Bridgehead (10 page)

With no woody core to strengthen it, the cambium had exploded into unrestrained growth. After thirteen hours, Selve had replaced the nutrient solution with a salt bath. The swelling edges of growth shrank inward like a sphincter muscle closing. They remained in perfect symmetry because Selve's original pithing stroke had been perfectly circular. At twenty-one hours all growth had stopped. The bud had swollen, then shrunk abruptly, into a vase. Over the next three days the cambium had hardened into eggshell rigidity along the lines which Selve had imposed upon nature.

Sara Jean had the eye of a connoisseur. That vase had been the most nearly perfect piece Selve had ever created.

“What happened there?” said Astor from the doorway. “One of yours?”

“Yes,” Selve agreed without turning. “One of the transportees was holding it. It fell, of course, when she rebounded.” He had picked up all the fragments he could find, so he rose to his feet again. It was not the sort of thing which could be repaired, but he thought he might burn the shards instead of merely leaving them for Maintenance to compact.

“It sure did fall, didn't it?” said Astor as she saw the handful of remains. “Say, that's a shame. But I guess you can make a new one as soon as the project is completed.”

Astor had always appreciated the craftsmanship her colleagues displayed, thought Selve, in this as well as in matters relating to their mission. But it would be a very long time before the big female came to understand Art.

“Yes, that's right,” Selve agreed as he walked back into the project room. “But you know…” He juggled the fragments in his palm so that they clicked together like insect mandibles. “If Sara Jean's world is blown into pieces no bigger than these, who's going to build her a new one?”

Both Astor and Keyliss watched Selve's back as he stalked toward his private quarters.

*   *   *

“Dave, it all came loose, I'm telling you,” said Arlene Myaschensky desperately. “I don't think I'll even be going on the, on the transport tomorrow, now that Dr. Shroyer's learned about it and everything.”

“Arlene,” said her husband, “sit down and shut up for a minute.” He did not raise his voice, but the intensity in it was as sharp as a slap; and a slap would follow, they both knew, if she did not obey at this juncture. Arlene sank back into her chair. She crossed her plump white hands on the kitchen table.

Dave Myaschensky pointed again to the camera he had set on the table. He said in a tone of textured calm, “What you do every day is a lot harder than this. I've loaded the film and set the lens for minimum focus.” He would rather have used the bellows than the hard extension tubes, but the greater bulk and complexity of the flexible arrangement outweighed any benefit his wife's inexperience could draw from them.

“It's a single-lens reflex, so you don't have to worry about getting a picture of your thumb. You just slide up to an insect, make sure the needle in the viewfinder's in the notch”—he had bought fresh batteries for the light meter so that Arlene didn't have to learn about turning it on and off between shots—“and the insect looks sharp in the field, like you were just seeing it through glass. The background'll be blurry, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter if all the insect is sharp. Get the head, say, and then move to get him from the side. Your depth of field with the extension tubes is going to be half an inch at the outside, but that's okay.”

“D-Dave,” his wife said, “the little camera is automatic and I could hide it—”

Dave Myaschensky did not move. His face settled into gray curves like a concrete casting. His right hand, with which he had been about to indicate the cocking lever, twitched; only twitched. “Arlene,” he said in the deadly silence, “listen this once. I need identifiable photographs, not colored blurs. The Nikon's big and old, but we couldn't afford a new package that does the same thing.”

He curled his fingers around his wife's right wrist. His swarthy skin was a contrast to the white delicacy of hers, and his tendon-ridged grip began to sink as well into her plumpness. “We could have bought a new camera if you hadn't decided you needed a master's, couldn't we, dear?”

“Dave, let go of me,” Arlene said in a small voice. Then, louder and with undertones of strength rather than panic, “Dave, if you hurt me, I won't be able to go at all. There'll be no pictures.” The fingers released like springs. Into her husband's startled eyes Arlene added, “They may not let me go anyway. Really. The chairman's going to go, and I don't know what'll happen next.”

