Bridgehead Read online

  * * *

  Danny had run out of the laboratory as soon as he recognized the solid walls around him. Sara Jean gripped the table for a moment to steady herself. She remembered screaming or thought she did. The deep breath she took now choked her on burnt insulation. It swam in gray swirls above the hot equipment. There was a pair of scorch marks on the tarpaulin where it covered the cylindrical coils.

  She walked out of the room quickly and with her face set. It made her look stern, but there were no signs of the panic very close beneath the surface. Years of teaching preschoolers had trained Sara Jean never to show panic. You kept a stolid expression while you got help from the nearest source available.

  The stair treads were concrete. They had no rebound whatever, even when Sara Jean began taking them two at a time. The fire door into the basement was locked, as her mind had absolutely refused to remember it would be.

  Her control did not crack. Rather, it burned away in fury at unintelligible constraints on what had been a normal world. Sara Jean began to pound on the door with the heel of her hand. The stair tower reverberated. She continued hammering. The sound by now had become an end in itself, a pulse that drank her frustration like surf washing ramparts of sand.

  The door opened. Sara Jean pitched into the arms of the figure within. It was some moments before she realized it was Mike Gardner on whose embarrassed shoulder she sobbed.

  * * *

  “Now will you believe there’s something wrong with the system, Astor?” snarled Keyliss to the bigger woman’s back.

  Astor turned with a snarl of her own. “Does that make you so happy, then? Maybe it’s even something you were planning?”

  Arlene and Mustafa slid from the instruments they had been watching and converged on Mike Gardner. His shirt, his hair, and the neck of his jacket, which he still gripped, were dark with sweat. “Did it?” Arlene demanded. She pumped her colleague’s arm in what had to be congratulations on getting back alive.

  “Everything here was all right,” put in Mustafa, “though there was some overheating in the main rectifiers.”

  “I think you really…” Isaac Hoperin said to Selve as the Traveler frowned. “It seems that you were able to do what you told Louis you could, though I don’t see…”

  “I suppose it would have looked all right,” Selve replied. He walked away from the physicist in abstraction rather than discourtesy. There were electronic recorders which would give detailed information on the run, but for the moment he just wanted to check the frequencies indicated by the three-pen paper tape unit hooked to the output board. Over his shoulder he added, “The location Portal was all right, but the duration was much too short. Even with the transfer mass increased by one person.…”

  Someone began pounding on the door to the nearest stairwell.

  “Astor,” said Keyliss in a deadly voice, “if you suspect treason affecting the project, then you’d better bring formal charges, hadn’t you?” Her spine was stiff as the gun she held at high port.

  “Your device,” said Professor Gustafson as he took the hands of both Keyliss and Astor, “has been successful beyond my dreams.” Tears of joy were close to brimming down his cheeks. He had not been listening to the tense interchange between the Travelers. “You have, you have given our world a focus beyond war and weapons, you three. You have saved our time and yours together.”

  “I thought it worked,” said Gardner with a doubtful nod toward the Travelers. “It, there wasn’t any hurt, we got back and—” He looked at his shoes, which should have been muddy and leaf-stained. They were not, though the perspiration from his own body had traveled back—forward?—with him. “Ah, Professor, should I get the door?”

  “Yes, of course get it!” Astor said. “What sort of incident will there be if you don’t?”

  Keyliss, equally willing to find a subject which did not involve treason and failure, said, “There shouldn’t have been any effects outside the immediate area, unless— Do you use cesium oscillation for lighting? Ah—in this age?”

  “Perhaps I should—” Professor Gustafson said.

  Before he more than turned, however, the graduate student had reached the door and opened it himself. The various emotions which had hung in the air of the basement became brittle for the instant of the latch clicking. Sara Jean’s stumbling entry was a surprise and anticlimax to everyone.

  Mike Gardner was too shocked to swear, even under his breath. The others—Gustafson and the other students, at least—had met Mrs. Layberg a time or two, but they almost certainly did not recognize her in this context of panic and confusion. God, he was in trouble.… “Sara Jean,” he said aloud, “what’s the matter?”

