A Bridge of Years

  It was hardly likely the fat proprietor was his target, in any case. He looked too much at home here: too bored, too mindlessly familiar. Bide your time, Billy thought. Wait, watch.

  He stood at a newsstand and pretended to examine a copy of Life.

  The second man stepped through the door a moment later and locked it with his own key.

  This man, Billy thought. His heart speeded up in his chest.

  Billy followed at a discreet distance.

  He was working on intuition, but he didn't really doubt this was his prey. Here was a reasonably young man in pale blue jeans, cotton shirt, a pair of sneakers that looked suspiciously anachronistic. Dust in the tread of those shoes, Billy thought. Some dust, maybe, still trapped in the weave of his pants. In the dark, this man would light up like a neon tube. Billy was sure of it.

  He lagged back a block or two, following.

  The man sensed Billy's presence. Sometimes this happened with prey. Sometimes it didn't; there were people who simply didn't pick up the clues. You could sit next to them on the subway, follow them up an escalator, read over their shoulders; they didn't notice. More often, a victim would feel some warning instinct; he would walk a little faster, cast a nervous glance over his shoulder. In the end, of course, it didn't matter; prey was prey. But Billy wanted to be careful now. He couldn't use the armor too conspicuously and he didn't want to lose this trail.

  He crossed the street, came parallel with his prey, then ducked into a liquor store and paid for a bottle—a squat fifth of whiskey, but any bottle would have done; it was only a prop. He put the paper bag under his arm and hurried out. He spotted his target a block away, heading into a seedy neighborhood on the border of the warehouse district.

  The target paused once, turned, and gazed back at Billy.

  And what do you see, Billy wondered. Not what Mr. Shank had seen, certainly. Not naked death, not on a sunny afternoon. Billy crossed at the corner and examined his own reflection in a window. Here was a gray-haired man in a dirty gray overcoat carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag. Ugly but hardly conspicuous. He smiled a little.

  The prey—the time traveler—nearly walked into the path of a taxi (Billy contemplated this possibility with a mixture of regret and relief); stepped back at the last minute (Billy felt a different mixture of relief, regret); then hurried into the lobby of a tenement building.

  Billy noted the address.

  Follow him, was Billy's next thought. Follow him into whatever shabby little room he occupies. Kill him there. Finish with this. His armor wanted a killing.

  Then Billy hesitated—

  And the world dimmed.

  Dimming was how he thought of it later. It felt like a dimming —literally, as if someone had switched off a lightbulb in his head.

  He was suddenly Billy Gargullo, farmboy, standing on a dirty street on the Lower East Side in the antiquated past, the words kill him still echoing in his head like the chorus of an obscene song. He thought of the man he had followed and felt a hot rush of guilt.

  Suddenly Billy wasn't a killer. He wasn't a hunter; his senses weren't keen. He felt opaque, thick, frightened, leaden-footed. His clothes were too heavy; he started to sweat.

  His armor had malfunctioned.

  Billy fled.

  It wasn't a problem he could run away from. But running was his first instinct. He ran until he was breathless, bent double and gasping for air, then walked in a cold daze until the streetlights blinked on.

  He sought shelter in a movie theater on Forty-second Street, where lonely men masturbated in the balconies or gratified each other in the toilet stalls. Other nights, he had come here looking for victims. But that irony was lost on him now. Billy huddled into a torn seat, terrified in the flickering movie light.

  His life might be over.

  Maybe it had been a bad bargain all along. Billy had seized the opportunity when it was offered: leap back into the fabulous past, out of the Storm Zone, battle zone, Infantry, mortal fear; seal the exits and check them; live a modest, concealed life with his armor a private and occasional indulgence.

  Oh, but Billy (some fraction of himself had objected even then), the armor won't last forever, there are no replacements where you're going, no parts no labor no repair. He envisioned a searing, unquenchable, and ultimately deadly Need.

  But that might not come (Billy had told himself). Who could tell how long the golden armor might last? Out of combat, preserved, groomed, polished, maintained, diagnosed, coddled—maybe it would last forever. Or as long as Billy lived. The power packs were good for that.

