Bridgehead (9 page)

Meekly, while his mind tried to recall the private number of a friend in psychiatry, Dr. Layberg obeyed.

*   *   *

“Good afternoon,” said the tall woman with the attaché case and the motorcycle jacket. “My name is Schlicter, Sue Schlicter. I've been trying to find Professor Gustafson's office, B Two, but none of the rooms have that prefix.”

She spoke sharply enough, thought Danny Cooper, that she had probably been waiting some time for him to lift his eyes from his hands clasped on the desk in front of him. Christ, she must be six feet tall and built more like a fencepost than a woman. The severity of her dark slacks and white blouse made her lines seem harsher and roused unwelcome memories of the Travelers in black and white.…

“You're too late, I'm afraid,” Danny said. Natural amiability overcame the flatness of voice that his present level of energy would have justified. “There was, we had a bit of a problem here today with some equipment, and I believe Dr. Gustafson went off for a conference with the chairman.” He nodded toward Shroyer's empty, darkened office.

“Ah,” he continued, “the office is in the basement, if you'd care to try back another time. Down those stairs, just across the hall”—he pointed—“will get you there. But I don't think he'll be back tonight.”

Gustafson and Shroyer had paused to pick up a file from the chairman's office before they went out again. The faculty members were talking about the way the two Travelers had disappeared in the middle of a sentence. That had shocked Cooper even more than the memory of what he had gone through himself. The fact that his body had winked out, had ceased to exist in the only world there really was—destroyed, expunged, made never to have existed!

Two policemen had vanished the night before, just outside the building. The search for them had caused a stir among the office staff, though few of the faculty had arrived early enough to hear about the incident directly. Had the same thing happened to those men? Danny's eyes glazed, and he shuddered again.

“Look,” said the woman. She shifted to stand hipshot in front of the desk. “This is because of Professor Gustafson's project, right? What…” Sue paused, because she had once before seen the look on Cooper's face. She had been interviewing the mother of an accident victim. It was several minutes before she realized the woman had actually watched her six-year-old dragged down the street by the truck's undercarriage. Now the tall woman hooked a chair from the wall and pulled it around beside the secretary's desk. She sat in it so that it was to him and not toweringly at him that she said, “Sir, are you all right?”

Danny's attention had drifted again. He did not usually go to Friday-night meetings, but there was one at the hospital. Expunged. He needed AA tonight, or he needed—

“You look like you need a drink,” the woman said in what seemed to be real concern. “Was someone injured in the experiment?”

“Best idea I've heard in five months and seventeen days,” Danny Cooper said in a jagged counterfeit of cheerfulness. He rolled his chair back and stood. “Want to come have a drink, Miss Susan Schlicter”—his unconscious mind had retained information, and the tall woman wore no rings at all—“and hear about the things that happen to me when I'm straight?” The light tone evaporated. “Oh,” he continued, “but I don't have a car.…” Or a license, of course, since the last conviction.

Sue cocked her head but did not rise for the moment. “This is the professor's project, isn't it?” she said.

“So it seems,” Danny agreed carelessly.

“Then,” the woman said as she stood, “I've got a friend with a cupboard full of Scotch who'd like to hear about it, too. And I've got an extra helmet, if you don't mind traveling by motorcycle.” If there had been trouble, Mustafa was probably at Charles's house already. If he weren't, they could summon him for a stereoscopic description of the event.

“If there's a drink at the end of it”—Danny Cooper took the woman's arm with exaggerated gallantry and led her toward the door—“then I wouldn't mind traveling with a rocket shoved up my ass for thrust. Not since this afternoon.”

*   *   *

“
Hel
-lo, m'dear,” said the cheerful voice. “Something happened this afternoon and we need to talk about it.”

Lexie Market looked up. She thought she had locked the office door after briefing the last of her laboratory assistants for the coming semester. Obviously, she had not remembered to; and anyway, she knew Barry Rice too well to believe that a spring lock was going to stop him if he suspected she was inside.

