A Bridge of Years (42 page)

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.

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.