A Bridge of Years

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 could 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.


But when she finished the story she found herself soothed by the telling of it.

Archer said he believed her, but maybe that was politeness. He said, "I want you to take me there."

The idea revived her fear. "Now?"

"Soon. Today. And before dark." He hesitated. "You might be mistaken about what you saw. Maybe somebody really does need help."

"I thought about that. Maybe somebody does. But I know what I saw, Mr. Archer."

"Doug," he said absently. "I still think we have to go back. If there's even a chance somebody's hurt out there. I don't think we have any choice."

Catherine thought about it. "No," she said unhappily. "I don't guess we do."



But it was late afternoon now and the forest was, if anything, spookier. Fortified by the brandy and a great deal of soothing talk, Catherine led Archer downhill past the creek, past the blackberry thickets and the tall Douglas firs, to the edge of the meadow where the woodshed stood.

The woodshed hadn't changed, except in her imagination. It was mossy, ancient, small and unexceptional. She looked at it and envisioned monsters.

They stood a moment in brittle silence.

"When we met," Catherine said, "you asked me to watch out for anything strange." She looked at him. "Did you expect this? Do you have any idea what's going on here?"

"I didn't expect anything like this, no."

He told her a story about a house he'd sold to a man named Tom Winter, its strange history, its perpetual tidiness, Tom Winter's disappearance.

She said, "Is that near here?"

"A few hundred yards toward the road."

"Is there some connection?"

Archer shrugged. "It's getting late, Catherine. We'd better do this while we can."



They approached the crude door of the woodshed.

Archer reached for the latch handle, but Catherine turned him away. "No. Let me." You found him, Gram Peggy would have said. He's your obligation, Catherine.

Already the thing inside was "he," not "it." She had shut out the image and concentrated on the voice.

Help me.

Catherine took a deep breath and opened the door.

The sun had edged down toward the treetops; the woodshed was darker than it had been this morning. A green, buzzing, loamy darkness. Catherine wrinkled her nose and waited for her eyesight to adjust. Doug Archer hovered at her shoulder; his presence was at least a little bit reassuring.

For a time she couldn't hear anything but the quick beat of her heart; couldn't see anything but dimness and clutter.

Then Archer forced the door to the extremity of its hinges and a new beam of light slanted in.

The monster lay on the pressed-dirt floor, precisely where she had left it this morning.

Catherine blinked. The monster blinked. Behind her, she heard Archer draw a sudden, shocked breath. "Holy Mother of God," he said.

The monster turned its pale, moist eyes on Archer a moment. Then it looked at Catherine again.

"You came back," it said. (He said.)

This was the terrible part, she thought dizzily, the truly unendurable, this voice from that throat. He sounded like someone you might meet at a bus stop. He sounded like a friendly grocer.

She forced her eyes to focus somewhere above him, on the pile of moldy newspapers. "You said you needed help."

"Yes."

"I brought help."

It was all she could think of to say.

Archer pushed past her and knelt over the man—if it was a man. Be careful! she thought.

Catherine heard the tremor in his voice: "What happened to you?"

Now Catherine's gaze drifted back to the man's head, the caul of translucent tissue where the skull should have been, and the brain beneath it—she presumed this whitish, vague mass must be his brain. The creature spoke. "It would take too long to explain."

Archer said, "What do you want us to do?"

"If you can, I want you to take me back to the house."

Archer was silent a moment. Catherine noticed he didn't say What house? The Tom Winter house, she thought. These things were connected after all. Mysterious events and living dead men.

She felt like Alice, hopelessly lost down some unpleasant rabbit hole.



But it was at least a thing to do, carrying this monster back to the Tom Winter house, and deciding how to do it brought her back to the level of the prosaic. There was an old camp cot Gram Peggy had kept in the cellar; she hurried and fetched it back with Doug Archer beside her, neither of them talking much. They wanted to be finished before nightfall: already the shadows were long and threatening.

We'll have to touch that thing, Catherine thought. We'll have to lift it up onto this old cot. She imagined the injured thing would feel cool and wet to the touch, like the jellyfish lumps that washed up on the beach along Puget Sound. She shuddered, thinking about it.

Archer propped open the door of the shed and did most of the lifting. He supported the thing (the man) with his hands under its arms and brought it out into the fading daylight, where it looked even more horrific. Some of its skin was dark and scabbed over; some was merely flesh colored. But whole chunks of it were translucent or pale, fishy gray. It blinked gray eyelids against the light. It looked like something that had been underwater a long time. One leg was missing. The stump ended in a pink, porous mass of tissue. At least there was no blood.

Catherine took a deep breath and did what she could to help, lifting the leg end onto the army cot. Here was more pale skin and a fine webbing of blood vessels underneath, like an illustration from an anatomy textbook. But the flesh wasn't cool or slimy. It was warm and felt like normal skin.

Archer took the head end of the army cot and Catherine lifted the back. The injured man was heavy, as heavy as a normal man. His strangeness had not made him light. This was good, too. A creature with this much weight, she reasoned, could not be ghostly.

