Bridgehead (31 page)

Human retinas have the capacity to react only to gross inputs during high-speed driving. Sue dragged the tiller hard toward the major avenue, knowing she could not hope to maneuver through a narrow alley at a rate that could get her clear of the alerted encampment.

Two of the eight-limbed aliens ran into the throat of plaza and avenue. There was plenty of room to avoid them, but both were raising hand weapons.

One of the aliens fired as Sue essed toward the avenue. The guide beam might have missed behind her—for a moment or two—if the car had continued its high-speed circuit. As it was, the beam ticked the flank of the car and shut down all systems as thoroughly as distributor failure does a gasoline engine. The car had been rock steady at short-radius turns on the unbanked plaza. Now it skidded and spun like a hockey puck. The alien gunner continued to waggle his beam, but he did not hit the car again.

Sue's hand flailed at the part of the dashboard which had started the vehicle while she was experimenting with the controls. Despondent without speed to exhilarate her, she had no hope that the car would restart. She slumped, visualizing the damage which the beam that missed her was doing as it slid across the cell and Charles within.

Control and the interior lights returned simultaneously. The rush of joy was as much of body as of soul. Schlicter's hand stabbed down on the speed control.

The alien who had not fired at her now cut down the alien who was firing.

Charles had been in Sue's mind and in the potential line of fire, but that was surely no concern of the aliens themselves. Their own spherical drive coils were equally at risk to a wildly flailing beam, however. There was a fraction of a second during which a blue-white arc connected the alien gunman to the suit of his target. During that moment, Sue reacted and cramped the tiller again. Her car spun in a curve as tight as a yo-yo's.

“Move the building,” Charles had directed, but shifting the drive coils would achieve the same result—and all
they
had to be shifted was off.

The acceleration was like a slingshot's. The aliens now running into the plaza from all sides might have been embedded in amber for anything their legs could do to match her speed. How long would it take to summon vehicles from other parts of the camp, tanks or trucks or even another car which could end Sue's run in a suicidal collision?

Longer than the aliens had left.

Another one fired. His aim was off, far behind, because the angle must be safe: a quarter frontal shot with no chance of slashing one of the spheres. Training kept the other massing aliens from shooting. They would have thrown their bodies into the car, hundreds of them, but they were too far behind and she was too fast.

She had always wanted to be a hero. She wondered if Charles would know.

At the last instant, all the lights in the camp were shut off. The final thirty feet of empty pavement arrowed back at Sue in the fan of her car's beam, but all her brain saw now was its own construct—the huge drive coil seemingly balanced on the ground without a pedestal or bracing.

The world snarled in a coruscant arc.

*   *   *

“Mike, they're here,” Lexie Market called. From where she stood at the door of Professor Gustafson's office, she could see Gustafson and Ike Hoperin just entering the basement through the back door.

“That's all right, Mrs. Hitchings,” Gardner said to Gustafson's housekeeper on the other end of the phone line, “we've found him. Thank you.” He was already turning and slamming the phone down as his mouth uttered that last courtesy.

“Dr. Gustafson, Ike,” Market called in greeting. Mike had blurted to her a description of what he had just seen. The shock of that information kept the physicist from being self-conscious as she had been when surprised the night before.

“Ah…” said Professor Gustafson.

Isaac Hoperin was wearing casual clothes, unusual for him in public, and carpet slippers on his feet. “Lexie,” he remembered to say.

Mike Gardner burst out of the office. “Sir,” he said, “I've been trying to get you. Selve and the others aren't building a time machine at all, it's—it's got to be something else, where we went just
looked
like Earth two hundred million years ago.”

“Dr. Layberg just called me,” Louis Gustafson agreed, frowning in puzzlement as if trying to decide which of two frozen dinners to warm in the oven. Mike Gardner was not fooled by the abstracted look or the mild tone in which his professor continued, “He and his wife say the same thing. I asked Isaac to pick me up and bring me here”—he nodded to the male physicist—“so that we could try to learn what has been … Michael, what in
goodness
are you wearing?”

