Bridgehead Read online

  “And increasing the likelihood of more backflows in the future, and worse ones,” Keyliss noted tartly. “After all, what real harm will twenty minutes from the Carboniferous do? At worst?”

  Selve looked up from his console. There was a low trembling, more imagined than truly sensed, coming from the sealed black pillars of their drive coils thirty feet away. A ghost memory in its own circuits was responding to the activity in the device to which it had recently been coupled. “The unit was cleared this afternoon,” Selve said, “and now it’s not. Gustafson couldn’t have activated it if he wanted to, so long as we kept it locked here.” His index finger tapped the console beside a switch thrown firmly to the off position. “I don’t understand, I just don’t understand.”

  Keyliss took a deep breath. “All right,” she said, “we won’t inspect the site until we’re scheduled to tomorrow.” After a moment she added, “Sometimes I feel like I’m juggling bombs. Some are duds and some aren’t. If one starts to get away, I can catch it again—but maybe then another one falls instead. And you never know which is the dud.”

  * * *

  His pencil had remained poised above the paper ever since he heard the tea kettle begin to sing in the kitchen, seven minutes before. Mrs. Hitchings’s tap on the jamb of the open door was only the culmination of the process, the dawn that is the certain result of the Earth’s rotation. “I’ve made you a pot of tea, Louis,” said Mrs. Hitchings. She carried in the tray without request, now that she had received Professor Gustafson’s formal attention.

  “Thank you, Eva,” Gustafson said. His desk was untidy, but he had learned from experience to leave clear a portion the size of a tea tray on the corner nearest the door. If he worked to eleven P.M. in his room, his landlady would appear with the full panoply: teapot in a knitted cozy; a single cup and saucer (Mrs. Hitchings never attempted to turn her interruptions into social events); milk pitcher; sugar bowl, holding cubes and an ornately clawed pair of tongs; and a matching dish with lemon slices laid in a neat, overlapping pattern. Gustafson used milk to cut the acidity of the tea. In twenty-three years as Eva Hitchings’s tenant, he had never taken a sugar cube or lemon slice from the tray.

  “Don’t stay up too long, now,” Mrs. Hitchings said as she exited the room. “We’re not as young as we once were, Louis.”

  Well, that was no more than the truth, Louis Gustafson thought as he poured his tea. The bergamot odor of Earl Grey sweetened the air. When he had been younger, he drove to his office at night in order to avoid interruptions. No one came down into the basement of the engineering building after hours. His was the only office there, just as he was the only professor with continuing research going on among the pipes and concrete.

  Gustafson’s night vision was no longer up to after-dark drives from the center of town to the campus and tiredly back, however. Besides, the disruption of going to the office was easily—and obviously—as great as that of Mrs. Hitchings’s clockwork kindnesses. Gustafson had finally decided that when he had something difficult to put on paper, his mind would refuse to get on with the task until he had been interrupted a time or two.

  His glasses had fogged when he poured the tea. He took them off and cleared them by holding them carefully above the ventilation holes of his incandescent desk lamp. Then, as his tea cooled, he began to write in a neat, draftsman’s hand.

  The sentences came easily now. The delay had shown a portion of his mind that there was no need to lie after all. He did not have to claim equations which had been offered him complete by Keyliss, Astor, and Selve.

  “The notes and worksheets which this letter accompanies,” Professor Gustafson wrote, “will make it possible to reconstruct my work, even in the event that portions of the equipment are destroyed during testing tomorrow.”

  The pencil hesitated, then canceled the last word. He resumed, “The errors which have led to this letter becoming public are mine alone. Furthermore, the fact that I intended to apply an Army Research Office grant for matter transmission research to this use was known by only me.” That was a lie: his two American assistants, Arlene and Michael, had drawn up the grant proposal for Gustafson when his own mind refused to function in even so well-intentioned a deceit. “In translating theories into reality, however, I was immeasurably helped by my graduate assistants, Arlene Myaschensky, Michael Gardner, and Mustafa Bayar.”

  The pencil waited again, then wrote the concluding sentence: “These three are no less responsible than I for the fact that mechanical transference in time will become possible in our century.”