It was hard to hold the pipe legs of the army cot without spilling the man off, and she was sweating and her hands were cramped and sore by the time they passed out of the deep forest, down a trail nearly overgrown with moss and horsetail fern, into the back yard of what must be the house Archer had described. It was a very ordinary-looking house.

They put the army cot down on the overgrown lawn for a minute. Archer wiped his face with a handkerchief; Catherine kneaded her aching palms. She avoided his look. We don't want to acknowledge what we're doing, she thought; we want to pretend this is a regular kind of job.

The thing on the cot said, "You should be prepared for what's inside."

Archer looked down sharply. "What is inside?"

"Machines. A lot of very small machines. They won't hurt you."

"Oh," Archer said. He looked at the house again. "Machines." He frowned. "I don't have a key." "You don't need one," the monster said.



The door opened at a touch.

They carried the army cot inside, through an ordinary kitchen, into the big living room, which was not ordinary because the walls were covered with the machines the monster had warned them about.

The machines—there must he thousands of them, Catherine thought—were like tiny jewels, brightly colored, segmented, insectile, eyes and attention all aimed at the man on the cot. They were motionless; but she imagined them, for some reason, quivering with excitement.

It's like a homecoming, Catherine thought dazedly. That's what it's like.



None of this was possible.

She understood that she had reached an unexpected turning point in her life. She felt the way people must feel in a plane crash, or when their house goes up in flames. Now everything was different; nothing would be the same ever again. In the wake of these events, it wasn't possible to construct an ordinary idea of the world and how it worked. There was no way to make any of this fit.


But she was calm. Outside the context of the decaying woodshed—outside of the woods—even the monster had ceased to be frightening. He wasn't a monster after all; only a strange kind of man who had had some strange kind of accident. Maybe a curse had been placed on him.

They carried him into the bedroom, where there were more of the machine insects. She helped Archer lift him onto the bed. Archer asked in a small voice what else the man needed. The man said, "Time. Please don't tell anyone else about this."

"All right," Archer said. And Catherine nodded.

"And food," the man said. "Anything rich in protein. Meat would be good."

"I'll bring something," Catherine volunteered, surprising herself. "Would tomorrow be all right?"

"That would be fine."

And Archer added, "Who are you?"

The man smiled, but only a little. He must know how he looks, Catherine thought. When your lips are nearly transparent, you shouldn't smile too much. It creates a different effect. "My name is Ben Collier," he said.

"Ben," Archer repeated. "Ben, I would like to know what kind of thing you are exactly."

"I'm a time traveler," Ben said.



They left Ben Collier the time traveler alone with his machine bugs. On the way out of the house Catherine saw Archer pick up two items from the kitchen table: a blue spiral-bound notebook and a copy of the New York Times.



Back at Gram Peggy's house, Archer pored over the two documents. Catherine felt mysteriously vacant, lost: what was next? There was no etiquette for this situation. She said to Archer, "Shall I make us some dinner?" He looked up briefly, nodded.

It had never occurred to her that people who had shared experiences like this—people who were kidnapped by flying saucers or visited by ghosts—would have to deal with anything as prosaic as dinner. An encounter with the numinous, followed by, say, linguine. It was impossible. (That word again.)

Step by step, she thought. One thing at a time. She heated the frying pan, located a chicken breast she'd been thawing since morning, took a second one from the freezer and quick-defrosted it in the microwave—she would eat this one herself; Catherine didn't believe in nuked food, especially for guests. She didn't much believe in pan-fried chicken, either, but it was quick and available.

She set two places at the dinner table. The dining room was large and Victorian, Gram Peggy's cuckoo clock presiding over a cabinet stocked with blue Wedgwood. Catherine started coffee perking and served dinner on the Petalware she'd picked up at a thrift shop in Belltower—because it seemed somehow wrong or impertinent to be eating from Gram Peggy's china when Gram Peggy wasn't home. Archer carried his two souvenirs, the notebook and the New York Times, to the table with him. But he set them aside and complimented her on the food.

Catherine picked at her chicken. It tasted irrelevant.

She said, "Well, what have we got ourselves into?"

Archer managed a smile. "Something absolutely unexpected. Something we don't understand."

"You sound pleased about that."

"Do I? I guess I am, in a way. It kind of confirms this suspicion I've had." "Suspicion?"

"That the world is stranger than it looks."

Catherine considered this. "I think I know what you mean. When I was eighteen, I took up jogging. I used to go out after dark, winter nights. I liked all the yellow lighted-up windows of the houses. It felt funny being the only person out on the street, just, you know, running and breathing steam. I used to get an idea that anything could happen, that I'd turn a corner and I'd be in Oz and nobody would be the wiser—none of those people sleepwalking behind those yellow windows would have the slightest idea. I knew what kind of world it was. They didn't."

"Exactly," Archer said.

"But there was never Oz. Only one more dark street." "Until now."

"Is this Oz?"

"It might as well be."

She supposed that was true. "I guess we can't tell anyone."

"I don't think we should, no."

"And we have to go back in the morning."

"Yes."

