A Bridge of Years

by Charles Robert Wilson

  Joyce repeated, “What is that?” There was only a tremor of uncertainty in her voice—she wasn’t frightened yet.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tom said. “Maybe we should get out while we can.”

  What he felt was not quite awe, not yet fear. The luminescence was bright and had taken on the suggestion of a shape. Tom hustled Joyce toward the exit, aware that he was in the presence of something he didn’t understand, something akin to the tunnel itself: strange, powerful, beyond his comprehension.

  This was the tunnel under the world, where demons and angels lived.

  He paused at the place where the broken brick and old lathing and plaster had collapsed, because it was impossible to resist the urge to turn and look. Joyce did the same.

  But the phenomenon had moved much faster than he’d guessed. It was almost on top of them.

  He drew a breath, stepped back instinctively—and caught his heel on a brick, and fell. Joyce said, “Tom!” and tried to drag him up. The creature hovered over them both.

  Tom couldn’t find a word for the thing suspended in the air above him, almost close enough now to touch. Briefly, his fear was crowded out by a kind of abject wonder.

  The shape of the apparition was indistinct—blurred at the edges—but approximately human.

  Later, Tom reviewed his memory of the event and tried to reconstruct the creature in his mind. If you took a map of the human nervous system, he thought, modeled it in blue neon and surrounded it with a halo of opalescent light—that might come close.

  It was translucent but not ghostly. There was no mistaking its physical presence. He felt the heat of it on his face. Joyce crouched beside him.

  The creature had stopped moving. It was watching them, he thought—perhaps with the two opaque spots which occupied the position of eyes; perhaps in some other fashion.

  This was terrifying—bearable only because the creature was utterly motionless.

  Tom counted silently to ten, then backed up the piled rubble an inch or so.

  The creature’s attention followed him. But only that.

  Joyce looked at him. He could tell by the grip of her hand that she was deeply frightened but still in control. He whispered, “Back up slowly. If it moves, stand still.”

  He didn’t doubt the creature’s immense power; he felt it all around him, felt it in the radiant heat on his exposed skin.

  Joyce nodded tightly and they began to inch up the rubble and out of the tunnel. It occurred to Tom that this was the instinctive response to a dangerous large animal, no doubt wildly inappropriate here. He stared into the creature’s eyespots and knew—absolutely wordlessly—that its interest in them was intense but momentary; that it could kill them if it wished; that it hadn’t decided yet. This wasn’t the random indecision of an animal but something much more focused, more intimate. A judgment.

  Gazing into that pale blankness, he felt naked and small.

  They had almost reached the welcome darkness of the basement when the creature vanished.

  Later, he argued with Joyce about the way it had disappeared. Tom maintained that it simply blinked out of existence; Joyce said it had turned sideways in some way she couldn’t describe—“Turned some corner we couldn’t see.”

  They agreed that its absence was as sudden, absolute, and soundless as its appearance.

  Joyce scrambled through the dark basement, pulling Tom up the stairs. He felt her trembling. This is my fault, he thought.

  He made her wait while he put the hasp of the lock back on the wooden door. He fumbled in his pocket for the three screws and the dime to drive them with, sank the first two home and then dropped the last. Joyce said, “Christ, Tom!” —but held a match in one unsteady hand while he groped on his knees. The screw had rolled under the edge of the door and for one sinking moment he thought he’d have to pry off the hasp a second time to get the last screw back, which would be next to impossible in this dark bad-smelling basement full of who-knows-what-kind-of-impossible-monsters— but then he caught the head of the screw with his fingernail and managed to retrieve it.

  He was as meticulous as his shaking hands would allow. He didn’t want anyone to know he’d been here—though maybe that was impossible. But the idea of one more barrier between himself and the tunnel, no matter how flimsy, was reassuring.

  He tightened the last screw and pocketed the dime. They climbed the stairs toward the lobby, Joyce leading now.

  He pictured the top door, the one he’d opened with a credit card and Joyce’s key. A terrifying thought: what if it had slipped shut? What if the bolt had slammed home and he couldn’t open it again?

  Then he saw the crack of light from the lobby, saw Joyce groping for the door, saw it open; and they tumbled out together, unsteady in the light, holding each other.

  Twelve

  Billy’s nerves were steadier by the time he got home, and for two days after that he resisted his urgent need for the armor.

  He told himself he needed time to think; that there was nothing to be gained by acting impulsively.

  The truth was, he feared the armor almost as much as he feared the violation of the tunnel.

  Feared it as much as he wanted it.

  The days grew long, hot, sullen-bright and empty. His apartment was sparsely furnished; he owned a sofa, a brass bed, a Westinghouse TV set and an alarm clock. He left the windows open and a warm breeze lifted the skirts of the white lace curtains. Through the endless afternoon Billy listened to the ticking of the clock and the sound of traffic on the street below.

  Listened to the hollow keening of his own unbearable hunger.

  He was afraid of his armor because he needed it.

  He would never stop needing it … but here was a fact Billy didn’t like to think about: the armor was getting old.