  The woman took charge of herself in a way that went beyond standing straighter and brushing a wisp of hair out of her face. “I’m sorry for the way I…” she said. She stepped a little apart from Gardner, though she kept one hand on his waist. Loudly enough to be heard by all those watching, Sara Jean went on, “Upstairs something happened, and I was—with people in another cit—” Her eyes, scanning her audience, froze on the weapon which Keyliss still held at her side.

  Sara Jean’s recovered composure broke again. She pointed and screamed, “Mike, oh, my God, they had guns like that, and they— What’s happening here?”

  Astor snatched Keyliss’s weapon and thrust it back into the locker in which she had already stowed her own. Selve’s gun was leaned idly against a rack of instruments, out of the interloper’s sight, at least.…

  “The anomalies!” Selve cried with the joy of Archimedes leaping from his bath. “Astor, the feedback, everything—there’s something similar enough to a transport unit upstairs that we modulate it between this one and our own!”

  “Madam, are you all right?” asked Louis Gustafson as he moved toward Mrs. Layberg. He collided at the enclosure doorway with Astor. In his determination to reach a person whom he might have injured with his experiment, the old professor shouldered the Traveler aside.

  “Where were you when you transferred?” demanded Astor, a half pace behind Gustafson now but no less intent on Sara Jean Layberg. The big Traveler did not have to ask about the Portal to which the woman had been transported: the circumstances which she had already blurted identified that adequately. Only at the home Portal would there have been armed guards—and the possibility of a stranger returning alive.

  “Oh, shit,” said Arlene Myaschensky. Her hand closed on Bayar’s wrist for support, though she did not look at the Turk. “The test unit we built in the lab. Oh, shit.”

  “We were in Laboratory, I think it was Three,” Sara Jean said in a clear voice. She seemed to be under control again, though close examination would have shown that her eyes were not focused on anything in the basement. “Danny Cooper had taken me there to wait for”—her arm moved from Mike’s waist to return demurely to the woman’s side—“Mr. Gardner. Something on a table started, I don’t know, buzzing.”

  Mustafa and Arlene had been edging closer while Mrs. Layberg spoke. Now Arlene repeated, “Oh, shit,” under her breath.

  “We were in a, a huge city,” Sara Jean continued. “Then there were women”—she nodded fiercely toward Astor—“with guns, like the ones y-you have. Where have I been? Where have you s-sent me?”

  Gustafson had stopped a stride away from Sara Jean when he saw she was physically all right. Keyliss put a hand on the professor’s shoulder to edge by him. “Sara,” the Traveler said, “through an error which will be corrected at once, you have visited twelve thousand A.D.” Keyliss took a deep breath. “Perhaps we can arrange another visit under more pleasant circumstances.”

  “Come, Sara, please,” said Astor, with more firmness than respect. “Take me to where the event occurred at once.” She reached out as if to bodily turn Sara Jean toward the stairwell.

  Mike Gardner interposed his body, though it brought him almost chest to chest with the big Traveler. “I know where it is,” he said flatly. “We built a tabletop unit to spec to see
if we could get the same results. I’ll take you to it.”

  Astor stepped back. “All right, Michael,” she said. “So long as we know.” She gestured toward the stairs with a flourish that lay between suggestion and imperiousness.

  The two female Travelers flanked Gardner as he walked away. Professor Gustafson moved with them, almost in step. He said, “How did you duplicate all the apparatus on your own, Michael? I don’t see…”

  “We took feeds from the digital signal generators down here,” said Mustafa to the professor’s back.

  Gardner had his own problems now. His two fellows wobbled with unexpressed relief, however, since the potential disaster of their own experiment seemed to be greeted with interest rather than censure. “But all the power was turned off,” added Arlene, beside Bayar and already at the door. “We hadn’t even tried to run it in a week.”

  Isaac Hoperin was following in the wake of the others headed presumably for the upstairs lab. He paused at the doorway and gave Sara Jean an abstracted glance. Then he, too, disappeared up the stairs.

