Bridgehead (23 page)

Sue Schlicter caught at her companion's wrist and jacket. Without Charles's weight to anchor her, she would have fallen. Not only had the moment of transport been vertiginous, but the ground on which she now found herself sloped sharply.

The concrete basement was gone. There was no building at all. There was no hint anywhere in the wild landscape that buildings would ever exist. The pair of them stood in dun grass nodding at waist height. That background was broken every few yards either by brush with dark foliage or by outcrops of weathered stone. The sky was brilliantly blue.

Eisley wrapped his arm around Schlicter as he stared at the landscape. She felt him shiver. It was not because of the temperature: the air was still and the sun seemed extraordinarily hot. Sue squeezed her lover in response, then disengaged herself to take off the black leather jacket.

“I suppose,” said Charles in a very distinct voice, “that you know how we got here. But do you have any faint idea of where here is?”

“Mustafa said that the, that the test would be to the Mesozoic this time,” Schlicter replied. “Of course, that doesn't mean it's where we are now.”

The fold of earth in which they stood sloped more steeply on their side than it seemed to across from them. Presumably there was a watercourse down the heart of the valley, but it was hidden by a broad belt of coarser vegetation. Like the scrub nearby on the hillside, the green of the foliage covering the valley floor was dark enough to appear black in the punishingly direct sunlight.

“I wonder,” said Charles Eisley, “whether that means we're going to see dinosaurs? Though I don't sup—”

“Jesus Christ,” Sue agreed breathlessly. They clutched each other's hands.

There was a great deal of what looked to Sue like gray stone exposed on either side of the valley. One such mass, fifty feet away, stumped a few yards closer. It lowered its head again and resumed cropping the grass in jaws that ground forward and back. When she recognized that outcropping as something huge and alive, it was stunningly evident that other rocks—not all of them, but hundreds, dear God a thousand perhaps in the miles of visibility—were also alive.

Sue reached for the flat, lock-blade folding knife she carried unobtrusively in one hip pocket. The absurdity of drawing it brought her hand away empty. These things were every one of them the weight of a car—and the size of a tank.

“I wonder,” Eisley said as if the question were of no great importance, “whether any of the trees down there would be sturdy enough to hold us if we wanted to climb?” He motioned with his free index finger. It was a tiny gesture which would not call the attention of the grazers near them.

“Worth checking out,” Sue said. She had much less experience in hiding a quaver in the midst of disaster, but she did a creditable job nonetheless.

They began to walk down the hillside at a slow, jerky pace. Charles took off his tie and thrust it into his pocket. Only by constant control could he avoid spinning around at every step or two to see whether one of the browsers was stalking them. He remembered that when he had been serving in Rangoon, someone had told about being chased by elephants. You were supposed to run uphill—or downhill—because the animal was as much slower than a man in the one direction as it was faster in the other.

Eisley could not remember which direction was which, nor did a direct correlation with dinosaurs seem likely, but the line of thought provided a ledge to hold him short of a sea of panic.

Sue Schlicter was holding her jacket collar with both hands. She had a half-conscious plan of using it like a matador's cape if they were charged by one of the dinosaurs. None of those gray brutes showed hostile intentions or much in the way of intellect at all. Every minute or two, each of them would lurch a pace forward and resume cropping grass. The loudest sounds the animals made were the rumblings of their intestines. The final result of digestion was proclaimed by passages of enormous flatulence.

“Will they come back to get us, do you suppose?” Sue asked lightly. She was feeling a trifle looser now that they had stepped between two dinosaurs, neither of them twenty feet away. The beasts had ignored them. “The, Mustafa and his friends, I mean. They must have seen us just before everything changed.”

“As I understood Bayar…” said Eisley. He flicked his head sideways as an eye blinked back at him above half a bale of dun grass which was ratcheting into the broad jaws. The scale of things here was that of a parking lot, not a pasture. “As I understood Mustafa,” the diplomat resumed, “the recovery is automatic. We just have to stay alive till then. I presume.” And, Eisley thought, we have to hope that I did understand; that Mustafa was correctly informed; and that the fact the two of us are here at all doesn't mean that something catastrophic had happened to the apparatus.