  Billy did all the maintenance he could. He kept the armor clean and dry; he ran all the built-in diagnostics. But there was no way to repair any serious damage in this extravagant but technically primitive era. Already some of the more complex subroutines had begun to function sporadically or not at all. Eventually the armor’s main functions would begin to falter, despite their multiple redundancies—and Billy would be left with his fierce hunger, his terrible need, and no way to satisfy or end it.

  To postpone that apocalypse Billy had taught himself to hoard the armor, to use it sparingly and only as often as his body demanded.

  He resisted the urge, now, because he wanted to think. It occurred to him that there were lots of ways to handle this crisis. The obvious fact was that another time traveler had entered the city. But the time traveler might be anyone or anything; might have an interest in Billy or might not. Maybe no one really cared about him. .Maybe this intruder would leave him alone.

  The other (and, Billy thought, more likely) possibility was that the time traveler knew all about Billy and the secrets he had prised from the woman with the wedge of glass in her head—that the time traveler wanted to punish or kill him. He had no evidence of this and some to the contrary; the intruder hadn’t tried to conceal his presence, and a good hunter would, wouldn’t he? Unless the hunter was so omnipotent he didn’t need to.

  The idea frightened him.

  Billy thought, I have two options.

  Run or fight.

  Running was problematic. Oh, he could get on a plane to Los Angeles or Miami or London; he knew how to do that. He could make a life for himself in some other place … at least as long as the armor continued to function.

  But he couldn’t live with the knowledge that they might still find him—the time travelers, the tunnel builders, unknown others. Billy didn’t relish living the rest of his years as prey. That was why he had stayed in New York in the first place: to mind the tunnel, check the exits.

  Therefore, he could fight.

  True, he didn’t know who or what the intruder might be. But maybe that was only a temporary difficulty. Much of his armor’s forensics were still working; Billy guessed he could lear
n a great deal if he examined the tunnel for clues.

  It all depended on the armor, didn’t it?

  His lifeline. His life.

  At last, he took it out of its hiding place.

  He had traded its cardboard box for a wooden chest of approximately two cubic feet in volume—he’d found it in a Salvation Army thrift shop. The chest was closed with a padlock. Billy placed great faith in padlocks; they seemed so much more substantial than the electronic locks of his own era. He wore the key attached to a belt-loop of his pants. Billy lifted the chest from the back of his closet and used the key to open it.

  The holes where the lancet and the stylet entered his body had almost healed—but it only hurt for a minute.

  He wore loose, layered clothing over the armor to conceal it.

  Billy knew how this made him look. He looked like an alcoholic, a bum. Seeing him, people would turn their faces away. But that wasn’t a bad thing.

  Underneath, the armor regulated his skin temperature, kept him cool, kept him alert.

  The armor was “turned off”—well below full combat capability. But its regulatory functions were automatic. The armor sampled his blood, his nervous impulses. A gland in one of the elytra synthesized new hormones and drip-released them into his body. He was alert, happy, confident.

  He was awake.

  Life is sleeping, Billy thought. The armor is waking up. Funny how he always forgot this in the long gray passages of his fife; how he remembered it when he put the armor on. It was like coming out of a trance.

  All his doubts dissolved. He felt the way he imagined a wolf must feel: fiercely focused and dizzy with the pleasure of the hunt.

  He went to the building where his pensioners lived, at the junction of time and time.

  He installed two new locks he’d bought at a hardware store yesterday: a new knob set for the door in the lobby and a new padlock for the door farther down. If one of the tenants happened to see him while he was working Billy was prepared to offer an excuse for the way he was dressed—but no one came by except a delivery boy with a box of groceries for Amos Shank, up the stairs and out again without speaking.

  Then Billy was in the basement, where no one ever went.

  He installed the new padlock and hooked the key to the loop on his belt. Now Billy jingled when he walked.

  Then he followed the stone stairs down to the lowest level of the building, the sub-sub-basement where the tunnel began, where one of his concussion grenades had taken out a wall and sealed the empty space behind it—where the rubble had been cleared away again to make a passage.

  He didn’t like coming down here. Armor or not, he didn’t like the tunnel. The tunnel made him think of the time ghost he had encountered in it, a mystery even Ann Heath had not been able to explain, a fiery monstrosity with a queasily organic internal structure pulsing under the bright membrane of its skin. Ten years ago now: but the memory was still painfully fresh. The creature had come close enough to singe the hair from the right side of his head. He had smelled the stink of his own burning for days afterward.

  Was it a time ghost that had come after him now?

  Billy didn’t think so. Ann Heath had said they never appeared outside the tunnels; the tunnels were their habitat; they lived in these temporal fractures the way certain bacteria lived in the scalding heat of volcanic springs. Whatever had come through the door, Billy thought, it must be at least approximately human.

  He clambered over the scattered rubble into the mouth of the tunnel. He looked apprehensively into the blank, white distance; but there was no time ghost, not now, and he guessed there probably wouldn’t be; Ann Heath had said they were dangerous but seldom seen. Nevertheless, Billy stayed close to the entranceway. How strange to have made this transition so easily. Billy had damaged the tunnel so that it had a single destination, a house in the Pacific Northwest some thirty years in the future, and he had sealed that entranceway and killed that, time traveler and therefore no one should have come through … but there were footprints in the dust.

