Bridgehead

by David Drake

  Sara Jean sat down on the other arm of Layberg’s chair. She covered her husband’s hands with her own free hand. “I thought that must be it,” she said. “That we couldn’t be their ancestors, whatever they said.” She smiled wanly. “Even Selve.”

  “Now how in Hades would you know that, Jeanie?” Dr. Layberg demanded in a tone of frustrated sadness. He had gripped his wife’s hand greedily. Now he drew it toward his chest as if he could physically prevent the blitheness with which she seemed to be drifting out of his life. “It doesn’t show from the outside, not when they’re wearing clothes. I don’t know how many thousand chests I’ve looked into and I never said, ‘Oh, nine true ribs on these so-called time travelers.’”

  The woman leaned over and kissed Henry’s hand. As she straightened, she held the bowl out between the two of them. It had the texture of parchment and a mottled pattern as delicate as the curves of an ammonite’s septa. “This wasn’t human, Henry. Not—a blood human, whatever. Selve and I are very much alike, I think, but—the way a bat and a bird are alike.”

  The fear of loss that had shocked Dr. Layberg a moment before was fading. He stretched out one arm to Sara Jean’s waist while he continued to hold her hand with the other. Now that he was sure that his wife was not mocking him, Layberg proceeded in a reasonable voice to correct her mistaken assumptions. “Remember, Jeanie, that they were supposed to come from the future. They of course might have equipment that does wonderful things. The fabric, the suit that bandaged Keyliss automatically, truly marvelous. You know, it might even save her life? If the base facilities are of the same quality, I’m sure they did.”

  Sara Jean shook her head gently.

  Her husband caught himself. “Ah,” he muttered. Then he finished. “This pot is very amazing, too, Jeanie, but it’s the sort of thing that even a few decades—well, centuries—of current progress could very well come up with.”

  “As an industrial process, Henry,” the woman explained ironically, “I’m sure we could do better right now.” She gestured carefully with the bowl toward the ranks of her own pottery on the shelves above them. “There’s better ways to make mugs than the way I do it, too.”

  “Well,” said Henry uncomfortably, “I think your work is very, ah, tasteful.”

  “You’re sweet,” Sara Jean said. Her elbow squeezed his hand against her waist. “And that doesn’t matter. What I mean is, this is a handicraft, just like my pottery is handicraft. Back however long ago—ten thousand years—what Selve did and what I do were necessary so that our, our cultures would have something to boil water in and store seed grain. But what I do with clay and a kiln was as different to Selve as this is to us, Henry. We’ve grown in the same directions, but we grew from different worlds.”

  Henry Layberg sighed deeply. He stood up and took the alien bowl from his wife in both hands. It did not sit firmly when he put it on the table. The desiccated remnants of the branch were still attached to it. “Jeanie,” the man said, “do you think they still sell tickets to Bermuda? For a week, maybe?”

  “Why?” Sara Jean said from where she sat.

  “Because I don’t understand,” the doctor said simply. “Because I’ve been going through life as if I was on tracks, and it seems the tracks may not go anywhere.” He paused, managing both to smile and to meet his wife’s eyes for the first time since he stood up. “Or they do go just where I thought, but there’s more interesting places out there, too.”

  Sara Jean rocked to her feet. She did not close the short distance now separating her from her husband. “Henry,” she said, “you may not like the islands. We could go to the beach here, maybe, if—”

  Layberg set one hand on either of his wife’s shoulders. He did not try to draw her in, but it was his turn to shake his head in gentle demurrer. “Jeanie, I may be bored in Bermuda and I may burn myself like a lobster. To tell the truth, I’ve been planning to get in shape.” He looked ruefully at the belly which overhung his belt even when he tensed his muscles. “The—the exercise I got this morning with … Anyway, it made a believer out of me.”

  “Swimming and bicycling might be nice,” the woman said as she stepped nearer to her husband and pressed herself against him.

  “But that isn’t the thing,” Henry Layberg concluded. “I may be bored and I may not, but I’ll go to my grave knowing which. And … Jeanie, I think I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too, Henry,” said Sara Jean.

