Bridgehead (15 page)

“In three minutes, less elapsed, Barry will be—rebounding?” Lexie Market said. Rice had used the term, and Selve's repetition of it had aided its retrieval from the physicist's memory. She strode alone outside the enclosure. The wire threw rhomboidal patterns across her face and hands but merged with the black of her clothing. “You'll be able to—cure him in that time?” Lexie had not approached the body. She could very well imagine chlorine corroding lung tissue like a fire devouring dry leaves … membranes shrinking, shriveling, rupturing to drain fluids that could not quench the hunger of their destroyer.

“They'll use the unit at home to stabilize him there until he's ready to return,” Selve lied as he turned to face the woman whom he did not know. “It will be—some weeks, I suppose.” He stifled the impulse to say “thirty-seven days,” unnecessary and inappropriate, except as humor … and humor so black was always unnecessary and inappropriate. He was too tired, too wrung out, to exercise the conscious control that was now even more needful than before.

“What do you mean by stabilize?” Mike Gardner asked without hostility. “You mean everything doesn't rebound the way you told us?”

“You can keep a spring taut by continuing to press against it, Michael,” Selve said wearily. He did not bother to look around at his immediate questioner. The locals pressed about him like predators and their prey, not physically, but neither was the danger they posed physical, not directly. “In transport, either a single massive stressing at the receiving portal, or a constant low input to balance the tendency to rebound. There wasn't time to explain that, and there still isn't. Perhaps someday…”

Sara Jean Layberg touched Selve's hand.

The Traveler turned toward her. There was no agenda hidden behind Sara Jean's smile, only fellow feeling for one as exhausted as herself … and one much like herself, perhaps, though they had spoken only briefly.

“I brought you something, Sara,” said Selve. Instead of squeezing her hand in response and releasing it, the Traveler kept a light grip and led the woman to one of the cabinets along the south wall. The men parted to pass them, then trailed after in muttering curiosity.

Louis Gustafson alone remained where he was. His eyes were tracing current paths through the apparatus he had built to others' plans. His hand rested now on the hot casing of a transformer. The touch proved even subconsciously that there was a connection, whether or not it was a material connection in the present universe.

Lexie Market still stood in the long hallway. Though she was more distant from Selve than was anyone else in the basement, she recognized the object the Traveler took from the cabinet top to present to Mrs. Layberg. It was the globe and bud which had preceded the orange-suited figures. Lexie had meant to look at it more closely, but Barry Rice's reckless stupidity had driven the thought from her mind.

Ruptured membranes, soft tissue returning to organic soup in the body cavity.…

“You were admiring my craft, my hobby,” Selve said. He handed the globe to Sara Jean. Dr. Layberg craned his neck past Robert Shroyer for a better look at the object. “This won't be a vase like the one you touched, but it should grow into a bowl of pleasant shape.” Selve was diffident, but he knew very well the quality of his art. He would not disparage that, even at the risk of seeming arrogant to himself. “I thought it might remind you of me.”

“May I see that?” said the chairman. He reached out in prejudgment of the answer.

Sara Jean cradled the globe against her breasts, enfolding it with both hands. “Thank you, Selve,” she said. “Just watch it, you say?”

“For Christ sake, woman,” her husband muttered, “let the rest of us see it.”

“That's right,” Selve agreed. “And a few hours—or more, after the nutrient has been absorbed, cut the bowl away from the stem with a sharp knife. We”—his smile and voice stumbled—“owe you a great deal for the trouble we cause, I'm afraid.”

The woman reached out to squeeze his hand again, the gloved one this time. “I hope you'll be able to come to my pottery soon.”

“I think there's a—” Mike Gardner said. “Ah, I hear the coils.”

The hum was indeed building again from a feeling to a sound. Instead of scurrying to the control panels as before, Professor Gustafson picked up an induction ammeter and snapped its loop over the nearest transformer's output leads.