“Oh, for God's sake, Barry,” she said as the engineering professor closed—and locked—the door behind him, “maybe another time, but not tonight, huh? I'm just not up for it. Go home to your wife.”

“Not up for it?” Rice repeated as he sprawled into the armchair and crossed his legs. “Come on, that's not the Lexie I know. But to tell the truth, that's not why I'm here. I need a physicist, and you're the best one I know.”

“Gallant as ever,” snorted the woman, though it was true enough. Rice was six kinds of bastard, but he was always a gentleman in the eighteenth-century sense. And though his repertoire was limited—her hands were massaging the aches in their opposing wrists—he was very, very good in the sack at what he did. “What do you need a physicist for, Barry?”

The engineer had been toying with a silver-barreled pen. He pointed with it toward the sidewall. “Your next-door neighbor, Hoperin? He and one of my esteemed colleagues”—the sneer was in the voice as well as the lips—“think they've built a time machine. More precisely, think that time travelers have taught them to build a time machine. And I think they've been sold a load of bull-puckey.”

“Ike Hoperin's saying that?” Market said in amazement. There were plenty of screwball things she could imagine Hoperin being involved with, but as a scientist the man's work was impeccable.

Rice nodded, his brows knitted as he recalled the events of the afternoon. “Yeah,” he said, “I don't mean he's just gone off his nut. Or Gustafson, either, though he's been missing a few cards from his deck for years now, if you ask me. Thing is”—and the scowl released into an expression more of puzzlement than of anger—“there
is
something goddamn strange about these Travelers. I saw two of them just blink out in a crowd of people.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like turning out a light. And when Gustafson says they appear the same way … well, he may be senile, but I don't think he's having hallucinations like that, no.”

The engineer got up and walked around to Lexie's side of the desk. His hand rested on her shoulder. She did not turn. “I can't put my finger on just what's wrong,” Rice continued. “The whole thing's crazy, but the explanation fits the facts as well as”—his free hand fluttered in an empty gesture—“anything would. But you can't bullshit an old bullshitter, eh, Lexie? And I know these folks are hiding something, I know it!”

“What do you want me to do?” Market said to her hands. “Talk to Ike?”

“Better than that,” Rice replied as the fingers of both his hands worked firmly on the knotted muscles of the woman's back. “They're going to give Shroyer a demonstration tomorrow morning, but the big cheese doesn't see any reason I need to be present.”

“Shroyer doesn't?” said Lexie. The last syllable rose in a little gasp which had nothing to do with the conversation.

“He never has liked me,” the engineer said bitterly. “Thank God this is the last year of his appointment as chairman. Gustafson can do work for the Army Research Office, sure, but when I have a damned good chance to do a study on fission triggers for the air force, ‘I think we have to be cautious about involving the university in certain kinds of programs, Dr. Rice.'”

Rice took a deep breath. His fingers continued to work with mechanical skill. “Well,” he continued, “I'll miss the snow job that Shroyer and the rest get tomorrow, but in the meanwhile, you and I'll take a good long look at the whole rig tonight. I'm going to learn just what they've really got going on, these Travelers. Gustafson may get his picture on the cover of
Time,
but next week it's going to be Dr. Barry Rice who exposed the hoax of the century. And you, my dear, can have anything up to half credit, because you're going to help come up with the theory behind all those coils and transistors.”

“Tonight, then,” Lexie said. She was slumping forward, away from the chair, so that Rice could work farther down the taut muscles over her ribs.

“We'll wait till dark,” the engineer explained. “No point in calling attention to ourselves. I've got a key that'll fit Gustafson's office, and he's got keys to his equipment hanging right on the wall on a pegboard. We're not going to hurt anything, we're just going to take the sort of neutral look at the project that somebody should have taken before it started.”

Rice's earlier frustration had been wearing off as he outlined his plan. The grim edge returned for a moment as he added, “You know, I can't believe that anybody at Army Research Office really knows what's going on with their money. I'd like to see Gustafson raise a stink if he found us looking at his toys!”