"We can't forget about it and we can't walk away. He needs our help." "I think so." "But what is he?"

"Well, I think maybe he told us the truth, Catherine. I think he's a time traveler." "Is that possible?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I'm past making odds on what's possible and what isn't."

She gestured at the notebook, the newspaper. "So what did you find?"

"They belonged to Tom Winter, I believe. Look." She pushed aside her chicken and examined the paper. Sunday, May 13, 1962. The Late City Edition.

u.s ships and 1,800 marines on way to indochina area; laos decrees emergency . . . doctors transplant human heart valve . . . church in spain backs workers on strike rights

The front page had yellowed—but only a little.

"Check out the notebook," Archer prompted.

She leafed through it. The entries were brief scrawls and occupied the first three pages; the rest of the book was blank.

Troubling Questions, it said at the top.

You could walk away from this, it said.

This is dangerous, and you could walk away.

Everybody else on the face of the earth is being dragged into the future an hour at a time, but you can walk out. You found the back door.

Thirty years ago, she read. They have the Bomb. Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They have racism, ignorance, crime, starvation—

Are you really so frightened of the future?

I'll go back one more time. At least to look. To really be there. At least once.

She looked up at Doug Archer. "It's a sort of diary." "A short one." "Tom Winter's?" "I'd bet on it." "What did he do?"

"Walked into a shitload of trouble, it looks like. But that remains to be seen."



Only later did the obvious next thought occur to Catherine: Maybe we walked into a shitload of trouble, too.

Archer slept on the sofa. In the morning he phoned the Belltower Realty office and told them he was sick—"Death's door," he said into the phone. "That's right. Yup. I know. I know. Yeah, I hope so too. Thanks."

Catherine said, "Won't you get into trouble?"

"Lose some commissions, for sure."

"Is that all right?"

"It's all right with me. I have other business." He grinned —a little wildly, in Catherine's opinion. "Hey, there are miracles happening. Aren't you a little bit excited by that?"

She allowed a guilty smile. "I guess I am."

Then they drove down to the Safeway and bought five frozen T-bone steaks for Ben, the time traveler.

□ □

□ □

Archer visited the house every day for a week, sometimes with Catherine and sometimes without her. He brought food, which the time traveler never ate in his presence—maybe the machine bugs absorbed it and fed it to him in some more direct fashion; he didn't care to know the details.

Every day, he exchanged some words with Ben.

It was getting easier to think of him as "Ben," as something human rather than monstrous. The bedclothes disguised most of his deformities; and the white, sebaceous caul where his skull should have been had acquired enough pigmentation, by the third day, to pass for human skin. Archer had been scared at first by the machine bugs all over the house, but they never approached him and never presented any kind of threat. So Archer began to ask questions.

Simple ones at first: "How long were you in the shed?"


"Ten years, more or less."

"You were injured all that time?"

"I was dead most of that time."

"Clinically dead?"

Ben smiled. "At least." .

"What happened to you?"

"I was murdered."

"What saved you?"

"They did." The machine bugs.

Or he asked about Tom Winter: "What happened to him?" "He went somewhere he shouldn't have gone." This was ominous. "He traveled in time?" "Yes."

"Is he still alive?" "I don't know."

Brief questions, brief answers. Archer let it rest at that. He was trying to get a sense of who this person really was—how dangerous, how trustworthy. And he sensed Ben making similar judgments about him, perhaps in some more subtle or certain way.

Catherine didn't seem surprised by this. She let Archer sleep in her living room some nights; they ate dinner and breakfast together, talked about these strange events sometimes and sometimes not. Like Archer, she stopped by the Winter house every day or so. "We're like church deacons," Archer said. "Visiting the sick." And she answered, "That's what it feels like, doesn't it? How strange."

It was that, Archer thought. Very strange indeed. And the strangeness of it bolstered his courage. He remembered telling Tom Winter about this, his conviction that one day the clouds would open and rain frogs and marigolds over Belltower. (Or something like that.) And now, in a small way, that had happened, and it was a secret he shared only with Catherine Simmons and perhaps Tom Winter, wherever Tom had gone: absolute proof that the ordinary world wasn't ordinary at all . . . that Belltower itself was a kind of mass hallucination, a reassuring stage set erected over a wild, mutable landscape.

"But dangerous, too," Catherine objected when he told her this. "We don't really know. Something terrible happened to Ben. He was almost killed."

"Probably dangerous," Archer admitted. "You can get out of this if you want. Sell the house, move on back to Seattle. Most likely, you'll be perfectly safe."

She shook her head with a firmness he found charming. "I can't do that, Doug. It feels like a kind of contract. He asked me for help. Maybe I could have walked away then. But I didn't. I came back. It's like saying, Okay, I'll help."

"You did help."

"But not just carrying him back to the house. That's not all the help he needs. Don't you feel that?"

"Yes," Archer admitted. "I do feel that."

He let her fix him a meal of crab legs and salad. Archer hated crab legs—his mother used to buy cheap crab and lobster from a fishing boat down by the VFW outpost—but he smiled at the effort she made. He said, "You should let me cook for you sometime."

