Bridgehead Read online

  “You’d better get back from here,” said Keyliss to the gaping trio of Monitors. Others of the group, also suited, could be seen as blurs milling beyond the dome’s translucent panels. “We’re not going back on rebound. We’ll wind up at Portal Eleven, but I don’t have time to figure where people with your”—she gestured with a finger—“energy background would be shunted.”

  “Or whatever’s in the wrong location at Eleven,” Selve added somberly. “But we’ll have to deal with that when we get there.” Keyliss had made the decision. Selve had serious doubts about it, and even Astor seemed less than enthusiastic. In an emergency like this, however, they would act as a team. Keyliss had preempted the situation by her strong, sudden action—which was the intended result of their training.

  “Look at them run,” said Astor with bitter satisfaction. The Monitors were scampering away from the dome and the incipient transport. Their fear was not of being shifted briefly to some other portal. Rather, they were driven away lest they become involved in a situation which they could not fathom. The project was too desperately necessary for it to be wrecked by inexplicable events. What loomed now before the Monitor Group was such an event.

  “Yes,” said Keyliss brusquely. She felt—all three of them felt—the same aura of catastrophe. Unlike the Monitors, they knew perfectly well what the problem was or might be.

  Keyliss looked down at her control plate. Her exposed skin was tingling, but there would be no long-term effect beyond a slight bleaching. Selve had his plate open also, itching to make side-effect calculations which were wholly beyond the unit’s capacity. The emergency controls had full use of the memory of their base unit, but there was no way to display that memory. Preset commands as complex as this—powered reversion through a remote unit—could be carried out. Not even Selve’s prodigious calculating ability could use the data on hand to determine tertiary effects, however.

  “There…” Astor whispered as she felt a twist in the realm of the currently possible.

  They could only pray that what they were doing would not make the situation at Portal Eleven even worse.

  * * *

  “We got to get out of this circle,” said Mike Gardner. His lack of affect made the words seem less desperate than they really were. He tried to pick up Rice’s body by the arms. The face lolled hard against the concrete and the young man swore.

  “But where is the power coming from?” muttered Louis Gustafson as he squinted at the instruments over his glasses. “The modulation, yes, but the power…?”

  “You mean it’s going to—” said Chairman Shroyer. He was reacting as much to the buzz of the coils as in reply to anything Gardner had said. He skipped toward the edge of the circle but hesitated, looking back at his companions.

  Lexie Market was watching with an analytical blankness as events unfolded. Sara Jean pressed herself against the fencing, gripping it with both hands. She shouted, “Get back! For God’s sake, get back before it takes you!” Neither she herself nor a neutral observer could have been sure to which of the men particularly she cried.

  Dr. Layberg brushed Gardner’s efforts aside and rolled the body into his own arms. Layberg’s softness was roped together with muscle, and he had years of experience in moving patients the best way available in an emergency. When a heart-bypass patient pauses halfway over a sixth-floor banister, there is no time to worry about whether wrestling him back from his death will cause internal injuries. With Rice a limp weight in his arms and the engineering student beside him, Layberg bolted toward safety. The flash threw their joined shadows against the instrument cabinets and the closed eyes of Professor Gustafson.

  * * *

  “There they are,” called a female voice even as the Contact Team caught its collective balance in the short cross hall on the eastern side of the enclosure. The blue glare was only a memory. The enclosure wall doubled its diamond pattern in its reflection from the Lucite-covered pillars. A group of men—one of them carrying the body of the interloper—turned beside the enclosure with puzzled expressions. It was one of the pair of women in the basement’s long main hall who had first noticed the transported Travelers, however.

  “We’ve got to get that body and get it back home,” Astor muttered as the trio stripped back their protective hoods. “Thirty seconds is all we really need.”

  “It’s Sara Jean,” said Selve in pleased surprise. Keyliss stared at her colleague in angry disbelief at his frivolity.

