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He turned back to the rubble at the near end of the tu
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 tu
This was the tu
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 tu
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 tu
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 tu
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 street 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, I have two options.
Run or fight.
Ru