She nodded. "That would be nice. This is kind of weird, you know. We hardly know each other, but we're nursemaiding this—person out of a time machine."

"We know each other all right," Archer said. "It doesn't take that long. I'm a semi-f*cked-up real estate agent living in this little town he kind of loves and kind of hates. You're a semisuccessful painter from Seattle who misses her grandmother because she never had much of a family. Neither of us knows what to do next and we're both lonelier than we want to admit. Does that about sum it up?"

"Not a bad call." She smiled a little forlornly and uncorked a bottle of wine.



The night after that she went to bed with him.

The bed was a creaky, pillared antique in what Catherine called the guest room, off the main hall upstairs. The sheets were old, thin, delicate, cool; the mattress rose around them like an ocean swell.

Catherine was shy and attentive. Archer was touched by her eagerness to please and did his best to return the favor. Archer had never much believed in one-night stands; great sex, like great anything, required a little learning. But Catherine was easy to know and they came together with what seemed like an old familiarity. It was, in any case, Archer thought, a hell of an introduction.

Now Catherine drifted to sleep beside him while Archer lay awake listening to the silence. It was quiet up here along the Post Road. Twice, he heard a car pass by outside—one of the locals, home late; or a tourist looking for the highway.

There were big questions that still needed answering, he thought. Archer thought about the word "time" and how strange and lonely it made him feel. When he was little his family used to drive down to his uncle's ranch outside Santa Fe in New Mexico, dirt roads and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance, scrub pines and sage brush and ancient pueblos. The word "time" made him feel the way those desert roads used to make him feel: lost in something too big to comprehend. Time travel, Archer thought, must be like driving those roads. Strange rock formations and dust devils, and an empty blank horizon everywhere you look.



When he woke, Catherine was dressing herself self-consciously by the bed. He turned away politely while she pulled on her panties. Archer sometimes wondered whether there was something wrong with him, the doubtful way women always looked at him in the morning. But then he stood up and hugged her and he felt her relax in his arms. They were still friends after all.

But something was different today and it was not just that they had gone to bed last night. Something in this project was less miraculous now, more serious. They knew it without talking about it.

After breakfast they hiked down to the Winter house to visit Ben Collier.

The steaks from the Safeway had been doing him good. Ben was sitting up in bed this morning, the blankets pooled around his waist. He looked as cheerful as a Buddha, Archer thought. But it was obvious from the he of the bedclothes that his leg was still missing.

Archer believed the stump was a little longer, though. It occurred to him that he expected the time traveler to grow a new leg—which apparently he was doing.

"Morning," Archer said. Catherine stood beside him, nodding, still a little frightened.

Ben turned his head. "Good morning. Thank you for coming by."

Archer began to deliver the speech he'd been rehearsing: "We really have to talk. Neither of us minds coming down here. But, Ben, it's confusing. Until we know what's really going on—"

Ben accepted this immediately and waved his hand: no need to continue. "I understand," he said. "I'll answer all your questions. And then—if you don't mind—I'll ask you one."

Archer said that sounded fair. Catherine brought in two chairs from the kitchen, on the assumption this might take a while.

□ □

□ □

"Who are you really," Archer asked, "and what are you doing here?"

Ben Collier wondered how to|respond to this.

Confiding in these people was a radical step . . . but not entirely unprecedented, and unavoidable under the circumstances. He was prepared to trust them. The judgment was only partially intuitive; he had watched them through his own eyes and through the more discerning eyes of his cybernetics. They showed no sign of lying or attempting to manipulate him. Archer, in particular, seemed eager to help. They had weathered what must have been a frightening experience, and Ben credited that to their favor.

But they would need courage, too. And that quality was harder to judge.

He meant to answer their questions as honestly and thoroughly as he could. He owed them this, no matter what happened next. Catherine could have made things infinitely more difficult when she discovered him in the shed—if she had called the police, for instance. Instead, his recovery had been hastened by a significant margin. It would have been pointless and unkind to lie about himself.




He was born (he explained) in the year 2157, in a small town not far from the present-day site of Boulder, Colorado. He had lived there most of his professional life, doing research for a historical foundation.

All this begged the definition of "small town," of "professional life," and of "historical foundation" as these things would be understood by Archer and Catherine—but they were close enough to the truth.

Catherine said, "That's how you became a time traveler?"

He shook his head. "I was recruited. Catherine, if you visited the twenty-second century you would find a lot of marvelous things—but time travel is not among them. Any reputable physicist of my own era would have rejected the idea out of hand. Not the idea that time is essentially mutable and perhaps nonlinear, but the idea that it could be traversed by human beings. The water in the ocean is like the water in a swimming pool, but you can't swim across it. I was recruited by individuals from my own future, who were recruited by others from their future—and so on."

"Like stepping stones," Archer supplied.

"Essentially."

"But recruited for what?"

"Primarily, as a caretaker. To live in this house. To maintain it and protect it."

"Why?" Catherine asked, but he imagined she had already surmised the answer.

"Because this house is a sort of time machine."