“Now, doll,” the entomology student said. He converted his grip of a moment before into a pat for his wife's soft shoulder. “You always say what a sweetheart Gustafson is. He won't keep you off when your heart's set on it, right?”

“He may not—” Arlene began.

Again the gentle pat, but Dave's face was congealing. “And if you have to, you'll remind the chairman that all this he's joining is a fraud on the government, isn't it?”

Dave Myaschensky put his hand back on the camera. “You've got to understand what it means,” he said. For the first time that evening his voice held an emotion that was not frustrated anger. “Doll, if you bring back so much as a picture of a housefly, I'll do a paper on ‘Preliminary Investigations of Cretaceous Dipterids in a Living Environment.' They'll think it's a fake at first, but when the story about this comes out on TV, well…”

He clutched Arlene's hands, raised them, kissed them. “Doll, wherever I send it, they'll print it—
Science, Nature,
it's my choice. If we wait till it's all public, the big names take over and I'm out in the cold forever. But if I'm the first, I'm a big name, and I'm on the ground floor of the biggest thing that ever happened to entomology.”

Arlene nodded slowly. After all, no one had said anything against taking pictures … and according to Mike Gardner, there was no reason not to walk around, just out of sight, so that the question would not arise.

“Okay, bunny,” she said aloud to her husband. “Show me again how I keep the light right on this one.”

“Tomorrow's going to be a great day!” Dave Myaschensky beamed.

*   *   *

“The funny thing is,” said Mike Gardner, “that yesterday I believed in it, in the time machine. But now that I've gone and it really works, it's like I was watching a movie, is all.” He smiled. “A pretty boring movie. They needed Godzilla tramping down the middle of the swamp, didn't they?”

Isaac Hoperin grinned back abstractedly over his own beer. The bustle of the pizza parlor was warm insulation instead of a distraction to him. “Well,” he said, “I continue to be less concerned with what we saw than I am in
how
we were able to see it. It's an awkward position for a physicist, being quite certain that the apparatus I see couldn't do anything except set up a fluctuating magnetic field—of the sort which might indicate a Dobbs phasetime basis for…”

Hoperin stopped and glanced up, realizing that his companion was not equipped to care about what he was being told. The physicist began again, “But to actually have been a part of the, the temporal shift these Travelers claimed was going to occur.” His lips pursed, just over the rim of his mug. “I've met their type, you know. So sure they have all the necessary data. So sure there's two ways to look at a problem, their way and the wrong way. Every soldier and damn near every politician I've met was that way.” The lips relaxed in a smile. “Most engineers as well, Gardner.”

Mike grinned. “But it's Astor you mean,” he said.

“The tall one?” clarified the physicist. “Yes, well … It's a mistake to think any group is monolithic, I know. Astor has the face and bearing of a colonel who told me how much he'd like to order his men to use me for bayonet practice, though that was a long time ago. I can never believe that a person like that has the right answer to anything. Even though we both were part of the proof.”

The two men had met for the first time that afternoon. They were together now because, alone of the jetsam hurled out of the day's events, they had no one else with whom to discuss matters. “What I can't understand,” Gardner said, “is—the test unit the three of us built, it never worked. Never. Down in the basement, the big one made things disappear, and they came back … even a cage full of guinea pigs. But only when the Travelers were there. Why the hell does the little rig work when the power to the coils isn't even on?”

“I take this with a grain of salt,” said the physicist. “With a whole handful if you like, but your Astor seemed to be claiming that the coils were energized by induction so long as the correct control signal was reaching the boards. Now even if that were true, we should be talking about field effects in an asymptotically flat spacetime, not a”—he barked a laugh at the absurdity of the thought—“not time travel, whatever that could conceivably be. I seem to be being offered the engineering benefits of Grand Unification, a form of simulated initial instant in which omega equals one, and thus symmetry—and tunneling—can take place.”

