Bridgehead (4 page)

And as she watched the group in the docking area, she thought, Easy for you to say, Myaschensky.

Months ago, Mike Gardner had lined off the docking area using white latex-base paint and no special skill or tools. The line wavered in course and thickness. Where the concrete had not been swept clean enough, the paint was already lifting up its yellow-gray underside.

Like the breadboard circuitry comprising much of the equipment, though, the lines were sufficient to their purpose. When the device Gustafson had built was activated, everything within the lined area would be moved and replaced by something filling a similar volume elsewhere.

The same was true of the Travelers' own apparatus. When Astor, Keyliss, and Selve appeared, odors and qualities within the basement of the building changed because of the volume of air transferred with them. To be accidentally within the docking area during such a transfer would mean an unplanned excursion—and hinted problems at the far end. Bidirectional transfers would take place, but in—good time. Keyliss had laughed at the joke on time travel. Her colleagues and the students joined in, after a moment. Professor Gustafson had simply continued to blink at the trio who claimed to be the descendents, three hundred generations removed, of twentieth-century man.

But the lined-off area was to prevent awkwardness, not danger. The edges of the transport field were soft. The event took place by integral units on a go/no go basis. There was no chance of a left arm being snatched elsewhere while its owner screamed. The broom-finished concrete floor, effectively one with the building and the fabric of the Earth itself, did not gape into concavity during operations.

Astor now stalked across the twenty-foot circle as if it were an arena and Louis Gustafson her opponent. “What is he?” she demanded in perfect English. Her hand gestured out at Hoperin as if the physicist were a mess of dog vomit. “This is your responsibility, Louis. Why is he here?” Astor spoke with obvious, hissing rage, but her voice was pitched too low to draw the students from their deferential place by the wall.

“Yes,” said Gustafson, who did not comprehend or even fully recognize the anger. “We needed help determining the layer spacings of the coils.” He pointed at the copper pillars, a mild gesture and not a slashing attack on circumstances as the woman's hand had made. “My friend, Dr. Hoperin, gave us that help. Now he very properly wants to see the results of his work and ours.”

Astor's six-foot height made her an inch or two taller than anyone else in the basement. As stocky as Mustafa Bayar, she was formidable both in body and in personality. Fifteen years before, while an undergraduate, Isaac Hoperin had chanted, “We shall overcome,” as he lay down in the path of a tank transporter at the main gate of Fort Bragg. He now clutched his briefcase with white knuckles, but he was not about to run from this confrontation, either.

“You were told, Louis,” Astor began, “how necessary secrecy is to—”

Hoperin cut her off. “What government department are you with?” he asked sharply. “You obviously think your rank takes precedence to natural law. What
are
you?”

Astor stopped, nonplussed. Keyliss stepped forward with a trace of a smile. She extended her hand to shake Hoperin's and said, “Astor is part of the Contact Unit, Doctor. You prefer to be called ‘Doctor'? As am I, Keyliss, and Selve here as well, all equals.”

Selve moved past Astor on the other side and also held out a hand—his left, since Keyliss was shaking Hoperin's right. It was now Hoperin's turn to be taken aback. He started to set down his briefcase. Then he curved his index finger up from the handle to return. Selve's grip.

All three of the Travelers wore outfits of charcoal gray. The women were dressed in skirts to midcalf, jackets, and white blouses. Selve wore trousers, jacket, and a bowtie with incongruous black polka dots on a white ground at the throat of his plain white shirt. The trio had the slightly skewed look of a comedy team. Their uniformity of dress did not disguise their individual personalities, however. “I—” Hoperin said in a less belligerent voice. Remembering that the big woman, Astor, had called Gustafson by his first name, the physicist said, “Well, I suppose Isaac. Or Hoperin. But not Doctor, no.”

“The tolerances weren't that close,” muttered Astor, who had been responsible for transmitting that portion of the data. “At worst we could have modulated the main coils with a small external unit.…” She did not meet the eyes of her colleagues or the two professors.

“Isaac,” said Keyliss, “this project is very important to our times. If Louis believes you're necessary to its success, then we all welcome you. But perhaps—Louis, is there a place where we can sit down and talk before we proceed? The five of us?”