"So you're not a real time traveler," Archer said. "I mean, you come from the future . . . but you're only a kind of employee."

"I suppose that's a good enough description." "The machine in this building isn't working the way it's supposed to—am I right?" He nodded.

"But if it was, and you were the custodian, who would come through here? Who are the real time travelers?"

This was a more serious question, more difficult to answer. "Most of the time, Doug, no one would come through. It's not a busy place. Mainly, I collect contemporary documents —books, newspapers, magazines—and pass them on."

"To whom?" Catherine asked.

"People from a time very distant from my own. They look human, but they aren't entirely. They created the tunnels— the time machines."

He wondered how much sense they would make of this. The real time travelers,' Archer had said: as good a description as any. Ben always trembled a little on the occasions when he was required to interact with these beings. They were kindly and only somewhat aloof; but one remained conscious of the evolutionary gulf. "Please understand, much of this is as far beyond my comprehension as it may be beyond yours. All I really know are legends, passed down by people like myself—other custodians, other caretakers. Legends of the future, you might say."

"Tell us some," Archer said.



What this concerns (Ben explained) is life on earth.

Look at it in the context of geologic time.

In the primeval solar system the earth is fused into coherent shape by the collisions of orbiting planetesimals. It has a molten core, a skin of cooler rock. It exudes gases and liquids —carbon dioxide, water. In time, it develops an atmosphere and oceans.

Over the course of millions of years, life of a sort arises as vermiform crystalline structures in the porous rock of hot mineral-dense undersea vents. In time, these crystalline structures adapt to a cooler environment by incorporating proteins into themselves—so successfully that the crystalline skeleton is discarded and purely proteinoid life comes to dominate the primitive biosphere. RNA and DNA are adopted as a genetic memory and evolution begins in earnest.

An almost infinite diversity of structures compete against the environment. There will never again be such complexity of life on earth—the rest of evolution is a narrowing, a winnowing out.

The climate changes. Prokaryotic cells poison the atmosphere with oxygen. Continents ride tectonic plates across the magma. Life flows and ebbs in the long intervals between cometary impacts.

Mankind arises. It turns out that mankind, like the grasses, like the flowering plants, is one of those species capable of transforming the planet itself. It alters the climatic balance and might well have drowned in its own waste products, except for an extraordinary new ability to modify itself and to create new forms of life. These are parallel and complementary technologies. Mankind, dying, learns to make machines in its own image. It learns to change itself in fundamental ways. The two capabilities combine to generate a new form of life, self-reproducing but only marginally biological. It can be called human because there is humanity in its lineage; it's the legitimate heir of mankind. But it's as different from mankind as crystalline life from the rocks it was born in, or protein life from the rocky structures that preceded it. These new creatures are almost infinitely adaptable; some of them live in the ocean, some of them live in outer space. In their diaspora they occupy most of the planets of the solar system. They are very successful. They begin to comprehend, and eventually manipulate, some fundamental constants of the physical universe. They visit the stars. They discover hidden structures in the fabric of duration and distance.



Ben paused, a little breathless. How long since these mysteries had been explained to him? Years, he thought—no matter how you measure it. "Catherine," he said, "would you open the window? There's a nice breeze outside." A little dazedly, she rolled back the blinds and lifted the window. "Thank you," Ben said. "Very pleasant."

Archer was frowning. "These new creatures,' these are the folks who travel in time?"

"Who built the machine that operates in this house, yes. You have to understand what time travel means, in this case. They discovered what might be called crevices in the structure of space and time—fractures, if you like, with a shape and duration outside the definable bounds of this universe but intersecting it at certain points. A 'time machine' is a sort of artificial tunnel following the contour of these crevices. In the local environment of the earth, a time machine can only take you certain places, at certain times. There are nodes of intersection. This house—an area surrounding it for some hundreds of yards—is one of those nodes."

Archer said, "Why here?"

"It's a meaningless question. The nodes are natural features, like mountains. There are nodes that intersect the crust of the earth under the ocean, nodes that might open in thin air."

"How many places like this are there, then?"

Ben shrugged. "I was never told. They tend to cluster, both in space and in time. The twentieth century is fairly rich in them. Not all of them are in use, of course. And remember: they have duration as well as location. A node might be accessible for twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years, and then vanish."

Catherine had been sitting in patient concentration. She said, "Let me understand this. People a long way in the future open a pathway to these nodes, yes?"

Ben nodded.

"But why? What do they use them for?" "They use them judiciously for the purpose of historical reclamation. This century—and the next, and my own—are the birthing time of their species. For them, it's the obscure and distant past."

"They're archaeologists," Catherine interpreted.

"Archaeologists and historians. Observers. They're careful not to intervene. The project has a duration for them, also. Time passes analogously at both ends of the link. They're conducting a two-hundred-year-long project to restore their knowledge of these critical centuries. When they're finished, they mean to dismantle the tunnels. They're nervous about the mathematics of paradox—it's a problem they don't want to deal with."


Catherine said, "Paradox?"

Archer said, "A time paradox. Like if you murder your own grandfather before you're born, do you still exist?"

