Bridgehead (5 page)

Selve and Keyliss exchanged glances. Astor's expression did not change. None of the Travelers interrupted the physicist as he went on. “But what you've described, this bootstrapping—that's surely impossible, isn't it? I grant you the potential of hardware whose principles I am incapable of grasping”—his tone became a partly conscious mimicking of the powerful female's—“but there you're talking not about principles but about sheer common sense.”

Each dark-clad female opened her mouth to reply and paused at the first syllable from the other. Selve inserted his voice into the gap, saying, “Isaac, we're technical personnel, rather like Louis. We are not theoreticians. We've been very carefully prepared for our duties by assimilating as much of the languages and cultures of your age as was possible in ours, but we cannot describe to you the—bases of the problems foreseen by the theoreticians of our day. You would not understand them, and we do not understand them.”

“I'm sure that when our part of the project has been successfully concluded,” Astor put in, “there will be opportunities for you—as an insider, of course, and still in secrecy—to discuss matters with more knowledgeable persons than us.”

Selve's face lost all expression. He looked at his colleague without speaking. Astor, startled, also stopped speaking.

“It remains to convince Isaac that there's a secret to keep, doesn't it?” Keyliss said smoothly. “And perhaps you have doubts also, Louis?” she added with a smile, which Gustafson echoed tightly. “Shall we proceed with the demonstration?”

She opened the door with a flourish. Hoperin looked at a fresh cigarette, then shot it back into the pack. “Sure,” he said. “That's what we came for.”

*   *   *

Cooper, thought Sara Jean Layberg. The plastic nameplate on the desk read “Daniel R. Cooper.” The desk return held a typewriter, but deeper in the office there was a computer terminal hooked to a printer.

A man in his early thirties turned as Sara Jean and the secretary entered. He was in sport coat and tie, very good looking and dressed with a flair that suggested he knew it. “Oh, hello, Danny,” he said. “Couldn't find you or Marge. Any notion whether Dr. Shroyer might be in this afternoon?”

“She's on vacation this week, Dr. Rice,” Danny said. He stepped into the left room of the three-room suite and poured his carafe of water into the tank of the coffee maker. “But Dr. Shroyer ought to be in any time. Going to be in your office? I can buzz you when he gets here.”

“Umm,” Rice said. “Look, if it's all the same, I'll just wait in his office. I need to discuss some matters with him before the students get back.”

“Sure,” said Cooper, flipping his hand toward the farthest room of the interconnected trio. “Look, if he gets in before I'm back, tell him I'm just running Mrs. Layberg here”—of course Danny had known her full name, she'd given it to him at the meeting to pass on to the grad student he thought could help her set up the kiln—“down to Lab Three.”

“Ah, Mrs. Layberg?” Rice said. “I'm Barry Rice, one of the Young Turks here on the faculty.” He extended his hand.

Rice's eyes had taken in the tailored quality of Sara Jean's beige dress and very possibly the fact that her wristwatch was a Rolex. Sara Jean had been uncertain as to what she should wear. She was more comfortable in slacks and a pullover shirt, but dresses enhanced her looks … and that had been the deciding factor. Now she took Rice's hand, but she said noncommittally, “Yes, my husband's on the faculty, too. Not here, of course; he's an internist at the medical center.” Sara Jean had met men before who first-named their secretaries but expected those secretaries to address them as “Doctor.” It was not an attitude toward which she warmed. “Mr. Cooper,” she continued as she turned to Danny, “I can probably find—”

“Oh, it won't take a minute, and nothing's happening now anyway,” Danny interrupted lightly. Over his shoulder he called, “I won't be long, Dr. Rice.”

As the two of them strode down the hall, Danny threw Sara Jean a conspiratorial wink. It brightened her day more than anything else thus far had done.

*   *   *

“God,” Sue Schlicter said as she made it to a standing position. The sheet trailed back to Eisley and the bed like the wake of the shock waves in her head. She began walking carefully toward the liquor cabinet. Her eyes were slitted. The sun that made her wince also glowed on her body hair. “Charles,” she said, “I haven't been this sick since I was in high school. When I got up to call in, I thought I was going to barf in your wastebasket.”