  * * *

  “Arlene!” he called as he heard the hall door open. “Arlene, where the hell have you been?” As he got a look at his wife, Dave Myaschensky blurted, “Like that?”

  Arlene closed the door behind her. She wore her shoes, her bra, and a towel that was a good deal less ample than the hips which it draped. “Upstairs at Laura’s,” she said. “She let me use her shower. We talked.” The woman tossed the slacks she carried and the towel over the back of a chair as she walked toward the bedroom and her clean clothes. Bruises were particularly prominent on her shoulders and the wobbling inner side of her thighs.

  “Talked about this, did you?” her husband said. He waved a fan of eight-by-ten-inch prints. They were still damp enough to sling water from their trailing edges. “Just come and have a goddamn look at what you did!”

  Arlene paused in the bedroom doorway. She walked back to her husband. Her calm as she stood almost nude in view of the living room windows would have struck him as amazing if he had not been so upset himself. “Look at this!” Dave shouted. He slapped a print into her hands. “Or this one!”

  The woman looked at the first print carefully and held the other in her free hand for comparison. It seemed to her to be surprisingly good, though she had never been able to accept black-and-white photographs as real the way color ones were. The subject was one of the winged insects against a tree trunk. The wings were slightly raised and enough out of focus that their veins were a suggestive blur instead of being the sharp pattern of lacework that Arlene had seen on the original. Still, the body was clear enough to show the ruffs of fine hairs at each joint of the abdomen and the legs.

  The second print … well, it was a different insect, shot at enough of a frontal angle on its perch that the abdomen trailed off in a blur indistinguishable from the bark. Still, the creature’s frontal parts including its side-spread wings had razor-sharp definition. Like the other, the photograph was much better than Arlene had hoped to achieve.

  “All right,” she said to her husband, “I think they’re pretty good. What’s the matter?”

  Dave’s face went white and his right arm drew back.

  “Don’t hit me, Dave,” Arlene said in a voice which had no emotional loading at all.

  Her husband swung open-handed. Arlene raised her left arm with the care she would have used to position a circuit board for hookup. Dave’s wrist struck the point of her elbow, numbing his hand by the force of its own blow. Arlene’s mind was a magenta blur of recalled emotions. She straightened her right arm, crumpling the prints against her husband’s chest and hurling him back over a chair. The small man crashed to the floor with a look of amazement on his face.

  “Don’t hit me,” his wife repeated as flatly as she had said the words before.

  Arlene closed her eyes and shuddered from her neck to her calves. When she looked up again, she began to straighten the photographs against a sofa cushion. For the first time since her return, she seemed to be aware that the blinds were not drawn. The prints which Dave had not given her were scattered across the floor beside him. “What was the matter with the pictures?” Arlene asked without looking directly at her husband.

  Dave Myaschensky got to his feet slowly. He touched his chest where Arlene had straight-armed him. “Look at the legs,” he said. “Look at how many legs they’ve got.”

  His wife knew as little about entomology as the next person, but that was enough to understand the problem when it was directly stated. “Eight legs,” she said. “So they can’t be insects, they’
re spiders.”

  “They’re not goddamn spiders,” Dave shouted, “and they’re for sure not spiders with wings. They’re fakes is what they are—goddamn fakes!” His fists clenched, but he did not step closer and swing.

  Arlene smiled coldly and unconsciously; then her face smoothed. “They weren’t fakes, Dave,” she said as she looked again at the photographs. “All of them were moving, were flying around. It was so long ago, a hundred million years or whatever. Couldn’t they have evolved since?”

  Pallid anger flared briefly across the entomologist’s face again. It replaced itself with nervous surprise, a copy of his expression as he’d sprawled over the chair. “They don’t evolve into two fewer legs, Arlene,” Myaschensky said in a perfectly reasonable voice. “Any more than we could breed six-legged cows. It doesn’t work that way.”