  * * *

  “Health!” said Charles Eisley in Turkish, and took a drink. Mustafa Bayar echoed the toast, while Sue Schlicter, the tallest of the three in the living room of Eisley’s home, merely drank.

  The tall, black-haired woman looked down at her glass. “Anisette?” she said. “But you know, Charles, I’d swear it was more than the fifty proof on the bottle.”

  Eisley smiled broadly as he rotated the bottle on the glass-topped table. He had brought two gallons of Jeni Raki back from his most recent post, Ankara—the Foreign Service encourages a specialist interest in liquor. It was not until he met Mustafa Bayar, a Turkish national on the campus at which Eisley taught a course in international relations as diplomat in residence—until State found a post suitable for his senior rank—that he had reason to congratulate himself on his foresight in providing a drink otherwise unobtainable here.

  Now he pointed to the figure Sue had seen on the label: 50°. “This, you mean?” he said. “I was surprised, too, till I saw some whiskey bottled in Turkey that said 40°. That’s not proof—even imperial proof. It’s percent. What you’re drinking”—he nodded to the glass—“is one-half absolute alcohol.”

  Sue pursed her lips approvingly and tossed off the rest of her raki.

  “Sorry, Mustafa,” Eisley said. “I don’t suppose you came with an intention of being lectured on your national drink. How can I help you?”

  Mustafa Bayar was stocky and dark with a bushy mustache. He laced his hands around his own empty glass. He was glaring at it with the fervor of one of his Ottoman forebears surveying the smoldering ruins of Constantinople. Abruptly he looked up again in blank concern. “I am”—he glanced from his host to Sue Schlicter, then back again—“I am interrupting, Dr. Eisley. I should not be here.”

  Eisley reached out a hand to the younger man’s shoulder to keep Bayar from getting up and leaving as suddenly as he had come. Whatever had brought the Turk out at this hour had to be more serious than the whiff of beer on his breath could alone explain.

  “Besides,” said Sue, “you aren’t interrupting anything that won’t keep. Hey, Charles?” She grinned wickedly and stretched one of her incredibly long, booted legs over the arm of the couch on which she was sitting.

  Bayar blinked, more with the amazement of meeting a creature from mythology than in active disapproval. Turks were not Arabs, and their women had been forbidden to go veiled since the 1922 revolution. But it was still the culture from which the word seraglio—sarai—had come; and for that matter, lanky, six-foot women like Sue were uncommon anywhere. “Ah,” Bayar said. He focused his eyes on Eisley again and got a grip on his thoughts. “You see, Dr. Eisley, not my classwork, but—”

  The other two people waited, both subconsciously expecting some variation on ‘a woman.’ Instead the young Turk said, “The project I am working on, you see. For Dr. Gustafson. I come to you not only as a friend”—Eisley nodded slowly in the pause, to keep the narrative coming now that it had begun—“but because you are part of the government. Of the embassy.”

  Eisley would be appointed as deputy chief of mission when a suitable post opened, but he was not attached to an embassy at present. He did not bother to correct the technical misstatement, however. Jumping to what he suspected was the heart of the problem, he said, “You’re afraid that an unfavorable report by Professor Gustafson will affect your student visa, Mustafa?”

  “Yes, that is�
��” Bayar agreed with a shake of his head and chopping motions of both hands. Droplets of raki glittered in the air. “Not an unfavorable report, no, but—Dr. Gustafson is a fine man, very brilliant. I am honored to know him. But…”

  Sue was still on the couch, but as she watched Bayar now she had the cool concentration of a cat which has sighted movement. Eisley himself kept his face sympathetic but without further emotion or suggestion of concern. He did not blink as he met his guest’s eyes.

  “You see,” Bayar went on as his own gaze fell, “Dr. Gustafson is lying to the government. Your government. He has grant money, from the army even, and he is not spending it to transport matter the way he says.”

  Without speaking, Eisley filled Bayar’s glass and his own. He raised an eyebrow to Sue, but she shook her head briefly so as not to disturb the statement.