  So he told himself.

  It hadn't seemed like a fairy tale, then.

  It was a calculated risk. Maybe this optimism was a flaw in his mental equipment; maybe some slip of the scalpel at the military hospital had left him too independent of mind or too vulnerable to imagination. Billy had huddled against the noise and fury of the combat zone and told himself, You don't have to stay here—and that meant a great deal, with the wind outside, the constant lightning, furtive combat in ruined buildings, in this nightmare wasteland a thousand miles from Ohio.

  He remembered that time without wanting to.

  Three of them had discovered the time traveler.

  Billy killed the two infantrymen while they slept. Then he killed the time traveler herself, the so-called custodian, whose name was Ann Heath.

  And journeyed back. And sealed his exits. And checked them.

  Exhausted and afraid, Billy fell asleep in the movie theater.

  The film—an "art film," mainly of people fucking—droned on around him.

  In his dream he unreeled private movies.

  Billy didn't know much history.

  After his conscription, in the tedious hours at training camp, he sometimes picked up the popular novels his buddies read—illustrated historicals about the wild days of the twentieth century. Billy enjoyed these books. There was always a pointed moral about the sins of gluttony or pride; but Billy could tell the writers took as much prurient pleasure in their stories as he did. Some of these books had been banned in California for their frank depiction of tree-burning forest barons, of greedy politicians zooming around the world in gasoline-powered aircraft. As a conscript Billy relished the promiscuity of his ancestors. They had danced on their cliff-edge, he thought, with great style.

  These were his first coherent thoughts about the past.

  The rest of Billy's knowledge was commonplace. The climate had begun to change long before he was born. In school they'd made him sing pious songs about it. Sun and water, wind and tree, what have these to do with me? Sun and water, tree and wind, against these, Father, I have sinned. But climate was Billy's destiny. Long before his birth, a fierce curl of tropical air had formed and stabilized over the waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. The Storm Zone ebbed and strengthened; some years it was hardly more than a knot in the Jetstream, some years it generated hurricane after hurricane, battering coastlines already devastated by the rising of the world's oceans and the melting of the poles. And every decade—as the atmosphere warmed another degree or two— the trend was unmistakable: the Storm Zone had become a stable new climatic feature.

  By the time Billy was five anyone who could afford to had migrated out of the southeastern coastal states. But the poor stayed behind, joined by refugees from the Caribbean and Central America seeking the relative safety of these ruined American cities. There were food riots, secession riots. Washington dispatched troops.

  By the time he was conscripted the war had been going on for nearly a decade. It had turned into one of those festering conflicts all but ignored by the prestigious European news cartels. A senseless effort, some said, to preserve as American territory a swath of land rapidly growing uninhabitable. But the war went on. Billy didn't much care about it, not at first. Recruited at the age of twelve, he was shipped around to various training and indoctrination bases, mainly out west. He spent a couple of years guarding the transcontinent
al railway tracks where they passed through insurgent territory in Nevada, where water-poor locals had tried to dynamite the trains a couple of times. Billy didn't see any action, but he loved to watch the trains go by. Big silver bullets shimmering in the sun haze, loaded with grain, ingots, armaments, liquid hydrogen. The trains levitated soundlessly from horizon to horizon and left dust-devils dancing in their wake. Billy imagined himself riding one of those trains to Ohio. But it was impossible. He'd be AWOL; there were travel restrictions. He'd be shot. But it was a lovely thing to think about.

  He was lonely in Nevada. He lived in a stone barracks with three other recruits and an aging, armored CO named Skolnik. Billy wondered whether he would ever see a woman, hold a woman, marry a woman, have children with a woman. Billy was technically assigned to an armored division of the 17th Infantry, but he hadn't been issued his armor yet; privately, he hoped he never would. Some recruits did a term of menial labor and were released back into their communities. Maybe that would happen to him. Billy was careful to do everything he was asked to do—but slowly, ploddingly. It was a form of silent rebellion.