  He picked up one of the scattered prints and stared at it. On this one, the wings of the subject blurred not from focus problems but because the wings were fluttering. “Damn,” Myaschensky said softly. “If they’re not fakes, Arlene, then something else is wrong. Because nothing built like this ever lived on Earth.”

  * * *

  The structure into which they threw Charles Eisley was cylindrical and about ten feet both in height and diameter. The diplomat rolled to a sitting position cautiously. Each of the dozens of aliens around him had carried a weapon. The ones which were not actively engaged in putting up the prefabricated structure kept their disk-topped guns pointed determinedly at their prisoner, even while he was firmly lashed to the tank carrying him. Either the eight-limbed creatures were ridiculously nervous, or something had occurred to give Charles a reputation he could not justify. Perhaps they thought the carnivore had been under his control when it tore into the first patrol.

  The building, the cell, was solid except for its door, which had disappeared as soon as it slammed shut, and the two fist-sized holes carved in its side walls. The building material had looked thick but spongy, like Styrofoam sheets, to Eisley when he watched the hasty construction. It was indeed foam; but now that Eisley could touch it, he found the material was as hard and unyielding as concrete. The tip of Eisley’s pen scraped along the wall, scarring the metal without leaving a mark on the structure.

  The door fitted flush without need of gaskets; there was no sign of a latch or handle on the inner side. The structure had obviously been intended to be gas tight: except for the two gun-carved holes in the walls, it still was. Charles walked to one of the air vents and fingered it. The hole was too small to pass even his hand. His skin began to prickle.

  Eisley jumped back, instinctively connecting the touch of the dense foam with the tingle over his body. The tingle continued. Hope leaped high in the diplomat’s breast as he recalled the similar feeling an instant before he and Sue had found themselves stumbling on a grassy slope. The tingling had almost been lost in the vibration which permeated the engineering building, but surely this was the same—and surely it meant that he was about to shift back to the world he had known that morning.

  Nothing changed for seconds, for the minute during which Charles forced himself to stare at the digits flickering across the window of his watch.

  A door opened outward with angry suddenness.

  Eisley’s mind jumped and his muscles all sprang taut, although his body did not move perceptibly. The diplomat’s instincts were those of any man, but his formal training for years had been to wait, not act.

  There was little that action could have accomplished anyway, except to get the captive dismembered by the six waiting guards who were standing in an arc outside the doorway so that their weapons could sweep almost the whole interior of the cell. Eisley stared at the aliens for a moment before the arc split to either side and the nose of a vehicle slid against the doorway hard enough to jar the structure.

  The prisoner had no time to grasp the whole of the vehicle before a portion of its flat bow blocked the door opening and all real view through it. All Eisley could see was a black sheet similar to the viewscreens of the utility vehicles. This close, the material had a suggestion of internal pebbling like that of heavy stained glass.

  “What’s your name?” the black sheet asked in excellent English. The voice had a noticeably southern—even black—tinge to it.

  “My name is Charles Eisley,” the diplomat said. He crossed his hands behind the small of his back. It was a trick developed from reception lines, to keep his shoulders straight and his hands out of the way. “Who, may I ask, are you?”

  The demands broadcast by the vehicles hunting him had obviously been prerecorded and mindless. Eisley was expecting the same situation here, though perhaps with an array of stock phrases which might be tailored to the situation. The bodiless voice chuckled and said, “Why, you can call me Vrage, Mr. Eisley. And you can forget about handing me a line of bullshit because you figure you’ll snap back to where you came from in a few minutes. We’re holding you and whatever all you came with right here. Feel the charge? We’re using our own drive to stabilize you right here.”

  “I don’t understand,” Eisley said. It was intellectually the truth. The way his belly chilled and solidified hinted that his body, at least, understood very well. He took a step forward to increase the illusion that he had free will.

  “How did you get here?” the voice asked.

  “You’re human, aren’t you?” the diplomat said. For the moment it seemed better to act on a basis of assumed equality with his captors. “How did you meet these, these aliens?”