  The Contact Team had been transported on a reciprocal of the relationship of the pillars to the normal docking circle. That was a necessary result of controlling one set of drive coils through another. The danger was that the transport would be in exchange with whatever happened to be in an area which was not specifically cleared. That seemed by good luck to have been bare concrete also. At any rate, the locals were not shouting that someone or something had been snatched to another Portal.

  The fact that they were holding the dead body was bad enough.

  “Keyliss,” Astor said, “program it to send me and that one.” Her nod might have meant anything, but was Barry Rice now being lowered again to the ground. The Travelers strode in a rank up the main hallway toward the door. They were wearing their orange suits and fixed smiles. The blond woman turned to watch them curiously, but Sara Jean Layberg cocked only her head and one frightened eye. “Medical assistance at home.”

  Selve touched Sara Jean’s hand as he passed her. “I’ll do that,” he said. “Three-minute duration for the volume.”

  “The rebounds are going to twist us like corkscrews,” Astor said bleakly, “and we shouldn’t be treating the apparatus like this, the loads…”

  “We have to get that man to medical help immediately,” said Keyliss loudly as she entered the enclosure. “He injured himself on the apparatus.”

  “He didn’t injure himself, he’s dead,” said Henry Layberg as he straightened behind the body. “And from all indications he died of chlorine poisoning.”

  “What’s going on?” Chairman Shroyer added in a stark voice. He was rubbing his hands together unconsciously. He was forty-three years old and he had never touched a corpse before.

  “That’s why we have to get him home while we’re still able to revive him,” Astor said. She was taken aback by the detailed awareness of this local. She had feared at worst the certainty that the interloper was dead. Astor knelt by the body.

  “I’m going to set this to transport them home,” Selve murmured to Professor Gustafson. The Traveler’s slim hands quickly adjusted settings on the cabinet in front of him, then moved to the parallel unit. The ungloved hand winked like an entity separate from the orange-suited man.

  “We were checking the dielectric anchor,” Keyliss improvised authoritatively. Dr. Layberg had spread a hand, palm down, above Rice, and the departmental chairman’s fists were now clenched. “It’s a huge chamber, and of course the atmosphere was charged with chlorine. This man must have followed us—did you send him?” She pointed like a dagger at Shroyer. Keyliss had no need of acting ability to sound angry and concerned at this juncture. “If we don’t get him to treatment in our own age, he’ll die. Is that what you want?”

  “I’ll help carry,” said Mike Gardner. He bent to take the dead professor’s legs.

  “No need,” Astor muttered in reply. With the easy strength her size and manner suggested, she stood and walked toward the center of the docking circle.

  Dr. Layberg lifted his hand away but kept his fingers spread. “I can’t help him,” he said, aloud but to no one in particular. Robert Shroyer, embarrassed when he realized his fists were clenched, stepped even farther out of the way of Astor and her burden.

  “Keyliss?” called Selve as his hand poised on a dial. He was ready to choose whichever of a pair of constants better reflected the mass of the present transport.

  “You’ll be all right?” she replied. She had moved not so much within the docking area as to a point where she stood between Astor and the ch
airman, just in case.

  “You’ll have to act quickly,” said Selve sharply.

  His colleague nodded and backed closer to Astor in the center of the circle. The room vibrated as Selve’s mismatched hands touched controls as if he were molding a work of art from wet clay.

  Sara Jean Layberg walked slowly into the enclosure. This time the building power did not carry with it the déjà vu and messages of fear, as the transport minutes before had done. It was nothing to do with her or hers. It was an event, a subway roaring down echoing, immaterial tunnels. Her husband watched at the edge of the painted circle. His big shoulders were hunched. Mike Gardner stood beside him, straighter and firmer but almost frail by contrast to Henry. Mike glanced toward the control panels. He caught Sara Jane’s movement in the corner of his eye. Startled, stung both by fear and concern, he jerked his head straight.

