Mindbridge

  And in a low bowl, protected by mountains on all sides, a sudden alien splash of green. Gardenspot. They dipped over it but didn’t land. The floater was homing toward where the LMT was being built, in another valley beyond.

  It had taken six months to manufacture a crystal large enough to be practical and also free of internal flaws; a crystal with one microscopic bubble inside will explode with disconcerting force when you turn on the juice.

  The crystal was in place and calibrated now, but the installation bore little resemblance to the streamlined efficiency of Colorado Springs. The first sign of it Tania’s team saw was a glittering metallic spiderweb covering acres of mountainside-the antenna that collected power from an orbiting microwave laser. A few kilometers away the actual station sat, an aluminum dome dwarfed by four concentric rings of huge squat metal cylinders, which were the fuel cells fed by the antenna. Cables linked everything in a confusing but graceful skein of catenaries.

  They landed on a small concrete square by the entrance to the dome, between two larger vehicles that were obviously of local design and manufacture. There was nothing green here, just dark red dust that crunched underfoot.

  A man dressed only in shorts met them at the door. He led them around back to a crude winch arrangement, where they climbed out of their GPEM suits.

  Inside, he gave them homespun shorts and showed them the crystal.

  “Ninety centimeters,” he said. “I’m afraid it can only transport two at a time. Or one, with equipment.”

  “No facilities for sterilization,” Tania said.

  “Not really. We can seal off the dome and heat everything inside-specimens included, I’m afraid.”

  “It works, though?” Jacque said. “The crystal?”

  “Sure. We’ve sent people to Sixty-one Cygnus and Vega.”

  “Not Sirius?”

  “Not yet. We don’t want to send anybody on a blind jump.”

  “You’re still calibrating, then,” Gus said.

  “For Sirius, yeah. We’ve lost eight probes doing longer and longer jumps.” The shorter a jump, the bigger its target has to be.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Tania said.

  “Well, it means there’s no planet in the system the size of earth or bigger. . . or maybe there is. Maybe the L’vrai destroy our probes before they can slingshot back.

  “There’s one due back tomorrow, a ten-day jump. You can spend the night in town and come back with me in the morning.”

  “Fine,” Tania said. “It’s been a long day.”

  He laughed. “Nothing but long days on this planet.” Hell’s axis was almost perpendicular to the ecliptic. Tau skimmed along the southern horizon for a ten-hour-long sunrise during the day; for night, they had ten hours of twilight.

  They drove back to Gardenspot with the controller, whose name was Eliot Sampson. The ride on the electric truck was slow and bumpy.

  They crawled up a long rise beyond which Sampson had said it was all downhill to town. When they got to the top, he slammed on the brakes.

  “I’ll be damned. Look at that.” Suspended over Gardenspot was a large white-and-gray cloud. It was floating toward them.

  “What,” Jacque said, “A cloud?”

  “Right, a cloud, a cloud.” He put the truck in gear and lurched on down the hill. “I forgot,” he shouted over the whining motor, “today’s the big cloud-seed experiment. See whether local rain can be . . . can compete with irrigation.”

  A few big drops spattered the windshield, leaving brown mud tracks in the dust. “Nothing but fossil water here,” he said, “but lots of it. Underground lakes, rivers. We can pump it up, surround Gardenspot with standing water. Water vapor in the air.” He laughed wildly.

  Jacque had braced himself between the metal seatback and the dashboard, knuckles turning white. “Say, aren’t you going a little fast?”

  “No, hell, all I ever do is drive this road. Want to get there before-“ Suddenly they were drenched, blinded by a solid sheet of water. The rear wheels of the truck decided they wanted to lead for a while.

  They spun around several times, wheels trying to find traction under the thin layer of sudden mud. Finally they slid into a ditch and came to a jarring halt. The first rain in a million years had caused the planet’s first traffic accident.

  The driver got a bloody nose and Jacque wrenched his shoulder, but there were no other injuries. The rain stopped while they were still pushing on the truck and listening to apologies.

  “Sixty seconds now.” Eliot Sampson looked up from the control board and, with the rest of the small crowd, stared at the waiting crystal.