  Torture of prisoners was a regular part of several of the political systems on which Charles had reported as a part of his duties. Like cotton production or voting patterns, torture was not a thing which had ever touched him personally. Feeling otherwise meant that the plainclothes police who escorted you were imagined attaching electrodes to a prisoner’s genitals—as indeed might be the men’s duty the next day. That attitude of detachment meant the burst of high-frequency noise which lashed Eisley was wholly unexpected.

  He lost physical control and perhaps consciousness for a fraction of a second. The side effect of Vrage weapons firing had been gratingly unpleasant. This was deliberate and focused, enormously greater in both amplitude and range of frequencies. Charles received it not as a sound but as a blow across the entire frontal surface of his body. He fell to his knees. Even then he had to fling his hands out to keep from sprawling headlong.

  “You’re alive, Eisley, because it’s quicker for us if you are,” said the voice.

  The world was pulsing around Eisley. He closed his eyes. The fluids in his eustachian tubes surged in time with yellow flashes across the back of his eyelids. He gagged to keep from vomiting.

  “You don’t have to be alive, it’s just quicker—if you’re willing to answer questions.” The voice throbbed in a universe of lights and bile. Charles could hear it with perfect clarity, but it rose and fell against a background not of noise but of white velvet. “Raise your head, now, Eisley,” it coaxed. “Look at me for a moment and you’ll understand why you have to be reasonable.”

  Charles took his hands from the floor and slowly opened his eyes. His reluctance to do so was entirely subconscious, a certitude in his body that he would begin to vomit if he opened himself to the external world again. In fact, the hard outlines of the door and the seams of floor and wall damped his nausea and made a human being of him again. He rose to his feet, only a little wobbly. “You can do as you please, I suppose,” he said with dignity, “but you have neither right nor reason to punish me. I—”

  The blank, black plate filling the doorway went translucent. It cleared in a vortex like that of a toilet flushing. The interior of the vehicle became visible through a network of shadows. Charles Eisley had been logically certain that the Vrage who spoke to him in normal English had to be human—had to be an American, in fact, although the purple-suited creatures with the guns were neither.

  It was no subconscious surprise, however, that the creature which sprawled
behind the screen was a grossly distorted version of those in atmosphere suits. The eight limbs of what had called itself the Vrage were approximately the size of those of the others; the thorax to which both legs and arms attached was bulkier but still basically the same.

  There parity ended. The abdomen of the suited aliens, each approximately the size and shape of a basketball, hung in the midst of the four legs and did not appear to affect the creatures’ ability to run quickly. The abdomen of the creature speaking to Eisley was the size of a boar’s carcass and contorted rearward. It must have weighed several hundred pounds, several times as much as the remainder of the Vrage’s body. The creature could have moved itself unassisted only by dragging that dead weight like a broken-backed snake.

  It wore no clothing within the sealed environment of its vehicle. The ellipsoidal pucker in the middle of its chest must have been the mouth which was missing from the low-domed head. The skin, baggy at the joints, was a variety of mottled colors with red predominating, giving it somewhat the effect of a fall woodland. On an animate creature the pattern looked diseased.

  The Vrage was inhuman, but more or less as expected. The brain in a transparent vat beside the Vrage was not expected, and it looked quite human.

  “We already met a couple of your friends, you see,” said the alien. “This one was named Thurmond.” No part of the creature from which the sound could have come was moving, neither head nor presumed mouth. One of the creature’s arms did reach out to stroke the vat, however. The brain within stirred sluggishly. Transparent tubes running across its pink-white surface were barely visible because the fluids they carried had indices of refraction different from that of the supporting bath.

  “We would have had to sacrifice them anyway,” the voice continued, “to learn enough to be able to deal with you this way. It didn’t matter, since somebody transported them to our homeworld, not here.” Laughter, deep and resonant, rolled from the horrible tableau. “Not a good thing to do if you need to breathe oxygen, no. Somebody played them for fools. Played you for a fool, too, dumping you here for a decoy. You’d better tell me just what happened.”