Sue touched a miniature tree with a trunk like a pot. Its leaves were broad and patterned like those of a croton bush, though the veins were a deep cyan and the edges almost black. The ground was less steep, and the ribbon of dark vegetation had separated into discrete trees. They grew taller and were more densely sited farther toward the center of the valley. The water table seemed to be a crucial factor in the type of vegetation, suggesting that the brilliance and heat of the sun might not be simply subjective phenomena.

“Well,” the tall woman said, “I didn't really expect to have company here.” She was swinging her jacket loosely, now that they were beyond the area in which the dinosaurs grazed. From higher on the hill there were signs of paths beaten through the broad-leaved trees, probably by beasts seeking water. Sue hugged the man. “Anyway, I can't think of anybody I'd rather be trapped in a time machine with.”

“Halt.…” called a very distant, very loud voice.

The two accidental transportees stared at one another in amazement. Back up the slope, one of the grazers lifted its head and snorted. That ordinary, bestial sound disposed of any possibility that what they had heard before was not a voice speaking English.

Sue squinted and looked up the hillside. The valley's echoing walls made it impossible to really determine the source of the sound. The trees where the couple now stood were short and spaced generally yards apart, so the foliage did not interfere with Schlicter's view uphill. For the moment, it did not seem important to her that the trees provided camouflage though not concealment.

“Halt,” the voice called again. This time it repeated itself with the antiphony of competing echoes, “halt-halt-halt,” the single syllable stepping over itself, out of synchronization and from several locations.

Over the rise surged a dozen vehicles of two unfamiliar types. Ten of the vehicles were magenta-and-black egg shapes that reminded Eisley powerfully of the three-wheeled German bubble-cars of the 1950s. Though the high grass made certainty difficult, these did not appear to have any wheels at all. The two other vehicles were the size and general layout of flatbed trucks. They seemed to be circular rather than rectangular in ground plan, each with an identifiable cab sticking up in front.

What was far more shocking than the vehicles was the cargo which the pair of open trucks carried. At first sight they resembled mechanical contrivances contorted with their antenna arrays, six to the back of each of the larger vehicles. But they moved nervously, independently, acting not like machines but rather like the one thing their limbs made it certain they were not: human beings.

“Halt! Halt!” the trucks shouted. They were half a mile away, but their voices boomed with the distant authority of public address systems in sports arenas.

Eisley and Schlicter tensed. One of the grazing dinosaurs whirled with unexpected speed toward a truck. A corona of spikes which the two humans had not noticed before sprang erect on the beast's neck. It coughed a thunderous challenge toward the vehicle, a creature worth its notice.

Beings on the back of both trucks bathed the dinosaur in beams of intense, rusty light. The sound of giant fingernails on slate filled the valley. Pieces of the beast scaled away like rind clipped from a hard cheese. Grass and brush flattened and did not spring up again. A face of rock, touched by a stray beam, popped and scattered pebbles of itself down the hill.

The beast leaped onto its hind legs and flailed the air. Half a dozen beams converged. The vehicles' own forward motion sawed the beams forward. Claws, toes, and then the huge flat skull itself fell away. The torso strode onward, spouting blood from the neck and the half of the forelimb still linked to the heart. Another dazzle of beams cut at the hind legs. The animal crashed to the ground. Its blood continued to hose the grass, turning it black instead of dun.

“Halt!” resumed the speakers as the vehicles swept past the squirming corpse. “If you move, I'll blow you away!” The nearly synchronized words created harmonics which alone might have been enough to make Eisley's skin crawl.

“Let's get out of here,” he muttered as he turned. Sue patted his rump, not in affection so much as a signal to urge him to run beside her as she bolted.

Behind them, the voices followed, “Halt…!”

*   *   *

“Wait,” shouted Selve, and the word bounced off the ceiling of the cavernous basement lab. Isaac Hoperin tugged a sleeve for attention, but the male Traveler shrugged him off. Selve touched Astor, who, stepping backward, was cradling Keyliss's head and torso. The maimed Traveler's hand trailed on the ground. “Wait, Astor,” Selve continued, even though his bigger colleague showed every sign of intending to walk through him. “Take her back to that side. I'll program the reversal.”

