A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She held out the letter, postmarked Augusta.

  "They need me."

  "The hell they do. One more earnest white college graduate isn't going to turn the tide, for Christ's sake. They have TV. They have pinheaded southern sheriffs beating women on all three networks. They have friends in the Kennedy administration. After the assassination—" He was drunker than he'd realized. He was giving away secrets. But that didn't matter. "After the assassination they'll have Lyndon Johnson signing civil rights legislation while Vietnam escalates. You want the future? Vietnam, Woodstock, Nixon, Watergate, Jimmy Carter, Ayatollah Khomeini, the whole fucking parade of cliches, with or without the help of Joyce Casella. Please," he said. "Please don't go get killed before we know each other better."

  "Sometimes I wonder if I know you at all. What's all this shit about the future?"

  "That's where I'm from."

  She looked at him fiercely. "Tell me the truth or get out of my apartment."

  He described in broad and clumsy outline the train of events that had carried him here.

  Joyce listened with focused patience but didn't begin to believe him until he brought out his wallet and unpacked his ID from the card windows—his Washington State driver's license, his Visa card, an expired American Express card, a card to access bank machines; from the billfold, a couple of tens bearing a mint date twenty years in the future.

  Joyce examined all these things solemnly. Finally she said, "Your watch."

  He hadn't worn it since his first visit; it was in the left-hand pocket of his jeans. She must have seen it. "It's just a cheap digital watch. But you're right. You can't buy those here."

  He backed off and let her contemplate these things. He was a little more sober for the telling of it and he wondered whether this had been a terrible mistake. It must be frightening. God knows, it had frightened him.

  But she fingered the cards and the money, then sighed and looked at him fearlessly.

  "I'll make coffee," she said. "I guess we don't sleep tonight."

  "I guess we don't," Tom said.

  She held the cup in both hands as if it were anchoring her to the earth.

  "Tell me again," she said. "Tell me how you came here." He rubbed his eyes. "Again?" "Again. Slower."

  He took a deep breath and began.

  By the time he finished it was past two a.m. The street outside was quiet, the light of the room seemed strange and sterile. He was dazed, sleepy, hung over. Joyce, however, was wide awake.

  "It doesn't make sense," she said. "Why a tunnel between here and—what's it called? Bellfountain?"

  "Belltower," Tom said. "I don't know. I didn't build it, Joyce. I found it."

  "Anybody could have found it?"

  "I suppose so."

  "And no one else used it?"

  "Someone must have. At least once. Used it and, I guess, abandoned it. But I don't know that for a fact."

  She shook her head firmly. "I don't believe it."

  He felt helpless. He had shown her all the evidence he possessed, explained it as calmly as possible—

  "No, I mean—I know it's true. The cards, the money, the watch—maybe somebody could fake all that, but I doubt it. It's true, Tom, but I don't believe it. You understand what I'm saying? It's hard to look at you and tell myself this is a guy from the year 1989."

  "What more can I do?"

  "Show me," Joyce said. "Show me the tunnel." This wasn't the way he had meant it to happen.

  He walked with her—it wasn't far—to the building near Tompkins Square.

  "This place?" Joyce said. Meaning: a miracle—here? He nodded.

  The street was silent and empty. Tom took his watch out of his pocket and checked it: three-fifteen, and he was dizzy with fatigue, already regretting this decision.

  Later Tom would decide that the visit to the tunnel marked a dividing line; it was here that events had begun to spiral out of control. Maybe he sensed it already—an echo of his own future leaking through zones of fractured time.

  He was reluctant to take her inside, suddenly certain it was a mistake to have brought her here at all. If he hadn't been drunk . . . and then weary beyond resistance . . .

  She tugged his hand. "Show me."

  And there was no plausible way to turn back. He took one more look at the bulk of the building, all those rooms and corridors he had never explored, a single window illuminated in the darkness.

  He led her inside. The lobby was vacant, silent except for the buzzing of a defective fluorescent lamp. He grasped the handle of the door that led to the basement.

  It wouldn't turn.

  "Trouble?" Joyce inquired.

  He nodded, frowning. "It wasn't locked before. I don't think it had a lock." He bent over the mechanism. "This looks new."

  "Somebody installed a new lock?" "I think so."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I don't know. Could mean somebody knows I've been here. Could mean the janitor found some kids in the basement and decided it was time for new hardware."

  “Is there a janitor?"

  He shrugged.

