A Bridge of Years

Twelve


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.

He cast a final glance down the empty tunnel, then switched on his forensic programs.



He was able to learn a great deal.

His armor detected and memorized fingerprints from the cellar walls, skin samples where the intruder had cut himself on a shard of glass projecting from the rubble. The intruder was quite human, a male, type 0+ blood. Back home, a competent laboratory might have been able to put together a portrait of the man from a simple genome projection, assuming the samples were more or less intact. But Billy didn't have that capacity; he needed another means of tracking his prey.

The enormity of the task was daunting. It might be impossible—a civilian joyriding from the future might be anywhere. Might have jumped a plane to some familiar place. Invested money in the stock market and set off on a tour of his own recent history.

But the man had arrived here less than a month ago and Billy guessed he would need more time than that to adjust. After all: his money was no good, his knowledge was valuable but difficult to cash in on. He might still be close by.

But how to identify him?

Billy ran a finger through the dust on the floor. Dust from his concussion grenade, dust from the foundation of the building. He opened a pouch in one of the elytra of his armor and withdrew the armor's headset, a leathery black mask that covered his face entirely. He clipped an optical cable between the headset and the armor's processors while his forensics sampled the dust and announced its constituents to Billy in a flickering eyepiece readout: limestone, sand, bedrock . . . and microscopic fragments of the tunnel itself: strange long-chain molecules that fluoresced in dim light, absorbing background radiation and leaking photons.

Billy narrowed the bandwidth of his eyepiece to the frequency of strongest emission, then clambered back into the dark chamber of the basement.

With his opticals adjusted, the dust was plainly luminescent.

He stood in a starry blue limbo, very strange. The tip of his forefinger radiated light like a small constellation.

How much of this dust had the intruder carried out of the building? How much would cling to him? To his shoes? To his clothes? For how long?

Interesting questions.



He stood in the tunnel a moment before he left.

He took a step forward, his heart pounding. This was not a place, he reminded himself. It was a time machine. Each step carried him a measured distance forward: a week? a month? And what am I doing out there? Take a step: February? March? Is it snowing? Am I out in the snow? Am I hunting? Is the armor alive? Am I?

Suppose he ran a hundred yards forward. 1963? 1964? Had the elytra failed? The gland dried up? Have I convulsed and died somewhere? Suppose he went even farther. Suppose he stood in some sheltered part of this tunnel where 1970 raged overhead, 1975, 1980: was Billy in his coffin in some potter's field, buried a century before his own birth?

He felt a sudden weightlessness, a kind of vertigo.

It was better not to think about these things.



Home, he showered away all the dust still clinging to him; then he washed and shined the armor. He disliked taking the armor off. He hadn't powered up entirely and the physical need was still urgent and unsatisfied. The lancet had left a painful sore on the right side of his abdomen; without the hormone drip he felt small, vulnerable, and nervous. But he needed to sleep. And it would be wasteful to sleep in his armor.

Tomorrow, he promised himself. In the night.



He dreamed of the Storm Zone, of armored combat, in the future, where he had once lived; and then of Ohio, the fierce summers and cold, snowless winters there. He dreamed of the bed he had slept in as a child, with a heater he was allowed to switch on in January and February; of bitter nights walking from the common store to the housing plex, frost on the ground and a horned moon overhead.

He dreamed these things with a clarity so absolute and a sadness so piercing they could be sustained only in a dream. And then, finally, he dreamed the face of Nathan, his father.



He woke wanting the armor.



Even in New York City—even in 1962, in a city that was the axis around which much of the world revolved—the night was quieter than the day.

Billy chose the stillest hours of the night, between three a.m. and dawn, to begin his search.

He wore the armor snug to his body. He pulled on loose, filthy pants over the leggings. Over the elytra and the halteres he wore a torn athletic sweatshirt marked NYU, which he had found in a bin at a secondhand shop. He pulled up the hood to help disguise the headset; the headset was conspicuous but he needed its eyepiece. Over the sweatshirt Billy wore a slate-gray, threadbare coat that reached to his knees, the high collar turned up at his throat.

Before he left the apartment he looked at himself in the chipped bathroom mirror.

The black headset with its calibrated goggles projected from the hood of his sweatshirt like the muzzle of an animal.

A rat, Billy thought. He looked like some kind of leathery, robotic sewer rat attempting to pass for human. I look like someone's nightmare.

The thought was disquieting. It troubled him until he activated the armor's lancet; then everything was simple, everything was clear.



He kept to the shadows.

He tuned his eyepiece to the radiant frequency of the tunnel dust. He was able to follow his own footprints—a faintly blue, faintly luminous path—back to the building near Tompkins Square.

The lobby of the building was alive, starry with ghostlight.

But the intruder had come through here long ago and there was no clear trail to follow. Well, Billy had expected that. There had been rain since then; there had been wind, air pollution, foot traffic, a thousand scatterings and adulterations.

He stood in the street outside the building. Faint blue light glimmered here and there. A brush of it adhered to a lamppost. A scatter of it stood like snow crystals along the filthy curb.

No trail, only clues: dim, ambiguous.

He looked up at the building, dark except for Mr. Shank's apartment. Amos Shank chose that moment to pull back his blinds—awake in some delirium of creativity—and Billy gazed up calmly at him. Mr. Shank returned his look for one long breathless moment . . . then pulled away from the window; and the blinds slashed down again.

Billy smiled.

What did you see, Mr. Shank? What do you think I am, out here in the lonely dark?