“Sir, I followed them—through tonight,” Gardner said. He waved an orange-gloved hand toward the enclosure across the aisle. “I wore this, Keyliss's suit, and it's not
Earth
through there.”

“Louis, I think your apparatus is running,” broke in Isaac Hoperin. “Is this something you've programmed it to do?” he added with a glance toward Gardner.

“Negative, negative,” the younger man said. He made a dismissing sweep with both hands.

“It does that on the ret—on the rebound,” Lexie said, walking across the aisle with firm, quick steps. “Mike, they didn't come back before you did. Maybe they're coming back now. The Travelers.”

Gustafson and, a step later, Hoperin strode after the woman. From the door of the office, Mike Gardner cried, “Look, they've got guns. Sir, there's a whole
army
on the other side of things there.”

“Then we'll ask them what they're doing,” Louis Gustafson called back over the growing level of vibration.

Market paused, but the two men stepped past her into the enclosure. Dr. Hoperin seemed to be interested solely in the readings from the control panel. As the coils built to full potential, Louis Gustafson could be heard saying, “I built this for peace. I will not have it used for war!”

*   *   *

Freed by rebound from the Monitors who had tried to hold him, Selve and his gun appeared separately in the docking area. The male Traveler stripped his hood back and met the eyes of Professor Gustafson. The fact that the weapon lay ten feet behind him impinged neither on Selve's interest nor on his memory.

By contrast, Astor's weapon was an extension of her intellect: it swung with her eyes as she pivoted to take in her surroundings. Only when the big woman had recognized all those around her in the basement did she relax enough to unmask. Even so, the muzzle of her gun jumped when the Laybergs entered through the door Gustafson had deliberately left unlocked.

“Hello, Sara Jean,” Selve called as he walked toward the analogue recorders, his expression unreadable. With one hand, the Traveler gathered in the formal and angry Louis Gustafson and guided him along. “This is a crossover station between two linear matter transmission systems,” Selve said, letting true details stand in place of the apology for which he had no time.

“Astor, what have you done?” asked Mike Gardner as he walked stiffly toward the enclosure fence.

Astor glared for a moment at the young man in the suit he should not have taken. Then she remembered Keyliss and the urgency of the situation in which she felt herself to be drowning. Her snarl cleared. “Selve,” the big female begged, “what are we going to do?”

The two members of the Contact Team had had no time to plan during the violent confusion at Portal Four Base. They could have spoken here in confidence using Skiuli, but it was a measure of Astor's training and automatic discipline that she spoke clearly and in English.

“It's running again,” said Lexie Market. “The apparatus is about to transfer someone else, Dr. Gustafson.”

Astor again had duties with which she felt comfortable. She crossed the painted circle in two strides and scooped up Selve's gun. After slinging her colleague's weapon in the locker, she continued to hold her own as she returned her attention to the docking area. Selve would have said something if the transport had been programmed from the portal. If the flow were the result of meddling or error, there was no way to tell what would be appearing in a moment's time. Astor shifted so that her field of fire covered both the normal area and its reciprocal on the other side of the woven wire.

Selve kept glancing up at the area in which some one or thing would momentarily appear. Meanwhile he ran a sort of private race, scrolling from hand to hand the analogue tapes, checking for evidence of some transport for which this could be the rebound. The answer was not available from the data, and the exercise was in any event a pointless one … except that it was a part of Selve's conviction that he could solve any problem involving the programming of portal apparatus.

Most of the humans in the basement remained fixed where they stood at Market's warning. Henry Layberg had paused. He resumed walking toward the gate of the enclosure after cool consideration that there was no reason to do otherwise. Sara Jean followed him. She looked at and past Mike Gardner. It was only a look, the look of an erstwhile lover, and it did nothing to disturb the serenity of the person she thought she had returned to being.

