition nonetheless was the ultimate source of Robertson’s salary.

  There had followed six months of increasing strangeness, however, focusing finally down to the rare gouts of light from the engineering building. There had been several reports from students walking late at night, but nothing was ever actually wrong, no signs of fire or the ozone harshness of arcing components. Then a week ago, Robertson had seen the glare himself, and for the first time he understood why the previous flashes had aroused as much comment as they had on a campus where much of the student body would have ignored a rape; there were people paid to take care of things like that, weren’t there? And anyway, Daddy said it was better not to get involved.

  The light was different even at a distance too great to pinpoint its source, its color too deeply saturated to be confused with that of the mercury-vapor streetlights. Even apart from its richness, the light was closer to the violet end of the spectrum than a germicidal lamp. It was frightening only for the reason that a swift object making ninety-degree turns in the distant sky is frightening: the glare did not appear to belong on Earth.

  A car approached fast on the silent street, fast enough that Robertson’s eyes narrowed in a frown. Then the light in front of the mathematics and physics building glittered on the vehicle’s blue bar light: Lieutenant Thurmond, and not wasting any time about it.

  The second cruiser swung across the empty traffic lane and pulled up nose to nose with Robertson’s car. Its exhaust continued to poom for a moment; then the engine cut to silence and the headlights died to only brief orange afterimages of their filaments. There was a squawk from Robertson’s radio as his superior reported in curtly. Lieutenant Thurmond got out of the car, settling his portable unit into the holster on the left side of his belt, where it balanced the revolver.

  “Down there in the basement, sir,” Robertson said. He was taller than Thurmond, but the black lieutenant was built with the squat power of a bulldog. At times, Thurmond could be intimidating, but right at the moment, Robertson was more than glad of the lieutenant’s presence.

  Not that anything was really wrong.

  “Looks quiet enough now,” Thurmond said.

  “Just the one flash,” Robertson agreed, “but it lighted up the whole floor.” There had been nothing in his superior’s voice to suggest doubt about the event; only a statement, a datum to be weighed. “I guess it’s just some experiment or other, nothing to worry about now we seen it,” Robertson added after a moment’s silence.

  “Hell,” Thurmond said without a clear referent. He hunched his shoulders, loosening the dark blue fabric of his uniform. He had boxed professionally twenty years before. The way he shrugged his torso forward when he made a decision was one of the holdovers from that time. “They might have let somebody know, mightn’t they?” he said. “It’s not like it hasn’t been in the papers about the funny light on West Campus. Let’s go take a look. Maybe we can find out who the hell’s in charge.”

  The squat man began walking toward the main door of the building. Robertson noticed that the lieutenant’s left hand had already isolated one of the passkeys on his belt-chained ring.

  The air in the lobby was still innocent of any odor beyond that of sweeping compound on the dark asphalt tile. There would be a fire door between him and any short circuit or overheated machinery in the basement, Robertson knew. The narrow beam of Thurmond’s flashlight bobbed across the bulletin boards, the empty hallway, the chromed stand with a card advertising for blood donors. The lieutenant held his light out at arm’s length to his left side, probably by habit rather than in anticipation of need, but …

  “I could find the switches,” suggested Bus Robertson.

  “This’ll do,” Thurmond replied.

  Robertson unsheathed his own flashlight as he followed his superior. That gave him something to do with his hands besides play nervously with the strap of his holster. Thurmond’s laconic style was making his subordinate uneasy, even in a situation without apparent danger.

  The first stairway led up only. The building was something of a labyrinth even without the office addition of glass and stucco yoked by walkways to the back of the original structure. A turn past darkened, silent rooms brought the officers to a second red Exit sign. The concrete stairs beyond this one led down as well as up. The lights demanded by the building code in fire exits were a quick passage back to the real world for Bus Robertson. He relaxed, and it was only in that moment that he realized quite how taut he had been.

  Lieutenant Thurmond did not seem any different when he pushed open the lower fire door, but Robertson had only his own nervousness to
suggest that the older man had been tense in the first place. The banks of fluorescents in the basement’s sixteen-foot ceiling were not lit. There were scores of lighted instrument dials, however. While their green or yellow glows did not illuminate the huge room, they did limit and demarcate it as stars do the night sky. There was an unexpected tinge to the atmosphere, an organic odor rather than the electrical sharpness for which Robertson had been prepared. Machinery hummed in placid unconcern.

