A Bridge of Years

Seventeen


He slept for twelve hours in a bed he had never really thought of as his own and woke to find a strange woman gazing down at him.

At least, Tom thought, an unfamiliar woman—he had grown a little stingy with the word "strange."

She occupied a chair next to the bed, a paperback Silhouette romance in her hands; she put the book splayed open on the knee of her jeans. "You're awake," she said.

Barely. "Do I know you?"

"No—not yet. I'm your neighbor. Catherine Simmons. I live in the big house up by the highway."

He collected his thoughts. "Mrs. Simmons, the elderly woman—you're what, her granddaughter?"

"Right! You knew Gram Peggy?"

"Waved to her once or twice. Delivered her paper when I was twelve years old."

"She died in June ... I came down to take care of business."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

He took a longer look around the room. Same room, same house, not much changed, at least this corner of it. He didn't remember arriving here. The shoulder wound had gone from painful to incapacitating and he had crossed the last fifty yards of the tunnel with his eyes squeezed shut and Doug Archer propping him up.

The shoulder felt better now ... He didn't check for blisters but the pain was gone.

He focused his attention on Catherine Simmons. "I guess this isn't the business you meant to take care of."

"Doug and I sort of stumbled into it."

"I guess we all did." He sat up. "Is Joyce around?"

"I think she's watching TV. But you'll need to talk to Ben, I think."

He supposed he would. "The TV's working?"

"Oh, Ben was very apologetic about that. He says the cybernetics managed to scare you without warning you off. They were dealing with a situation way outside their expertise; they went about it all wrong. He made them fix the TV for you."

"That's very thoughtful of Ben."

"You'll like him. He's a nice guy." She hesitated. "You slept a long time . . . Are you sure you're all right?" "My shoulder—but that's better now." "You don't seem too pleased to be back." "Friend of mine died," Tom said.

Catherine Simmons nodded. "I know how that is. Gram Peggy was pretty important in my life. It leaves a vacuum, doesn't it? Let me know if there's something I can do."

"You can bring me my clothes," Tom said.



He reminded himself that he had climbed back out of the well of time and that this was the summer of 1989—the last hot summer of a hot decade, hovering on the brink of a future he couldn't predict.

The house was a fortress, Archer had told him, and some of that showed in the living room: the furniture had been pushed back against the walls and the walls themselves were covered with a mass of gemlike machine bugs. It looked like a suburban outpost of Aladdin's Cave.


Tom followed Catherine to the kitchen, where the machine bugs—a smaller mass of them—were dismantling the stove.

A man, evidently human, sat at the kitchen table. He stood up clumsily when Tom entered the room. "This is Ben," Catherine said.

Ben the time traveler. Ben who had risen, like Lazarus, from the grave. Ben the custodian of this malfunctioning hole in the world.

He stood with one hand propped against a cane. His left leg was truncated, the denim tied shut between his knee and the place where his ankle should have been. He was pale and his hair was a faint, fine stubble over his scalp.

He offered his hand. Tom shook it.

"You're the time traveler," he said.

Ben Collier smiled. "Let's sit down, shall we? This leg is still awkward. Tom, would you like a beer? There's one in the refrigerator."

Tom wasn't thirsty. "You lived here ten years ago."

"That's right. Doug must have explained all that?"

"You were hurt and you were in that shed out in the woods. I think I owe you an apology. If I hadn't gone haring off down the tunnel—"

"Nothing you've done or haven't done is anybody's fault. If everything had been working correctly the house would never have been for sale. You walked into a major debacle; you didn't create it."

"Doug said you were—he used the word 'dead.' Buried out there for some years."

"Doug is more or less correct."

"It's hard to accept that."

"Is it? You seem to be doing all right."

"Well . . . I've swallowed a fair number of miracles since May; I suppose one more won't choke me."

He gave Ben a closer look. A ray of sunlight from the big back window had fallen across the time traveler and for a moment Tom imagined he saw the outline of the skull under the skin. An optical illusion. He hoped. "Maybe I'll have that beer after all. You want one?"

