He thought about Barbara, who had never much cared about the past but had longed for the future … the uncreated future in which there were no certainties, only possibilities.
Everywhere the same, Tom thought. 1962 or 1862 or 2062. Every acre of the world littered with bones and hope. He was indescribably tired.
He stepped into the hallway and sealed the apartment, which had contained a fair portion of his happiness, but which was empty now. He would be better off waiting with Doug in the car.
He was leaving the building when a taxi pulled up at the curb.
He watched Joyce pay the driver and step out into the rain.
Her clothes were instantly wet and her hair matted against her forehead. Her eyes were obscure behind rain-fogged lenses.
It was raining when they met, Tom recalled, a couple of months ago in the park. She had looked different then. Less tired. Less frightened.
She regarded him warily, then crossed the pavement.
He touched her wet shoulders.
She hesitated, then came into his arms.
“He was dead, Tom,” she said. “He was just lying there dead.”
“I know.”
“Oh, God. I need to sleep. I need to sleep a long, long time.”
She moved toward the lobby; he restrained her with his hands. “Joyce, you can’t. It’s not safe in there.”
She pulled away. He felt a sudden tension in her body, as if she were bracing herself for some new horror. “What are you talking about?”
“The thing—the man who killed Lawrence—I believe he meant to kill me. He must know about this place by now.”
“I don’t understand this.” She balled her fists. “What are you saying, that you know who killed Lawrence?”
“Joyce, it’s too much to explain.”
“He wasn’t stabbed, Tom. He wasn’t shot. He was burned open. It’s indescribable. There was a big hole burned into him. Do you know about that?”
“We can talk when we’ve found a safe place.”
“There’s no end to this, is there? Oh, shit, Tom. I’ve seen way too much ugliness tonight. Don’t tell me this shit. You don’t have to go inside if you don’t want to. But I need to sleep.”
“Listen, listen to me. If you spend the night in that apartment you could come out like Lawrence. I don’t want it to be that way but that’s the way it is.”
She looked at him fiercely … then her anger seemed to subside, swallowed up in an immense exhaustion. She might have been crying. Tom couldn’t tell, with the rain and all.
She said, “I thought I loved you! I don’t even know what you are!”
“Let me take you somewhere.”
“What do you mean, somewhere?”
“A long way from here. I’ve got a car waiting and I’ve got a friend inside. Please, Joyce.”
Archer put his head out the window of the Ford, shouting against the hiss of the rain—the words were unintelligible— then ducked back inside and revved the engine.
Tom felt his heart bump in his chest. He pulled Joyce toward the car.
She resisted and would have turned back, but a smoking gash opened in the concrete stoop a few inches from her hand. Tom looked at the blackened stone for a few dumb seconds before its significance registered. Some kind of weapon had done this: some kind of ray gun. This was ludicrous but quite terrifying. Archer leaned over the seat and jacked open the rear door of the car; Tom pushed Joyce toward it. She didn’t push back this time but was too shocked to coordinate her legs. She tumbled inside with Tom behind her, a motion that seemed endless, and the rain came down on the metal roof with a sound like gunfire.
Archer lunged his rental Ford into the street before Tom could close the door. He committed a 180-degree turn that left V-shaped skids on the wet asphalt, tires shrieking.
As the car rotated Tom caught a glimpse of the man who had tried to kill him.
If “man” was the word.
Not human, Tom thought.
Or, if human, then buried under some apparatus, a snoutlike headpiece, an old cloth coat humped across his back, oily in the rain and the glare of a streetlight.
His eyes were aimed at Tom through the rear window of the car. Nothing showed of his face except a wide, giddy smile … gone a moment later as Archer fishtailed the Ford around a corner.
They abandoned the car on a desolate street near Tompkins Square.
The sky seemed faintly brighter. The rain had slackened a little but the gutters were running and dark water dripped from the torn awning over the lobby of the tenement building which contained the tunnel.
Tom touched his shoulder, where a ferocious pain had just begun: a reflection or glancing shot from the marauder’s weapon had blistered a wide patch of skin there.
The three of them stood a moment in the empty lobby.
Tom said, “The last time we came this way there was something in the tunnel—”
“A time ghost,” Archer said. “They’re not real dangerous. So I’m told.”
Tom doubted this but let it pass. “Doug, what if he comes after us? There’s nothing stopping him, is there?” He kept an arm around Joyce, who was dazed and passive against his shoulder.
“He might,” Archer admitted. “But we know what to expect now. He can’t take us by surprise. The house is a fortress; be prepared—you might not recognize it.”
“This isn’t over,” Tom interpreted.
“No,” Archer said. “It isn’t over.”
“Then we ought to hurry.”
Tom led the way into the basement, over the heaped rubble and down an empty space into the future.
Seventeen
He slept for twelve hours in a bed he had never really thought of as his own and woke to find a strange woman gazing down at him.
At least, Tom thought, an unfamiliar woman—he had grown a little stingy with the word “strange.”
She occupied a chair next to the bed, a paperback Silhouette romance in her hands; she put the book splayed open on the knee of her jeans. “You’re awake,” she said.