For the first second of silence after the flash, no one—human or Skiuli—recognized the couple who sprawled at the reciprocal point outside the enclosure.

Astor shouldered and pointed her weapon, more because there was no reason not to than that the situation required such preparation.

As the kneeling man stood and the woman untangled her long legs, Gardner shouted, “It's all right! Selve, they're the people that got caught this afternoon. Mustafa's friends, do you remember?”

The woman who had just appeared was lifting what seemed to be the remains of a leather jacket. Not only had the garment been ripped, the leather gave the impression of having been tie-dyed—or rather, tie-bleached—from the action of powerful acids as it lay wadded in the carnivore's stomach. The man with her looked distinguished though disheveled. He eyed Astor with guarded suspicion even after the Traveler had lifted her gun to port when she heard Gardner's identification.

“Right, I remember that,” Astor said as she turned to Selve.

“Thank goodness!” the professor said, his concern for the project transiently outweighed by his relief that this small-scale disaster had been averted. He trotted toward the newcomers, oblivious both of the docking area he was crossing and the fact that Astor's weapon had swept the area only seconds before. “Madam? Sir? I'm Louis Gustafson, and I'm afraid responsibility for this accident is mine. Are you all right?”

“Astor, this is—” Selve began. Another possibility occurred to him. “Michael,” he snapped; there was no time for pleasantries, “are you
sure
this is the couple which was transported—five hours thirty-three and a half minutes ago?”

Gardner touched the fencing with one hand as he peered toward Schlicter and Eisley. The instant confusion made him revert to the assumptions of the past several months—that this was a colleague rather than an alien who had hidden enormous military power from him. “What? Yeah, I think—” the student said. “Charles and Sue?” he queried, calling the newcomers by the names he recalled Mustafa using.

Sue Schlicter looked up, eyebrows raised, when she heard her name called. Charles was talking through the fence to Professor Gustafson, warning the project director about the Skiuli in a voice he hoped Astor could not hear.

Sue was still too amazed at being alive to find anything about the future to be a matter of present concern. She walked up the long aisle, carrying the remnants of her jacket. Her first thought had been to abandon the ruined garment as a thank offering to the gods who had preserved her from a like fate. Then she realized that she really had to keep the jacket, to hang it over the TV set in her living room. Otherwise she herself, come next year or next week, would never be able to believe what had just happened.

The fact of the leather being dry explained her survival. She had expected, had intended, to die as her car shorted the coils of the great sphere. At the instant that happened, she and Charles—and presumably the volume of air transported with them—had rebounded to the present a moment before Sue would have been crushed into the hardware she was destroying.

Momentum did not transfer on the rebound. Sue had simply sprawled on the concrete without her dignity. If the coils had fried a half second later, she and her jacket would have been matched in their degree of mutilation.

“That's wrong,” Selve insisted, “that won't fit the output or”—the tape bunched and slid expertly through his fingers to extend the section which had just come out of the pens—“the input side, either. They can't…” He looked up to face Sue Schlicter, who was sauntering through the enclosure gate.

“The spiders in the purple suits had Charles in their—” the tall woman said. She pointed in a gesture made theatrical because she used the hand which held the jacket. Behind the wire, Eisley glanced up, thinking the gesture was meant for him. To those who had heard what Schlicter was saying, it was obvious that she had indicated the drive coils. “Only theirs were round, not long like these,” she concluded.

“Selve, a bomb,” Astor said. She spoke loudly but with a clarity which made the words a command instead of a hysterical outburst. Schlicter and Eisley were to either side of the female Traveler. By instinct, Astor pivoted so that her weapon would bear—needs must—on the woman first. A human gunman would have made the opposite choice. “Shunt them into a test Portal—”

“Twenty-nine,” Selve said as he let the tapes fall and lunged for the controls.

“—fast!”

“Selve!” cried Sara Jean Layberg, and touched the Traveler on the arm as he would have passed her.