Bridgehead (14 page)

The sun was bright enough, but the atmosphere filtered its light into the yellow green and changed the lines of even the most familiar objects. Astor muttered something brief and bitter, then asked, “Is he one we know? I swear they all look the same to me.”

“We've seen him,” said Selve as he folded his emergency gear. “One of those this afternoon; the chairman, I think. This is going to mean trouble.”

“Guns!” said Keyliss. “We need a gun.”

“What?” Selve said.

“We don't have time to stabilize him,” Keyliss explained with animation, “but if he goes back as vapor—you see? What's the communications level for Assault Command?”

“There won't be time,” said Astor. She knelt and lifted the body of Barry Rice over one powerful shoulder, acting before she had time to explain. “We'll carry him to a gun. We can worry about getting clearance later.”

Like smoke in a whirlwind, the weight was gone from her shoulder and the body was recovering itself to the point from which it had been launched to its death.

Three Monitors burst into the dome. There was a fresh gush of the atmosphere whose stain the pumps had begun to thin from the interior. Their leader was Deith, unmistakable despite the atmosphere suit into which she had scrambled. “You've aborted the check!” she cried, voice deepened by the speaker. “Do you realize that you're delaying the schedule? Astor?”

“It was on residual,” Selve said. “Nothing to modulate the setting, but the duration would be much lower, even for the lesser mass involved.”

“What are you talking about?” Deith demanded. She did not speak as loudly as she had a moment before. It was evident that something had gone very wrong. Deith was increasingly aware that it might be best if she and her colleagues were not involved in the problem. It had to be the fault of the Contact Team, whatever the trouble was.…

“I'm going to reverse us into Eleven,” Keyliss said. “There may still be time to clean things up.” She slid the atmosphere suit off her left hand and forearm, baring the iridescent control plate on her wrist.

“We can't be sure Eleven will take the strain,” Selve warned with a frown.

“Well, we'd been getting the backflows before we found that fourth leg in the system,” Astor retorted. “It took that, didn't it? Besides, it's no good for the project unless it can take redirected power.”

“You'd better get back from here,” said Keyliss to the gaping trio of Monitors. Others of the group, also suited, could be seen as blurs milling beyond the dome's translucent panels. “We're not going back on rebound.
We'll
wind up at Portal Eleven, but I don't have time to figure where people with your”—she gestured with a finger—“energy background would be shunted.”

“Or whatever's in the wrong location at Eleven,” Selve added somberly. “But we'll have to deal with that when we get there.” Keyliss had made the decision. Selve had serious doubts about it, and even Astor seemed less than enthusiastic. In an emergency like this, however, they would act as a team. Keyliss had preempted the situation by her strong, sudden action—which was the intended result of their training.

“Look at them run,” said Astor with bitter satisfaction. The Monitors were scampering away from the dome and the incipient transport. Their fear was not of being shifted briefly to some other portal. Rather, they were driven away lest they become involved in a situation which they could not fathom. The project was too desperately necessary for it to be wrecked by inexplicable events. What loomed now before the Monitor Group was such an event.

“Yes,” said Keyliss brusquely. She felt—all three of them felt—the same aura of catastrophe. Unlike the Monitors, they knew perfectly well what the problem was or might be.

Keyliss looked down at her control plate. Her exposed skin was tingling, but there would be no long-term effect beyond a slight bleaching. Selve had his plate open also, itching to make side-effect calculations which were wholly beyond the unit's capacity. The emergency controls had full use of the memory of their base unit, but there was no way to display that memory. Preset commands as complex as this—powered reversion through a remote unit—could be carried out. Not even Selve's prodigious calculating ability could use the data on hand to determine tertiary effects, however.

“There…” Astor whispered as she felt a twist in the realm of the currently possible.

They could only pray that what they were doing would not make the situation at Portal Eleven even worse.