  Sneaker-prints.

  There was a great confusion of these prints and Billy wondered—nervous in the brisk, pale light of the tunnel— whether the intruder might have come from the other direction: discovered the tunnel in Manhattan and followed it into the future.

  But no—the lock on the door had been broken from the inside.

  Someone who had stumbled onto the tunnel at its other terminus, somewhere near the end of the century?

  That was possible—even encouraging. Billy had assumed that gateway was all but unusable; still, after a decade, he supposed someone might have opened it somehow. This new possibility made him more optimistic. He would have to hunt the intruder down and kill him, of course; he needed to be the tunnel’s only proprietor. It was a secret too important to share. But an unsuspecting civilian from the near future would be easy prey.

  Still, he shouldn’t count on that. Prepare for hard battle, hope for a vulnerable target.

  He cast a final glance down the empty tunnel, then switched on his forensic programs.

  He was able to learn a great deal.

  His armor detected and memorized fingerprints from the cellar walls, skin samples where the intruder had cut himself on a shard of glass projecting from the rubble. The intruder was quite human, a male, type 0+ blood. Back home, a competent laboratory might have been able to put together a portrait of the man from a simple genome projection, assuming the samples were more or less intact. But Billy didn’t have that capacity; he needed another means of tracking his prey.

  The enormity of the task was daunting. It might be impossible—a civilian joyriding from the future might be anywhere. Might have jumped a plane to some familiar place. Invested money in the stock market and set off on a tour of his own recent history.

  But the man had arrived here less than a month ago and Billy guessed he would need more time than that to adjust. After all: his money was no good, his knowledge was valuable but difficult to cash in on. He might still be close by.

  But how to identify him?

  Billy ran a finger through the dust on the floor. Dust from his concussion grenade, dust from the foundation of the building. He opened a pouch in one of the elytra of his armor and withdrew the armor’s headset, a leathery black mask that covered his face entirely. He clipped an optical cable between the headset and the armor’s processors while his forensics sampled the dust and announced its constituents to Billy in a flickering eyepiece readout: limestone, sand, bedrock … and microscopic fragments of the tunnel itself: strange long-chain molecules that fluoresced in dim light, absorbing background radiation and leaking photons.

  Billy narrowed the bandwidth of his eyepiece to the frequency of strongest emission, then clambered back into the dark chamber of the basement.

  With his opticals adjusted, the dust was plainly luminescent.

  He stood in a starry blue limbo, very strange. The tip of his forefinger radiated light like a small constellation.

  How much of this dust had the intruder carried out of the building? How much would cling to him? To his shoes? To his clothes? For how long?

  Interesting questions.

  He stood in the tunnel a moment before he left.

  He took a step forward, his heart pounding. This was not a place, he reminded himself. It was a time machine. Each step carried him a measured distance forward: a week? a month? And what am I doing out there? Take a step: February? March? Is it snowing? Am I out in the snow? Am I hunting? Is the armor alive? Am I?

  Suppose he ran a hundred yards forward. 1963? 1964? Had the elytra failed? The gland dried up? Have I convulsed and died somewhere? Suppose he went even farther. Suppose he stood in some sheltered part of this tunnel where 1970 raged overhead, 1975, 1980: was Billy in his coffin in some potter’s field, buried a century before his own birth?

  He felt a sudden weightlessness, a kind of vertigo.

  It was better not to think about these things.

  Ho
me, he showered away all the dust still clinging to him; then he washed and shined the armor. He disliked taking the armor off. He hadn’t powered up entirely and the physical need was still urgent and unsatisfied. The lancet had left a painful sore on the right side of his abdomen; without the hormone drip he felt small, vulnerable, and nervous. But he needed to sleep. And it would be wasteful to sleep in his armor.

  Tomorrow, he promised himself. In the night.

  He dreamed of the Storm Zone, of armored combat, in the future, where he had once lived; and then of Ohio, the fierce summers and cold, snowless winters there. He dreamed of the bed he had slept in as a child, with a heater he was allowed to switch on in January and February; of bitter nights walking from the common store to the housing plex, frost on the ground and a horned moon overhead.

  He dreamed these things with a clarity so absolute and a sadness so piercing they could be sustained only in a dream. And then, finally, he dreamed the face of Nathan, his father.

  He woke wanting the armor.

  Even in New York City—even in 1962, in a city that was the axis around which much of the world revolved—the night was quieter than the day.

  Billy chose the stillest hours of the night, between three a.m. and dawn, to begin his search.

  He wore the armor snug to his body. He pulled on loose, filthy pants over the leggings. Over the elytra and the halteres he wore a torn athletic sweatshirt marked NYU, which he had found in a bin at a secondhand shop. He pulled up the hood to help disguise the headset; the headset was conspicuous but he needed its eyepiece. Over the sweatshirt Billy wore a slate-gray, threadbare coat that reached to his knees, the high collar turned up at his throat.

  Before he left the apartment he looked at himself in the chipped bathroom mirror.

  The black headset with its calibrated goggles projected from the hood of his sweatshirt like the muzzle of an animal.