Bridgehead (12 page)

“You've always trusted them, Astor,” Keyliss said in the defense Selve would not make for himself. “At any rate, they've always been right, haven't they? Except when that other unit was affecting things. We don't need arguments now that we're so close.”

Astor ignored her. Very possibly she could not even hear because of the rising amplitude of the buzz.

Barry Rice began to straighten from his crouch, although the trio of Travelers still stood in the fans of their own light. The overhead fixtures were trembling enough to snow down dust and the wings of insects dead for decades. The individual coils of chain-link fencing sang, each in a note determined by its precise length and the vibration which it harmonized. The ensemble was a suggestion not of Hell but of Chaos.

Then the blue flash sucked away all sound and the three figures in the docking circle. A trick of light made it seem as if the Travelers spun in a helix through this and other forms of reality.

“Goddamn!” muttered Rice as he ran toward the afterimage of the figures. The flash had been blinding. Even though he had switched on his flashlight again, he stumbled hard against a shin-height table. The engineer was so focused that he did not even bother to curse.

The jalousie effect which had hidden Lexie from the Travelers also saved her vision from the worst of the glare. She was able to pick her way at leisure through the maze of equipment and still reach the control panel as soon as Rice did. Even as they met, there was a metallic snap from the panel's face.

“There!” said Rice excitedly. He used his flashlight beam as a pointer to probe among the switches and dials. The light steadied into an ellipse on the slanted gray surface. “That's the one they threw, isn't it? Sure, it must be—they've even painted it red.”

The big three-position toggle switch Rice indicated had been sprayed with red paint after it was installed on the panel. Most of the other switches bore cryptic legends in Dymo tape, but the red one was otherwise unmarked.

“If you mean the one they threw before they left,” Lexie said cautiously, “I couldn't see from where I was. I'm not even sure that it was one switch and not several.” The physicist's day had begun in bondage to a partner who had acted out psychoses which he had not hinted earlier. What she had just seen was the perfect complement to that beginning. She had watched an event of patent unreality, and the man she was with was requiring her to treat the hallucination in concrete terms.

“No, I'm sure it was just the one,” said Rice peevishly. “She checked some of the others, but we would have heard if she'd thrown one.”

The physicist knelt and shined her light through one of the voids on the control panel. “It seems to be an ordinary thermocouple,” she said. “It's a circuit breaker, for all practical purposes.”

“Well, let's see what it does when our friends in orange aren't around to stage-manage it,” said Barry Rice. He snapped the switch home again. Sparks paled Lexie's flashlight as the contacts arced closed.

“Barry, don't be a damned fool,” the physicist snapped. She stood and slid around to the front of the panel in a motion just short of panic. The painted circle had obvious implications. Her position had put her hips far too close to that boundary for ease.

“What I'm being, my dear,” said the engineer as he walked by her, “is the early bird. This is the best way to learn what they're doing, and it'll be that much simpler to decide how they're doing it. Care to come along?” Rice crooked his arm for her to take and gave an insouciant wink. He was standing well inside the circle.

“If they are lying, they're not going to let you come back, Barry,” Market called over the rising hum of the machinery. Gauges on the panel before her reacted to the new inputs by quivering into upward curves. “Come on, let's think about this before something happens.” She extended her own hand as a gesture, but as she did so her body pulled back instinctively from the area that would be affected.

“They don't have a choice,” Rice said. “It's automatic, you see? What happened to Cooper and that Layberg woman.” The engineer's hair was beginning to fluff as if from static electricity. There was no sign of a glowing cloud as those which had presaged incoming transports. “And you know just where I am. I'll tell them that. They don't have any choice but to show me the truth!”