  “I just thought of something,” Carol whispered.

  “What’s that?” Jacque said.

  She took his hand. Her palm was moist and cold. ‘What if . . . what if the probe doesn’t come back alone? What if some L’vrai is inside the slingshot radius?”

  “Forty-five,” Sampson said.

  “Seems unlikely,” Jacque said. “Crystal’s not that big.”

  “Still. There isn’t a weapon in this place.”

  Jacque shook his head. “Probe won’t even come back, probably.” He stepped to the wall and removed a heavy pair of boltcutters hanging there; he hefted the tool like a club. “Better than nothing.”

  Sampson looked at him quizzically. “Thirty seconds. What are you doing, Lefavre?”

  Some of the others caught on. “Move up here, Jacque,” Tania said. She was one of a half-dozen sitting closest to the crystal. “Just in case.”

  “Oh. I see,” Sampson said. He started to count down from twenty. Jacque moved directly in front of the crystal and planted his feet in a wide solid stance. He had never played baseball or cricket, but he stared at the air over the crystal like a batter sizing up his strike zone.

  “Zero—God!”

  The probe was a squat black four-legged machine cluttered with instruments. Three severed tentacles clutched one side of it, pale white and writhing, spraying droplets of iridescent green fluid. Jacque half-swung and then stepped back.

  The tentacles stopped squirming, relaxed, and dropped off. Tania broke the silence.

  “I guess we do have a mission.”

  Later that day they looked at the tapes from the probe. It hadn’t found a planet. It had come out of the LMT onto the hull of a L’vrai spaceship.

  It sat on the long black hull undisturbed for days. Its holo camera revealed eight other L’vrai vessels, nearby, slowly orbiting Sirius. There might have been a thousand others, out of camera range.

  Then a big spidery thing that could have been either a robot or an alien in a space suit-or just another L’vrai transmutation-scratched its way up the hull, captured the probe, and took it inside the ship through an iris in the hull.

  It left the probe in an empty room, where it sat unmolested for hours. Then a L’vrai came in, shuffling awkwardly on four stiff legs: it had taken the form of the probe, perhaps to put the machine at its ease, perhaps for some less obvious motive.

  The two machines regarded each other for some time. The probe’s instruments recorded no sound, no electromagnetic signal that might have been an attempt at communication. They just looked at each other for ninety-three minutes; then the bogus probe waddled out.

  It was replaced immediately by several L’vrai, in what was probably their natural form (if indeed they had a natural form). It was a versatile shape, rather like an octopus with a flexible skeleton. They had six or eight-varying with the individual-large tentacles that could serve as feet or crude two-fingered hands. A tubular thorax broadened into a scalloped crest at the top, where it sported three eyes; one large fixed one and two smaller eyes on articulated stalks, which waved from the corners of the crest. Under the fixed eye was a slit that occasionally curled open to reveal parallel rows of black shark-like teeth set in foamy mucus.

  Several small tentacles sprouted from under the crest, ending in various arrangements of fingers, hooks, and suckers. Some of them cha
nged form as they watched.

  Most of the body was a waxy, off-white color (the eyes were amber); the thorax was translucent, revealing dark pulsing shadows of organs. In the back were two slits that might have been excretory, genitals, or watch pockets.

  They were too odd-looking to be disgusting or terrifying.

  One of the L’vrai came in pushing a cart that hovered wheelless over the floor. It had two tiers of shiny metal instruments. He squatted down by the probe and the others watched as he fiddled with the machine.

  Most of what he did was out of the camera’s range. But after a few minutes of what looked like a parody of “scalpel. . . sponge. . . retractors.. .” he managed to disconnect or short out the power source, and the picture went dark.

  Sampson spun the tape ahead; there was nothing more to it.

  “That’s it,” he said. “What would you like to see again?”

  “Run it back to where they took the probe off the outside of the ship,” Tania said. “We’ll look at the whole thing again. And again. And get everybody who’s not on some vital duty to come study it.

  “Jacque, Carol, you better go get some sleep. Get pills; sleep for a couple of days if you can.”

