A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Help us, the voices had said.

  Help us, Tom Winter. Please help us.

  Archer arrived that afternoon with a VCR, a Sony video camera, and a tripod packed into the trunk of his car.

  Tom helped him unload and erect all this paraphernalia in the living room, where it loomed like a selection of props from a science fiction movie. He said so to Archer, who shrugged. "That's what we're playing at, isn't it?"

  "I don't think of this as playing. I live here."

  "You live here. I'm playing."

  "This is not a Huck Finn adventure, Doug. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not enjoying it."

  "Something happen during the night, or are you just in a bad mood?"

  "No, nothing happened." The question made him uncomfortable. "What's all this for?"

  "Surveillance. The unsleeping eye. Take a look."

  Tom peered into the eyepiece of the video camera. It was aimed into the kitchen and captured a fairly wide angle of the room, including the stainless steel sink and the tile counter-top. A digital clock in the corner of the display read out the date, the hour, the minute, and the second.

  Archer said, "The camera's hooked into the VCR and I just set the timer for midnight. At the slowest speed, we've got approximately eight hours of tape. You leave everything alone, you sleep soundly, and in the morning you see what we've got."

  Tom shook his head. "They won't stand for this." Archer regarded him curiously.

  Tom pulled back from the eyepiece. "So what do we do in the meantime?" "I think the logical thing would be to mess up the kitchen."

  Archer had brought more than electronics. From the back seat of his car he produced two six-packs of beer, a bag of potato chips and a quart of sour cream and avocado dip his girlfriend had made.

  "You eat like an undergraduate," Tom said.

  "Is there any other way?" Archer opened the six-pack and popped the tab on a can. "We can order a pizza for dinner." He handed a can to Tom, then looked suddenly dubious. "Oh, hey, are you AA or anything like that? I don't want to make life difficult."

  "I was a hobby drinker," Tom said, "not a professional." But he left the beer alone.

  The afternoon droned on. It was a sunny, warm day and Tom opened the front and back doors to let a breeze sweep through the house. The air smelled of hot, tarry pine.

  Archer kicked back and put his Reeboks on the kitchen table. "You went to Sea View Elementary. Then the high school over on Jackson, I guess, just like everybody else. Shit-awful schools, both of them," and then they were off on a round of skewed nostalgia—what Barbara had once called "the hideous past, relived at leisure." It turned out that the trouble Archer had gotten into in high school had been more serious and more personal than preadolescent rock throwing. He had waged a war of attrition against his high school principal and his father—two staunch disciplinarians who happened to be poker buddies. Archer had spent plenty of nights listening to them vent their hatred of children over pretzels and a well-shuffled pack of Bicycle playing cards. His father was an appliance repairman who hated kids, Archer explained, out of some fundamental quirk of personality; the principal, Mr. Mayhew, had professional reasons and was deemed to be an expert on the matter. Jackson Archer, belt-whipping his only son, liked to explain that Mr. Mayhew did this for a living and could probably do a better job of it. In fact Mr. Mayhew confined himself to the use of a ruler on the back of the hand, which was painful without incurring the kind of visible injuries that brought mothers howling down to the school—maybe this was what made him an expert. Archer had a theory that they took out their poker losses on him; he learned to avoid whoever had lost money on Sunday night.

  "Didn't stop you from getting in trouble," Tom observed.

  "Didn't stop me from drinking, smoking, and riding in fast cars. Nope. But I never figured they really wanted to stop me. They were having too much fun."

  "Does this story have a punch line?"

  "When I was sixteen I drove my father's Pontiac into a

  tree. Totaled it. I wasn't hurt, but I was driving without a

  license. They sent me to a so-called military school upstate,

  with the happy consent of the Juvenile Court. What it was,

  of course, was a concentration camp for adolescent psychotics.

  "What did you do there?"

  Archer ceased smiling. "I ate shit, like every other inmate. These institutions live up to their rep, Tom. They can turn a sullen, rebellious teenager into a sullen, submissive one—like that. I ate shit for a couple of semesters and came back when my dad died. My mother said, 'I couldn't leave you in that place.' I thanked her politely, and when she marched me past the casket—in full parade dress, for Christ's sake—I looked down and said, 'Screw you and your poker game and your cardiac arrest too.'"

  The silence rang out in the kitchen for a few awkward moments. Tom said, "You never forgave him?"

  "He was a lonely, hostile man who never forgave me for being born and complicating his fife. Maybe I'll be more generous than that. One of these days." He took a long pull from his beer. "So how about you? Another casualty of childhood?"

  "I had a reasonably happy childhood. Nobody sent me to military school, anyway."

  "That's not the only way to suffer."

  "I can't say I did suffer. Not substantially. Dad wouldn't have stood for it."

  "Ah—wait a minute. Winter? Doctor Winter? Used to have a practice over on Poplar Street?" 1 hat s us.

