A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  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 bo
ught 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.