A Bridge of Years (29 page)

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.

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, /
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 learn 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.