  Somewhat sheepishly, Selve carried his gun over to the locker. Sara Jean did not look up until the door leaves rang closed.

  Selve caught her eye and gave a brief, nervous smile through the chain-link fencing. “You’re all right?” he asked as he walked out of the enclosure.

  “I guess,” Sara Jean agreed. She took in his conservative but oddly cut suit. “You’re one of them, I suppose,” she said.

  He nodded. “My name is Selve,” he said. “I’m sorry. What happened to you must have been a terrible shock. Though I’m glad the problem has been solved, at least traced.”

  “I’d almost convinced myself it hadn’t happened,” the woman said with a glassy cheerfulness. “I was holding something in my hand—there. And it was gone when I was in the lab again, so I thought it hadn’t happened.” She had been brushing her hair up and back with her fingers as she spoke, lifting it away from her sweaty neck. Now she held her empty right hand out in front of her. “It was a vase. I’d never seen anything like it … just beautiful, very delicate.” She laughed. “I’m almost glad to know the—whatever happened was real. Because that vase deserves to be real.”

  Selve’s expression of diffident concern transfigured like a rosebud unfolding. He stepped, almost drifted, closer to Sara Jean and took her extended hand. “You saw my vases?” he said. “You liked them?”

  “Why, they were yours?” Sara Jean said. Her own smile flashed as a mirror of his. “On the wall, and the bowls, too? Whatever do you make them out of? It surely can’t be ordinary clay.”

  “Goodness, you’re a potter, then,” the Traveler babbled. “Look, I think there’re chairs in the office—” They were already moving that way, hand in hand though with the formality of dancers in a minuet. “Everything out here would smudge your clothes. Doesn’t matter to me”—he flicked at the lapel of his suit with a deprecating thumb—“because the dirt won’t pass when we return to, ah, to our time.”

  Sara Jean perched rather self-consciously on Professor Gustafson’s desk. It did feel unexpectedly good to get off her feet. The office was still in a state of organized surfeit. Selve hesitated, then sat atop the books stacked on a chair instead of moving them.

  “I couldn’t ever have one of your vases, then,” the woman said as she thought over Selve’s comment about grime. “But you…?”

  Selve brightened again. He was not shy when he had a listener he considered sympathetic. “Not on the rebound, no, but on the initial transport, of course. As you were transported to where we came from, as I came here.” He tapped the chair on which he perched. “Not forever—there is always a rebound for matter; still in a state of matter, that is. But the duration of a transport can be very long, especially if the mass and volume in the field is kept small. Even without stabilization.”

  His excitement sagged away abruptly. “Ah,” he said, “it’s important that the public not know who we are just yet. It, well, the reasons are complex. It won’t matter very long, I think, now that the problem in the equipment has been found.”

  Sara Jean stood up and walked over to Selve. She put a hand on his arm. “‘Time travelers kidnapped me,’ says housewife,” she suggested aloud. “Don’t worry, I won’t be calling the newspapers.” Pursing her lips, she added, “But I will tell my husband, you know. I—it’s the sort of thing that he wouldn’t understand if I hid.” The reason for her sudden bleakness was as unclear to an outsider as Selve’s loss of animation a moment before when he discussed the need for secrecy.

  “That shouldn’t matter,” said the Traveler. “One more person…”

  “But you know,” Sara Jean went on as her mind shifted gears, “I wasn’t alone there—Danny Cooper was with me. And I really don’t know who he might have told.”

  * * *

  Mike Gardner whisked the tarpaulin off the tabletop unit.

  “Why, this is tiny,” said Keyliss as she surveyed the equipment. The odor of burned insulation had had time to become stale. It was a blue haze hanging in the air of the lab.

  “Well,” said Arlene Myaschensky, “we kept the resistances and impulse strengths to scale. There was nothing in the formulae that determined size.”

  “The one downstairs we built,” added Mustafa, “was that size because you said it, not because the mathematics said it.”