“You can't!” Astor snapped. The weight of the body she held did not affect her, but the delay was driving her wild. Keyliss's chest was rising and falling with breaths as swift as those of a panting dog. The mutilated plane of her right side was gray with the gauze of film that protected it. Though the film was wholly beneficial, it had the look of gangrene. “We don't have the time for you to fool around. Get out of the way and get to work on the program!”

“Any of you, who
were
those creatures?” demanded Robert Shroyer. It was the third time he had asked the question since Selve had found the parameters he needed and plucked them all vertiginously back into the engineering building.

“We've got the time, it's faster,” Selve insisted. “If I wait for the field to dissipate, it'll be ten extra minutes. We'll ride back on the first reversal. We'll have Keyliss fully dissociated before the reversal shock hits her.”

“Mr. Eisley was just there,” said Mustafa Bayar. “In the docking area. Where are they now? Are they all right?”

Astor nodded abruptly to Selve. “Go,” she said. Selve broke from the group, running toward the control panel.

The female Traveler turned back to Dr. Layberg. He was breathing heavily, more from the events on the other side of the transition than because he carried the lower half of Keyliss's body. “Back where we were,” Astor said curtly. No one else in the room existed for her at this moment but Keyliss and the local helping to carry her. She began shuffling around with her share of the burden. “Keep out of the way, then, or you'll … Keep well back.”

The excited group halved, then fragmented. Isaac Hoperin started to follow Astor with his questions because Selve had rushed past as if he were not there. Professor Gustafson caught the physicist's arm. “I don't think now, Isaac,” the older man said. He had not understood Astor's previous warning against being transported from the unmarked docking area. First Dr. Rice, now whatever it was that had happened to Keyliss, to all of them. “We'll have to talk about many things, but for the moment I don't want anything worse to happen.”

Robert Shroyer had started to follow Astor in red-faced determination to get an answer. Professor Gustafson's words made the chairman pause, then recoil. His anger had been a reaction to the fear he had felt so recently. The possibility of a further nightmare trip if he were not careful stopped him. He was trembling.

Arlene Myaschensky walked down the long aisle toward the stairs at the other end. The plump woman did not seem a part of the group around her. She had rather the aspect of an atheist in a crowd of Christmas shoppers, affected by common stimuli but separate nonetheless.

Selve's haste had drawn Mike Gardner back into the enclosure. There was nothing for the graduate student to do, though. The Traveler's fingers danced over the terminal keyboard, using his left hand for the alphanumeric pad and his right for the function keys. At intervals, Selve reached down and changed a setting on one or another of the control panels.

Rather than interfere with what he could not help, Gardner said, “Are you okay, Arlene? Did—well, what went wrong, I mean?”

Myaschensky looked at her fellow, then down at herself. Her flesh was white and puffy through the gaping seams of her sweater; the camera still flopped against her back. She reached around carefully and lifted the strap away from her neck where the skin had been badly chafed during the fight. “I guess I'm all right,” she said. “I'm going to soak in the tub for a couple of hours.” She took a deep breath.

Gardner was frowning at her in concern. Beyond him Selve was snapping his fingers while the computer ran an involved series of procedures. Selve never cursed—none of the Travelers did—but his nervous frustration was obvious in his stance and gestures. The Traveler's suit was stained by plant juice and the blood which had spurted when Keyliss toppled.

Arlene said calmly, “There was something back there that was purple and had eight legs. Like a joke. But it wasn't a joke. I think I need to get home.”

Mike Gardner rubbed his palms against his trousers as he watched Myaschensky walk stiffly away. Behind him, Selve shouted in triumph. The knife switch on the control panel clunked home. The male Traveler brushed past Gardner and ran back down the aisle toward Astor. Gardner watched the two healthy Travelers clasp arms briefly above the sprawled and drooling Keyliss. Mustafa Bayar was speaking animatedly to the three faculty members. The Turk gestured frequently toward the Travelers—or toward the patch of aisle from which the two interlopers had disappeared minutes before.