He was shouting now, and only in part because of the mounting background noise. Rice was poised like a wax figure as he stared at the woman safely withdrawn from him and from his choice. He had to believe that there was enough data for a decision, because he had to make that decision, he was an engineer—

But he could hear Lexie crying out in icy logic, “If they're liars, you can't trust what they say about coming back, either. You don't know what you're getting into, you don't know the rules!” In her mind were the soft pressures on her wrists and ankles, the hard angles of the pistol with which the friend with the now contorted face was fondling her, entering her …

The fluorescent fixtures paired along the high ceiling flickered on with a palpable impact. Someone was clinging to the wire of the enclosure and shouting, though the gate was still unlocked.

Rice turned. His vision was blurring. It was one of Gustafson's students, not the wog or the fat girl, but he still had no authority to give orders to a tenured professor. Rice drew himself up. The hauteur of his expression would have done credit to Lord Cardigan riding toward the guns at Balaklava. “I'll discuss this with—” Rice began, and the flash that was as intense as a sound seared through him, blinding him, dissociating him from himself and from his universe.

On the other end of the transport, there was solid ground and time to scream. As well as need for screaming.

*   *   *

Even with the overheads on, the glare had burned its memory into their eyes. Mike Gardner rubbed his face with one hand as he used the touch of his other hand to guide him to the gate of the enclosure. “Miss,” he said in a voice underlain by anger, “you've got to come out of there right now. It could be very dangerous.”

“I'm Dr. Alexis Market of the Department of Physics,” replied Lexie stiffly to underscore her status. She picked her way carefully toward the door, however. There was a bleach-bottle sharpness in the air which made her sneeze. Not ozone, but some other result of what they had done, she and Barry.

“Oh,” said the student. His tongue poised before the next word. Rather hopefully, he went on, “That was Professor Rice, wasn't it? Ah, did Professor Gustafson send you here tonight?”

“I believe you'd have to ask Barry about that,” said Lexie in a neutral voice, but with a warm and transfiguring smile. She had dressed for what amounted to a break-in when they'd left her apartment, but she was always careful of her appearance. Her slacks and long-sleeved jacket were dark gray, but they were tailored to her figure. The spray of lace at the throat of her blouse was dressy without being confining. She looked the part of a physics professor … and that was just as well, because if this nonsense became too public, there were going to be serious interdepartmental problems.

“Barry?” the engineering student repeated. “Oh.” He nodded toward the tall coils, now silent. “He … he did, didn't he?”

“Yes, he did,” said Lexie with a wry smile. “Something, at least. You mean, it isn't Barry's project, Mr.…?”

“Shit,” he said without emphasis. He looked up. “I've got to report this, Miss—Doctor, I mean. Oh—my name's Gardner, Mike Gardner.”

“Yes, I think a report might be a good idea,” agreed the physicist as she followed Gardner toward the office. If Barry was going to disappear—literally—while taking schoolboy chances, he was just going to have to accept the consequences.

*   *   *

The phone rang. Henry Layberg froze in midsentence before he remembered that after the single ring, the call would be shunted to his office and oblivion.

The phone rang again. “Oh, my goodness,” said Sara Jean in surprise. “It must be mine.”

Carrying her napkin in her hand like a forgotten banner, she strode down the hall to her workroom and caught the phone on its fourth ring.

Before she could speak, Mike Gardner said in a tense voice, “Sara Jean? Something's happened, in the basement. The professor was going to your place tonight, wasn't he? They said so when they left.”

Gardner was feeling more desperation than he allowed to show through. He would have been reasonably comfortable if the hardware were behaving in an unplanned way, but whatever was going on tonight put him deep in university politics. He had memorized Sara Jean's personal phone number in months past. That brought him through the barrier of call-forwarding on the listed number without even knowing there was a problem.

“Yes, he's still here,” said the woman. Part of her was feeling normal social surprise at the call. Another part felt a surge of sexual longing; but that was a separate person, a remembered person, who could no longer speak. “Bob Shroyer brought him. Do you want to speak—”

“Look, Sara,” Mike rushed on, “tell him that Professor Rice was fooling with the equipment and seems to have sent himself somewhere. Tell them both. I'll wait here in the basement of the engineering building. Oh—and there's a lady from the Physics Department, too. I—I think it'd be a good thing if they hurried.”

