Bridgehead (32 page)

He looked aside and met her anguish. She knew less than many of the others, but she must have guessed more. There was no choice or time to lose, however: if the Vrages had sent these prisoners back, they had done so with a bomb, however concealed. It would destroy the apparatus at Portal Eleven. With the apparatus would go the life of every human for miles around, and any chance for the maintenance of life on Skius.

“No, they escaped,” said Louis Gustafson with unexpected firmness as he turned from his whispered conversation with Eisley. The diplomat looked through the fencing past Gustafson's shoulder. Charles began to stride up the aisle to join Sue and whatever awaited them.

“Right,” Schlicter was saying. In her euphoria at present survival, she had not grasped the threat implied in the Travelers' exchange. “There was
going
to be a bomb when they got it ready, but I drove a car into their”—her free hand mimed in the air—“their things, the balls, and they let go of us.”

Selve pivoted toward Schlicter with the grace of a pitcher turning to throw out the runner at first. “You drove a vehicle into the Vrage transport coils,” he said, “and you did enough damage to affect dynamic stabilization?”

Dr. Layberg and Hoperin had been drifting toward Astor with different thoughts in mind.

Layberg had seen the accuracy and ruthless speed with which the big Traveler used her weapon. He had no idea what the aliens were planning now, but the way Astor's gun moved as a part of her showed what she expected. Henry Layberg intended to jump the female at his first safe opportunity … though logic warned him that her strength and speed gave even the best opportunity an element of risk.

Isaac Hoperin was reacting at a deeper level to the disinterested command in Astor's voice. That the Travelers were indeed alien was a matter of wonder and interest to the physicist, but no more than what he had already felt at the evidence they were time travelers. Astor's willingness to treat humans as beans to be shuffled carelessly from pile to pile was not a sign of her own nonhumanity. Hoperin had heard the same phrasings, the same tone, often enough over the years. In his undergraduate days, many of the beans were being piled in Viet Nam. Hoperin, stalking toward Astor as he had years ago stalked toward a police line, did not even realize that his hands were clenched.

Almost none of the nouns Selve had used in his question made individual sense to Sue Schlicter. But taken in context, and aided by her ebullience at being alive, she could understand enough to answer. “I hit it going, hell, I don't know how fast. A hundred and forty? Faster'n I've ever gone on the ground, that I know. I hit it at the bottom, but there were sparks all over hell, and I don't think it was all in my eyes. I mean—we're
here.
”

Selve covered his face with his hands in an attitude of worship which the watching humans misconstrued. There were tears of joy in his eyes as he took his hands away. “Sara, Astor … everyone!” Selve said. “We've won. Even without the Monitor Group's concurrence, we've won. We
have
to attack the Vrage base now while they're out of communication. They won't have a chance!”

Astor stepped past Isaac Hoperin and hung her weapon in the locker. Dr. Layberg blinked at the unexpected action. It was the sort of care with weapons to be expected of Astor before what she did next—shout and stride to her colleague with her arms open to embrace him.

The big Skiuli's enthusiasm infected everyone in the basement with the exception of Louis Gustafson. All around him, people were clasping one another, despite general uncertainty as to what the good news had been. Selve, feet off the ground, was spinning in a circle, supported by Astor's arms. Those two were the only ones who understood that Earth's death sentence had been surely countermanded. The others simply reacted to the Travelers' relief—and it was enough.

“Why do you have to kill with it?” Professor Gustafson demanded loudly. “Destroy a planet? How can you think of that? And if they're chlorine breathers, dear God, even if there weren't an entire universe out there—what possible reason could there be to fight them?”

“Well, Louis…” temporized Dr. Layberg as his body shut down the systems which had been preparing him to grapple with Astor. At his present nadir of relaxation, the thought of resumed conflict between the parties in the lab was peculiarly horrible.

Simultaneously but from a different viewpoint, Charles Eisley said, “I don't think it's profitable for us to assess the merits of decisions made by sovereign parties in their own spheres, Professor.”