She regarded him with some astonishment. "How do you know that?"

"I used to read a lot of science fiction."

Ben said, "I'm told there are tentative models. The problem isn't as overwhelming as it seems. But no one is anxious to put it to the test."

Archer said, "Even the presence of somebody from the future might have an effect. Even if they just crush a plant or step on a bug—"

Ben smiled. "The phenomenon isn't unique to time travel. In meteorology it's called 'sensitive dependence on original conditions.' The atmosphere is chaotic; a small event in one place might generate a large effect in another. Wave your hand in China and a storm might brew up in the Atlantic. Similarly, crush an aphid in 1880 and you might alter the presidential election of 1996. The analogy is good, Doug, but the connection isn't precisely causal. There are stable features in the atmosphere that tend to recur, no matter what—"

"Attractors," Archer supplied.

Ben was pleased. "You keep up with contemporary math?"

Archer grinned. "I try."

"I've been told there are similar structures in historical time—they tend to persist. But yes, the possibility for change exists. It's an observer phenomenon. The rule is that the present is always the present. The past is always fixed and immutable, the future is always indeterminate—no matter where you stand."

"From here," Archer said, "the year 1988 is unchangeable"

"Because it's the past."

"But if I traveled three years back—"

"It would be the future, therefore unpredictable."

"But there's your paradox already," Archer said. "It doesn't make sense."

Ben nodded. He had struggled with this idea himself . . . then submitted to it, a Zen paradox which happened to be true and therefore inarguable. "It's the way time works," he said. "If it doesn't make sense, it's because you haven't made sense of it."

"You said there was a math for this?"

"So I'm told."

"You don't know it?"

"It's not twenty-second-century math. It's several millennia beyond that. I doubt you or I could contain it without a certain amount of neural augmentation."

Catherine said, "This is awfully abstract."

Archer nodded and seemed to struggle a moment with his thoughts.

Ben looked out the window. There was something wonderfully calming about all these Douglas firs. The sound they made when the wind moved through them.

Archer cleared his throat. "There's another obvious question."

The painful question. "You want to know what went wrong."

Archer nodded.

Ben sighed and took a breath. He didn't relish these memories.



He had reconstructed this from his own experience, from the fragmentary memories of the cybernetics, from the evidence of the tunnel itself.

There was a house like this house, he told Archer and Catherine, a temporal depot, in the latter half of the twenty-first century, in Florida—in those days a landscape of fierce tropical storms and civil war.

The custodian of that house was a woman named Ann Heath.

(Ann, he thought, I'm sorry this had to happen. You were kind when you recruited me and I never had a chance to repay that kindness. Time may be traversed but never mastered: the unexpected happens and in the long run we are all mortal.)

The Florida house had been scheduled for shutdown. Its environment was growing too unpredictable. But something unexpected happened prior to that closing. As nearly as Ben could deduce from the available clues, the house had been invaded by forces of the American government.

The house had possessed some defenses and so did Ann Heath, but perhaps these had been partially dismantled prior to shutdown; in any case, the soldiers of the grim last decades of that century were formidable indeed, with weapons and armor rooted deep into their bodies and nervous systems.

One of these men must have occupied the house, overpowered Ann, and forced her to reveal some of the secrets of the tunnel. The man had used this information to escape into the past.

(She must he dead, Ben thought. They must have killed her.) The marauder had invaded Ben's domain without warning, disabled the cybernetics with an electromagnetic pulse, destroyed much of Ben's body, and dumped his corpse in the woodshed. The attack had been quick and successful.

Then the marauder had opened a tunnel some thirty years long, to a nodal point in New York City, where he had committed the same sort of attack but more thoroughly; another custodian and all his cybernetics were irretrievably destroyed.

Finally—as a last, shrewd defense—the marauder had disabled the tunnel's controls so that the connection between Belltower and Manhattan was permanently open.



Catherine said, "Permanently open? Why is that such a great idea?"

Ben was lost a moment in temporal heuristics, then hit on a simple analogy: "Imagine the nodal points as terminals in a telephone network. Simultaneous connections are impossible. I can call a great number of destinations from one phone— but only one at a time. As long as the connection with Manhattan is open, no other connection can be made."

"The phone is off the hook," Catherine said, "at both ends."

"Exactly. He's sealed himself off. And us along with him."

"But a phone," Catherine said, "if it doesn't work, you can always go knock on the door. Somebody from another terminal somewhere else could have shown up and helped. Better yet, they could warn you. Leave a message in 1962: In seventeen years, watch out for a bad guy."

Oh dear, Ben thought. "I don't want to get too deeply into fractal logistics, but it doesn't work like that. Look at it from the perspective of the deep future. Our time travelers own a single doorway; its duration governs duration in all the tunnels. From their point of view, Belltower 1979 and Manhattan 1952 disappeared simultaneously. Since that disappearance, approximately ten years have elapsed—here, and in the New York terminus, and in the future. And there are no overlapping destinations. The portal in this house was created in 1964, twenty-five years ago, when its valency point with Manhattan was the year 1937 . . . Are you following any of this?"