  She said, "But somebody must own the building. It's a matter of record, right? You could look it up at City Hall."

  "I suppose so." It hadn't occurred to him. "Might be dangerous. This isn't a Nancy Drew mystery. I don't think we should draw attention to ourselves."

  "If we don't open that door," Joyce pointed out, "you can never go home again."

  "If we do open it, maybe they'll put in a better lock next time. Or post a guard." This was a chilling thought and he couldn't help looking past her, through the cracked glass of the outer door. But the street was empty.

  "Maybe we can open it without being too obvious," Joyce said.

  "We shouldn't even try. We should get the fuck out of here."

  "Hey, no! I'm not backing out now." Her grip on his hand tightened. "If this is true ... I want to see."

  Tom looked at the lock more closely. Cheap lock. He took out his Visa card and slipped it between the door and the jamb. This worked on television but apparently not in real life; the card bumped into the bolt but failed to move it. "Give me your keys," he said.

  Joyce handed him her key ring.

  He tried several of the keys until he found one that slid into the lock. By twisting it until it caught some of the tumblers he was able to edge the bolt fractionally inward; then he forced the card up until the door sprang open an inch.

  A gust of cool, dank air spilled through the opening.

  He felt the change in Joyce as they descended. She had been cocky and reckless, daring him on; now she was silent, both hands clamped on his arm.

  In the first sub-basement he tugged the cord attached to the naked forty-watt bulb overhead—it cast a cheerless pale circle across the floor. "We should have brought a flashlight."

  "We probably should have brought an elephant gun. It's scary down here." She frowned at him. "This is real, isn't it?"

  "As real as it gets."

  The second lock, on the wooden door in the lowest sub-basement, had also been replaced. Joyce lit a series of matches while Tom examined the mechanism. Whoever had installed the lock had been in a hurry; the padlock was new and sturdy but the hasp was not. It was attached with three wood screws to the framing of the door; Tom levered the screws out with the edge of a dime and put them in his pocket.

  Down into darkness.

  They climbed over rubble. Joyce continued striking matches until Tom told her to stop; the fight was too feeble to be useful and he was worried about the flammable debris underfoot. She let the last match flicker out but flinched when the darkness closed over them. She said, "Are you sure—?

  But then they were in the tunnel itself. A sourceless light illuminated the slow, precise curve of the walls ahead.

  Joyce took a few steps forward. Tom hung back.

  "It's really all true," she said. "My God, Tom! We could walk into the future, couldn't we? Just stroll a few decades down the road
." She faced him. "Will you take me sometime?" Her cheeks were flushed. She looked fragile and feverish against these blunt white walls.

  "I don't know if I can promise that. We're playing with something dangerous and we don't know how it works. I can't guarantee we're safe even just standing here. Maybe we're exposed to radiation. Maybe the air is toxic."

  "None of that stopped you from coming here."

  But that was before, Tom thought. When I had nothing to lose.

  She touched the walls—smooth, slightly resilient, utterly seamless. "I wonder who built it? Haven't you thought about it?"

  "Often," he said. "It must have been here at least ten years. Maybe longer." Maybe since the Indians occupied Manhattan. Maybe since Wouter van Twiller operated the Bossen Bouwerie in this district. Maybe Wouter had had a tunnel under his cowshed hereabouts. Maybe he knew it and maybe he didn't.

  "People from the future," Joyce said. "Or Martians or something like that. It's like a 'Twilight Zone' episode, isn't it?" She drew a line in the dust with the point of her shoe. "How come it's broken at this end?"

  "I don't know."

  She said, "Maybe it was hijacked."

  He blinked at the idea. Joyce went on, "The people who are supposed to use it aren't here. So somebody used it who wasn't supposed to . . . maybe fixed it so nobody could find him."

  Tom considered it. "I suppose that's possible."

  "There must be other tunnels. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. So maybe this one used to be connected somewhere— a junction. But somebody hijacked it, somebody sealed it off."

  This was plausible; he couldn't formulate a better explanation. "But we don't really know."

  "Hey," she said. "Nancy Drew is on the case."

  Maybe, Tom thought, this would turn out all right. He had convinced her to turn around and go back—but then the strange thing happened.

  Joyce saw it first.

  "Look," she said. "Tom? What is that?"

  He turned where she was pointing, already afraid.

  What he saw was only a vague blur of luminescence against the uniform brightness of the tunnel, far away. He thought at first it might be some malfunction of the lights. Then Joyce squeezed his hand. "It's moving," she said.