Barely. “Do I know you?”
“No—not yet. I’m your neighbor. Catherine Simmons. I live in the big house up by the highway.”
He collected his thoughts. “Mrs. Simmons, the elderly woman—you’re what, her granddaughter?”
“Right! You knew Gram Peggy?”
“Waved to her once or twice. Delivered her paper when I was twelve years old.”
“She died in June … I came down to take care of business.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
He took a longer look around the room. Same room, same house, not much changed, at least this corner of it. He didn’t remember arriving here. The shoulder wound had gone from painful to incapacitating and he had crossed the last fifty yards of the tunnel with his eyes squeezed shut and Doug Archer propping him up.
The shoulder felt better now … He didn’t check for blisters but the pain was gone.
He focused his attention on Catherine Simmons. “I guess this isn’t the business you meant to take care of.”
“Doug and I sort of stumbled into it.”
“I guess we all did.” He sat up. “Is Joyce around?”
“I think she’s watching TV. But you’ll need to talk to Ben, I think.”
He supposed he would. “The TV’s working?”
“Oh, Ben was very apologetic about that. He says the cybernetics managed to scare you without warning you off. They were dealing with a situation way outside their expertise; they went about it all wrong. He made them fix the TV for you.”
“That’s very thoughtful of Ben.”
“You’ll like him. He’s a nice guy.” She hesitated. “You slept a long time … Are you sure you’re all right?”
“My shoulder—but that’s better now.”
“You don’t seem too pleased to be back.”
“Friend of mine died,” Tom said.
Catherine Simmons nodded. “I know how that is. Gram
Peggy was pretty important in my life. It leaves a vacuum, doesn’t it? Let me know if there’s something I can do.”
“You can bring me my clothes,” Tom said.
He reminded himself that he had climbed back out of the well of time and that this was the summer of 1989—the last hot summer of a hot decade, hovering on the brink of a future he couldn’t predict.
The house was a fortress, Archer had told him, and some of that showed in the living room: the furniture had been pushed back against the walls and the walls themselves were covered with a mass of gemlike machine bugs. It looked like a suburban outpost of Aladdin’s Cave.
Tom followed Catherine to the kitchen, where the machine bugs—a smaller mass of them—were dismantling the stove.
A man, evidently human, sat at the kitchen table. He stood up clumsily when Tom entered the room. “This is Ben,” Catherine said.
Ben the time traveler. Ben who had risen, like Lazarus, from the grave. Ben the custodian of this malfunctioning hole in the world.
He stood with one hand propped against a cane. His left leg was truncated, the denim tied shut between his knee and the place where his ankle should have been. He was pale and his hair was a faint, fine stubble over his scalp.
He offered his hand. Tom shook it.
“You’re the time traveler,” he said.
Ben Collier smiled. “Let’s sit down, shall we? This leg is still awkward. Tom, would you like a beer? There’s one in the refrigerator.”
Tom wasn’t thirsty. “You lived here ten years ago.”
“That’s right. Doug must have explained all that?”
“You were hurt and you were in that shed out in the woods. I think I owe you an apology. If I hadn’t gone haring off down the tunnel—”
“Nothing you’ve done or haven’t done is anybody’s fault. If everything had been working correctly the house would never have been for sale. You walked into a major debacle; you didn’t create it.”
“Doug said you were—he used the word ‘dead.’ Buried out there for some years.”
“Doug is more or less correct.”
“It’s hard to accept that.”
“Is it? You seem to be doing all right.”
“Well … I’ve swallowed a fair number of miracles since May; I suppose one more won’t choke me.”
He gave Ben a closer look. A ray of sunlight from the big back window had fallen across the time traveler and for a moment Tom imagined he saw the outline of the skull under the skin. An optical illusion. He hoped. “Maybe I’ll have that beer after all. You want one?”
“No, thank you,” Ben said.
Tom took a beer from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap. Welcome to the future: throw away that clumsy old bottle opener.
A stove grill clanked against the floor behind him and a brigade of machine bugs began hauling it toward the basement stairs.
Life, Tom thought, is very strange.
“They’re using the metal,” Ben explained. “Making more of themselves. It’s hard on the appliances, but we’re in fairly desperate straits at the moment.”
“They can do that? Duplicate themselves?”
“With enough raw material, certainly.”
“They’re from the future,” Tom said.
“Somewhat in advance of my own time, as a matter of fact. I found them a little repellent when I was introduced to the concept. But they’re extremely useful and they’re easy to conceal.”
“They can repair the tunnel?”
“They’re doing precisely that—among many other things.”
“But you said we were in ‘dire straits.’ So nothing is repaired yet and this so-called marauder—”
“Might choose to follow you here. That’s what we’re on guard against, yes.”
“But he hasn’t tried it yet. Maybe he won’t.”
“Maybe. I hope not. We do have to take precautions.”
Tom nodded; this was sensible. “How well protected are we?”
Ben seemed to ponder the question. “There’s no doubt we can stop him. What troubles me is that it might take too long.”
“I don’t understand.”