Catherine looked dazed. Archer said, "I think so . . . but you could still leave a message, seems to me. A warning of some kind."

"Conceivably. But the time travelers wouldn't, and the custodians have sworn not to. It would create a direct causal loop, possibly shutting down both terminals permanently."

" 'Possibly'?"

"No one really knows," Ben said. "The math is disturbing. No one wants to find out."

Archer shrugged: he didn't understand this, Ben interpreted, but he would take it on faith. "That's why nobody came to help. That's why the house was empty."

"Yes."

"But you survived."

"The cybernetics rebuilt me. It was a long process." He gestured at the stump of his leg under the blanket. "Not quite finished."

Catherine said, "You were out there for ten years?"

"I wasn't suffering, Catherine. I woke out of a long sleep, the day you opened the door."

"Then how do you know all this?"

This was easier to demonstrate than explain. He made a silent request and one of the cybernetics climbed the bed-sheets and sat a moment in the palm of his hand—a glittering, many-legged jewel.


"My memory," he said.

"Oh," Catherine said. "I see."

□ □

□ □

This was an awful lot to accept all at once, Archer thought. Time as a fragmented structure, like sandstone, riddled with crevices and caverns; twenty-first-century marauders; insect memories . . .

But Ben made it plausible. Plausible not because of his exoticisms—his strange injuries or his tiny robots—but because of his manner. Archer had no trouble at all believing this guy as a twenty-second-century academic recruited into an odd and secret business. Ben was calm, intelligent, and inspired trust. This could, of course, be a clever disguise. Maybe he was a Martian fifth columnist out to sabotage the planet—given recent events, it wouldn't be too surprising. But Archer's instinct was to trust the man.

Questions remained, however.

"Couple of things," Archer said. "If your marauder did such a thorough job at the Manhattan end, why did he screw up here?"

"He must have believed I was dead beyond reclamation. Probably he thought all the cybernetics were dead, too."

"Why not come back and check on that?"

"I don't know," Ben said. "But he may have been afraid of the tunnel."

"Why would he be?"

For the first time, Ben hesitated. "There are other . . . presences there," he said.

Archer wasn't sure he liked the sound of this. Presences? "I thought you said nobody could get through."

The time traveler paused, as if trying to assemble an answer.

"Time is a vastness," he said finally. "We tend to underestimate it. Think about the people who opened these tunnels— millennia in the future. That's an almost inconceivable landscape of time. But history didn't begin with them and it certainly didn't end with them. The fact is, when they created these passages they found them already inhabited."

"Inhabited by what?"

"Apparitions. Creatures who appear without warning, vanish without any apparent destination. Creatures not altogether material in constitution."

"From an even farther future," Archer said. "Is that what you mean?"

"Presumably. But no one really knows."

"Are they human? In any sense at all?"

"Doug, I don't know. I've heard speculation. They might be our ultimate heirs. Or something unrelated to us. They might exist—somehow; I find it difficult to imagine—outside our customary time and space. They seem to appear capriciously, but they may have some purpose, though no one knows what it is. Maybe they're the world's last anthropologists—collecting human history in some unimaginable sense. Or controlling it. Creating it." He shrugged. "Ultimately, they're indecipherable."

"The marauder might have seen one of these?"

"It's possible. They appear from time to time, without warning."

"Would that frighten him?"

"It might have. They're impressive creatures. And not always benign." "Come again?"

"They almost always ignore people. But occasionally they'll take one." Archer blinked. "Take one?"

"Abduct one? Eat one? The process is mysterious but quite complete. No body is left behind. In any case, it's very rare. I've seen these creatures and I've never felt threatened by them. But the marauder may have been told about this, maybe even witnessed it—I don't know. I'm only guessing."

Archer said, "This is very bizarre, Ben."

"Yes," Ben said. "I think so too."



Archer tried to collect his thoughts. "The last question—" "Is about Tom."

Archer nodded.

"He discovered the tunnel," Ben said. "He used it. He should have known better." "Is he still alive?" "I don't know."

"One of these ghost things might have eaten him?"

Ben frowned. "I want to emphasize how unlikely that is. 'Ghost' is a good analogy. We call them that: time ghosts. They're seldom seen, even more seldom dangerous. No, the more present danger is from the marauder."

"Tom could be dead," Archer interpreted.

"He might be."

"Or in danger?"

"Very likely."

"And he doesn't know that—doesn't know anything about it."

"No," Ben said, "he doesn't."

□ □

□ □

This talk worried Catherine deeply.

She had accepted Ben Collier as a visitor from the future; as an explanation it worked as well as any other. But the future was supposed to be a sensible place—a simplified place, decorated in tasteful white; she had seen this on television. But the future Ben had described was vast, confusing, endless in its hierarchies of mutation. Nothing was certain and nothing lasted forever. It was scary, the idea of this chasm of impermanence yawning in front of her.

She was worried about Doug Archer, too.