Billy imagined himself old and senile in 1962, lost in a dream of antiquity and Napoleonic Europe, peering from his slum apartment into a nighttime world inhabited by monstrosities.

Why, Billy thought, I must look like Death.

Good guess, Mr. Shank.

Billy laughed quietly and turned away.



He moved in a crude spiral away from the tunnel, avoiding Fifth Avenue and the late-night crowds in the Village, hoping for some substantial clue, an arrow of blue light, that would lead him to the intruder.

He found none. He found traces of the dust here and there almost at random—a big deposit clinging to an oil slick at Ninth and University Place, a smaller one smudged into the yellow grass at the foot of a bench in Washington Square Park. Billy lingered at the bench a moment, but there was nothing coherent, only a suggestion that his prey had passed this way. He frowned and decided to move south, avoiding the west side of the park where a few hustlers and homosexuals still lingered in the darkness. That part of the park was a familiar hunting ground when his armor needed a killing— like Times Square and union   Square at night, places where disposable nonpersons gathered. Billy's armor wanted a killing now; but there wasn't time and he suppressed the urge.


He paused a moment, adjusted his opticals and gazed up at the sky.

Ordinarily the city sky was featureless, but Billy's opticals showed him too many stars to count. It was like an Ohio sky, Billy thought.

He felt a sudden pang of longing, so intense it worried him. The armor was pumping out complex neurochemicals to make him alert, to help him hunt—to keep him alive. There shouldn't have been room for nostalgia. Unless the elytra or the lancet or the strange, false gland in the armor had begun to fail.

But they hadn't, really; or if they had, the effect was purely transient. Billy sat on a park bench until the pang of homesickness faded. Then the sky was only the sky, clean and blank of meaning. He retuned his opticals and crossed the empty space of Washington Square South at Sullivan, hunting.

And came up empty. And sweated through another day.

In the early evening he went out without his armor to wander the busy streets of the Village. He sat for a time on the terrace at the Cafe Figaro, mistaken by its regulars for one more middle-aged tourist, wondering whether the intruder had strolled past him in the crowd or might even be sitting at the next table, smug with thirty years' worth of cheap prescience. Or might after all have left the city: that was still a real possibility. In which case Billy's prey would be hopelessly beyond reach, no trace of him but a residue of fading phosphorescence.

But Billy hadn't given up yet.

He went home, donned the armor, wandered toward mid-town in a ragged pattern for three hours without result.

He finished the night without killing anything—a profound disappointment.



And dreamed of blue light.



Three nights later, ranging west along Eighth Street, he discovered a smoky luminescence around the doorway and interior of a tiny retail shop called Lindner's Radio Supply. Billy smiled to himself, and went home, and slept.

He woke in the heat of the afternoon.

He put on his golden armor, activated the lancet, and dressed to conceal himself. He didn't wear the headset; today he didn't need it.

He felt a little strange, going outside in daylight.

He walked to Lindner's in his overcoat, attracting a few stares but nothing more. He paused on the sidewalk in front of the store and pressed his face against the window.

It wasn't a big store, but business seemed reasonably good. There was a hi-fi set in the window bristling with vacuum tubes, a hand-lettered card announcing the word stereophonic! Beyond that, in the dimness, an old man stood patiently behind a wooden counter. Billy felt a tinge of disappointment: was this feeble thing his prey?

Maybe. Maybe not. It was too soon to say.

He crossed the street to a delicatessen, ordered a ham sandwich and coffee, and occupied a table by the window.

Lindner's was moderately busy. People came, people went. Any of them might be the intruder. But Billy guessed from the smoky nimbus of the glow last night that the man had come here often. The dust—by this time a few motes still clinging to his shoes or cuffs—could only have been deposited by repeated traffic. Probably he's an employee, Billy thought. A deliveryman, say, or a sales assistant.

The sandwich was very good. He hadn't eaten much for days. He bought a second one, a second coffee. He ate slowly and watched the traffic in and out of Lindner's.

He counted fifteen individuals in and fifteen individuals out, all of them customers, Billy guessed. Then a truck pulled up to the curb and a sweating man in a blue shirt unloaded three cardboard boxes on a dolly. Billy watched with heightened interest: here was a possibility. There was no way to follow the truck, but he made a note of the license number and the name of the distribution company.

And continued to watch.

A little after four o'clock the counterman at the deli approached his table. "You can't just sit here. This is for paying customers."

The place was nearly empty. Billy slid a ten-dollar bill across the table and said, "I'd like another coffee. Keep the change." Thinking, If I wanted to kill you I could do it right now.

The counterman looked at the money, looked at Billy. He frowned and came back with the coffee. Cold coffee in a greasy cup.

"Thank you," Billy said. "You're welcome. I think."



The last customer left Lindner's at five-fifteen; the store was scheduled to close at six. Billy divided his attention between the storefront and the clock on the deli wall. By six, his focus was intense and feverish.

He watched as the old man—the proprietor, Billy guessed —ambled to the door with a key ring in his hand and turned the sign around to show the word closed.

Billy left his table at the deli and moved into the street.

Warm, sunny afternoon. He shielded his eyes.

At Lindner's, the proprietor—gray-haired, balding, fat— stepped through the door and pawed at his keys. Then paused, turned back, pronounced some word into the shadow of the store, closed the door, and walked off.

Billy's interest was immediate: the old man had left someone inside.

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 f*cking—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 transcontinental 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.