  "Shit, I knew Doc Winter! I went there with a ruptured appendix when I was ten years old. My father said, The kid's complaining about a bellyache.' Of course, I had a raging fever, my abdomen was hard as a rock, I was convulsing from the pain. Your dad took a look at me and phoned the hospital for an ambulance. When he put down the phone he turned to my old man and said, 'You nearly killed your child by waiting this long. If there was a license for fatherhood, I would have yours revoked.' Sick as I was, I remembered that. It felt good. My God, Doc Winter's son! But didn't he—?"

  "Both my parents died in a car accident," Tom said. "It was about twelve years ago. A log truck sides wiped them coming around a turn on the coast highway."

  "You were how old?"

  "Just finishing high school."

  "Tough situation," Archer said.

  "I lived. The insurance paid for my engineering degree. Much good it's doing me. But, you know, it was kind of ironic. I always figured Dad got into medicine because he believed the world was a bad, dangerous place. He had a real sense of human vulnerability—the basic fragility of a human body. He once told me the human body was a sack of skin containing the vital organs and something even more fragile, which was life."

  "Maybe not a good attitude to grow up with," Archer said.

  "But he was right. I understood that when the police showed up at the door, the night the truck accordioned his car. There's no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad's voice: This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.' Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can't stop that by marching."

  "Isn't that a little like giving up?" "I think it's called acceptance."

  Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees. "Very bleak attitude, Tom." "Experience bears it out."

  Around six, when the sun began to slant through the window over the sink and the kitchen bloomed with summer heat, they moved into the cooler dimness of the living room. Tom phoned Deluxe Pizza in Belltower and was assessed a five dollar delivery charge, " 'Cause we don't ordinarily come out that far." The order arrived an hour later—pepperoni pizza with anchovies, room temperature. After he paid the delivery driver Tom opened the curtains
onto a view of the back yard, shadows lengthening among the pines. His appetite had vanished. He ate a little and took his plate to the kitchen. Coming back he negotiated around the video camera looming on its tripod like an alien sentinel. "They won't stand for it," he said again.

  Archer looked up from his intense involvement with the pizza. "Yeah, you said that before. Who's they?"

  "I don't know." Tom shrugged. "But don't you get a sense of it—a sort of intelligence at work?"

  "I didn't think we'd admitted that much. Maybe you just have exceptionally tidy roaches."

  "I'm beginning to think otherwise."

  "For any particular reason?"

  The dreams, Tom thought. The dreams, the holes in the foundation of the house . . . and a feeling, an intuition. "No, no particular reason."

  "What you've described," Archer said, "sounds less like intelligence than it does like a machine. The kind of idiot machine that keeps running when the owner's on vacation."

  "Its owner being who? The guy who lived here—Ben Collier?"

  "Maybe. Unfortunately, it's impossible to find out anything about him. Totally anonymous. Joan Fricker at the grocery store up at the highway must have seen him more than anybody else, and I doubt she could give you a good description. He never participated in public affairs, never held office, never wrote letters to the editor—never said more than hello, as far as anybody can remember. The only person with a special memory of Ben Collier is Jered Smith, who delivered his mail."

  "He had memorable mail?"

  "According to Jered, Ben Collier subscribed to every magazine published, or it seemed that way. Some not even in English. Every business day Jered delivered five or ten magazines and newspapers to this address. Magazines, he says, are heavy—and he was delivering on foot back then, though the Postal Service gave him a truck last year. That was the first hint that Ben Collier had vanished: Jered complained that there was a stack of magazines deep enough to block the mail slot."

  "What kind of magazines?"

  "Everything from Time to the Manchester Guardian. Heavy on current events, but not exclusively." Tom was bemused. "It's an eccentricity, but—" "Not just eccentricity. There's some pattern here. It's not a random set—more like a linear equation." Tom raised his eyebrows; Archer added, "Math is my other hobby. Math was the only high school class I never cut—you remember Mr. Foster? Tall guy, gray hair? Said I had a talent for it. I'm the guy who always reads the puzzles column in Scientific American. "

  Douglas Archer, JD mathematician. Don't underestimate this man. "It's not much to go on."

  "It's absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Just kind of interesting." Archer put his plate aside and stood up. "Well, anyway. Don't touch the equipment—it'll turn itself on. But you might want to play back the tape in the morning."

  "Count on it. Can you stay for coffee?"

  "I have a date for a late movie. But let me know what shows." His smile was mischievous. "Or what doesn't."

  Archer closed the door behind him, and suddenly the house was hollow and empty.

  That night, Tom made the disturbing discovery that he was afraid to go to sleep.

  He showered and wrapped himself in a bathrobe and tuned in the "Tonight" show. The chatter was tedious, but he left it on for the sound of human voices. That's why we all own these boxes, he thought: because they talk to us when there's no one else home.

  But maybe "afraid to sleep" was overstating the case: he wasn't jittery. It was more like a reluctance to close his eyes in the midst of these curious events. He had convinced himself something was happening here, a kind of subterranean industry, maybe something (if Archer's history was accurate) that had been happening for a hundred years or more on this spot. Something insectile, something out of the ground; something that loved holes and hidden places. He was developing a sense of it that was almost frighteningly precise. The eyes that regarded him in his dreams were the eyes—not of machines, Archer was wrong; but of something nearly mechanistic in its single-mindedness. A builder's eyes. But what exactly were they building?