“Well, my office,” said Gustafson. He turned his head to indicate a paneled cubicle on the other side of the fencing. “I don't know about chairs.…” With sudden focus, the white-haired man looked back at Astor and said, “This is my responsibility, you know. One of my students will be taking part in the test today. If I'm uncertain as to how to meet design parameters with the available materials, I will enlist necessary help. Isaac is very trustworthy and very able.” He touched the physicist's arm in a gesture of association.

“You have our full confidence, Louis,” said Astor with a touch of bitterness. “But perhaps yes, a discussion with Isaac here directly would be in order.”

Professor Gustafson paused at the doorway of the mesh enclosure. “Michael,” he called to the student who would accompany him on the first test, “we should not be long, I trust.”

As the professors and the visitors trailed out of the enclosure, Selve said more or less aloud, “This is a secret that mustn't get out until we've been successful, after all.”

*   *   *

The stairwell door was locked. The sign on it read: Experiment in Progress. Please Do Not Disturb.

Sara Jean Layberg thought she recognized Mike's hand in the precise lettering. With a little sigh, she turned back up the stairs. She patted her hair, which, like the spodumene she used as a pottery glaze, held myriad variations on the general theme of brown … and some white still scarcely visible unless she stared into a mirror and thought about life more than she ought to do.

The locked door was both a relief and a disappointment. Sara Jean had visited the school several times when Mike had begun helping her with the design and construction of her kiln. That had been before Gardner became her lover, however. Her husband, Henry, could have built the kiln, but his duties as internist at the university medical center kept him too busy for that—or for much of anything else involving Sara Jean.

She hadn't wanted to come back to the engineering building, but it seemed the only way to be sure that the two of them could meet. For a talk. She had steeled herself to walk in on Mike in the basement laboratory. Since she couldn't do that, she would wait upstairs, where the intrusion would have less reason to make Mike angry. They were so busy with this experiment, after all.

Layberg stumbled as her unguided foot took one more step than there was in the flight. She had not seen or heard from Mike in twenty-four days. He wasn't that busy.

“Hi, Sara Jean,” called a familiar voice. “How's your kiln doing?”

Sara Jean's face was already brightening into the proper social lines when her eyes cleared enough from grim introspection to focus on the speaker: a well-knit man of moderate height, hair graying but his mustache still a rich brown. He wore slacks and a dress shirt but no tie. In his right hand was the carafe of an automatic coffee maker, which he had just filled in the men's room. Danny, of course. It was one of the paradoxes of Alcoholics Anonymous, where they had met, that neither of them knew the other's last name.

“Oh, it's fine, Danny,” she said aloud. “I, ah—I've been thinking of a salt kiln, too. I thought I'd see Mike, but they've got the doors locked for an experiment, it says. Ah, you can't use the same kiln for regular glazes as well as salt, you know.”

“I don't know a thing about it,” the man said cheerfully, “but I did know that Mike was the person to help with a job that took using a wrench as well as knowing the theory. Look”—Danny glanced down at the carafe as if he had just become aware of it—“come on back to the office while I make a pot of coffee. I'm the EE chairman's secretary now, Dr. Shroyer's, and he always wants a cup as soon as he comes in, no matter how hot it is.”

Danny fluttered his shirt collar with his free hand, though actually the interior of the old building was comfortable despite the lack of air conditioning. “Then we can wait in Lab Three.” He gestured vaguely down the hall. “It wasn't going to be used during summer session, so the students on Professor Gustafson's project pretty well took it over. I'm sure they'll come up there when they're finished in those dungeons downstairs.”

“Well, I—” Sara Jean said. She looked at her watch, then her purse, without actually seeing either one of them. Then she smiled forcefully and said, “Well, yes, Danny, that would be a good idea. How do you like working for a department chairman now instead of being in the dean's office?” As she walked beside the taller man, her heels clicked sharply on the tile floor.

*   *   *

“I think this will be simplest, Isaac,” said Keyliss as she closed the glazed office door, “if you first give us your understanding of the project you have joined.” She nodded toward Gustafson to blur any impression that she was criticizing him.