The words were rote from his past training. The image in Eisley's mind was that of the thing which called itself the Vrage … and beside it, the thing which still housed a human mind, coupled now into machines and—like a machine—useful only for its function. The thought of bombs sweeping across the planet from which came that creature and its fellows was not something that troubled Eisley. “So long as our own interests are safeguarded, of course,” the diplomat's tongue added.

Astor's mind had run a path parallel to that of Eisley. “They aren't like us, Louis,” she said as she lowered Selve to the floor again. “I don't mean that they have more legs. Only. They won't share—not the universe, and certainly not the principle of transport.”

“
You
aren't human,” Henry Layberg said bluntly. He did not want to say the words, but the situation demanded that they be said.

Both Travelers turned to look at the doctor. Before either could speak, Sara Jean laid a palm inside her husband's crooked elbow and said, “I think they are, Henry. For good and bad. But I think they are.”

Layberg glowered in exasperation, thinking that his wife misunderstood him. Sara Jean forestalled her husband's explanation by kissing him at the corner of the mouth. Then she turned back to meet Selve's smile.

“Louis,” said Selve, “I think you may have been right about the chance for peace, not so many years ago.” Astor glared in amazement at her colleague, but the look only tugged Selve's expression a little more wryly askew. “There's no chance now, even I am certain. The—pistol hammers are falling. For either party now to pause, to turn aside, Louis, would be only suicide. You would not be better for the Vrage surviving.”

“That will not happen!” Astor said.

“That will not happen,” her colleague agreed. He stepped to the terminal and began keying in a set of commands to replace those he had begun minutes before.

Lexie Market had watched Mike step back among the instrument chassis to strip off his atmosphere suit. That was fine for the moment, anyway, though the night wasn't over. Shunting her thoughts into a different track, the blond physicist said, “What do you propose to do to them now that you wouldn't have done before? What changed by their—drive coils being damaged?”

Neither Traveler responded to the question. Even the humans in the room seemed more concerned with their own thoughts or whispered conversations. Louis Gustafson was holding his glasses in one hand and slowly rubbing his eyes with the other.

Market walked into the enclosure. Selve was quite obviously busy with the computer terminal, but Astor appeared only to be waiting to take the orange suit from Mike Gardner when he got it off. Lexie touched the female Traveler's wrist. In a clear voice she repeated, “What are you going to do to the Vrage that you couldn't while their tr-transport apparatus was working?”

Astor's ingrained habit of secrecy stiffened her back and her face at the question. The big female would not have been part of a Contact Team had she been wholly inflexible, however. The notion of treating procedure as a god minutes after she had shot a Portal Four Monitor seemed so obviously absurd that Astor clapped out a laugh. Then she said, “These”—a wave toward the twin pillars dominating the room—“are a focusing device. They're controlled and fed from all this”—a wave toward the hulking transformers and instrument frames stretching to the far end of the enclosure—“but act only as a lens to shape a bubble in the planetary magnetic field.”

All eyes but Selve's were on the big Traveler now. Isaac Hoperin held the cigarette which his fingers were now steady enough to light. Professor Gustafson listened with the grim interest of a man being told the details of how his cancer has spread. The old man was not angry, but his hurt was as obvious as his resignation.

“That's true of every Portal in the column,” continued Astor, “except for Skius itself. The magnetic field of Skius drives every transport. All this or any other set of drive coils does is tap a path for that channeled power to sweep through.”

“And Vrage is the same?” prompted Charles Eisley. The military implications were more clear to him than they were to the others in the room.

Astor nodded, a gesture to which she had been trained for her duties on the Contact Team. Out of her human persona, she would have flicked up a thumb and forefinger to signal assent. “We both had located the other's homeworld. We both had built an assault base, to hold a few square miles of the other planet just long enough to be able to implant a bomb between the mantle and the core.”

“But that would take years,” blurted Mike Gardner in amazement.