He shook his prematurely balding head. “Forced Unification? Well, perhaps if Einstein were here, he'd be able to make something of this. But I keep expecting to learn that this tunnel has an oncoming train at the end of it, too.”

Hoperin studied his companion for the first time as a person. A nice-enough fellow, whose observations of the general circumstances and of the event itself were as clear as the physicist's own. But Gardner came from a different generation—eighteen, maybe nineteen years, but a generation nonetheless; and even with the same background as Hoperin, the younger man's personality would not react to certain forms of authority in the same way.

The physicist said, “The truths that people like Astor tell you, uh, Mike, are false. Partly because the truth is never so simple that it can be grasped by a mind with only go/no go responses. And partly because that sort of mind always prefers a lie.” He smiled because he fully realized how absurd his absolute statement was according to his own terms. But it was nonetheless the philosophy which had guided Isaac Hoperin throughout his adult life.

“Not my sort of lady, either,” said Gardner as he stood. He was smiling also, but wryly and thinking more about women for the moment than he was about the project. He'd gotten into something without thinking much. Not thinking about it further wouldn't make it go away—if that was what he wanted—but it certainly felt better in the short run. “Well,” he continued, “I'm going to take a run back to the school and look things over. Just for the hell of it. You want to come, too? I've got keys.”

Hoperin shook his head in self-amusement. “I'm going home with the formulae,” he said, tapping his briefcase. “I'm going to see if they make any more sense to me now than they did over the past two months. Quite frankly, I find concrete objects confuse me more than they help.”

Mike Gardner laughed as he fished in his wallet for his half of the bill. “That's one thing we sure don't need,” he said. “More confusion.”

*   *   *

“What confuses me,” said Charles Eisley as he sipped his drink, “is what these future visitors do with their time machine. Besides help us build time machines of our own, of course.”

“They explained that,” said Mustafa Bayar. He was the only one of them drinking raki again this evening, and he was sipping rather than tossing glasses down the way he had the night before. None of them were drinking heavily except the newcomer, Danny Cooper. Cooper had anesthetized himself with Scotch before he had time to give a connected account of what had happened to him and was now slumped on the couch, holding a glass no one had volunteered to again refill.

“You see,” Mustafa went on, “they find crises and correct them, so that their world—their time is peaceful, comfortable.”

Sue Schlicter frowned. “You mean they make things like, oh, Auschwitz not have happened?” she said. “Or World War Two, period? But they did happen.”

“Do you suppose the machine has to be invented, so-called invented, before they can travel to an era?” Eisley suggested. He had become interested in the situation as an event, not just because of Mustafa's involvement.

“No,” said Sue, “because they did go back to whenever, long before man. Right?”

Mustafa pumped his head vigorously and said, “But to change, not just to visit—perhaps that?”

“That's all bullshit, you know,” said Danny Cooper in a gloomy, muzzy voice.

The other three looked around abruptly. The secretary had not moved on the couch; in fact, he had not even opened his eyes. Toward the empty glass, he continued, “Peaceful? If they're so peaceful, why the guns?”

“Well, those were tools,” said Mustafa with a frown. “They were for animals when they guided us back into time. Common sense, not … unpeace.”

“Bullshit,” Cooper repeated in a singsong. His body was struggling to lift itself upright, but his eyes were still closed. “You weren't there, boyo, you weren't there.”

The Turkish student's mouth opened momentarily. He closed it again, swayed either by the fact that Cooper was drunk or remembrance that they both were guests in a friend's house. Eisley was already moving to place himself between the other two men, just in case.

“At first there wasn't a damn soul,” Cooper was saying, “just the walls and the furniture that looked like somebody poured it. And the city, the mother-huge city, but they were all ants, you know?” Unexpectedly, Cooper's eyes popped open. He glared at the other three people intensely. As suddenly, the lids closed again and the voice went on, “It was a goddamn army when they came for us, though, wasn't it? I don't care they were all split-tails, they all had guns.”