There was a swivel chair behind the desk. Gustafson walked around to it but did not sit down. The small room's three straight chairs had been pressed into service as bookshelves. Their stacks of heavy volumes were neat continuations of the rows filling the shelves proper.

Isaac Hoperin cleared a corner of the desk with less care than his host would have chosen. The physicist then sat down with his back to Gustafson alone. He opened his mouth but hesitated while tact replaced ‘I've been told…' with the phrase that actually came out: “As it's been described to me, you—the three of you—are from the distant future. Our future. You purportedly came here through a … well, there's no other word for it, is there? Through a time machine. And you want to build a time machine here and now, in the twentieth century, I understand.”

“We want Louis to build a time machine here and now,” Astor corrected. “Because, you see, he did build one in our age. In our history.”

“Effects don't normally predate causes, do they? Well, that's only one of the things I don't understand,” Hoperin said. He took out a cigarette and tapped it twice on the crystal of his watch to pack the tobacco, then lit it. Unseen behind him, Gustafson winced.

“And I'll be very honest with you,” the physicist went on, flicking his eyes across the Travelers again when his cigarette glowed and puffed, “I've seen the formulae you've provided Louis here, and I can't imagine how such an apparatus could possibly have the effect you claim—especially with the power requirements you specify. If you're working in a Gödel manifold, creating timelike loops, then
where
are you getting the one over radical two c's worth of power you'd need to drive it? Not from what I've seen in there, not the numbers, not the hardware. And if it's Dobbs-like phasetime—well … It's as ridiculous as those claims for solar-power satellites—though at least those”—he poked his cigarette toward the pillars visible through the office window—“won't be spraying high-energy microwaves through the chromosomes of everybody on Earth.”

“You should think of what you see only as the controls, Isaac,” Selve said.

Astor clenched her fist and glared at her male colleague. Keyliss was frowning also, but she put a hand on Astor's arm. “There are two questions,” Keyliss said. “Whether or not the apparatus works”—she nodded in a reference to the hardware in the enclosure—“and why we are—why our age is acting as it is. The first question”—her voice rose slightly and her fingers clamped tighter as Astor started to speak—“will very simply be answered when you see the demonstration.”

Astor relaxed with a grimace. Keyliss released her and continued, “It is crucially important that you understand what we are about, however, so that you will also understand the need for secrecy. I—”

She broke off in a series of high-pitched sneezes as a tendril of smoke licked her face. Calmly, Astor said, “We, too, realize that the principles of time transport are unknown to your age. That was a matter of great concern to scientists of our time, who believe that actions in the past can change reality in the future, in our present. Historically, time transport was developed in your age … which, as you say, is incapable of grasping the equations even when it is handed them.”

Hoperin glared and inhaled so deeply that the tube of his cigarette rolled back toward his lips in an angry glow. Astor was unconcerned with the effect of her insult, if she even noticed it. She went on, “If you did not develop time transport, then we do not exist. In a form we would recognize, surely; and perhaps not at all. There would have been instead a world-destroying war.…”

Selve muttered what could only have been a prayer and looked at the floor. Even Astor seemed more tense as she continued, “At any rate, we have been sent here to make sure that you do develop the technique on which our age depends. All the credit will be yours—your age's—because that is what your future knows.”

“It is absolutely critical,” interjected Keyliss at a pause, “that few people know what is really being done. If your government were to become involved, there would be no way to hide our role, our age's interference in your age. We would have made certain the disaster of a changed future that we were sent to avoid.”

Hoperin crushed out his cigarette on the metal edge of the desktop, thinking about the Nobel Prize for physics and his seminal contribution to come: the Hoperin deterministic spacetime manifold. He dropped the stub on the floor with the ashes, in lieu of an ashtray. “Look,” he said, “I'm helping Louis because he's a friend and because I'm, well, interested, even if this is a load of hokum you're pitching. As for the government learning anything, not from me. Or not unless the ones they have tapping my phones and reading my mail off and on are a lot smarter than those I've met were.”