“This should balance everything,” said the Traveler. His lips quirked into a grin, “In one swell foop. Whatever the initial duration settings were.” He closed and sealed his hood. His lowered voice added, “It should be an interesting microsecond.”

Dr. Layberg had taken the globe from his wife without protest. He was turning it to the light, trying to get some idea of its character. Feathery petals had already begun to expand from a cylindrical section. Some sort of crystal-growing arrangement, he decided. A great deal more sophisticated than the packets of multicolored salts from his childhood, however.

“Is it dangerous for you, then?” Sara Jean asked. She remembered the terrifying vertigo of her own transport.

“Tomorrow morning,” said Chairman Shroyer over the buzz and his growing frustration. “You'll be back with a real explanation and a chance for me to see what's going on?”

“There's no danger now,” said Selve. “Maybe a little when we carried on as we did initially, but there wasn't any choice.”

“Tomorrow,” Shroyer repeated, clutching at the Traveler's arm.

“Yes,” Selve agreed, turning. “We will be back as scheduled. Everything will resume as sched—”

Selve's voice and the memory of his touch hung as the glare dissolved him from Sara Jean's eyes and fingers. The globe in her husband's hands blazed in a symphony of reflection and refraction, but Henry continued to hold it in the stillness following the multiple transports.

As usual in the aftermath, the great room felt warmer. There was no odor of hot insulation this time; Selve had been correct in saying that there was no chance of an overload.

The air seemed, however, to have a tinge of burned flesh.

*   *   *

Astor clutched her face shield open and began to vomit. Selve had understated the effect of simultaneously unraveling multiple consecutive transports. Even Selve was in three places at once—or as near to once as made no difference to the synapses of his brain. The females of the Contact Team had made an additional transport home. That was one more vertiginous twist, though the pair began and ended the series of rebounds in practically the same place.

Keyliss grunted. She took a step in the antiseptic docking area and stumbled, pressing her hands to her temples.

Selve reached out, either to steady her or to steady himself. “It'll pass in a moment,” he said in what sounded like a voice of prayer.

The equipment locker just outside the docking area was open. Near it lay the guns which Astor and Keyliss dropped when the transport system sucked them back. The guns had not been transported initially, so they fell to the floor instead of rebounding through the catalog of Portals. The air was hot. A splotch of the cast flooring, ten feet by twenty raggedly, still bubbled and smoked.

The guns had no low-power setting, so Astor and Keyliss had flared the muzzles to their widest apertures as they enveloped the body in fire. Narrower beams would have scored too deeply into the building's heart, eviscerating other chambers and their contents. Even the energy scattered with a broad brush had darkened half the chamber by cutting a cable. The door of Astor's room had crumpled as one gun or the other jiggled.

Local atoms had combined with those ripped from the corpse under the cascade of energy. The rebound left those atoms nascent. The bitter tinge of ozone began to join the less identifiable products sublimed from the building's structure. Black feathers the size of thumbnails floated in heat-spawned convection currents and the desperate attempts of the ventilation system to deal with the circumstances. Still nauseous, Astor began to stumble toward the outer door. The feathers which brushed her made sooty, indelible stains on her orange suit.

The door opened as she reached for the latch plate.

For a moment, the big woman thought she saw in the doorway a hallucination born of disorientation and combustion products. She bowed anyway and said, “Pray enter,” because even a mirage of the Directorate deserved honor.

The two women and the man in their suits of coronal white entered the room. Outside the door, the air crackled and flashed with a temporary force screen and the silver-shot vehicles of the guards.

Keyliss had begun to step out of her atmosphere suit. She was too logy and wretched to have bothered to seek the privacy of her room. Now she gaped and whimpered at the Directorate. The conscious part of her brain reasserted itself. She straightened and stood with quiet dignity, draping the tangled suit over her arm. The situation transcended normal modesty. All she could do at this point by trying to scramble back into the garment was to make herself absurd. Selve, for his part, smoothed the glove portion of his suit down over his left hand. The fabric slipped back over his fingers and sealed seamlessly.