  Sara Jean was not walking toward those men, her men. Professor Gustafson flanked and overlooked Selve as he earlier had done with his student assistant. He watched the Traveler change settings in ways that had been unsuggested or even prohibited in discussions of the apparatus and its use. Sara Jane moved toward Selve’s other side, the third point of the figure described by the Traveler’s knowledge and the professor’s observation.

  “Ready,” said Selve in a voice that cracked over the white noise. Now all those in the basement knew to cover their eyes and await the shock of coming silence.

  The flash brought them back to awareness of the hot room and the stink of overloaded electronics.

  “I’ve walked into a circus,” the chairman muttered to Mike Gardner because Gardner was the nearest human being at the moment. Shroyer pulled from the pocket of his coat the necktie which he had stuffed there earlier in the evening. He used it now to mop sweat from his face. “Maybe a sideshow, a carnival sideshow.”

  “There’s no reason for this to be overheating,” said Professor Gustafson in wonder. He patted the silicon-steel core of one of the big transformers under the windows. The others had only noticed the odor of hot insulation. Gustafson’s nose and carefulness had led him to the source, unlikely as that source appeared. “These aren’t even in the circuit at the time of discharge,” he went on. He touched the pads of his fingers to his cheek to confirm the heat they had picked up from the transformer. “And they’re far larger than we needed, from anything I could understand.…”

  Selve turned to look at him. The Traveler was wrung out by events and by reaction to the successful cap he seemed to have put on them. “No, Louis, that’s correct,” he said. He touched the frame of the instrument cabinet as if for support or for at least the awareness of solidity. “They act as moderators, and with the series of transports we’ve just run, they must be closer to design limits than Keyliss would care for.” That portion of the project had been Keyliss’s responsibility. “Or me,” he added in wry awareness of what system failure would have meant to him physically. “There won’t be any problem on rebound, though—the very complexity will serve to balance out the worst peaks.”

  “But they aren’t connected,” said the professor. He was not objecting to Selve’s statement. He was simply reiterating the salient facts so that he might someday fit them all together into a coherent whole. “A timer disconnects the bank of tranformers nine point six seconds after the start-up command is entered.”

  “In three minutes, less elapsed, Barry will be—rebounding?” Lexie Market said. Rice had used the term, and Selve’s repetition of it had aided its retrieval from the physicist’s memory. She strode alone outside the enclosure. The wire threw rhomboidal patterns across her face and hands but merged with the black of her clothing. “You’ll be able to—cure him in that time?” Lexie had not approached the body. She could very well imagine chlorine corroding lung tissue like a fire devouring dry leaves … membranes shrinking, shriveling, rupturing to drain fluids that could not quench the hunger of their destroyer.

  “They’ll use the unit at home to stabilize him there until he’s ready to return,” Selve lied as he turned to face the woman whom he did not know. “It will be—some weeks, I suppose.” He stifled the impulse to say “thirty-seven days,” unnecessary and inappropriate, except as humor … and humor so black was always unnecessary and inappropriate. He was too tired, too wrung out, to exercise the conscious control that was now even more needful than before.

  “What do you mean by stabilize?” Mike Gardner asked without hostility. “You mean everything doesn’t rebound the way you told us?”

  “You can keep a spring taut by continuing to press against it, Michael,” Selve said wearily. He did not bother to look around at his immediate questioner. The locals pressed about him like predators and their prey, not physically, but neither was the danger they posed physical, not directly. “In transport, either a single massive stressing at the receiving portal, or a constant low input to balance the tendency to rebound. There wasn’t time to explain that, and there still isn’t. Perhaps someday…”

  Sara Jean Layberg touched Selve’s hand.

  The Traveler turned toward her. There was no agenda hidden behind Sara Jean’s smile, only fellow feeling for one as exhausted as herself … and one much like herself, perhaps, though they had spoken only briefly.

  “I brought you something, Sara,” said Selve. Instead of squeezing her hand in response and releasing it, the Traveler kept a light grip and led the woman to one of the cabinets along the south wall. The men parted to pass them, then trailed after in muttering curiosity.