*   *   *

“We got to get out of this circle,” said Mike Gardner. His lack of affect made the words seem less desperate than they really were. He tried to pick up Rice's body by the arms. The face lolled hard against the concrete and the young man swore.

“But where is the power coming from?” muttered Louis Gustafson as he squinted at the instruments over his glasses. “The modulation, yes, but the power…?”

“You mean it's going to—” said Chairman Shroyer. He was reacting as much to the buzz of the coils as in reply to anything Gardner had said. He skipped toward the edge of the circle but hesitated, looking back at his companions.

Lexie Market was watching with an analytical blankness as events unfolded. Sara Jean pressed herself against the fencing, gripping it with both hands. She shouted, “Get back! For God's sake, get back before it takes you!” Neither she herself nor a neutral observer could have been sure to which of the men particularly she cried.

Dr. Layberg brushed Gardner's efforts aside and rolled the body into his own arms. Layberg's softness was roped together with muscle, and he had years of experience in moving patients the best way available in an emergency. When a heart-bypass patient pauses halfway over a sixth-floor banister, there is no time to worry about whether wrestling him back from his death will cause internal injuries. With Rice a limp weight in his arms and the engineering student beside him, Layberg bolted toward safety. The flash threw their joined shadows against the instrument cabinets and the closed eyes of Professor Gustafson.

*   *   *

“There they are,” called a female voice even as the Contact Team caught its collective balance in the short cross hall on the eastern side of the enclosure. The blue glare was only a memory. The enclosure wall doubled its diamond pattern in its reflection from the Lucite-covered pillars. A group of men—one of them carrying the body of the interloper—turned beside the enclosure with puzzled expressions. It was one of the pair of women in the basement's long main hall who had first noticed the transported Travelers, however.

“We've got to get that body and get it back home,” Astor muttered as the trio stripped back their protective hoods. “Thirty seconds is all we really need.”

“It's Sara Jean,” said Selve in pleased surprise. Keyliss stared at her colleague in angry disbelief at his frivolity.

The Contact Team had been transported on a reciprocal of the relationship of the pillars to the normal docking circle. That was a necessary result of controlling one set of drive coils through another. The danger was that the transport would be in exchange with whatever happened to be in an area which was not specifically cleared. That seemed by good luck to have been bare concrete also. At any rate, the locals were not shouting that some
one
or some
thing
had been snatched to another Portal.

The fact that they were holding the dead body was bad enough.

“Keyliss,” Astor said, “program it to send me and that one.” Her nod might have meant anything, but was Barry Rice now being lowered again to the ground. The Travelers strode in a rank up the main hallway toward the door. They were wearing their orange suits and fixed smiles. The blond woman turned to watch them curiously, but Sara Jean Layberg cocked only her head and one frightened eye. “Medical assistance at home.”

Selve touched Sara Jean's hand as he passed her. “I'll do that,” he said. “Three-minute duration for the volume.”

“The rebounds are going to twist us like corkscrews,” Astor said bleakly, “and we shouldn't be treating the apparatus like this, the loads…”

“We have to get that man to medical help immediately,” said Keyliss loudly as she entered the enclosure. “He injured himself on the apparatus.”

“He didn't injure himself, he's dead,” said Henry Layberg as he straightened behind the body. “And from all indications he died of chlorine poisoning.”

“What's going on?” Chairman Shroyer added in a stark voice. He was rubbing his hands together unconsciously. He was forty-three years old and he had never touched a corpse before.

“That's why we have to get him home while we're still able to revive him,” Astor said. She was taken aback by the detailed awareness of this local. She had feared at worst the certainty that the interloper was dead. Astor knelt by the body.

“I'm going to set this to transport them home,” Selve murmured to Professor Gustafson. The Traveler's slim hands quickly adjusted settings on the cabinet in front of him, then moved to the parallel unit. The ungloved hand winked like an entity separate from the orange-suited man.