“From what I can reconstruct, the man is an armored conscript soldier, a renegade from the territorial wars at the end of the next century. In a sense, he isn’t really our enemy— the enemy is his armor.”
“I saw him in New York,” Tom said. “He didn’t look especially well armored.”
“It’s a kind of cybernetic armor, Tom. Thin, flexible, very sophisticated, very effective. It protects him from most conventional weapons and interacts with his body to improve his reflexes and focus his aggression. When he’s wearing the armor, killing is an almost sexual imperative. He wants it and he can’t help wanting it.”
“Ugly.”
“Much worse than ugly. But in a way, his strength is his weakness. Without the armor he’s more or less helpless; he might not even be inclined to do us harm. The fact that he took advantage of the tunnel to flee the war suggests his loyalty isn’t as automatic as his surgeons might have liked. If we can attack the armor we can neutralize the threat.”
“Good,” Tom said. He pulled at the beer. “Can we?”
“Yes, we can, in a couple of ways. Primarily, we’ve been building specialized cybernetics—tiny ones, the size of a virus. They can infiltrate his bloodstream and attack the armor … dismantle and disconnect it from the inside.”
“Why didn’t they do that in the first place?”
“These aren’t the units he was exposed to. They’ve been built expressly for the purpose. He had the advantage of surprise; he doesn’t have that anymore.”
“So if he shows up here,” Tom interpreted, “if he breathes the air—”
“The devices go to work instantly. But he won’t simply fall over and die. He’ll be functional, or partly functional, for some time.”
“How much time?”
“Unfortunately, it’s impossible to calculate. Ten minutes? Half an hour? Long enough to do a great deal of damage.”
Tom thought about it. “So we should leave the machine bugs and clear out of here. If he shows up, they can deal with him.”
“Tom, you’re welcome to do so if you like. I can’t; I have an obligation to protect the premises and direct the repair work. Also, we have weapons that might slow down the marauder while the cybernetics work on him. It’s important to keep him confined to the property. The machines inside him aren’t entirely autonomous. They need direction from outside, and if he moves beyond a certain radius they’ll lose the ability to communicate, might not be able to finish disarming him. He could cause a great deal of havoc if he wandered down to the highway.”
No doubt that was true. “Doug and Catherine—”
“Have volunteered to help. They’re armed and they know what to do if an alarm sounds.”
He asked the central question: “What about Joyce?”
“Joyce is making a difficult adjustment. She’s endured a great deal. But she volunteered her help as soon as she understood the situation.”
“Might as well make it unanimous,” Tom said.
He found Joyce in the back yard, in a lawn chair, reading the Seattle paper in the shade of the tall pines.
It was a cool day for August; there was a nice breeze bearing in from the west. The air carried the smell of pine sap, of the distant ocean, a faint and bitter echo of the pulp mill. Tom stood a moment, savoring all this, not wanting to disturb her.
He wondered what the headlines were. This wasn’t precisely the present, not exactly the future; he had come here by a twisted path, a road too complex to make linear sense. Maybe some new country had been invaded, some new oil tanker breached.
She looked up from the editorial page and saw him watching her. He came the rest of the way across the lawn.
She was an anachronism in her harlequin glasses and straight hair, beautiful in the shade of these tall trees.
Before he could frame a sente
nce she said, “I’m sorry about the way I behaved. I was tired and I was sick about Lawrence and I didn’t know how you were involved. Ben explained all that. And thank you for bringing me here.”
“Not as far out of danger as I thought it would be.”
“Far enough. I’m not worried. How’s your shoulder?”
“Pretty much okay. Enjoying the news?”
“Convincing myself it’s real. I watched a little TV, too. That satellite news station, what’s it called? CNN.” She folded the paper and stood up. “Tom, can we walk somewhere? The woods are pretty—Doug said there were trails.”
“Is it a good idea to leave the house?”
“Ben said it would be all right.”
“I know a place,” Tom said.
He took her up the path Doug Archer had shown him some months ago, past the overgrown woodshed—its door standing open and a cloud of gnats hanging inside—up this hillside to the open, rocky space where the land sloped away to the sea.
The sea drew a line of horizon out beyond Belltower and the plume of the mill. In the stillness of the afternoon Tom heard the chatter of starlings as they wheeled overhead, the rattle of a truck out on the highway.
Joyce sat hugging her knees on a promontory of rock. “It’s pretty up here.”
He nodded. “Long way from the news.” Long way from 1962. Long way from New York City. “How does the future strike you?”
The question wasn’t as casual as it sounded. She answered slowly, thoughtfully. “Not as gee-whiz as I expected. Uglier than I thought it would be. Poorer. Meaner. More shortsighted, more selfish, more desperate.”
Tom nodded.
She frowned into the sunlight. “More the same than I thought it would be.”
“That’s about it,” Tom said. “But not as bad as it looks.”
“No?”
She shook her head vigorously. “I talked to Ben about this. Things are changing. He says there’s amazing things happening in Europe. The next couple of decades are going to be fairly wild.”
Tom doubted it. He had watched Tiananmen Square on television that spring. Big tanks. Fragile people.
A Bridge of Years Page 26