“Hours,” corrected Astor, “and I'm sure too long even at that. We can no more fight them on Vrage than they could fight me at Portal Thirty-one.”

Selve made a last entry. “They put their base at a crossover point,” he said as he stepped back from the control panel. “In transport column both with Vrage and with Skius. Ours—Portal Four Base—is in column only with Skius. Our crossover point is here, more work but much safer; they couldn't have stumbled over our base the way we did theirs. Of course, there are disadvantages.”

“We were the bridgehead for your attack on Vrage,” said Eisley. “Whatever happened to your own planet, whatever happened to your base, the bridgehead itself was going to be destroyed. Wasn't it?”

“There would have been rebound attacks, Charles,” Astor replied with a candor which was more disarming than evasion could ever be. “That won't happen now.”

Selve squinted and bent closer again to the oscilloscope, part of the instrument panel's array, as it began dancing with a pattern of signals. They were not, as he had first hoped, harmonics of the transport he had just programmed into the school's mainframe computer. “Astor,” he called. The situation was suddenly outside the realm of Selve's own special competence.

“That's not enough,” said Lexie Market. Astor had glanced away from her, but the physicist's hand recalled the Traveler to the question. “Why is their base so important?”

“Because,” said Astor, giving the flat answer she would rather have avoided in front of Louis Gustafson, “it's their only way of striking Skius directly. If we destroy their base, we can take as much time as we need to blast Vrage till it glows—and then set the World Wrecker.”

“Astor, we're about to get company!” Selve shouted.

“I don't—” began Isaac Hoperin, then realized that the factors included human survival as well as the morality of war and peace. His mind wavered from death camp to napalmed baby to a world shattered into asteroids. In a universal scheme, it would not have mattered whether that last image were of Earth or some world unimagined by men until this moment. In fact, and despite his repugnance at the realization, Isaac Hoperin did care very much that the broken world not be Earth.

Hoperin looked at Louis Gustafson, who whispered, “None of this would have happened here, except that I made it happen.”

Astor was only two steps in a straight line from the locker and the guns she had put away—a straight line that would have taken her through the docking area. The banks of fluorescents hid the faint excitation glow, but the Traveler's skin tingled even beneath her suit in warning that the circle was indeed the target area. The turn and extra step meant that Astor was still reaching for the door panel when the six Monitors appeared.

The newcomers faced out from a common center like the petals of a flower, each Monitor with a pistol raised. The Monitor closest to Astor shouted at the Contact Member in Skiuli,
“Freeze! Freeze!”

Deith whirled and fired across the circle. One of her fellows screamed and dropped his own gun. The shot had passed close enough to melt and blacken the sleeve of his tunic against his right arm.

Astor slumped. The pistols had a thirty-millisecond burst control to keep their miniaturized components from melting down. The white flash was too brief for the onlookers' comprehension, coming as it did without warning and on the heels of the Monitor Group's appearance. The energy transfer might not have stopped a Vrage in armor, but it was quite enough to burn a fist-sized hole in the back of the Traveler's atmosphere suit.

Astor's fingers scrabbled at the front of the locker. They found no purchase on the smooth synthetic to keep her from sliding down. Bubbles in the gray panel at chest height showed where the locker had stopped such of the blast as Astor had not.

“Wait, don't move!” Selve shouted in English as the humans in the basement reacted each in his or her own way.

Charles Eisley reached for Sue with both hands to shunt her behind him. The tall woman was fractionally off-balance because she was reaching for her hip pocket and the knife folded there. Her mind had gone white, and she had no idea in the world as to what her next step might have been.

Dr. Layberg reacted in accordance with his training. He swung around and knelt beside Astor, just in time to keep her face from striking the concrete. The shot's intensity was a violet dazzle across his retinas, forcing him to blink and use his peripheral vision to examine the wound. It did not matter, except to Layberg himself. The charred edges of the suit were exuding their protective film, just as Keyliss's suit had done, although there is nothing important to protect when the victim's heart has been burned away.