  Slowly but perceptibly, it was. It was moving toward them.

  He guessed it might be a hundred yards away—maybe more.

  He turned back to the rubble at the near end of the tunnel. They had wandered maybe thirty feet from it. Sprinting distance, Tom thought.

  Joyce repeated, "What is that?" There was only a tremor of uncertainty in her voice—she wasn't frightened yet.

  "I've never seen anything like it," Tom said. "Maybe we should get out while we can."

  What he felt was not quite awe, not yet fear. The luminescence was bright and had taken on the suggestion of a shape. Tom hustled Joyce toward the exit, aware that he was in the presence of something he didn't understand, something akin to the tunnel itself: strange, powerful, beyond his comprehension.

  This was the tunnel under the world, where demons and angels lived.

  He paused at the place where the broken brick and old lathing and plaster had collapsed, because it was impossible to resist the urge to turn and look. Joyce did the same.

  But the phenomenon had moved much faster than he'd guessed. It was almost on top of them.

  He drew a breath, stepped back instinctively—and caught his heel on a brick, and fell. Joyce said, "Tom!" and tried to drag him up. The creature hovered over them both.

  Tom couldn't find a word for the thing suspended in the air above him, almost close enough now to touch. Briefly, his fear was crowded out by a kind of abject wonder.

  The shape of the apparition was indistinct—blurred at the edges—but approximately human.

  Later, Tom reviewed his memory of the event and tried to reconstruct the creature in his mind. If you took a map of the human nervous system, he thought, modeled it in blue neon and surrounded it with a halo of opalescent light—that might come close.

  It was translucent but not ghostly. There was no mistaking its physical presence. He felt the heat of it on his face. Joyce crouched beside him.

  The creature had stopped moving. It was watching them, he thought—perhaps with the two opaque spots which occupied the position of eyes; perhaps in some other fashion.

  This was terrifying—bearable only because the creature was utterly motionless.

  Tom counted silently to ten, then backed up the piled rubble an inch or so.

  The creature's attention followed him. But only that.

  Joyce looked at him. He could tell by the grip of her hand that she was deeply frightened but still in control. He whispered, "Back up slowly. If it moves, stand still."

  He didn't doubt the creature's immense power; he felt it all around him, felt it in the radiant heat on his exposed skin.

  Joyce nodded tightly and they began to inch up the rubble and out of the tunnel. It occurred to Tom that this was the instinctive response to a dangerous large animal, no doubt wildly inappropriate here. He stared into the creature's eyespots and knew—absolutely wordlessly—that its interest in them was intense but momentary; that it could kill them if it wished; that it hadn't decided yet. This wasn't the random indecision of an animal but something much more focused, more intimate. A judgment.

  Gazing into that pale blankness, he felt naked and small.

  They had almost reached the welcome darkness of the basement when the creature vanished.

  Later, he argued with Joyce about the way it had disappeared. Tom maintained that it simply blinked out of existence; Joyce said it had turned sideways in some way she couldn't describe—"Turned some corner we couldn't see."

  They agreed that its absence was as sudden, absolute, and soundless as its appearance.

  Joyce scrambled through the dark basement, pulling Tom up the stairs. He felt her trembling. This is my fault, he thought.

  He made her wait while he put the hasp of the lock back on the wooden door. He fumbled in his pocket for the three screws and the dime to drive them with, sank the first two home and then dropped the last. Joyce said, "Christ, Tom!" —but held a match in one unsteady hand while he groped on his knees. The screw had rolled under the edge of the door and for one sinking moment he thought he'd have to pry off the hasp a second time to get the last screw back, which would be next to impossible in this dark bad-smelling basement full of who-knows-what-kind-of-impossible-monsters— but then he caught the head of the screw with his fingernail and managed to retrieve it.

  He was as meticulous as his shaking hands would allow. He didn't want anyone to know he'd been here—though maybe that was impossible. But the idea of one more barrier between himself and the tunnel, no matter how flimsy, was reassuring.

  He tightened the last screw and pocketed the dime. They climbed the stairs toward the lobby, Joyce leading now.

  He pictured the top door, the one he'd opened with a credit card and Joyce's key. A terrifying thought: what if it had slipped shut? What if the bolt had slammed home and he couldn't open it again?

  Then he saw the crack of light from the lobby, saw Joyce groping for the door, saw it open; and they tumbled out together, unsteady in the light, holding each other.

  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 stree
t 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.