Bridgehead (7 page)

She recognized nothing in the silent room except Danny Cooper. His goggled-eyed wonder was almost certainly a mirror of her own expression. “Danny,” she said, “I don't know where the cover went.” She could speak about the tarpaulin while her brain still refused to deal with anything else.

They were in a large room. It had walls of pastel green with faired edges like the front of a squash court rather than right-angle meetings. There were four doors but no windows. The style of furnishing and decoration was as alien to Sara Jean as the equipment in Mike's lab had been a moment before.

“Those,” said Danny Cooper. He pointed toward the black pillars at the end of the room. “That's what did it, Sara. It's like the ones down in the basement and the little ones we…”

He walked gingerly toward the paired objects. They were coldly silent and, so far as Sara Jean could tell, were architectural rather than mechanical contrivances. They certainly had none of the wire-wound busyness of the coils which had hummed and …

The two of them had to be in the laboratory.

If they weren't, where in God's name were they?

The curved and scalloped objects in the center of the room could be instrument consoles. She tapped one with her blunt fingers. The units had a plasticity of line that was far more surprising to Sara Jean than the fact that they appeared to be made of synthetics and not metal. A display on the wall caught her eye. She walked over to it. Danny called something as he inspected the pillars. The thirty-yard distance and Mrs. Layberg's own bemusement kept Cooper's words from registering.

It was a rack of pottery. Not a rack, precisely, because the peg supports seemed to be integral to the wall. There were several bowls, but most of the dozen objects were narrow-necked vases. Their curves were as perfect and delicate as those of a swimming otter. The basic color was brown, but their surfaces were marked by black striations which twisted instead of angling as surface crazing would have done.

“Sara Jean,” Danny called loudly. “I'm going to open this door.”

The brown-haired woman turned. Danny was pointing at the door beyond the pillars. The other three doors were in the wall on which the pottery was displayed, but there did not seem to be any distinctions among them. Mauve crescents at waist height were presumably the latches.

“All right,” Sara Jean replied. She picked up one of the vases. At once she decided that she had been wrong. It had to be plastic and not pottery at all. The vase was about ten inches high and very slim overall. Even so, it should have weighed far more than it did. The closest equivalent in mass to what she held was a single long-stemmed rose; a comparison which occurred to Sara Jean because she had been thinking how well such a rose—a white one—would have set the vase off.

“Sara, come here!” Danny shouted from the open doorway. “Sara!” There was more pure excitement in his voice than fear, but the fear was there as well.

Sara Jean ran to her companion as quickly as her high heels and the vase in her hand permitted. The vase was not as fragile as its paper-thin walls made it appear. The surfaces were not synthetically slick; rather, they had the texture of weathered fir. She should have put the object down, but it was too lovely to be broken by haste—and Danny's summons required haste.

Cooper still clung to the door with one hand. It opened inward from a road or extended balcony. That surface was ten feet wide with no railing … and she and Danny looked out at midheight on the buildings across from them, every one of them a thousand feet high or more.

“We can't really be…” the woman said. She walked toward the edge of the balcony. The slick underside of another layer projected above her like a roof. Danny was following now, a pace behind. The buildings Sara Jean could see were no more uniform than so many termite mounds studding the Serengeti Plain. As she walked forward, her wedge of vision broadened vertically. All the buildings were tall; but she could look down on a few, while the spires of the highest were hidden by distance even now that the upper balcony did not block her view.

“There aren't this many people on Earth,” Danny whispered. The air that should have boiled through these artificial canyons was still. It had a metallic taste, which had been present inside but seemed more noticeable in the context of a landscape.

The implications in terms of human numbers had not occurred to Sara Jean before her companion spoke. There was motion visible, though the distance hid details and the very scale made it difficult to think of the quivering activity as having anything to do with men. All the buildings were stratified by balconies like the one on which she and Danny stood. Vehicles and smaller blurs which must have been individuals scudded brightly across the faces of mountainous structures. Nowhere was there a crowd or even an apparent grouping, but the total number of figures in the panorama would have populated a small town.