  Carol nodded. “Ten-day jump?”

  “We can’t take a chance on a shorter one, not on such a small target. So it’ll probably be ten days without sleep.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll be along. I want to go through the tape once more and then set up the jump parameters with Eliot.” She patted Carol on the shoulder. “I don’t need as much sleep as you youngsters.”

  “Youngsters,” Jacque said. “See you later, Mom. Don’t stay up too late.”

  They went by the medical building to get sleeping pills and tell the woman in charge how they needed to modify the pharmaceutical systems in their GPEM suits. She said she could set up the personnel recorder to monitor the level of fatigue poisons in their blood, and compensate with small doses of joy juice. It would be a strain, though. They’d pay a big price when they got back-narcolepsy alternating with paranoiac insomnia. And old-fashioned cold turkey.

  That’s all right, they said. Cross that bridge, etc.

  They went to the transients’ longhouse, pushed two of the narrow beds together, and unfolded privacy screens around them.

  Undressed, Jacque stretched out on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Carol nestled up next to him. He scratched her back listlessly.

  “Ten days,” Jacque said. “We aren’t going to make it.”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “God knows what those monsters can come up with in ten days.”

  “It doesn’t do any good to worry about it.”

  “Riley didn’t say anything about ten days.”

  “He couldn’t have known. We had a chance to say no.”

  “Sure. But it gets to me. I don’t feel like dying this particular-“

  “Stop it!”

  “Sorry. Thinking aloud. We have the magnets, we might be all right.”

  “We will,” she whispered. She rolled over and pulled him to her and held him fiercely. “We will.”

  43 - Job Description

  It is 22 January 2054 and John Riley enters the conference room and says hello to the five people seated around the seminar table. He passes each one of them a single sheet of paper:

  Mission Chronology:

  PHASE I:

  24 Jan. Passive courier to Groombridge 1618. He will remain on Groombridge for 21 days, obtaining two bridges, detoxified by Thanos volunteer. Without touching the bridges himself, he will bring them back to Tamers Lefavre and Herrick.

  PHASE II:

  14 Feb. Tamer Jeeves’s team to Tau Ceti, 21 days.

  PHASE III-A:

  Date and duration to be set by Jeeves, Tau Ceti controller. LMT from Tau Ceti to Sirius: Jeeves, Lefavre (with bridge), and Wachal. Priorities: Gather information, survive, attempt to communicate, engage L’vrai in combat. Return with artifacts or prisoner if possible.

  PHASE III-B:

  Date and duration to be set by Hasenfel, Tau Ceti controller. If Jeeves, Lefavre, and Wachal do not return, Hasenfel and Herrick attempt the same mission (Herrick with bridge).

  PHASE IV:

  17 Feb. Research team to Tau Ceti, 12 days.

  PHASE V: Repeat Phase III as often as practical.

  PHASE VI:

  7 Mar. Slingshot translation to Earth.

  Tania scratches her head. “Doesn’t tell us much, really.”

  “I know,” says Riley. “All we can say for sure is that the Tau Ceti crystal is working. We got a note yesterday on a slingshot from a Sixty-one Cygni resupply mission, said they’d gotten a probe from Tau Ceti. We want to get you there as soon as possible.”

  “May I ask . . . why us?”

  “Well, the logic is clear. I know you aren’t the most experienced team available, not by a wide margin. But you do have Wachal,” he nods at her, “who has encountered the L’vrai on their own territory before, and Lefavre,” again, “who is more sensitive to the Groom-bridge Effect than any other Tamer. And besides, he’s bridged with the L’vrai before.”

  “That’s true,” Jacque says, “but my experience there would indicate you want somebody who’s not sensitive to the Effect. Not the other way around. They’re powerful.”

  “This has been taken into account,” Riley says. “This is why Tamer Herrick is holding the second bridge. She is relatively insensitive to the Effect, and Tamer Hasenfel is even less sensitive. If necessary, the bridge can be exposed to multiple contacts among the Tau Ceti personnel before Hasenfel touches it. So we are capable of a wide spectrum of sensitivity.”