  It didn't work. On his seventeenth birthday, Billy was shipped east for treatment.

  They gave him his armor and they posted him to the Zone.

  He woke in the movie theater on Forty-second Street and shuffled outside into a miserably humid night.

  Walking home, he felt a surge of energy, like needlepricks on his skin—a trickle from the gland in his elytra, Billy presumed. That was a good sign and it made him optimistic. Maybe the malfunction was temporary.

  His thoughts were more coherent, at least.

  Home, he attached the headgear to his armor and prayed the diagnostics were still working.

  His eyepiece bled graphs and numbers into his field of vision. A complete diagnostic sequence took more than an hour, but Billy knew what all the numbers ought to be. He ran down his electrical systems, then started on the biologicals. Everything came up normal or near normal except for two items: a local blood pressure and the temps on a tiny circulatory pump. Billy finished the general diagnostic, then called back those numbers for a closer look. He asked the armor for a complete sequence on the abdominals and waited nervously for the results.

  More numbers appeared, chiefly pressure readings. But Billy understood what these misplaced decimal points implied: a blood clot had lodged in the reedlike lancet.

  Billy climbed out of his armor.

  He hadn't powered all the way up, though he had worn the armor a great deal in the last week, and maybe that was good—a full power-up would have placed greater demands on the gland in the elytra, perhaps thrown the clot into an artery. He might have died.

  But the Need was still very great.

  The armor was limp in his hand. He turned the flexible elytra inside out and deployed the lancet—a long, narrow microtube still wet with blood.

  Here was where the clot had lodged.

  Billy went to the kitchen and put a pot of water on the stove. As it boiled, he shook in a handful of Morton salt to approximate the salinity of human blood. This was "emergency field service," a technique he had never tried, though he remembered it from training.

  When the water was cool enough to touch, Billy dipped the lancet in.

  Micropumps responded to the heat. Threads of dark blood oozed into the pot.

  He couldn't tell whether the clot had dissolved.

  He cleaned the lancet and retracted it. Then he wrapped the elytra around his body, sealed them, and ran the diagnostics again.

  The numbers looked better. Not perfect—but of course it was hard to tell until he plugged the lancet into his body and allowed his own blood to course through it.

  Billy activated that system.

  He felt the lancet slide under his skin. It stung a little— perhaps some salt still clinging to the microtube in spite of its own sterilants and anesthetics. But at least—

  Ah.

  —it seemed to be working.

  Billy experienced a dizzy sense of triumph. He set out from the apartment at once.

  He had lost a lot of time. It was late now. A street-cleaning truck had passed this way and Billy caught the reflection of a fingernail moon in the empty, wet asphalt.

  Only an interruption, he told himself. How childish to have been so frightened of a minor malfunction. But understandable: all his courage came from the armor.

  He thought about the secret gland hidden in the folds of the elytra.

  It was dormant when the armor was folded away, tissues bathed in life-suspending chemicals. But the gland was a living thing—grown, he supposed, in a factory somewhere, a critically altered mutation of a thalamus or thyroid. When it lived, it lived on Billy's blood—pumped in from an artery through the stylet, processed and pumped back through the lancet. The gland secreted the chemicals that made Billy the fine hunter he was tonight.

  But because the gland was alive it might age, might be susceptible to disease, tumors, toxins—Billy simply didn't know. For all the armor's inbuilt diagnostics, such problems were necessarily the business of the infantry doctors.

  No infantry doctors here.

  He wondered whether his gland had been damaged by the blood clot. Whether it would clot again. Maybe it would . . . maybe this last episode had been a token of his own mortality.

  But no, Billy thought, that's wrong. I am Death. That's what I am tonight. And Death can't die.

  He laughed out loud, an overflow of joy. It felt good to be hunting again.

  He went to the place his prey had gone, where the hunt had been interrupted. He adjusted the bandwidth on his eyepiece and saw a dust of blue light in the doorway, very faint. And up the stairs.

