Bridgehead (19 page)

When the fit of sneezing left her, Arlene screamed again.

*   *   *

“Well, she's a sensible girl,” said Chairman Shroyer in what was for him a compliment. “I'm sure she won't have wandered far. Miss Myaschensky?”

Something blatted like an air horn, then crashed through the nearby undergrowth like an eight-inch shell.

“Back to shelter!” roared Astor, very much within her element. She pointed with her left hand, not her weapon, toward the nearest of the tall trees. “Quick! We can't watch all ways if there's a herd!” She caught Louis Gustafson's coat by the shoulder and half tugged, half pushed the professor in the direction of safety.

“Don't shoot!” cried Selve. “We don't know where Arlene is!” His lips spread in a grin of terror.

With his own gun advanced at waist height, held at the grip and forestock, Selve was obviously the closest of the three Travelers to blasting away either by accident or intent. Keyliss was grimacing also, but she had jumped to interpose herself between the initial commotion and the three local males. Astor held her gun by the grip and the butt seated in the crook of her right elbow. Its muzzle slanted over the heads of her companions, a danger only to trees unless she chose to dip and fire it. Her free hand continued to scurry the locals to the tree that would block at least half the approaches of danger.

Twenty or thirty huge animals charged past the group. The creatures were divided into clots—a trio, a handful, handfuls more—rather than smashing across the landscape in a line abreast. Robert Shroyer, who had hunted ducks in his youth, was wonderstruck by the present similarity to flights of waterfowl coming in at evening. Only these beasts weighed tons, and it would require not a shotgun but a howitzer to bring one down.… The chairman looked from the thundering creatures to the Travelers.

 

 

Astor had shouldered her gun, but she was using her left hand to grip Selve's upper arm. Every time more of the black-and-mottled creatures made the nearby brush thrash, Selve raised his gun with a convulsed expression on his face. Astor's hand kept him from firing. Though the creatures repeatedly passed in view, despite the close cover, they invariably split to either side of the tree against which the party had backed. The huge spike of that trunk was visible at a distance, and the stampeding animals were prepared even in their panic to avoid it.

Keyliss also had her weapon raised. She held its butt an inch away from her shoulder, however, as if to disassociate herself from the gun's capabilities. The Contact Team was made up of persons with special abilities. Though they were all cross-trained, and though each of them was exceptional in his or her own right, only Astor responded to violent danger with a warrior's enthusiasm.

Twenty silent seconds that felt like an hour passed. No further monster forms could be heard stamping closer. “All right, let's find her,” said Astor. The big female ported her weapon and let out a breath which showed how tense she, too, had been only moments before.

“Good God,” said Dr. Layberg. He had been leaning back against the tree. The trunk flared at the base, more as if it were supported by a bulb than by normal roots. He levered himself fully upright. “What sort of dinosaurs do you suppose those were, Shroyer?” he asked.

“Yeah, we need to keep together,” Selve said in tones as normal as his panting permitted. “All of us, please don't stray this time.”

“How on earth would I know, Henry?” the chairman said curtly. Shroyer wiped the sweat from his palms onto his trousers. There was a rip under the right side pocket. He could not remember getting the tear, nor could he now at leisure see anything in their surroundings which might have snagged the cloth in that fashion.

The forest floor looked as if someone had been laying out paths with a spade. The nearest of the tracks forked some ten feet from the tree against which the party had huddled. During the stampede, the beasts had looked as huge as locomotives. Louis Gustafson knelt to touch one of the footprints. The claws had been driven down through the topsoil and had overturned a wedge of the dense yellow clay beneath. It was quite obvious that the beasts had been as dangerous as so many runaway locomotives.

By contrast, the dark foliage had come through almost unscathed. Trampled stems were springing up again from their common centers. Occasionally a spray would hang askew because the twig supporting it had been crushed, but even that was noticeable mostly because the plant's inner bark was a dull red. Leaves that the claws had torn were scarcely more ragged than undamaged fronds. For that matter, the toughness and slick finish which had kept a leaf from fraying in the chairman's hand had preserved others from the greater stresses of the stampede.