  “It must have been over there,” said Robertson. He gestured toward the apparatus behind the chain-link partition separating half the enormous room. “It was through those windows, at least.” He switched on his own flashlight as a pointer and drew it across the enclosure. The woven-wire fencing glittered in the beam’s oval. The glass of the outer wall reflected the light in varying facets as it skipped from one pane to the next.

  The narrow beam hid the fenced-off equipment rather than illuminating it, however. Like the basement itself, the apparatus was large, sprawling, and messy. Festoons of wire connected breadboard circuitry. There were scores of crackle-finished chaisses, which appeared from the excrescences bolted to them to have been adapted to service beyond that originally intended. The flashlight could blur a range of colors in a ribbon of control wires; in the diodes and solder of a circuit board; in the spiral shadows of an armored conduit. The pair of campus police could no more grasp the arrangement of the apparatus than they could its purpose.

  “Doesn’t seem to be a damn soul around, does there?” said Thurmond as he paced down the aisle with his own light turned purposelessly inward. He rattled the partition with his free hand. It was supported by a frame of heavy angle iron. The whole made a sullen clatter that mortised well with the lieutenant’s mood. “Shouldn’t have something like this running and nobody around to watch it, should they?”

  Actually, there did not at the moment seem to be any reason why the hardware should not have been left to itself. Bus Robertson was feeling more than a little silly. He did not understand the apparatus past which he walked with his superior, but that did not concern him. Robertson had spent four years in the navy as a damage control crewman on an aircraft carrier. He was used to being around extraordinarily complex hardware whose function was beyond his estimate.

  The light had been different. It was weird, and it was impinging on the normal world as it flooded even the clouds overhead in its brief intensity. The light was now a thing of the past, also. Memory can only store unusual data by reference to things known and accepted. Bus was trying to remember why he had been disturbed by a hue, sort of the shade of the summer sky, only richer.…

  There were several rooms walled off on the south side of the basement. One of them was a lab with a radiation-hazard sticker beneath the glazed portion of its door. That gave Robertson a momentary tremor; but nobody was building an atomic pile down here, they weren’t that crazy.

  The side rooms had false ceilings, so the concrete beams and pillars of the basement proper lowered over them. The wood-and-glass enclosures were containers, boxes to hold people and human endeavors. The chain-link fence across the aisle from them was by contrast an integral part of the great room, as was the hulking tangle of apparatus set off by the partition.

  “Lieutenant, I hear something,” Robertson said. They were nearing the end of the long aisle. Bus flicked his flashlight beam across bulletin boards with dusty notices.

  “That buzzing, you mean?” said Lieutenant Thurmond. His own beam prodded impalpably at the two huge pillars at the end of the enclosure. The light scattered on the fencing between the men and the pillars and again when Thurmond’s aim drifted away from the pillars and let the beam touch the cross partition which closed the fenced area to the north wall of the basement.

  Where the light played over the pillars themselves, it was mirrored back in its yellowish tinge from the surface. Only at the edges of the narrow beam were the interior construction of the pillars visible: fine-gauge wire had been wound on cores a yard in diameter. The sheen of its lacquer insulation was darker and more purple than the copper itself would have been. The cylindrical windings, very nearly as high as the twelve-foot partition setting off the work area, were encased in square-section boxes of clear plastic. It was this sheathing which made the windings so difficult to see. The plastic gave a measure of mechanical and dust protection, but it was clearly not intended to be airtight. One side of each box was hinged to be swung away.

  The pillars seemed to be about as far apart as they were high, ten or twelve feet. Within the enclosure, where it would form the third point of an isosceles triangle with the pillars, was a circle painted on the floor. An array of instruments including a computer terminal stood across the circle from the pillars—which themselves seemed to be buzzing, as the lieutenant had said.