  “In case it bums out my brain on the first try,” Jacque says flatly.

  “I wouldn’t put it so extremely. We admit the possibility-even a high probability-of psychological damage. But the Psych Group assures me that such damage would be reversible. And therapy would begin immediately; Dr. Sweeney himself will be on the Phase IV research team.”

  “Therapy as part of debriefing,” Jacque says.

  Riley exhales through his nose, twice, and says, “I can understand your apprehension, Lefavre. But one is a Tamer or one is not. You may refuse any mission.”

  “In a sense.”

  “In an absolute sense. All you have to do is say no.”

  Jacque chuckles lightly. “And miss seeing Sirius? Not on your life, Mr. Riley. No sir, not for the world.”

  “That’s the spirit, Lefavre.” Riley looks around the table. “Now that goes for everyone. I don’t deny that this is a perilous mission. If you want out, now’s the time. No trouble to make replacements at this stage.”

  Nobody says anything. Riley stands up. “Well, I’ve got to move on. Tomorrow you’ll go down to the Krupp factory and be fitted with modified GPEM’s, magnetic ones like Tamer Wachal used on Achernar.

  Thank you. You’re a good team.”

  The door sighs shut behind him. After a respectful interval of silence, Tamer Jacque Lefavre delivers his opinion:

  “Shit. Oh, shit.”

  44 – CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Tania went first. A ten-day jump to Sirius took enough power to almost completely drain the crystal’s fuel cells. Jacque and Carol had to wait forty-five minutes while they recharged.

  “Wonder if we’ll find one another,” Jacque said, standing by the crystal watching Sampson watch a dial.

  “That’s up to Tania.” She had the floater.

  “You can take your positions now,” Sampson said. “About two minutes.” Vivian and Gus raised their hands in a good-luck gesture. They were the only spectators-standing by GPEM-suited, in case something went wrong.

  After two minutes the control room suddenly disappeared and Jacque floundered in total darkness. “Carol!”

  She had been standing on his shoulders. “I’m here, Jacque . . . floating somewhere.”

  His retinas were adjusting to the darkness. A few stars were visible. Shee
pishly he remembered he’d set his optical circuits for the bright control room. He twisted the knob that controlled the sensitivity all the way to the left: stars grew bright all around him and, under his feet, the shiny black hull of a L’vrai ship.

  Carol’s helmet appeared above his head; then her shoulders. She was moving out of the spaceship’s shadow, into the light from Sirius.

  “I see you now. Are your boots on?” Their boots had magnetic soles.

  “Yes, but I guess I’m too far away. Turn on your lights, give me something to aim at.”

  Jacque did and Carol rotated slowly around, then threw him a line and he hauled her in.

  “Go see what the other side looks like?” Jacque said.

  “Just a second.” She wound the slender cable into a tight coil and slid it back into her thigh pocket. “Get anything from Tania?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “That’s not good.” Tania could be as much as a million kilometers away, much too far to travel on the floater in ten days. Or she might be on the other side of the ship.

  They walked around to the other side. Sirius was a bright dot the size of a pinhead; its dwarf companion, a faint point almost lost in the glare.

  “Jacque?” Tania’s voice was soft and blurred with static. “Carol? Do you read me?”

  They both answered at once. “Wait,” Tania said. “Give me a time reading; see how far away you are.”

  Jacque watched the digits shining just above his faceplate display. “Coming up on 11:14 . . . mark.”

  “Damn,” she said. “Second and a half, that’s a good half-million kilometers. Looks like we work alone.”

  “Guess so,” Jacque said. “Where are you,” Carol said, “are you on a ship?”

  Three-second lag. “No, you’re on a ship?”

  “On the outside of one, yeah,” Jacque said. “You found a planet, an asteroid?”

  “A rock, anyhow. Maybe two kilometers long.”

  “Will you just stay there,” Carol asked, “or go off looking for trouble?”

  “I’ve been looking for ships. Don’t want to take off without a-wait. Think I see one. Like a dim star but elongated. A short little line of light.”