  Mustafa raised his eyes. “When they learn, perhaps nothing will happen to Dr. Gustafson. He is an important man, respected. They will think he has gone mad, of course.” The young man tossed back his glass of clear liquor. His shudder seemed more a response to his plight than a physical reaction to the raki. “What will they do to a foreigner, hey? A terrible Turk who has stolen money from the government? I did not know, at first—but who will believe that?”

  He stared glumly into his empty glass.

  Sue got up smoothly and took the bottle. “I think, Mustafa,” she said mildly as she poured and added ice for all of them, “that you’d better tell us what your boss is doing with the money and why they’ll think he’s a candidate for the funny farm. Sorry, why he’s crazy.”

  “Dr. Gustafson,” the Turk said, “thinks he has met persons from another time. Our future. They call themselves Travelers. A man named Selve and two women with him.” Mustafa frowned, because his words did not properly indicate Selve’s position in the hierarchy, even according to Moslem perceptions. He continued regardless, “Dr. Gustafson thinks he has been told how to build a, a time transport. He has used funds from his grant and he has done so. Built it. We have built it.” Mustafa drew a tight circle around his heart with an index finger.

  “I think,” said Charles Eisley, “that there are some avenues that can be profitably attempted. To present the data in a fashion that minimizes the danger to your, ah, status, Mustafa.”

  He swirled the ice and raki in the bottom of his glass, but he kept his eyes candidly, disarmingly, on those of the young man consulting him. He had met Bayar as a friend. Both men had been lonely for things which were simply alien to most of the people with whom they came in contact, even at a cosmopolitan university. Now, however, the Turk was presenting himself as a “case”; and Eisley’s reflexes were taking over whether he liked it or not. “It’s to nobody’s benefit to have a major flap about this, after all.… A respected professor losing, ah, touch as he gets older. Outsiders, perhaps cultists of some sort, taking advantage of him.”

  Eisley stood up, sucking in his gut as was his recent practice. He had not been conscious of his body before he met Sue. He knew that he was soft and that he carried thirty pounds of which the weight charts would not approve; but diplomacy is a sedentary occupation, and Charles looked well enough in tailored suits against the men he met on the embassy cocktail circuit. It had hit him like a sledgehammer when his wife left him—not that there was any love lost by then, but the change.

  Which did not mean that Eisley began taking care of his body, only that he began drinking more. Then he met Sue, and there was now an exercise bench hidden from her in the room that had only been box storage until then. He would have changed his will sooner if he had known spirits as joyous as Sue Schlicter lurked in lawyers’ offices.

  “So for embarrassment,” said Mustafa Bayar, a gleam of puppyish hope in his eyes, “you think they will not wish to make examples of the others and even me?”

  “It would make no sense to do so,” said Eisley, aged forty-six and trying to shrink his waistline a decade for his thirty-year-old mistress. His words were true, but what his mind really meant was that as a diplomat, a negotiator, he could see no sense in publicity. He would have felt the same way at learning the Russians were basing nuclear weapons in Greece: get them out quietly, and for God’s sake don’t let the media learn and start a flap. He knew also that many people—and the Army Research Office might take a typically army attitude to diplomatic questions—did not think the way Foreign Service officers were expected to think.

  Sue poured more raki all around. Her face broadened in a slow smile. “You know,” she said, “that may be the best way to cover Mustafa’s ass. But it seems to me that it could cause problems in another way.”

  Eisley pursed his lips but said nothing until he could gather more data. Bayar, the only one of the trio still seated, raised an eyebrow. “Miss Schlicter?” he prompted politely.

  “You say Gustafson’s good, that he’s got a good track record,” the woman said, meeting the Turk’s eyes. “What happens if you blow the whistle—and Gustafson turns out to have been right this time, too?”

  The question hung over the clink of ice cubes as Charles Eisley swirled his drink.

  * * *

  The Saab cocked halfway up the curb with its motor running warned Dr. Alexis Market subconsciously. Without having to think, she stepped clear as Isaac Hoperin banged open the door of the physics and mathematics building at a dead run.

