Bridgehead

 

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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.