“Arlene!” called Selve again.

“Please don't stop like this, Louis,” said Keyliss as she tapped Professor Gustafson on the back. She offered her hand to help the apologetic engineer rise.

The party had formed itself without formal discussion into a spearhead. Selve was at the point, using his gun as a staff with which to brush foliage out of the way. Selve treated the weapon with a nonchalance unusual for him, perhaps in reaction to his fixity on it during the stampede. There was a soapy odor in the air, an effluvium of the great beasts in panic. There were different sorts of insects as well. One with an iridescent orange body landed on Gustafson's wrist and stabbed him before the professor's other hand could slap it reflexively.

Astor and Keyliss walked behind and to either flank of Selve. The three locals were framed within the triangle of Travelers. The group's overall tension was much less now than in the instants after arrival. Before, the Travelers' concern had been with what had gone mechanically wrong with the transport and with what unknown dangers were lurking nearby. Now, the immediate dangers seemed to have exposed themselves, and the need to find the missing local overshadowed the long-term seriousness of the calibration discrepancy.

“We don't even know she went this way,” Astor grumbled. Vegetation trampled down by the herbivores was springing back in the faces of the party as they moved against the direction of the stampede.

“Arlene!” Selve shouted again. The local men did not call out themselves. The chaos of the stampede had thrown them psychically under the guidance of the Travelers, who at least might understand what was going on in an alien universe. The huge animals had appeared as suddenly as a jack-in-the-box. That shock constrained the locals as no previous warnings could have done. It would not occur to them at this moment to shout into the forest unless they were literally directed to do so.

“This is the direction the herd was spooked from, Astor,” Keyliss said from the other flank. “I'm sure she can't have gone—” She looked down. Her foot was tangled in a creeper lifted in coils from the ground when the animals stamped across it. Keyliss raised her foot out of the loose snare and continued, “Gone very far.”

Beside Keyliss, a Vrage soldier stepped out of the foliage. The Vrage wore the usual magenta garment which acted both as atmosphere suit and body armor. In one of his hands was a raised weapon. Almost as shocking as the fact of a Vrage here was the way it acted. Instead of shooting from ambush and killing most or all of the party, the alien's vocalizer said in English, “Halt where you are. If you move, I'll blow you away.”

Keyliss shot the Vrage in the middle of the chest. Her weapon was still turned up to maximum aperture from being used to cremate Barry Rice. It threw a cone which glanced from the magenta armor and shriveled foliage which the stampede had scarcely bruised.

The Vrage fired back. The horizontal disk of its weapon spun. The thin, rusty beam from the handgrip was merely an aiming plane. Though Keyliss's blast could not be lethal at its present dispersion, the shock and glare of it made the Vrage twitch his own weapon upward instead of sawing it carefully across his target.

The wand of reddish light flowed up the right side of Keyliss's chest, her shoulder, the gun she held, and her ear. The tough material of her gun resisted, but even it shrank toward the line of the invisible discharge like polystyrene touched by a flame. Where the beam crossed only flesh and fabric, the target divided on glass-smooth margins. Bone ends gleamed as coat and flesh fell away like bark from a veneer log. The right arm and the silenced gun it had held flopped to one side while the body itself collapsed the other way. Keyliss's ear, thrown off by muscle fibers spasming as they parted, fluttered away in a distant arc.

The air was full of blood and the sound of the Vrage weapon screaming like a saw on nails.

*   *   *

“They've got to be able to hear us,” Sue Schlicter said angrily. She banged the door again with the heel of her hand and shouted, “Mustafa!”

“I think we best shouldn't emphasize our interest in Mustafa,” Charles Eisley said. He touched Sue's waist and leaned past her to look through the door's small, wire-reinforced window. “For his sake, you know, with his superiors.” Though Gustafson and his companions would certainly demand an explanation for why a pair of strangers wanted to barge in.

“Can you see anyone?” Sue asked in a subdued voice. She chewed carefully at the heel of her right hand to work out some of the bruised feeling from pounding.