“I'll take care of it, Mike,” Sara Jean said in the calm voice with which she would have spoken to a preschooler in an emergency. “You don't need to speak to them yourself?”

“If they need me, I'll be at the extension in the professor's office,” Gardner said. “I—I appreciate this, Sara.” He hung up.

Someone to hold his hand? thought Sara Jean as she trotted back to the dining room. Was that what Mike appreciated, needed? And perhaps that was what they all really needed in one way or another.

Her return to the dining room focused attention on her as a motion. The men's interest would have as quickly flickered back to their discussion had not Sara Jean faced Chairman Shroyer and said, “Your Professor Rice has done something to the, to the equipment. He's sent himself.” She turned to Louis Gustafson and added, “Mike Gardner is looking over things now, but he thinks you had better come back to the lab yourself.”

All three men leaped up. “Come on, Shroyer, I'll drive,” said Henry Layberg in a burst of pleased excitement.

“You'll do nothing of the sort,” Shroyer retorted as he checked his pockets for the car keys. “I'm parked behind you, and anyway, I know where the building is.”

Sara Jean snatched up a wrap of her own as the men shrugged into their suit coats. She was amazed to find that curiosity was leading her back to the scene of her recent terror. Perhaps it was the instinct that picked at scabs.

Aloud, but more as a note jotted in his memory than a statement to his companions, Louis Gustafson said, “We'll have to inform the Travelers of this as soon as we can. Whatever Dr. Rice has done may affect their calculations.”

*   *   *

“Check on Twenty-three,” said Keyliss as she compared the pattern of red and orange on the gauge against that on her template.

“We are competent to program our settings here, you know,” said Deith, the squat Monitor who was as physically powerful as Astor and at least equally aggressive. “Even if we've been stuck at the butt end of the universe.”

“Nobody doubts your competence,” said Selve. His fingers worked on the main console. “You have your duties and we have ours. Twenty-three A?”

“And we,” said Astor with a brooding glance at Deith, “have the ultimate responsibility, don't we?”

The quarters here at Base Four were safe enough, but they felt flimsy. Though the complex spread for miles, literally, it was of two- and three-story construction. That should not have mattered—there would have been no windows in either case, especially not here—but somehow the idea of the blanketing atmosphere penetrated the walls.

The atmosphere did so in fact as well. It clung bitterly to clothing and to the dead spaces of vehicles which had not been designed to shrug it off. Baths of nitrogen for everything entering the complex kept the concentrations well below the level of danger or even of active discomfort. The sharp reminders could not be filtered out, however. As Deith had said, Base Four was the butt end of the universe.

Astor's gibe brought Deith forward with her hands on her hips. She was simply one of the twelve Monitors at Base Four. The Monitor Group was collectively responsible for the three hundred construction personnel who had built the transport unit here, but they had no relative rank among themselves.

Unofficially, Deith had achieved total ascendancy over her companions.

“There have been no problems, here,” said Deith. She spoke in a rocking singsong that would work into a scream if her target did not back down before the volume was necessary. “Stabilization's gone just fine, seven hundred thousand troops and all their equipment. Starting from scratch, from ore, here on this—”

“Is it your duty to delay the project, Deith?” Selve demanded shrilly. Only in the upper registers could he speak loudly enough to interrupt. “Do you wish us to abort this test and to announce that we have done so because of your behavior?”

“Twenty-three A, check,” said Keyliss in her own attempt to defuse the confrontation. Astor had been a fool to speak the way she had, but she was not technically wrong; and besides, the Contact Team was an entity, just as was the Base Four Monitor Group.

The enclosed areas of the base were on a cramped, inhuman scale that itself did much to increase the tension. The Monitors had lined two walls of the control room as they watched the Contact Team recheck the calibrations. Two Monitors wearing their buff and gentian uniforms now stepped to Deith. One of them whispered and patted her shoulder. Deith swore and spat on the floor, but she moved back to the wall without speaking further.