"No, thank you," Ben said.

Tom took a beer from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap. Welcome to the future: throw away that clumsy old bottle opener.

A stove grill clanked against the floor behind him and a brigade of machine bugs began hauling it toward the basement stairs.

Life, Tom thought, is very strange.

"They're using the metal," Ben explained. "Making more of themselves. It's hard on the appliances, but we're in fairly desperate straits at the moment."

"They can do that? Duplicate themselves?"

"With enough raw material, certainly."

"They're from the future," Tom said.

"Somewhat in advance of my own time, as a matter of fact. I found them a little repellent when I was introduced to the concept. But they're extremely useful and they're easy to conceal."

"They can repair the tunnel?"

"They're doing precisely that—among many other things."

"But you said we were in 'dire straits.' So nothing is repaired yet and this so-called marauder—"

"Might choose to follow you here. That's what we're on guard against, yes."

"But he hasn't tried it yet. Maybe he won't."

"Maybe. I hope not. We do have to take precautions."

Tom nodded; this was sensible. "How well protected are we?"

Ben seemed to ponder the question. "There's no doubt we can stop him. What troubles me is that it might take too long."

"I don't understand."

"From what I can reconstruct, the man is an armored conscript soldier, a renegade from the territorial wars at the end of the next century. In a sense, he isn't really our enemy— the enemy is his armor."

"I saw him in New York," Tom said. "He didn't look especially well armored."

"It's a kind of cybernetic armor, Tom. Thin, flexible, very sophisticated, very effective. It protects him from most conventional weapons and interacts with his body to improve his reflexes and focus his aggression. When he's wearing the armor, killing is an almost sexual imperative. He wants it and he can't help wanting it."

"Ugly."

"Much worse than ugly. But in a way, his strength is his weakness. Without the armor he's more or less helpless; he might not even be inclined to do us harm. The fact that he took advantage of the tunnel to flee the war suggests his loyalty isn't as automatic as his surgeons might have liked. If we can attack the armor we can neutralize the threat."

"Good," Tom said. He pulled at the beer. "Can we?"

"Yes, we can, in a couple of ways. Primarily, we've been building specialized cybernetics—tiny ones, the size of a virus. They can infiltrate his bloodstream and attack the armor . . . dismantle and disconnect it from the inside."

"Why didn't they do that in the first place?"

"These aren't the units he was exposed to. They've been built expressly for the purpose. He had the advantage of surprise; he doesn't have that anymore."

"So if he shows up here," Tom interpreted, "if he breathes the air—"

"The devices go to work instantly. But he won't simply fall over and die. He'll be functional, or partly functional, for some time."

"How much time?"

"Unfortunately, it's impossible to calculate. Ten minutes? Half an hour? Long enough to do a great deal of damage."

Tom thought about it. "So we should leave the machine bugs and clear out of here. If he shows up, they can deal with him."

"Tom, you're welcome to do so if you like. I can't; I have an obligation to protect the premises and direct the repair work. Also, we have weapons that might slow down the marauder while the cybernetics work on him. It's important to keep him confined to the property. The machines inside him aren't entirely autonomous. They need direction from outside, and if he moves beyond a certain radius they'll lose the ability to communicate, might not be able to finish disarming him. He could cause a great deal of havoc if he wandered down to the highway."

No doubt that was true. "Doug and Catherine—"

"Have volunteered to help. They're armed and they know what to do if an alarm sounds."

He asked the central question: "What about Joyce?"

"Joyce is making a difficult adjustment. She's endured a great deal. But she volunteered her help as soon as she understood the situation."

"Might as well make it unanimous," Tom said.



He found Joyce in the back yard, in a lawn chair, reading the Seattle paper in the shade of the tall pines.

It was a cool day for August; there was a nice breeze bearing in from the west. The air carried the smell of pine sap, of the distant ocean, a faint and bitter echo of the pulp mill. Tom stood a moment, savoring all this, not wanting to disturb her.