  “Oh! I’m sorry, Lexie!” Dr. Hoperin blurted. He glanced down at the briefcase swinging furiously in his left hand. Hoperin’s eyes were black and bright. Lexie had always thought of her colleague as a manic vole, despite the long hair that trailed behind his prematurely high forehead. Fortunately, she had managed to avoid saying that even in the depths of her frequent migraines.

  “Ah,” Hoperin was saying, “I managed to leave this in my office last night, can you believe that?” He waggled the briefcase deliberately. Then, as if it were a starter’s flag, he bolted into his car. The Saab lurched off the curb so abruptly that the engine almost died. Hoperin straightened his course and racketed out of the parking lot. Fortunately, it was early enough in the morning that there were no other cars to contend with.

  Market did not think further about the incident as she climbed the stairs. Ike Hoperin had the office next to hers on the third floor, but they had no social contact beyond departmental meetings. The stairs were enough to think about this morning. Some days Lexie thought that she should make a point of running the four flights to and from the basement several times a day. It should be a quick way to shed the extra ten—be honest: fifteen—pounds she carried. Thirty-two-year-old women didn’t long stay in acceptable shape if they let themselves go. This morning, though … if the old building had an elevator, she would have used it. She massaged her left wrist.

  The door of Hoperin’s office was open. He really had been in a hurry. Within, a drawer of the locking file cabinet was also open, but it must have held only the briefcase. Market started to close the door when it struck her that Ike might very well have left his keys inside. Market had no use for the sort of officiousness which caused trouble for other people while smugly claiming to be helpful. She drew the door partway closed but did not latch it.

  Market locked her own door from the inside. She needed time to think. Even if someone saw her car in the lot, she could still be in the lounge or the ladies’ room. Instead of turning on a light, Lexie ran up the shade of her north-facing window.

  Ike Hoperin’s Saab had just pulled into the parking lot of the engineering building next door. It would have been faster for him to simply walk between buildings; though when you’re in a hurry, you often misjudge a situation. What on earth did Ike have going at the engineering building that had him in such a bounding hurry?

  Lexie continued to massage her wrist. Not that she had any reason to think about bizarre behavior on the part of her colleagues. The silk scarf with which she had tied herself to the bedposts had not abraded the skin or bruised her, even when Steve departed considerably from the expected
program. She seemed to have pulled something, however, before she forced herself into flaccid dissociation from anything that was happening to her body.

  Funny how people could surprise you on the levels at which you thought you knew them. There was Ike Hoperin, more excited than anybody had seen him since the Sixth Fleet took out El Djem. And there was Steve last night … a matter which for the moment seemed far more important than whatever was going on in the engineering building.

  * * *

  There was a sound between a hiss and a gasp, like the air brakes of a bus releasing. The docking area within the enclosure, the circle painted on the floor, held three conservatively dressed figures and an ordinary locker where nothing had been a moment before. The pillars were cold and black with darkness reflected from their Lucite coverings. A few of the instruments in the hollow basement registered, but there was no major reaction from the apparatus which Professor Gustafson and his students had built.

  “Unbefucking-lievable!” said Isaac Hoperin, standing beside the seated Gustafson. The physics professor’s left hand was wound into the wires of the chain-link partition. His grip was fiercer than he would have found bearable if he had noticed it. Hoperin had never seen the event before. Even in this ambiance of concrete and secondhand hardware, the way the figures appeared had the slick, phony quality of stage magic.

  Gustafson looked at the younger professor with relief and a touch of wry amusement. “You see,” he said to Hoperin, “the calculations you are helping with have a definite real-world application after all, Isaac.”

  “Damn, but we will get it to work, won’t we?” said Arlene Myaschensky. She was a big woman, too heavy to be conventionally attractive, with lustrous auburn hair. Her bovine appearance made her easy to discount until one saw her at work—conducting every test with an obsessive rigor which simply did not allow the use of a fudge factor. Arlene had done most of the work on the desktop unit the students had decided to build secretly in a laboratory upstairs—and she had remained cheerful despite the repeated failure of that small unit which was built precisely to the specifications which the Travelers had provided.