  Tonight, Billy thought, it would all come together.

  Tonight, at last, he would kill someone.

  Thirteen

  Catherine backed out of the woodshed, turned and ran, stumbling over the berry-bush runners and scratching herself on the thorns. She didn't feel any of this. She was too frightened.

  The thing in the shed was— Was unnameable. Was not human.

  Was a pulsating travesty of a human being.

  She ran until she was breathless, then braced herself against a tree trunk, gasping and coughing. Her lungs ached and her unprotected arms were bloody from the nettles. The forest around her was silent, large, and absurdly sunny. Tree-tops moved in the breeze.

  She sat down among the pine needles, hugging herself.

  Be sensible, Catherine thought. Whatever it is, it can't hurt you. It can't move.

  It had been bloody and helpless. Maybe not a monster, she thought; maybe a human being in some terrible kind of distress, skinned, mutilated . . .

  But a mutilated human being would not have said "Help me" in that calm and earnest voice.

  It was hurt. Well, of course it was hurt—it should have been dead! She had been able to see through its skin, into its insides; through its skull into its brains. What could have done that to a human being, and what human being could have survived?

  Go home, Catherine instructed herself. Back to Gram Peggy's house. Whatever she did—call the police, call an ambulance—she could do from there.

  At home, she could think.

  At home, she could lock the doors.

  She locked the doors and scoured the kitchen shelves for something calming. What she turned up was a cut-glass decanter of peach brandy, two thirds full—"for sleepless nights," Gram Peggy used to say. Catherine swallowed an ounce or so straight out of the bottle. She felt the liquid inside her like a small furnace, fiery and warming.

  In the downstairs bathroom she sponged the blood off her arms and sprayed the lacework cuts with Bactine. Her shirt was torn; she changed it. She washed her face and hands.

  Then she wandered through the downstairs checking the doors again, stopped when she passed the telephone. Probably she ought to call someone, Catherine thought.

  911?

  The Belltower Police Department? But what cou
ld she say?

  She thought about it a few minutes, paralyzed with indecision, until a new idea occurred to her. An impulse, but sensible. She retrieved Doug Archer's business card from a bureau drawer and dialed the number written there.

  His answering service said he'd call back in about an hour. Catherine was disconcerted by this unexpected delay. She sat at the kitchen table with the peach brandy in front of her, trying to make sense of her experience in the woodshed.

  Maybe she'd misinterpreted something. That was possible, wasn't it? People see odd things, especially in a crisis. Maybe somebody had been badly hurt. Maybe she shouldn't have run away.

  But Catherine had an artist's eye and she recalled the scene as clearly as if she had sketched it on canvas: dark blur of mold on ancient newsprint, bars of sunlight through green mossy walls, and the centerpiece, all pinks and blues and strange crimsons and yellows, a half-made thing, which pronounced the words Help me while its larynx bobbed in its glassy throat.

  Sweet Jesus in a sidecar, Catherine thought. Oh, this is way out of bounds. This is crazy.

  She'd finished half the contents of the brandy decanter by the time Doug Archer knocked. Catherine opened the door for him, a little light-headed but still deeply frightened. He said, "I was out in this neighborhood so I thought I'd just drop by instead of calling . . . Hey, are you all right?"

  Then, without meaning to, she was leaning against him. He steadied her and guided her to the couch.

  "I found something," she managed. "Something terrible. Something strange."

  "Found something," Archer repeated.

  "In the woods—downhill south of here."

  "Tell me about it," Archer said.

  Catherine stammered out the story, suddenly embarrassed by what seemed like her own hysteria. How could he possibly understand? Archer sat attentively in Gram Peggy's easy chair, but he was fundamentally a stranger. Maybe it had been dumb to call him. When he asked her to get in touch if she noticed anything strange, was this what he meant? Maybe it was a conspiracy. Belltower, Washington, occupied by hostile aliens. Maybe, under his neat Levi's and blue Belltower Realty jacket, Archer was as transparent and strange as the thing in the woodshed.