  Louis Gustafson alone remained where he was. His eyes were tracing current paths through the apparatus he had built to others’ plans. His hand rested now on the hot casing of a transformer. The touch proved even subconsciously that there was a connection, whether or not it was a material connection in the present universe.

  Lexie Market still stood in the long hallway. Though she was more distant from Selve than was anyone else in the basement, she recognized the object the Traveler took from the cabinet top to present to Mrs. Layberg. It was the globe and bud which had preceded the orange-suited figures. Lexie had meant to look at it more closely, but Barry Rice’s reckless stupidity had driven the thought from her mind.

  Ruptured membranes, soft tissue returning to organic soup in the body cavity.…

  “You were admiring my craft, my hobby,” Selve said. He handed the globe to Sara Jean. Dr. Layberg craned his neck past Robert Shroyer for a better look at the object. “This won’t be a vase like the one you touched, but it should grow into a bowl of pleasant shape.” Selve was diffident, but he knew very well the quality of his art. He would not disparage that, even at the risk of seeming arrogant to himself. “I thought it might remind you of me.”

  “May I see that?” said the chairman. He reached out in prejudgment of the answer.

  Sara Jean cradled the globe against her breasts, enfolding it with both hands. “Thank you, Selve,” she said. “Just watch it, you say?”

  “For Christ sake, woman,” her husband muttered, “let the rest of us see it.”

  “That’s right,” Selve agreed. “And a few hours—or more, after the nutrient has been absorbed, cut the bowl away from the stem with a sharp knife. We”—his smile and voice stumbled—“owe you a great deal for the trouble we cause, I’m afraid.”

  The woman reached out to squeeze his hand again, the gloved one this time. “I hope you’ll be able to come to my pottery soon.”

  “I think there’s a—” Mike Gardner said. “Ah, I hear the coils.”

  The hum was indeed building again from a feeling to a sound. Instead of scurrying to the control panels as before, Professor Gustafson picked up an induction ammeter and snapped its loop over the nearest transformer’s output leads.

  “This should balance everything,” said the Traveler. His lips quirked into a grin, “In one swell foop. Whatever the initial duration settings were.” He closed and sealed his hood. His lowered voice added, “It should be an interesting microsecond.”

 
; Dr. Layberg had taken the globe from his wife without protest. He was turning it to the light, trying to get some idea of its character. Feathery petals had already begun to expand from a cylindrical section. Some sort of crystal-growing arrangement, he decided. A great deal more sophisticated than the packets of multicolored salts from his childhood, however.

  “Is it dangerous for you, then?” Sara Jean asked. She remembered the terrifying vertigo of her own transport.

  “Tomorrow morning,” said Chairman Shroyer over the buzz and his growing frustration. “You’ll be back with a real explanation and a chance for me to see what’s going on?”

  “There’s no danger now,” said Selve. “Maybe a little when we carried on as we did initially, but there wasn’t any choice.”

  “Tomorrow,” Shroyer repeated, clutching at the Traveler’s arm.

  “Yes,” Selve agreed, turning. “We will be back as scheduled. Everything will resume as sched—”

  Selve’s voice and the memory of his touch hung as the glare dissolved him from Sara Jean’s eyes and fingers. The globe in her husband’s hands blazed in a symphony of reflection and refraction, but Henry continued to hold it in the stillness following the multiple transports.

  As usual in the aftermath, the great room felt warmer. There was no odor of hot insulation this time; Selve had been correct in saying that there was no chance of an overload.

  The air seemed, however, to have a tinge of burned flesh.

  * * *

  Astor clutched her face shield open and began to vomit. Selve had understated the effect of simultaneously unraveling multiple consecutive transports. Even Selve was in three places at once—or as near to once as made no difference to the synapses of his brain. The females of the Contact Team had made an additional transport home. That was one more vertiginous twist, though the pair began and ended the series of rebounds in practically the same place.

  Keyliss grunted. She took a step in the antiseptic docking area and stumbled, pressing her hands to her temples.