He wondered what the headlines were. This wasn't precisely the present, not exactly the future; he had come here by a twisted path, a road too complex to make linear sense. Maybe some new country had been invaded, some new oil tanker breached.

She looked up from the editorial page and saw him watching her. He came the rest of the way across the lawn.

She was an anachronism in her harlequin glasses and straight hair, beautiful in the shade of these tall trees.

Before he could frame a sentence she said, "I'm sorry about the way I behaved. I was tired and I was sick about Lawrence and I didn't know how you were involved. Ben explained all that. And thank you for bringing me here."

"Not as far out of danger as I thought it would be."

"Far enough. I'm not worried. How's your shoulder?"

"Pretty much okay. Enjoying the news?"

"Convincing myself it's real. I watched a little TV, too. That satellite news station, what's it called? CNN." She folded the paper and stood up. "Tom, can we walk somewhere? The woods are pretty—Doug said there were trails."


"Is it a good idea to leave the house?"

"Ben said it would be all right."

"I know a place," Tom said.



He took her up the path Doug Archer had shown him some months ago, past the overgrown woodshed—its door standing open and a cloud of gnats hanging inside—up this hillside to the open, rocky space where the land sloped away to the sea.

The sea drew a line of horizon out beyond Belltower and the plume of the mill. In the stillness of the afternoon Tom heard the chatter of starlings as they wheeled overhead, the rattle of a truck out on the highway.

Joyce sat hugging her knees on a promontory of rock. "It's pretty up here."

He nodded. "Long way from the news." Long way from 1962. Long way from New York City. "How does the future strike you?"

The question wasn't as casual as it sounded. She answered slowly, thoughtfully. "Not as gee-whiz as I expected. Uglier than I thought it would be. Poorer. Meaner. More shortsighted, more selfish, more desperate."

Tom nodded.

She frowned into the sunlight. "More the same than I thought it would be."

"That's about it," Tom said. "But not as bad as it looks." "No?"

She shook her head vigorously. "I talked to Ben about this. Things are changing. He says there's amazing things happening in Europe. The next couple of decades are going to be fairly wild."

Tom doubted it. He had watched Tiananmen Square on television that spring. Big tanks. Fragile people.

"Everything is changing," Joyce insisted. "Politics, the environment—the weather. He says we happen to be living on the only continent where complacency is still possible, and only for a while longer. That's our misfortune."

"I suppose it is. What did he tell you, that the future is some kind of paradise?"

"No, no. The problems are huge, scary." She looked up, brushed her hair out of her eyes. "The man who killed Lawrence, he's the future too. All the horrible things. Conscription and famine and stupid little wars."

"That's what we have to look forward to?"

"Maybe. Not necessarily. Ben comes from a time that looks back on all that as a kind of insanity. But the point is, Tom, it's the future—it hasn't happened yet and maybe it doesn't have to, at least not that way."

"Not logical, Joyce. The marauder came from somewhere. We can't wish him out of existence."

"He's a fact," Joyce conceded. "But Ben says anyone who travels into the past risks losing the place he left. Ben himself. If things happen differently he might be orphaned— might go home and find out it's not there anymore, at least not the way he remembers it. It's not likely, but it's possible."

"So the future is unknowable."

"I think the future is something like a big building in the fog—you know it's there, and you can grope your way toward it, but you can't be sure about it until it's close enough to touch."

"Leaves us kind of in the dark," Tom observed.

"The place you stand is always the present and that's all you ever really have—1 don't think that's a bad thing. Ben says the only way you can own the past is by respecting it— by not turning it into something quaint or laughable or pastel or bittersweet. It's a real place where real people live. And the future is real because we're building it out of real hours and real days."

No world out of the world, Tom thought.

No Eden, no Utopia, only what you can touch and the touching of it.

He took her hand. She gazed across the pine tops and the distant town site toward the sea. "I can't stay here," she said. "I have to go back."



"I don't know if I can go with you."

"I don't know if I want you to."

She stood up and was beautiful, Tom thought, with the afternoon sun on her hair.

"Hey," she said. "Don't look at me like that. It's just me. Just some f*cked-up chick from Minneapolis. Nothing special."

