Of Man And Manta - Ox Part 12

Actually, the apertures were two-way. They were really tunnels between alternates that one could move through in either direction. The trouble was that the device could not be activated from the far side. No doubt in time the technicians would develop a key for that purpose -- or perhaps they had already but simply hadn't gotten it into production yet. Alternate-projection was a nascent science.

She expected no difficulty but took no unnecessary chances. She wrote a short message addressed to Calvin Potter and attached it to the generator.

Veg emerged. It had only been a couple of minutes, but the agent had worked extremely rapidly. All was in order.

"What's that?" he asked.

"An aperture generator," she said, rising to approach him.

"You mean you had one of those all along?" he demanded. "We could have gone back anytime?"

"Yes and no," she said. "I could have used it anytime -- but it is a calculated risk. Our aperture technology is emergent; we seem to have less than a fifty per cent reliability of destination."

"You're getting too technical for me," Veg said, eying her displayed torso again. But she knew he understood the essence; he merely liked to a.s.sume a posture of country-boy ignorance when anyone used difficult words. This window might or might not take them back where they started from.

"We set our aperture projector on Paleo for Earth," she said. "Instead, it opened onto the machine desert. This one has a complementary setting. It should take us back to where the other one is. But it may not."

"We?" he asked. "You can go where you want to; I'm staying with my friends."

She could knock him out and toss him through. But she wanted his cooperation in case of emergency, and it was always better to keep things positive when possible. "I thought it would be more private this way," she said, using her specific muscular control to twitch her left breast suggestively.

The suggestion scored. But with his flare of desire came immediate suspicion. "What do you want with me?"

Time for a half-truth. "These generators are two-way -- but it is better to have an operator. When I'm over there" -- she indicated the prospective field of the projector -- "I can't turn it on again over here. And if it doesn't open in the right place, I could be stranded." She shrugged, once more making a signal with her decolletage. "That might please some of you, but..."

"Uh-uh," he said, giving her one more correct call. "We're all human beings, up against things we don't understand. We've got to stick together."

"That's right. So -- "

"So you want me to cross over first? No thanks! I did that before and almost got gobbled by a machine."

"No, I'll go," she said.

He relaxed, his suspicion warring with his desire to believe her. She knew Cal had warned him not to get involved with an agent. "Then you want me to turn it on in an hour to bring you back?"

"Yes." She took a breath, skillfully accentuating the objects of his gaze in yet another ploy. "Of course..."

"Not much privacy," he remarked, "if I'm here and you're there." Now he was getting angry, as the lure retreated, despite her seeming agreement to his prior objections. Fish on a hook.

"Well, the projector can be set to go on automatically after a certain period. A simple clockwork timer. And the limit is not necessarily an hour. It's a combination stress-time parameter with a safety factor. We could slip a load of five hundred pounds through -- twice the normal -- but then we'd have to wait four hours to return. The time multiplies at the square of the ma.s.s, you see. For sustained use, two hundred and fifty pounds per hour is the most efficient."

"I see," Veg said. "So we could both go through. Together we wouldn't weigh more than three fifty -- "

"Three sixty."

"Hold on! I'm two hundred, and you can't be more than one thirty -- "

"You're two-oh-five; you have prospered in the wilderness, I'm one fifty-five, including my hardware."

"You sure don't look it!"

"Heft me."

He put his big hands under her elbows and lifted her easily. "Maybe so," he said. "Sure no fat on you, though."

"Agents are more solid than they look. Our bones are laced with metal -- literally. And the android flesh with which we are rebuilt is more dense than yours. But you're right: no fat in it."

"I know you're tough," he agreed, not altogether pleased. "Still, might be safer if we both went in case there were bad trouble at the other end."

She would be better off alone if there were real trouble. But that was not the point. "Yes. But then there would be a long, uninterrupted wait -- and no one could reach us." She breathed again.

Veg was not slow to appreciate the possibilities. Two, perhaps three completely private hours with this seductive woman! "Safety first!" he said. "Let's go take a look."

He had taken the bait, lured by the thrill of exploration as well as her own enticements. And she really had not had to lie. It was safer with two, in a routine crossover, and the limitations of the generator were as she had described.

She really had taken more trouble than strictly necessary to bring him along. A knockout or a straight lie would have done the job in seconds. But either of these techniques would have led to complications later. This way, not only would he serve as an effective hostage -- he could be of genuine a.s.sistance in a variety of circ.u.mstances. All she had to do was prepare him.

She could do a lot with a man in three hours.

"All right," she said. "You're armed?" She knew he was; she was merely alerting him.

He nodded. "I keep a knife on me. I lost my other hardware to that machine back in the desert."

"If there's any long-distance threat, I'll cover it."

He glanced once more at her half-exposed b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "Yeah -- like Taler."

She laughed honestly this time, knowing he knew there was no jealousy between agents. She set the return aperture timer for three hours, leaving a reasonable margin for recharging, then activated the projector.

As the sphere formed, she drew him through the aperture beside her.

There was no pa.s.sage of time, just the odd transfer wrench. They emerged in a world apart. Where there had been surrealistic buildings, now were trees.

Not the desert world. She had been afraid of this.

"Not Paleo, either -- or Earth," Veg said, for once divining her thoughts before she read his.

Tamme looked about warily. "How do you know? This is a forest -- and there are forests on both worlds."

"This is the forest primeval," he said, unconsciously borrowing from American literature.

"Evangeline," Tamme said.

"Who?"

"Longfellow's poem from which you quoted. Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, vintage 1847."