  “So you’d try to lift a car with a string because in principle it’s the same as a hawser?” Astor demanded in a caustic voice. “You were lucky you weren’t killed! Smell that!” She waved an imperious finger through the stench.

  “Here’s the feed from below,” said Gardner. He pointed out the terminal to Keyliss, but he was already fishing a screwdriver out of a desk drawer to disconnect it himself. “But nothing’s live, nothing.”

  “Surely, Astor,” said Louis Gustafson in a reasonable tone, “if the field is weaker but the signals are in balance, nothing should—”

  The big Traveler set her hands on her hips and fiercely scowled the engineer to silence. “The field isn’t weaker,” she snarled in response. “The field is the same strength as that of our own transport unit that we harmonized yours with. It’s the machinery that’s ridiculously weaker but trying to maintain the same load. You could have killed us all!”

  “Astor,” said Keyliss as she looked around, “that of course isn’t true.”

  “Listen,” snapped Isaac Hoperin, also to the bigger Traveler, “You were swearing a moment ago that nobody here needed to know anything because you had it all under control. I think you had better fill us in. There’s a great deal at risk, here, and I don’t mean Louis’s reputation alone.”

  “Dr. Gustafson,” called a voice as gray as sword blades from the hall, “I’d like to speak to you in private if you don’t mind.”

  Everyone in the laboratory turned. The department chairman stood in the doorway, flanked by Rice and Cooper.

  “Yes, of course, Robert,” said Professor Gustafson. He took off his glasses as if to polish them on his sleeve. His tone was completely devoid of affect.

  “Who’s that?” whispered Keyliss to Gardner, frozen where he bent over his work.

  “The chairman,” the grad student whispered back. “Jesus, he’ll shut us down for sure if he’s learned.”

  “Louis,” said Astor. Her arm extended itself in front of Gustafson. “Chairman—please come in and close the door. This isn’t a matter for the two of you alone, because it isn’t a matter for your age alone.” Her eyes narrowed as they swept Rice and Cooper in the near background. “You, too, I suppose,” she added. “What can’t be helped…”

  “Astor, if this unit was harmonized during our transport, we don’t have very long,” interjected Keyliss. “Selve could calculate it better, but—”

  “Then be quiet and let me finish this,” Astor said sharply. She stepped forward. Myaschensky and Bayar made way, the Turk with the stiffness of a soldier executing an element of drill. The Traveler extended her hand to Chair
man Shroyer with the forcefulness of a climber helping a fellow over a lip of rock. “Please,” she repeated. “Earth saved itself in your era by turning inward, into time and not to war. You must listen so that you at least know what it is you would threaten if you acted hastily.”

  “Dr. Shroyer, I’m going back to the office now,” Danny Cooper said in a small voice. It was not certain that anyone even noticed the slim man turn and walk down the hall with his spine rigid. Rice, by contrast, was braced as if to thrust the chairman forward should Shroyer decide instead to leave.

  “All right,” said the chairman. He stepped inside without taking Astor’s hand. “Explain to me why experiments conducted in my department are”—he shrugged—“giving people seizures.”

  * * *

  “Oh, hello, dear,” called Henry Layberg from the living room. His voice was a surprise. Sara Jean had parked in the driveway, so she had not noticed whether or not the Porsche was already in the garage … and besides, it was always a surprise to find her husband home.

  Henry strode into the entryway with a cheerful expression. “Shroyer comes over tonight, doesn’t he? I just wanted to make sure everything’s taken care of. We had some good times back in Michigan, he and I.”

  “I’ve got the rabbit marinated,” Sara Jean said wearily. “I was just about to put it on.” She turned toward the kitchen. Normally she would have changed into a housedress first, but she was going to have to change again for dinner. The additional effort did not seem worthwhile to save possible stains on a dress she rarely had a chance to wear anyway. Her husband did not appear to notice anything unusual about her appearance; or to notice her appearance at all, for that matter.

  “I switched my phone,” Henry said as he followed her. “Used the call forwarding so that anybody who rings tonight gets the answering machine at my office. After all, with thousands of MDs practicing at the center, they can do without me for one night.”