Eisley had been watching her slim figure from behind in a reverie. Driven now by contrition, he sat up more quickly than he should have even with his acquired tolerance for raki. “Oh, Lord, Sue, I should have warned you,” he said. “Raki can really do that the morning after, and you can't ignore it because the taste stays with you all day.”

“I'm a big girl,” Sue said as she uncapped a bottle of Scotch. “Daddy doesn't have to hold my hand when I cross the street. And I'm going to work on the taste right now.…” She splashed whiskey into a highball glass. “Want one yourself?”

“Oh. Sure,” Eisley said. He watched her step into the kitchen with the glasses. She moved as smoothly as a Nereid in a still lake. She could not possibly know how “Daddy” shredded her lover's guts when he heard it … and she was here, anyway, that was all that mattered really.…

The tall woman paced back with a glass in each hand. The ice clinked, but she kept her eyes on her footing rather than on the drinks. “What are you going to do about Mustafa?” she asked.

Eisley's stomach twisted as if he had physically shifted too abruptly. “Well, I suppose I'll have to minute it to the department,” he said. He took the Scotch and sipped it, more for the pause it gave him than for the taste. “It's … well, one really has to have the record available to point to if some question is raised later.”

Sue's expression was partly a result of her swizzling the Scotch around to clear her mouth. Then she swallowed. It was still a moment before her lips unpursed. “Cover your ass, huh?” she said. Her glance and her lover's both slipped toward the phrase's literal referent. She smiled. He did not. His paunch was all too evident and as pale as a fish belly in the hard sunlight. “Thing is,” Sue continued as Eisley kept his face blank against a flash of self-revulsion, “that doesn't do much for Mustafa, does it? He came looking for help, after all.”

“And he came to a senior officer of the United States Foreign Service,” Eisley said sharply.

“He probably thought he was coming to the only friend he had in North Carolina, Charles,” the woman replied. Her voice was as thin as the light glancing from the ice in her drink. “Is that a reason to saw the branch off behind him?”

The bed sagged as Schlicter sat on the end of it. Her back was straight, and her eyes were straight on Eisley's as she sipped more of her liquor.

Eisley felt like a worm on a hook. There was none of the diplomatic indirection that he was used to hearing, even when someone was being fired. His wife had never pressed him that way. When she left, the first notification of the fact had been a letter from her attorney. “Well, Sue,” he said with a practiced smile and a practiced unction, “the good thing about a formal minute is that nobody's really going to read it until after something happens. There's not the least chance that it will cause Mustafa additional problems.”

“He came for help,” she said with even more of an edge than before. “Not lowering the boom on him—maybe—doesn't seem like the sort of help I'd expect from a friend.”

And so they were talking about something else after all, Eisley thought with a grim satisfaction. He would be offered an overseas post within the next six months … and while a wife might be a valuable adjunct to his duties, there was no way he could carry his mistress with him, say, to Nouakchott or Mogadishu. Sue was not a safe choice for the diplomatic round, even as a wife.…

“All right,” Eisley said. Now that the terms were clear to him, he spoke as if to a professional equal: with reserve, but without patronizing. “I would have said that Mustafa primarily wanted a shoulder to cry on, and we gave him that. What do you see as the practical help which I can offer him now?”

“You can recruit him as a source,” she said simply. “Mustafa comes from an important family, or they wouldn't be able to send him here. And he's good, or he wouldn't be working on something like this, even if it's crackpot. So he's going to be a valuable source of information when he goes home. If he's well disposed to the U.S. And if nothing happens to turn this valuable friend into an enemy of America.”

Eisley got out of bed slowly. He took the woman's empty glass and carried it with his part-full one to the liquor cabinet. Just before he spoke, Sue added, “And while you're making sure that Mustafa Bayar is on file as an important national resource, I'll see what I can learn about what's really going on. After all, Mustafa isn't in a position to give a very clear account of things.”