He had crawled into her bed last night with the bashful eagerness of a puppy dog. Catherine accepted this as a gesture of friendship but worried about the consequences. She had not slept with very many men because she tended to care too much about them. She lacked the aptitude for casual sex. This was no doubt an advantage in the age of AIDS, but too often it forced her to choose between frustration and a commitment she didn't want or need. For instance, Archer: who was this man, really?

She stole a glance at him as he sat beside her, Levi's and messy hair and a strange little grin on his face, listening to Ben, the porcelain-white one-legged time traveler: Douglas Archer, somehow loving all this. Loving the weirdness of it.

She wanted to warn him. She wanted to say, Listen to all these frightening words. A renegade soldier from the twenty-first century, a tunnel populated with time ghosts who sometimes "take" people, a man named Tom Winter lost in the past . . .

But Doug was sitting here like a kid listening to some Rudyard Kipling story.

She looked at Ben Collier—at this man who had been dead for ten years and endured it with the equanimity of a CEO late for a meeting of his finance committee—and frowned.

He wants something from us, Catherine thought.

He won't demand anything. (She understood this.) He won't threaten us. He won't beg. He'll let us say no. He'll let us walk away. He'll thank us for all we've done, and he'll really mean it.

But Doug won't say no. Doug won't walk away.

She knew him that well, at least. Cared that much about him.



Doug was saying, "Maybe we should break for lunch." He looked at Ben speculatively. "How about you? We could fix up some of those steaks. Unless you prefer to eat 'em raw?"

"Thank you," Ben said, "but I don't take food in the customary fashion." He indicated his throat, his chest. "Still undergoing repairs."

"The steaks aren't for you?"

"Oh, they're for me. And thank you. But the cybernetics have to digest them first." "Ick," Catherine said. "I'm sorry if this is disturbing."

It was, but she shrugged. "They fed my aunt Lacey through a tube for two years before she died. This isn't any worse, I guess. But I'm sorry for you."

"Strictly temporary. And I'm not in any pain. You two have lunch if you like. I'm quite happy here."

"Okay," Catherine said. Meekly: "But I have a couple of questions of my own."

"Surely," Ben said.

"You told us you were a sort of custodian. A caretaker. You said you were recruited.' But I don't know what that means. Somebody knocked at your door and asked you to join up?"

"I was a professional historian, Catherine. A good one. I was approached by another caretaker, from my own near future, also a historian. Think of us as a guild. We recruit our own."


"That puts a lot of power in your hands." Custodian was a modest word, Catherine thought; maybe too modest.

"It has to be that way," Ben said. "The tunnel-builders are journeying into their own distant past. Their records of this time are sketchy; that's why they're here. The custodians act as their buffer in a sometimes hostile environment. We provide them with contemporary documents and we help to integrate them into contemporary culture on the rare occasions when they choose to make a physical visit. Could you, for instance, walk into a Cro-Magnon encampment and expect to pass for one of the tribe?"

"I see. You agreed to this?"

"When it was explained to me."

"Just like that?"

"Not without some soul-searching."

"But you must have had a life of your own. It must have meant giving something up."

"Not as much as you might think. I was old, Catherine. An old man. And longevity is something of an art in my time; I was more than a century old. And failing. And quite alone."

He said this with a wistfulness that made Catherine believe him. "They made you young again?"

"Passably young," Ben said. "Young enough to begin another life when I leave here."

"Are you allowed to do that?"

"I'm an employee, not a slave."

"So what you want," Catherine surmised, "is to fix up all this damage. Make the tunnel work again. And eventually go home."

"Yes."

"Is that possible? Can you fix it?"

"The cybernetics are repairing as much of the physical damage as they can. Then we can close the connection to Manhattan, isolate it until it can be repaired as well. But that will take some time. Weeks, at least."

"And until then," Catherine interpreted, "the problem is Tom Winter."

"He may be perfectly safe. He may not. The cybernetics tried to warn him, but they were working across a tremendous information barrier—I'm afraid they weren't very specific. He may have alerted the marauder, which puts us at risk; or he may do so if he hasn't yet."

Catherine bit her lip. Here was the crux of it. "You want us to bring him back."

Ben looked very solemn. "That may not be possible at this stage. The cybernetics can help, and they might provide some defense against the marauder, but the danger is obvious. I won't ask you to go—either of you."

You don't have to ask, Catherine thought sadly. She looked at Doug Archer and knew.

Archer grinned.

"Tom is a likable sonofabitch," he said. "I expect I can drag his ass back here."

Doug went to the kitchen, leaving Catherine alone with Ben.

She hesitated in the doorway, unnerved by Ben's expressionless patience. Finally she said, "Is this necessary? If you don't get Tom Winter back . . . would the world end?" She added, "Doug is risking his life, I think."

"I'll do everything I can to minimize the risk. Some risk remains. The world won't end if Tom Winter stays in Manhattan . . . but there might be other consequences I can't calculate." He paused. "Catherine, Doug knows the doorway is open. Do you think he'd stay away from it if I told him to?"

"No ... I don't suppose he would." Catherine resented this but understood that it was true. "This way, at least he's serving a purpose. Is that it?"

"This way," Ben said, "he'll come back."