Sara Jean leaned over to peer down without coming too close to the edge of the balcony. Danny said, “I—” in a gurgling voice and tugged at her arm.

“Don't,” she said in irritation as she looked up. “I'll drop this— Oh.” She saw the figure that swelled as it raced toward them down the surface on which they stood.

Sara Jean straightened. She started to run back to the door, but she realized that the figure was approaching very fast. Her free hand clamped Danny's shoulder as if he were a grade-schooler at a street crossing. If they stood still, the figure could easily pass them. If they moved, they might merely dodge into its path. She felt like a squirrel on the highway. Danny gave a startled bleat. He did not try to move. The fingers that held him could extrude clay between them like the jaws of a hydraulic press.

For an instant, the figure was in sharp focus. Then it was a man-sized blur, decelerating from sixty or seventy miles per hour without a vehicle. The air roiled by its speed buffeted the teacher and secretary, making Danny gasp with memory of the drop a pace behind him.

There was a vehicle of sorts after all. The figure stood on a disk the size of a serving tray and gripped a T-shaped handle. With one hand the figure flipped up—her—face shield. Wisps of silky black hair fluttered at the edges of her helmet. She began shouting something. Danny stepped toward her with his hands out in contrition, but there was no sense at all to the sounds the local woman was speaking. Her garment was a puffy suit of cream-and-purple mottlings. When she had been moving, the fabric had molded her form without the fluttering that air resistance would have caused.

Doors popped along the balcony. They disgorged men—no, women most of them and most of them with guns pointed. Sara Jean felt that she was becoming dizzy. She still saw everything with diamond clarity. The women with guns wore uniforms of the same pale green as the walls of the room with the pillars. On them, the soothing color had a frog-belly wrongness. They were shouting also, past the muzzles of their weapons, and there were no words, only terrible noises.

Two men and a woman scurried out of the room in which Layberg and Cooper had themselves appeared. The new trio wore mauve and ocher. Their clothing appeared to be randomly printed until the identity of the three suits became apparent. One of the men pointed toward Sara Jean with his whole hand. He spoke as the other gabble stilled. With the wonder of a witness to a theophany, Sara Jean realized he was saying in English, “Why have you come here?”

“We haven't come,” she cried. She held out the vase in her hand toward the speaker. “We don't know—”

Like a nightmare repeating, the balcony began to shudder as the world had when it flung them into madness. Sara Jean crossed her forearms over her eyes, but there was nothing at all around her—

Except the blue glare.

*   *   *

“All right, Barry,” Chairman Shroyer said, “I'll talk to Louis about the possibility—”

Rice leaned forward in his chair, opening his mouth to speak. Shroyer rode his own voice firmly over the coming protest, repeating, “The possibility that you can get into the basement when they have an experiment under way. But I don't see—”

Rice had closed the door to the connecting office. Danny Cooper flung it inward so forcefully that it banged the corner of Rice's chair. “B-Bob,” the secretary gasped, “something…”

“Now what the hell?” snapped Rice.

“Cooper, are you all right?” Shroyer demanded. Danny slumped against the chairman's desk. He was disheveled and breathing hard. Shroyer offered an ineffectual hand over the width of the desk return. Then he pushed around the furniture and Rice as well to get to where he could support his secretary. “Rice,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “maybe you'd better phone the Rescue Squad.”

“Oh, no,” Cooper said. “I'm—” He shook himself, then straightened from the desk. “We touched a, a machine in Lab Three. Sara Jean was there. It wasn't the— I mean, it wasn't just me. It made us see things.” Straightening even more stiffly, Cooper added, “Dr. Shroyer, I think it sent us somewhere. The machine Professor Gustafson made.”

“Here, why don't you sit down, Danny,” said Barry Rice. He toed one of the padded chairs and touched Cooper on the elbow to guide him down onto it. Chairman Shroyer pursed his lips in doubt as the secretary settled away from him. Giving his superior a knowing look, Rice continued, “I think you need to tell the chairman and me just what Gustafson's experiment did to you.”