“A confusing situation has been reported by Portal Four Base,” said the male Director mildly. They had names, the Directors, but probably no one was intimate enough with them to use those names.

“We don't want you to think that we are concerned about your abilities or dedication,” said one of the female Directors as she tactfully lifted her eyes from the blasted patch of the floor and the guns beside it, still hot from firing.

“We came ourselves,” said the other female; she had started to close the outside door, but the fiery reek within caused her to swing the panel open again, “rather than send to you or call, to make it clear that we are not interfering. We are offering you whatever of the world's resources you think you may need.”

“Because,” the male concluded, “the world's survival depends on you.”

As soon as there was a target, the Directorate had put any number of parallel projects—perhaps a thousand of them—into development. Most of the groups had not found a suitable host Portal. Even those which found such a portal were beset with problems—perhaps greater than the problems of the Contact Team, perhaps just less adequately surmounted.

The three of them had been certain for a week that no other group was close to coming on line. They had been chosen from the scores, from the thousands of their recent peers, to be the group which programmed Portal Four for use. But what that fully meant had not been clear until this moment and the personal appearance of the Directorate.

“There have been problems,” Keyliss agreed. She nodded toward the floor, which had provided a burning ghat for Barry Rice. The nod was the wrong motion to have made. Surprise had overcome memory of nausea, but that nausea was ready to reassert itself. Swallowing back the lurch of her stomach, Keyliss continued, “One of them was there, yes. We think we've taken care of it.”

Astor cleared her throat and said, “There'll be more trouble, Your Worships. The project is attracting more local attention, involving more people. We didn't want that, but it's happened and it was going to happen. Your Worships.” She had drawn herself up very stiffly. Feelings of respect made Astor almost more willing to fail the world than to fail its Directorate. The same respect forced her to be candid about the difficulties. It would have been irrational to try to gloss over the blast-scarred flooring; but the whole situation was irrational, and another personality would have tried to hide the obvious.

“We are on schedule, Your Worships,” said Selve. Keyliss, having asserted her personal honor and dignity, was now deliberately donning her atmosphere suit. Selve reached out a hand to steady his colleague and proclaim their joint identity. Astor was sidling closer as well, though her eyes remained turned deferentially toward the Directorate. “The locals have minds of their own,” Selve continued. He pointed toward the gouge in the floor. “That means there are problems for us, for them. Somebody died because he had a mind of his own. But it also means that the project goes forward, as it couldn't if we had to make all the decisions.”

“Your Worships,” Astor resumed, “there is no help you could give us now except time and troops. And there is no way to be certain of holding Portal Eleven by force; not undamaged, not even for the brief time we need to make the final calibration. Not even if you transferred the whole of Base Four there.”

“So you all agree?” said one of the Directors. A tiny smile modified the smooth contours of her face. “The freedom you have given your locals—or they have taken—that is necessary for success?”

“Yes, Your Worships,” said the members of the Contact Team in unison. They spoke without haste, but they spoke in mutual certainty despite the fact that they did not bother to look at one another before speaking.

A Director coughed. “As you say,” he said, “there are only two things that might help. You don't need troops.”

“And unfortunately,” said another Director, “we can't offer time, either.”

“But we are on schedule,” Keyliss blurted in surprise.

“We fear that others are, too,” said a Director.

“Anomalies in the magnetic envelope are recorded as a matter of course.”

“But it takes time to check them. Sunspots, Portal activity all over the planet.”

“Sometimes even a meteor can be responsible. Everything is recorded. It can be checked, can be eliminated, but it takes time.”

“Except that this time, there is an anomaly that couldn't be explained. Except as a small-scale transport, a probe too tiny to call immediate attention to itself.”

The Directorate paused. Through dry lips, Astor said, “Your Worships, the locals at Portal Eleven built an ungoverned unit of their own. Perhaps…”