The window gave a perfect view down the long aisle to the stairwell at the other end of the basement. Because of the angle, however, the closer meshes of the enclosure's cyclone fencing were a solid wall to anyone who wanted to see through them. By craning his head to the side, Eisley got a marginally better view into the end of the enclosure. No one was in sight behind the vertical coils, either.

“Maybe,” he said aloud, “we can get in through the front of the building and find the stairs there.” He nodded to indicate the far doorway, though Schlicter was not looking through the window anymore. She stood hipshot toward Eisley. Her waist beneath his hand was as soft and supple as his mood an hour before. The touch recalled that earlier touching. The diplomat squeezed Schlicter close in amazed delight.

Schlicter gave Charles a broad smile and a cheerful pat on the rump as she disengaged herself. “I've got a better idea,” she said. The smile glowed wickedly across her face again. “Well, I've got a lot of better ideas, but right for now let's try the far door.”

Twenty feet down the loading dock on which they stood was another metal door. This one bore the legend BOILER ROOM stenciled in red paint. There were no windows set into it. With Charles in tow by one hand, the tall woman strode toward that door.

“If they lock this one, the other surely's going to be locked,” Eisley grumbled without heat or conviction. He did not really care about the business they were about. For the first time in his life, the veteran diplomat was feeling purely euphoric. The most marvelous part of the whole feeling was that it was not primarily physical. Not now, at least.

Schlicter worked the latch with her free hand and tugged the door open. “Voilà!” she said, waving Charles inward. He obeyed, wincing despite himself at what his mistress thought was French pronunciation.

The boiler room was large. It felt hollow, though it was nowhere near as big as the adjacent portion of the basement devoted to storage and experimental use. The heating plant was shut down at this tag end of summer, though stacked ladders and tools indicated that crews were working on the equipment during the regular work week.

While the boiler room was cool, it was not silent. As soon as the door opened, Charles and Sue could hear the hum and the resonances it wakened from the pipes and plates of the heating plant. For the moment, they did not connect the sound, the ambiance, with that which Bayar and Cooper had described as part of the operation of the time machine.

“Well, if this one opens,” said Eisley as he took the lead, “then we'll see if the inside one opens, too.” Still holding Schlicter's hand, he walked toward the door in the interior wall to their right. He was surprised to find that he had to raise his voice to be heard. The vibration was so all-encompassing that it did not seem loud.

“I wonder what they're doing in here?” the diplomat added as the inner door also swung open to his pressure. The metal of it trembled like a sparrow's heart in his grasp.

*   *   *

Selve spun toward the Vrage even before Keyliss fired at it. He cuddled his weapon down against his hip from instinct and against training. It was instinct again which froze his finger on the trigger: the locals beside him were bleating in amazement. Though they were not in the direct line of fire, they might …

Part of Selve's mind functioned with its usual clockwork precision. That part was correlating the appearance of the Vrage here with the wandering zero of the equipment that had transported their own party. The facts interlocked perfectly in one terrifying set of circumstances.

The air was aflame with Keyliss's shot, then tortured by the responding bolt that lopped Keyliss apart.

Unlike Selve, Astor was a dozen feet from the Vrage and could glimpse only a portion of its head through the vegetation and the bobbing locals. She made up for that deficiency with greater skill and a ruthlessness which was, in the circumstances, necessary. The spray of Keyliss's blast hid the Vrage for the fraction of a second before the alien's own weapon slashed through the fire.

Astor nudged her trigger. A bolt, not a cone or stream, curled and yellowed the wisps of Professor Gustafson's white hair. The alien's helmet gouted chlorine and gases vaporized from the body within. The Vrage's weapon continued to shriek and slant its marking beam up into the forest at a thirty-degree angle. The alien's limbs locked in position so that it stood like an abstract sculpture painted magenta.

“Get away, there'll be more!” Astor shouted. “They'll run to here!”

Henry Layberg threw himself down, not for cover but because Keyliss had fallen. Professor Gustafson touched his left hand to the side of his head. His ear felt sunburned, and some of his white hair crumbled brittlely beneath his fingers. He and Chairman Shroyer gaped at one another, then ran together into the undergrowth as they had been ordered to do.