He shook his head, was mute.

"I was a ghost for you," she said. "Ghost of some idea about what life used to be like or could be like or what you wanted from it. But I'm not that. But that's okay. Maybe you were a ghost too. Ghost of whatever I thought I'd find in the city. Somebody mysterious, wise, a little wild. Well, the circumstances are very strange. But here we are, Joyce and Tom, a couple of pretty ordinary people."

"Not all that damn ordinary."

"We hardly know each other."

"Could change that."

"I don't know," Joyce said. "I'm not so sure."



These last few hours—before the marauder attacked, or the time machine was repaired, whichever apocalypse happened first—were a kind of Indian summer.

Archer drove to the Burger King out along the highway and brought home dinner. They ate on the back lawn in the long sunlight; the alarms would sound, Ben said, if anything happened inside.

Ben, who didn't eat prepared food, was an avuncular presence at the edge of the feast, periodically hobbling over to the redwood fence where he had marked a long rectangular patch with string. It was too late in the year to start a garden, he said, but this was where one ought to be. Tom wondered, but didn't ask, whether he planned to start one in the coming year or expected someone else to.



After dark, Archer took Tom down into the basement—what remained of the basement. The false wall in front of the tunnel had been removed entirely, and so had one of the foundation walls—revealing a layer of what must be machinery, pale white and blue crystals swarming with cybernetics. This was the functional heart of the time terminal and the machine insects, he assumed, were repairing it. Periodically, bright sparks erupted from the work.

"We're running a race," Archer said. "The longer that sonofabitch in Manhattan sits on his hands, the closer we come to shutting him out entirely."

"How long until all this is finished?"

"Soon, Ben says. Maybe by this time tomorrow. Here—" He opened a drawer under the workbench: Tom's woodworking bench, the one he'd moved from Seattle. "Ben said you should have one of these."

Archer handed him a ray gun.

No doubt about it, Tom thought, this was a ray gun. It weighed about a pound. It was made of red and black polystyrene plastic and the words space soldier were stenciled on the side.

He looked at the gun, looked at Archer.



"We had to make 'em out of something," Archer said. "I picked up a bunch of these at the K-mart at Pinetree Mall. The machine bugs worked them over."

The trigger was made of what looked like stainless steel, and the business end featured a glassy protrusion too finely machined to match the rest of the toy. "You're telling me this is functional?"

"It projects a focused pulse that might or might not slow down the gentleman's armor a little bit. Use it but don't depend on it. We all have one."

"Jesus Christ, Doug, space soldier?"

Archer grinned. "Looks kind of cool, don't you think?"



Back upstairs, the sun was setting over the ocean and Catherine had turned on the living room lights.

Tom helped Archer collect the dinner plates from the back yard. The sky was a deep evening blue; the stars and the crickets had come out.

Archer hesitated a moment in the cooling air.

"Everything's going to be different when this is over," he said. "Suddenly we're out of the picture. Bystanders. But we did something rare, didn't we, Tom? Took a long stroll into the past. Imagine that. I stood on those streets, nineteen sixty-two, Jesus, I was a toddler down at Pine Balm Pre-School! Hey, Tom, you know what we did? We walked straight up to Father Time and we kicked that miserly SOB right in the family jewels."


Tom opened the screen door and stepped back into the warmth of the kitchen. "Let's hope he doesn't return the favor."



Archer and Catherine shared a mattress in the spare bedroom. Ben spent the night in the basement—slept there, if he slept at all.

Joyce had spent two nights on the living room sofa. She came into Tom's bed tonight with what he took to be a mixture of gratitude and doubt.

When he rolled to face her she didn't turn away.

It was a warm night in the summer of 1989, skies clear over most of the continent, oceans calm, the world on some brink, Tom thought, not yet explicit, a trembling of possibilities both dire and bright. Her skin was soft under his touch and she took his kiss with an eagerness that might have been greeting or farewell.

Midnight passed in the darkness, an hour and another.

They were asleep when the alarms went off.