Market said nothing. Rice's face relaxed again as he looked down at her. Her blouse was loose at the waist. He slipped his hands beneath it and used her firm, globular breasts to guide her torso upright. “We'll get some dinner before we come back to look around,” the engineer said. “I told my wife that I'd be working late on something important, and that's the truth, after all.”

Lexie felt her nerves begin to tremble in intersecting circles centered on her breasts and her groin. She stood up slowly and turned. The chair was in the way. She kicked it aside with a rattle of casters.

She would help Barry solve his problem, a part of her thought as she began to rub herself against the handsome man. And he was going to help solve hers; for the time being, for the next few hours at least.…

*   *   *

“They're going to want to know who was responsible,” said Keyliss gloomily. Her fingers touched switches. They had been forced to check each circuit, first independently and then in concert. The interlopers could have disturbed foci simply by trying to open access panels on the equipment. “They haven't said anything yet, because they know there's no time for anyone else to take over. But afterward…”

“Afterward, we'll quite literally be the people who saved the world,” Astor said, more defensively than the words themselves would imply. The three of them had changed back into their normal garments of pale blue with coppery overtones. Astor was comparing the programmed signals with the actual ones as the two blinked alternately on her screen at thirty cycles a second. “Check. Try Portal Nineteen.”

“We've done Portal Nineteen,” said Selve from the opposite side of the same console. “We've done them all. Everything's operating just as we left it—here. And now that we've disabled the fourth leg of the circuit that Arlene and the rest had built, there won't be any more backflows and duration anomalies.”

“They could figure it all out from that one incident, you know,” Keyliss said in the same doom-ridden tones. A chasm had gaped before her when she'd realized that the project was not—had not been for weeks—under their sole control. Keyliss had handled the crisis professionally, but now that it was over, she had fallen into a deep depression.

“They could do nothing of the sort,” Selve said testily. “For the same reason that we couldn't understand why we were having the anomalies. Until you know that there is a fourth leg in the circuit, none of the results make sense. And they don't know about…” His voice trailed off. Standing, he turned to look toward the display of bowls and vases over the door to his room.

“Anyway, nothing did go wrong,” Astor said. “That we gave out only the information the project required was proved by the fact that the additional unit wouldn't work by itself. It merely reacted to a harmonic induced when this”—she gestured to the console rather than the ebon pillars behind her—“and the unit they built at our instructions were both live.”

Selve walked toward the outer door and opened it. As he had rather expected, the fragments of a vase lay there on the Peripheral Road. Regular maintenance was not due for another thirty hours. There was nothing in these few crisp shards to require emergency cleanup. It went without saying that no one outside of Maintenance would have made it her business to pick up the pieces.

Using as a tray the largest fragment—it was the size of his cupped palm—Selve began collecting the remains. The edges were not sharp. The strength of the artifact had been in its unity. Now that the wholeness had been breached, the structure was willing to crumble away like a sweater unraveling from an unwhipped end.

Selve remembered making the vase. He had chosen the bud with a nonchalance which bespoke experience, not haste: he did not need to examine a hundred further possibilities to realize that the first he had seen was perfect.

After choosing the bud, he had clipped the stem above and below it. The lower end went into a nutrient solution. Plain water had sufficed in the distant past, but Selve was intent on creating a work of art rather than a table service. For the other cut, however, he had used the traditional smear of half-congealed sap from another plant instead of a modern, less messy, plastic cap.

Similarly, Selve had followed tradition in forming the bud without tools, without even the wooden stylus which some who called themselves purists were willing to sanction. The nail of his own right forefinger had been grown and trimmed into the point of a gouge. It was clipped short for stiffness, and it did not interfere with Selve's ordinary duties. With that fingernail he had scooped out the pulpy tip—the “brain”—of the bud and had shaped the surrounding material into a form very different from the branch into which its nature would have grown it.