*   *   *

Danny had run out of the laboratory as soon as he recognized the solid walls around him. Sara Jean gripped the table for a moment to steady herself. She remembered screaming or thought she did. The deep breath she took now choked her on burnt insulation. It swam in gray swirls above the hot equipment. There was a pair of scorch marks on the tarpaulin where it covered the cylindrical coils.

She walked out of the room quickly and with her face set. It made her look stern, but there were no signs of the panic very close beneath the surface. Years of teaching preschoolers had trained Sara Jean never to show panic. You kept a stolid expression while you got help from the nearest source available.

The stair treads were concrete. They had no rebound whatever, even when Sara Jean began taking them two at a time. The fire door into the basement was locked, as her mind had absolutely refused to remember it would be.

Her control did not crack. Rather, it burned away in fury at unintelligible constraints on what had been a normal world. Sara Jean began to pound on the door with the heel of her hand. The stair tower reverberated. She continued hammering. The sound by now had become an end in itself, a pulse that drank her frustration like surf washing ramparts of sand.

The door opened. Sara Jean pitched into the arms of the figure within. It was some moments before she realized it was Mike Gardner on whose embarrassed shoulder she sobbed.

*   *   *

“Now will you believe there's something wrong with the system, Astor?” snarled Keyliss to the bigger woman's back.

Astor turned with a snarl of her own. “Does that make you so happy, then? Maybe it's even something you were planning?”

Arlene and Mustafa slid from the instruments they had been watching and converged on Mike Gardner. His shirt, his hair, and the neck of his jacket, which he still gripped, were dark with sweat. “Did it?” Arlene demanded. She pumped her colleague's arm in what had to be congratulations on getting back alive.

“Everything here was all right,” put in Mustafa, “though there was some overheating in the main rectifiers.”

“I think you really…” Isaac Hoperin said to Selve as the Traveler frowned. “It seems that you were able to do what you told Louis you could, though I don't see…”

“I suppose it would have looked all right,” Selve replied. He walked away from the physicist in abstraction rather than discourtesy. There were electronic recorders which would give detailed information on the run, but for the moment he just wanted to check the frequencies indicated by the three-pen paper tape unit hooked to the output board. Over his shoulder he added, “The location Portal was all right, but the duration was much too short. Even with the transfer mass increased by one person.…”

Someone began pounding on the door to the nearest stairwell.

“Astor,” said Keyliss in a deadly voice, “if you suspect treason affecting the project, then you'd better bring formal charges, hadn't you?” Her spine was stiff as the gun she held at high port.

“Your device,” said Professor Gustafson as he took the hands of both Keyliss and Astor, “has been successful beyond my dreams.” Tears of joy were close to brimming down his cheeks. He had not been listening to the tense interchange between the Travelers. “You have, you have given our world a focus beyond war and weapons, you three. You have saved our time and yours together.”

“I thought it worked,” said Gardner with a doubtful nod toward the Travelers. “It, there wasn't any hurt, we got back and—” He looked at his shoes, which should have been muddy and leaf-stained. They were not, though the perspiration from his own body had traveled back—forward?—with him. “Ah, Professor, should I get the door?”

“Yes, of course get it!” Astor said. “What sort of incident will there be if you don't?”

Keyliss, equally willing to find a subject which did not involve treason and failure, said, “There shouldn't have been any effects outside the immediate area, unless— Do you use cesium oscillation for lighting? Ah—in this age?”

“Perhaps I should—” Professor Gustafson said.

Before he more than turned, however, the graduate student had reached the door and opened it himself. The various emotions which had hung in the air of the basement became brittle for the instant of the latch clicking. Sara Jean's stumbling entry was a surprise and anticlimax to everyone.

Mike Gardner was too shocked to swear, even under his breath. The others—Gustafson and the other students, at least—had met Mrs. Layberg a time or two, but they almost certainly did not recognize her in this context of panic and confusion. God, he was in trouble.… “Sara Jean,” he said aloud, “what's the matter?”