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He read the fashion ads, the movie ads, the sports pages. Then he folded the paper and set it neatly aside.
He took a pad of paper and a pencil from a kitchen drawer and opened the pad to its first fresh page.
At the top he wrote, Troubling Questions. He underlined it twice.
He paused, sipped coffee, then picked up the pencil.
Something is wrong here, he wrote.
Something is wrong or I would never have found the tu
Question of rubble at the end of the tu
Well, that was the real question, wasn’t it?
He wrote, The tu
Which would imply someone from the future, since they weren’t assembling time tu
The trouble was that such thinking was dangerously useless. He would have to think about these numbingly strange events with as much sobriety and clarity as he could muster. The stakes—he remembered destruction—might be very high.
Some destructive force caused problems at this end of the tu
But there was so much he still didn’t know. Why a tu
He wrote these questions down.
Then paused, refilled his coffee cup and sat down again. He reached into his pocket and took out the dead machine bug.
It lay pallid and empty-seeming on the inky front page of the Times.
Death by misadventure. Most likely, he thought, it had been murdered.
Ten years have passed, he wrote. If the passing of time means anything at all, under the circumstances.
Chewed his pencil.
You could walk away from this.
After all: what was he really doing here? Tempting himself? Daring himself?
This is dangerous, and you could walk away. It was undeniable.
Maybe the only question is which way to walk.
Because he had a choice now, didn’t he? He felt a tingle of excitement, the pleasure of this secret option, this new ace that had been dealt him. He hadn’t dared to consider it. He considered it now.
You could leave it all behind.
You could leave the car lot and the divorce and the polite pink slip and the greenhouse effect all behind. The sensation of writing the words made him dizzy. You could walk out on it. 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. Forcing some rationality here: Not the door to paradise. Thirty years ago. They have the Bomb. Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They have racism, ignorance, crime, starvation—
They have the Bomb, he thought, but maybe the important thing was, they didn’t use it He could live three decades, if he wanted to, knowing for a stone fact that the air-raid siren wouldn’t go off. He could laugh at the newspapers. If he was diligent, if he did his homework, he’d know the plane he stepped onto wasn’t going to fall out of the sky; he’d be out of town when the earthquake hit …
And even if someone died, it would be a death already entered into the history books. No graves would be filled that weren’t already full. The tragedy of the world would march on, but at least he would have its measure.
He heard an echo of Barbara from that chamber in his head where memories lived and sometimes spoke: Are you really so frightened of the future?
After Chernobyl, after Tiananmen Square, after his divorce? In a world where tritium regularly disappeared from scheduled shipments, where the national debt was coming due, where the stock market resembled an Olympic high-dive competition? Scared of the future, here in the world of teen suicide and the cost-effective assault rifle? Scared?—while the Brazilian rain forests clouded the atmosphere with their burning and the skin cancer rate had become an artifact of the evening news? What, frightened? Who, me?
I’ll go back one more time, he wrote. At least to look. To be there. At least once. Any other questions?
Yes, he thought. Many. But he chose not to write them down.
When Tom glanced up from the paper he saw that several of the larger machine bugs had climbed the table leg and were carrying their dead compatriot away.
Maybe to replace it, Tom thought. Maybe to repair it: they were big on repairing things. Or maybe to bury it, to inter it in some metallic grave while they gathered around and sang electromagnetic hymns.
They made a bright, glassy line against the kitchen tiles as they marched away. He didn’t interfere.
One more time, he promised himself, at least to see—all decisions postponed until then. He decided he’d provision himself for a weekend trip and in the meantime lead a normal life, as impossible as that sounded.
Astonishingly, the charade was a success. He put in good hours at work. Tony invited him for a family di
He woke up before dawn Saturday morning, marked the space between the wall studs and carved an opening with a keyhole saw—he was getting good at this.
At the opposite end of the tu
No one knows yet.
He was safe here still.
He left the tu
Of course, he got lost.
He had been to New York on business trips for Aerotech but his grasp of the city’s geography was vague at best. He walked across Fourteenth Street to Fifth Avenue with the notion that he might find some familiar landmarks … but he didn’t want to stray that far from the tu