  But it was not the buzzing that Robertson had really meant when he’d said he heard something. It was more—

  “Hey, lookit those goddamn things!” Thurmond shouted. The clear reflection of his flashlight had vanished from the protective sheathing because the coils within were themselves beginning to glow with a light that had no particular color as yet. Its average intensity was less than that of a firefly’s tail. When multiplied by the entire surface of the windings, the glow illuminated things in the basement which the flashlights had missed.

  One of the things was crawling around the back of the enclosure, into the aisle.

  It was ten feet long and looked more like forty. The skin was as slimy as a frog’s, drab-colored but perhaps a shade lighter on the throat and the inner side of four broadly splayed legs. Two eyes glittered beneath brow ridges, while in the center of the creature’s flat forehead was a pearly iridescence which might also have been an eye of sorts.

  The creature squirmed another step into the aisle. It opened its mouth with a glitter of conelike teeth and the swampy effluvium—still water and rotting fish—which Robertson had noticed as soon as he’d entered the basement. The throat was probably bellowing something also, but the sound was lost in the roar of the pillars.

  Lieutenant Thurmond was in a crouch, his right hand sweeping out the revolver he had never before had occasion to draw as a member of the university police. Bus Robertson held his flashlight out with both hands as if its narrow beam were a pole to fend off the monster which took another splayed footstep toward them. The beam could not be seen against the increasing glow of the pillars. Thurmond thumbed back the hammer of his weapon. There was a soundless blue flash—the flash.

  For an instant, Bus Robertson could see nothing but the retinal afterimage of the blazing pillars and the egg-shaped splotch of his flashlight beam on the bare floor. The basement was so silent that Lieutenant Thurmond’s hoarse breathing was the most of what sound there was. The smell of the toad-squat, toad-faced creature was gone; and the creature was gone as well.

  As Robertson’s vision returned, he could see that there were marks of sorts on the gritty dust of the floor. They might have been left by the wet, webbed feet that Robertson remembered; but even the traces of dampness had now disappeared.

  “What the hell?” Thurmond was saying. He jumped around the corner. Robertson followed with his revolver out and his heart pounding. The cross aisle to the boiler-room door was empty except for the tracks. “What the hell?”

  The lieutenant spun very abruptly, as if he suspected that something was crawling down the aisle behind them now with its fangs bared. There was nothing there, either.

  The pillars burped light in a sort of afterthought. Then they began to cool. The room of unguessably complex hardware no longer held any large animal—human or otherwise.

  Certainly neither of the policemen were anywhere to be seen.

  * * *

  “We’ve got a flow,” said Selve. The instruments on his console had been flat, as they should be during shutdown. Now the readouts were making their second automatic log-twelve jump, and the peaks were still rising. Strictly speaking there was no alarm, but the rising wh
ine of the recorders was enough to warn the three Contact Members.

  “Well, just a leakage,” said Keyliss as she jumped to the console herself; the words were a prayer. “A bit of trash in the coils here, in synchrony with—”

  “It’s no surge, it’s a full-scale run,” Astor shouted as she, too, riffled her glance along the instruments. “Selve, you were supposed to clear the boards after the run this afternoon. Now we’ll have to go in early and see what damage this has done!” Astor was taller and more powerfully built than either of her companions, a fact that colored the formal equality of the members of the Contact Team.

  “I did clear and balance the systems—” Selve snapped.

  Simultaneously, Keyliss said, “Look, Astor, if there is a flow—”

  “Of course there’s a flow! Can’t you read the dials?”

  “—then it’s because you insisted we go back to Portal Eleven and check out the anomaly last week. That’s what’s set everything askew. And now you want to do it again.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Astor. “We all agreed that we’d brought the systems back in balance after that.” But her voice was lower and perhaps a trifle apologetic for the initial outburst. It was easy to lash out in frustration at whoever was nearest. The anomalies seemed insoluble. While they were minor in themselves, they might indirectly lead to—

  To the end of the world.

  Keyliss was willing to bury the hatchet as well. She turned back to the console and asked—to change the subject and not because she could not have read out the information for herself—“What’s the other terminus?”

  “Thirty-seven, I think,” said Selve as he adjusted a pair of controls. “Short duration, I’d say. No more than twenty minutes.”

  “Carboniferous,” translated Astor. “And no way of telling if there was a real transport without going downline and checking ourselves.”