  Not something dangerous. Tom felt this to be true; the insects in his dreams weren't hostile or deadly. But they were fundamentally, utterly strange. It was as if he had reached into a tide pool and touched something that lived there: a variegated, many-limbed polyp so unlike himself that it might have been extraterrestrial.

  And of course there was Archer's video machinery, almost as alien, already whirring away. It had recorded no event and probably wouldn't. Or maybe—here was a disturbing thought —he would wake up and find the camera dismantled, its useful parts carried away and its carapace open and gutted on the carpet.

  He made himself go to bed before the end credits rolled on the "Tonight" show. He lay in the darkness a long time and imagined he could hear the camera whirring in the next room —but surely that was impossible? It was the whirring, more likely, of his own nerves. His own blood pulsing through his ears. He could not stop turning over these questions in his mind, of machines and intelligence and what might have been a faint cry for help; but in time his thoughts tumbled away in odd, skewed directions and he was asleep.

  For a second night Tom Winter slept dreamlessly. He woke to the noise of the clock radio, a Seattle AM station emitting prophecies about weather and traffic. Sunlight streamed in through the margin of the curtains, but he felt as if he had just gone to bed. Nothing remained of the night in his memory—except, dimly, the echo of a pervasive hum. It was the sound he imagined a buried dynamo might make.

  The sound of his thoughts.

  Possibly, the sound of their thoughts.

  But he put that idea away.

  The kitchen was clean again.

  This trick was familiar enough by now that it had ceased to impress him. It was the small details that fascinated. For instance, every minor dot of organic matter had been cleansed from the cardboard pizza sleeve but the box itself was still open at a random angle on the table. Decisions had been made: this is refuse, this is not. And not simple mechanical decisions. Food in the refrigerator was never disturbed. Unopened packages were off limits. There was a logic in it. Repetitive, maybe, but complex and odd. A maid would have tidied away the empty box. A robot would not. But a robot wouldn't care whether it was caught in the act; a robot wouldn't wait for the small hours of the night.

  The video recorder was still running, still minutes away from eight o'clock. Tom bent past the camera lens and switched it off.

  He ejected the tape and discovered his hand was trembling. It took him a good fifteen minutes to hook up the VCR to his TV set ... a minute more to rewind the cassette.

  He switched on the monitor and when the screen brightened he punched the Play button of the VCR. An image formed and stabilized—the kitchen, rendered odd and sterile by the static camera angle. The phantom numbers at the top left of the screen ticked off 12:01, 12:02—he had still been awake then and when he turned up the sound he could hear the Carson show playing in the background. Somewhere behind the picture tube he was watching the "Tonight" show in his bathrobe. A sort of time loop—but then they'd know all about that.

  This was another phantom thought, unbidden and peculiar. He shook it off.

  He punched the Fast Forward key.

  A noise bar rolled up the screen; the picture flickered. Minutes rolled by too fast to read. But it was the same messy kitchen he had abandoned last night.

  1:00 a.m. blinked past.

  2:00.

  3:00. Nothing happened. Then—

  3:45.

  He stabbed the Pause key, too late, and backed up.

  3:40:01.

  3:39:10.

  3:38:27.

  At exactly 3:37:16 a.m., the kitchen lights had gone off. "Goddamn!" Tom said.

  The camera was built to function in ordinary house light but not absolute darkness. The screen remained a gray, impenetrable blank. It was so obvious as to be painful. They had fucking turned the lights out.

  He hit Rewind and w
atched the sequence in real time. But there was nothing to see: only the static picture . . . and, faintly, the sound of the switch being thrown.

  Tock.

  Darkness.

  And in the background . . . buried in tape hiss, elusive and barely audible . . . something that might have been their sound.

  A chitinous whisper. The brush of metallic cilia on cold linoleum. The sound of a razor blade stroking a feather.

  He didn't even try to call Archer. He was already late; he locked the front door and climbed into his car.

  Leaving the house was like shaking off the influence of a long, hypnotic dream. It lingered at the edge of perception and it influenced his decisions. Because he was late he attempted a shortcut through Belltower, only to discover that the through street he remembered (Newcastle down past Brierley) had been widened and diverted to the highway. He hadn't come this way before and the trip was disorienting, a journey through the familiar to the jarringly new. Here was Sea View Elementary on its green hillside, and the high school a quarter mile south, similar buildings of salmon-colored brick so substantial and so immediate in memory that it would not have surprised him to see nine-year-old Doug Archer rush out to launch a fusillade at the car. But the neighborhood newsstand had become a video arcade and the Woolworth's had evolved into a Cineplex. Once again, the world had changed while his back was turned.

  Declined, his father might have said. Like the earth itself, Barbara would have reminded him. Debris clouding the atmosphere and melting the icecaps. Barbara was one of the few individuals Tom had met who both believed in the greenhouse effect and believed it could be stopped: the precarious balance of the activist. Bad thermodynamics, his father would have told her. You can delay a death but not make a man immortal. The same was surely true for a planet: it didn't improve with use. Things decline; the evidence was all around him. The evidence was his life.