“Neither are you,” said Eisley as he poured more Scotch. He hadn't really intended to refill his own glass. “They certainly won't tell you anything they didn't tell Mustafa, either—Gustafson or the people who seem to be taking advantage of him.”

“Sure they will,” said Schlicter from unexpectedly nearby. Her arms wrapped Eisley gently, pressing her breasts and the bony arc of her pelvis against his softer flesh. “Whether they're on the level or not, they're afraid to have this business out in the open. If I insist, and they see I mean it, they don't have any choice but to put me right in the middle of what they're doing.”

She was grinning like a summer dawn when the diplomat eased around to face her. “I wonder what it's like to ride a time machine,” she said, partially as a joke.

*   *   *

“Michael,” called Keyliss as she walked out of Gustafson's office, “are you ready for your first experience of time transport? And Arlene and Mustafa, ready to terminate the test if any of the equipment seems on the verge of failure?”

The students turned with a furtive surprise from the locker they had been examining while the meeting went on. The Travelers' locker was standard in appearance: two feet deep, four wide, and almost eight feet from top to bottom. It had a gray finish, vents stamped along either sidewall, and a double-leaf door across the front. At a glance or a short distance, it in no way differed from scores of heavy-duty lockers throughout the building.

It was not metal, though. When Mike rapped it with a fingertip, the material flexed and rang no more than a concrete block would have done. The padlock through the door hasp had no keyhole or any other clue as to how it was meant to be opened. Mustafa had bent to look up through the ventilating slots; without a light, he could see nothing. The students' curiosity was reasonable, but they all felt like boys peeping into the girls' shower when the principals in the project spilled out of the office.

“Ah, ready anytime,” Gardner said. He was amused to find that the embarrassment had driven out the fears which had chased themselves through his head since four in the morning. He was reacting now like a subordinate afraid of censure rather than as a test pilot chancing a very long stall.

“Here,” said Astor as she walked to the locker herself. “We won't need this during the secondary transport—that is, from your present to the Carboniferous. Give me a hand and we'll get it out of the affected area.”

“I'm ready to watch,” Arlene Myaschensky said, “but I do worry about the hardware—letting you down somewhere.” The euphemism made her blush slightly. “It's mostly either old or hand-built, and—you know.”

“Heave,” said Astor as she and the three grad students put their weight against the locker. It was not as heavy as it appeared—no heavier than an empty steel unit of the size—and it skidded easily.

“There's really nothing to worry about, Arlene,” said Selve over the sound of the locker on concrete. “Either it will transport us or it won't. The return transport is a one-for-one rebound occurring without fail when the duration dialed in here”—he pointed to the rank of instruments facing the tall pillars—“has been reached. If everything here is destroyed while we're gone, we still return. Just as we—the three of us—will return to our present in”—she did not look at any timing device—“an hour thirty-one and a half minutes.”

The locker cleared the painted line by a foot and a half. “Good,” said Astor as she straightened. With a smirk toward the students, she gripped the barrel of the padlock and pulled it down. The lock's shackle released and straightened with a liquid flexibility. Still smirking, the big female opened the doors wide.

“So you claim to be able to travel in time from our future,” said Isaac Hoperin, “and then you claim to travel from now back to another—period of time?” Hoperin was not geologist enough to know precisely what “the Carboniferous” implied, and he was far too much a scientist to simply guess.

“Yes,” called Astor over her shoulder, “we do. And you claim to be representative of your age's technical experts?”

“You did see us arrive,” added Keyliss, more mildly but to the same effect. “And in a moment you'll see the apparatus here transport us again.”

Selve said, “The reason to shut down the equipment, Arlene, is that it will add to the time till completion—operational completion—if things burn up during testing. Better to rebuild a weak spot in the circuitry than to spend weeks repairing the damage done by a successful test. But no danger.”

Astor handed him a weapon out of the locker.

The basic lines of a gun are going to be the same no matter what the principle or the details: handgrips and a shoulder stock, so that the business end can be steadied for use. The Travelers' weapons—Keyliss took hers and Astor drew out the third for herself—even had a rod resembling a barrel projecting from a larger cylinder that took the place of a carbine's receiver. The barrel was solid, however.