“We were checking the dielectric anchor,” Keyliss improvised authoritatively. Dr. Layberg had spread a hand, palm down, above Rice, and the departmental chairman's fists were now clenched. “It's a huge chamber, and of course the atmosphere was charged with chlorine. This man must have followed us—did you send him?” She pointed like a dagger at Shroyer. Keyliss had no need of acting ability to sound angry and concerned at this juncture. “If we don't get him to treatment in our own age, he'll die. Is that what you want?”

“I'll help carry,” said Mike Gardner. He bent to take the dead professor's legs.

“No need,” Astor muttered in reply. With the easy strength her size and manner suggested, she stood and walked toward the center of the docking circle.

Dr. Layberg lifted his hand away but kept his fingers spread. “I can't help him,” he said, aloud but to no one in particular. Robert Shroyer, embarrassed when he realized his fists were clenched, stepped even farther out of the way of Astor and her burden.

“Keyliss?” called Selve as his hand poised on a dial. He was ready to choose whichever of a pair of constants better reflected the mass of the present transport.

“You'll be all right?” she replied. She had moved not so much within the docking area as to a point where she stood between Astor and the chairman, just in case.

“You'll have to act quickly,” said Selve sharply.

His colleague nodded and backed closer to Astor in the center of the circle. The room vibrated as Selve's mismatched hands touched controls as if he were molding a work of art from wet clay.

Sara Jean Layberg walked slowly into the enclosure. This time the building power did not carry with it the déjà vu and messages of fear, as the transport minutes before had done. It was nothing to do with her or hers. It was an event, a subway roaring down echoing, immaterial tunnels. Her husband watched at the edge of the painted circle. His big shoulders were hunched. Mike Gardner stood beside him, straighter and firmer but almost frail by contrast to Henry. Mike glanced toward the control panels. He caught Sara Jane's movement in the corner of his eye. Startled, stung both by fear and concern, he jerked his head straight.

Sara Jean was not walking toward those men, her men. Professor Gustafson flanked and overlooked Selve as he earlier had done with his student assistant. He watched the Traveler change settings in ways that had been unsuggested or even prohibited in discussions of the apparatus and its use. Sara Jane moved toward Selve's other side, the third point of the figure described by the Traveler's knowledge and the professor's observation.

“Ready,” said Selve in a voice that cracked over the white noise. Now all those in the basement knew to cover their eyes and await the shock of coming silence.

The flash brought them back to awareness of the hot room and the stink of overloaded electronics.

“I've walked into a circus,” the chairman muttered to Mike Gardner because Gardner was the nearest human being at the moment. Shroyer pulled from the pocket of his coat the necktie which he had stuffed there earlier in the evening. He used it now to mop sweat from his face. “Maybe a sideshow, a carnival sideshow.”

“There's no reason for this to be overheating,” said Professor Gustafson in wonder. He patted the silicon-steel core of one of the big transformers under the windows. The others had only noticed the odor of hot insulation. Gustafson's nose and carefulness had led him to the source, unlikely as that source appeared. “These aren't even in the circuit at the time of discharge,” he went on. He touched the pads of his fingers to his cheek to confirm the heat they had picked up from the transformer. “And they're far larger than we needed, from anything I could understand.…”

Selve turned to look at him. The Traveler was wrung out by events and by reaction to the successful cap he seemed to have put on them. “No, Louis, that's correct,” he said. He touched the frame of the instrument cabinet as if for support or for at least the awareness of solidity. “They act as moderators, and with the series of transports we've just run, they must be closer to design limits than Keyliss would care for.” That portion of the project had been Keyliss's responsibility. “Or me,” he added in wry awareness of what system failure would have meant to him physically. “There won't be any problem on rebound, though—the very complexity will serve to balance out the worst peaks.”

“But they aren't connected,” said the professor. He was not objecting to Selve's statement. He was simply reiterating the salient facts so that he might someday fit them all together into a coherent whole. “A timer disconnects the bank of tranformers nine point six seconds after the start-up command is entered.”