Bridgehead (2 page)

The side rooms had false ceilings, so the concrete beams and pillars of the basement proper lowered over them. The wood-and-glass enclosures were containers, boxes to hold people and human endeavors. The chain-link fence across the aisle from them was by contrast an integral part of the great room, as was the hulking tangle of apparatus set off by the partition.

“Lieutenant, I hear something,” Robertson said. They were nearing the end of the long aisle. Bus flicked his flashlight beam across bulletin boards with dusty notices.

“That buzzing, you mean?” said Lieutenant Thurmond. His own beam prodded impalpably at the two huge pillars at the end of the enclosure. The light scattered on the fencing between the men and the pillars and again when Thurmond's aim drifted away from the pillars and let the beam touch the cross partition which closed the fenced area to the north wall of the basement.

Where the light played over the pillars themselves, it was mirrored back in its yellowish tinge from the surface. Only at the edges of the narrow beam were the interior construction of the pillars visible: fine-gauge wire had been wound on cores a yard in diameter. The sheen of its lacquer insulation was darker and more purple than the copper itself would have been. The cylindrical windings, very nearly as high as the twelve-foot partition setting off the work area, were encased in square-section boxes of clear plastic. It was this sheathing which made the windings so difficult to see. The plastic gave a measure of mechanical and dust protection, but it was clearly not intended to be airtight. One side of each box was hinged to be swung away.

The pillars seemed to be about as far apart as they were high, ten or twelve feet. Within the enclosure, where it would form the third point of an isosceles triangle with the pillars, was a circle painted on the floor. An array of instruments including a computer terminal stood across the circle from the pillars—which themselves seemed to be buzzing, as the lieutenant had said.

But it was not the buzzing that Robertson had really meant when he'd said he heard something. It was more—

“Hey, lookit those goddamn things!” Thurmond shouted. The clear reflection of his flashlight had vanished from the protective sheathing because the coils within were themselves beginning to glow with a light that had no particular color as yet. Its average intensity was less than that of a firefly's tail. When multiplied by the entire surface of the windings, the glow illuminated things in the basement which the flashlights had missed.

One of the things was crawling around the back of the enclosure, into the aisle.

It was ten feet long and looked more like forty. The skin was as slimy as a frog's, drab-colored but perhaps a shade lighter on the throat and the inner side of four broadly splayed legs. Two eyes glittered beneath brow ridges, while in the center of the creature's flat forehead was a pearly iridescence which might also have been an eye of sorts.

The creature squirmed another step into the aisle. It opened its mouth with a glitter of conelike teeth and the swampy effluvium—still water and rotting fish—which Robertson had noticed as soon as he'd entered the basement. The throat was probably bellowing something also, but the sound was lost in the roar of the pillars.

Lieutenant Thurmond was in a crouch, his right hand sweeping out the revolver he had never before had occasion to draw as a member of the university police. Bus Robertson held his flashlight out with both hands as if its narrow beam were a pole to fend off the monster which took another splayed footstep toward them. The beam could not be seen against the increasing glow of the pillars. Thurmond thumbed back the hammer of his weapon. There was a soundless blue flash—
the
flash.

For an instant, Bus Robertson could see nothing but the retinal afterimage of the blazing pillars and the egg-shaped splotch of his flashlight beam on the bare floor. The basement was so silent that Lieutenant Thurmond's hoarse breathing was the most of what sound there was. The smell of the toad-squat, toad-faced creature was gone; and the creature was gone as well.

As Robertson's vision returned, he could see that there were marks of sorts on the gritty dust of the floor. They might have been left by the wet, webbed feet that Robertson remembered; but even the traces of dampness had now disappeared.

“What the hell?” Thurmond was saying. He jumped around the corner. Robertson followed with his revolver out and his heart pounding. The cross aisle to the boiler-room door was empty except for the tracks. “What the hell?”

The lieutenant spun very abruptly, as if he suspected that something was crawling down the aisle behind them now with its fangs bared. There was nothing there, either.

The pillars burped light in a sort of afterthought. Then they began to cool. The room of unguessably complex hardware no longer held any large animal—human or otherwise.

Certainly neither of the policemen were anywhere to be seen.

*   *   *

“We've got a flow,” said Selve. The instruments on his console had been flat, as they should be during shutdown. Now the readouts were making their second automatic log-twelve jump, and the peaks were still rising. Strictly speaking there was no alarm, but the rising whine of the recorders was enough to warn the three Contact Members.

“Well, just a leakage,” said Keyliss as she jumped to the console herself; the words were a prayer. “A bit of trash in the coils here, in synchrony with—”

“It's no surge, it's a full-scale run,” Astor shouted as she, too, riffled her glance along the instruments. “Selve, you were supposed to clear the boards after the run this afternoon. Now we'll have to go in early and see what damage this has done!” Astor was taller and more powerfully built than either of her companions, a fact that colored the formal equality of the members of the Contact Team.

“I
did
clear and balance the systems—” Selve snapped.

Simultaneously, Keyliss said, “Look, Astor, if there
is
a flow—”

“Of
course
there's a flow! Can't you read the dials?”

“—then it's because you insisted we go back to Portal Eleven and check out the anomaly last week. That's what's set everything askew. And now you want to do it again.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” said Astor. “We all agreed that we'd brought the systems back in balance after that.” But her voice was lower and perhaps a trifle apologetic for the initial outburst. It was easy to lash out in frustration at whoever was nearest. The anomalies seemed insoluble. While they were minor in themselves, they might indirectly lead to—

To the end of the world.

Keyliss was willing to bury the hatchet as well. She turned back to the console and asked—to change the subject and not because she could not have read out the information for herself—“What's the other terminus?”

“Thirty-seven, I think,” said Selve as he adjusted a pair of controls. “Short duration, I'd say. No more than twenty minutes.”

“Carboniferous,” translated Astor. “And no way of telling if there was a real transport without going downline and checking ourselves.”

“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.