Free Bridgehead by David Drake Page B

and gave Sara Jean an abstracted glance. Then he, too, disappeared up the stairs.
    Somewhat sheepishly, Selve carried his gun over to the locker. Sara Jean did not look up until the door leaves rang closed.
    Selve caught her eye and gave a brief, nervous smile through the chain-link fencing. “You’re all right?” he asked as he walked out of the enclosure.
    â€œI guess,” Sara Jean agreed. She took in his conservative but oddly cut suit. “You’re one of them, I suppose,” she said.
    He nodded. “My name is Selve,” he said. “I’m sorry. What happened to you must have been a terrible shock. Though I’m glad the problem has been solved, at least traced.”
    â€œI’d almost convinced myself it hadn’t happened,” the woman said with a glassy cheerfulness. “I was holding something in my hand—there. And it was gone when I was in the lab again, so I thought it hadn’t happened.” She had been brushing her hair up and back with her fingers as she spoke, lifting it away from her sweaty neck. Now she held her empty right hand out in front of her. “It was a vase. I’d never seen anything like it … just beautiful, very delicate.” She laughed. “I’m almost glad to know the—whatever happened was real. Because that vase deserves to be real.”
    Selve’s expression of diffident concern transfigured like a rosebud unfolding. He stepped, almost drifted, closer to Sara Jean and took her extended hand. “You saw my vases?” he said. “You liked them?”
    â€œWhy, they were yours?” Sara Jean said. Her own smile flashed as a mirror of his. “On the wall, and the bowls, too? Whatever do you make them out of? It surely can’t be ordinary clay.”
    â€œGoodness, you’re a potter, then,” the Traveler babbled. “Look, I think there’re chairs in the office—” They were already moving that way, hand in hand though with the formality of dancers in a minuet. “Everything out here would smudge your clothes. Doesn’t matter to me”—he flicked at the lapel of his suit with a deprecating thumb—“because the dirt won’t pass when we return to, ah, to our time.”
    Sara Jean perched rather self-consciously on Professor Gustafson’s desk. It did feel unexpectedly good to get off her feet. The office was still in a state of organized surfeit. Selve hesitated, then sat atop the books stacked on a chair instead of moving them.
    â€œI couldn’t ever have one of your vases, then,” the woman said as she thought over Selve’s comment about grime. “But you…?”
    Selve brightened again. He was not shy when he had a listener he considered sympathetic. “Not on the rebound, no, but on the initial transport, of course. As you were transported to where we came from, as I came here.” He tapped the chair on which he perched. “Not forever—there is always a rebound for matter; still in a state of matter, that is. But the duration of a transport can be very long, especially if the mass and volume in the field is kept small. Even without stabilization.”
    His excitement sagged away abruptly. “Ah,” he said, “it’s important that the public not know who we are just yet. It, well, the reasons are complex. It won’t matter very long, I think, now that the problem in the equipment has been found.”
    Sara Jean stood up and walked over to Selve. She put a hand on his arm. “‘Time travelers kidnapped me,’ says housewife,” she suggested aloud. “Don’t worry, I won’t be calling the newspapers.” Pursing her lips, she added, “But I will tell my husband, you know. I—it’s the sort of thing that he wouldn’t understand if I hid.” The reason for her sudden bleakness was as unclear to an outsider as Selve’s loss of animation a