A Bridge of Years

“But dangerous, too,” Catherine objected when he told her this. “We don’t really know. Something terrible happened to Ben. He was almost killed.”

“Probably dangerous,” Archer admitted. “You can get out of this if you want. Sell the house, move on back to Seattle. Most likely, you’ll be perfectly safe.”

She shook her head with a firmness he found charming. “I can’t do that, Doug. It feels like a kind of contract. He asked me for help. Maybe I could have walked away then. But I didn’t. I came back. It’s like saying, Okay, I’ll help.”

“You did help.”

“But not just carrying him back to the house. That’s not all the help he needs. Don’t you feel that?”

“Yes,” Archer admitted. “I do feel that.”

He let her fix him a meal of crab legs and salad. Archer hated crab legs—his mother used to buy cheap crab and lobster from a fishing boat down by the VFW outpost—but he smiled at the effort she made. He said, “You should let me cook for you sometime.”

She nodded. “That would be nice. This is kind of weird, you know. We hardly know each other, but we’re nursemaiding this—person out of a time machine.”

“We know each other all right,” Archer said. “It doesn’t take that long. I’m a semi-fucked-up real estate agent living in this little town he kind of loves and kind of hates. You’re a semisuccessful painter from Seattle who misses her grandmother because she never had much of a family. Neither of us knows what to do next and we’re both lonelier than we want to admit. Does that about sum it up?”

“Not a bad call.” She smiled a little forlornly and uncorked a bottle of wine.

The night after that she went to bed with him.

The bed was a creaky, pillared antique in what Catherine called the guest room, off the main hall upstairs. The sheets were old, thin, delicate, cool; the mattress rose around them like an ocean swell.

Catherine was shy and attentive. Archer was touched by her eagerness to please and did his best to return the favor. Archer had never much believed in one-night stands; great sex, like great anything, required a little learning. But Catherine was easy to know and they came together with what seemed like an old familiarity. It was, in any case, Archer thought, a hell of an introduction.

Now Catherine drifted to sleep beside him while Archer lay awake listening to the silence. It was quiet up here along the Post Road. Twice, he heard a car pass by outside—one of the locals, home late; or a tourist looking for the highway.

There were big questions that still needed answering, he thought. Archer thought about the word “time” and how strange and lonely it made him feel. When he was little his family used to drive down to his uncle’s ranch outside Santa Fe in New Mexico, dirt roads and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance, scrub pines and sage brush and ancient pueblos. The word “time” made him feel the way those desert roads used to make him feel: lost in something too big to comprehend. Time travel, Archer thought, must be like driving those roads. Strange rock formations and dust devils, and an empty blank horizon everywhere you look.

When he woke, Catherine was dressing herself self-consciously by the bed. He turned away politely while she pulled on her panties. Archer sometimes wondered whether there was something wrong with him, the doubtful way women always looked at him in the morning. But then he stood up and hugged her and he felt her relax in his arms. They were still friends after all.

But something was different today and it was not just that they had gone to bed last night. Something in this project was less miraculous now, more serious. They knew it without talking about it.

After breakfast they hiked down to the Winter house to visit Ben Collier.

The steaks from the Safeway had been doing him good. Ben was sitting up in bed this morning, the blankets pooled around his waist. He looked as cheerful as a Buddha, Archer thought. But it was obvious from the he of the bedclothes that his leg was still missing.

Archer believed the stump was a little longer, though. It occurred to him that he expected the time traveler to grow a new leg—which apparently he was doing.

“Morning,” Archer said. Catherine stood beside him, nodding, still a little frightened.

Ben turned his head. “Good morning. Thank you for coming by.”

Archer began to deliver the speech he’d been rehearsing: “We really have to talk. Neither of us minds coming down here. But, Ben, it’s confusing. Until we know what’s really going on—”

Ben accepted this immediately and waved his hand: no need to continue. “I understand,” he said. “I’ll answer all your questions. And then—if you don’t mind—I’ll ask you one.”

Archer said that sounded fair. Catherine brought in two chairs from the kitchen, on the assumption this might take a while.

“Who are you really,” Archer asked, “and what are you doing here?”

Ben Collier wondered how to|respond to this.

Confiding in these people was a radical step … but not entirely unprecedented, and unavoidable under the circumstances. He was prepared to trust them. The judgment was only partially intuitive; he had watched them through his own eyes and through the more discerning eyes of his cybernetics. They showed no sign of lying or attempting to manipulate him. Archer, in particular, seemed eager to help. They had weathered what must have been a frightening experience, and Ben credited that to their favor.

But they would need courage, too. And that quality was harder to judge.

He meant to answer their questions as honestly and thoroughly as he could. He owed them this, no matter what happened next. Catherine could have made things infinitely more difficult when she discovered him in the shed—if she had called the police, for instance. Instead, his recovery had been hastened by a significant margin. It would have been pointless and unkind to lie about himself.

He was born (he explained) in the year 2157, in a small town not far from the present-day site of Boulder, Colorado. He had lived there most of his professional life, doing research for a historical foundation.

All this begged the definition of “small town,” of “professional life,” and of “historical foundation” as these things would be understood by Archer and Catherine—but they were close enough to the truth.

Catherine said, “That’s how you became a time traveler?”

He shook his head. “I was recruited. Catherine, if you visited the twenty-second century you would find a lot of marvelous things—but time travel is not among them. Any reputable physicist of my own era would have rejected the idea out of hand. Not the idea that time is essentially mutable and perhaps nonlinear, but the idea that it could be traversed by human beings. The water in the ocean is like the water in a swimming pool, but you can’t swim across it. I was recruited by individuals from my own future, who were recruited by others from their future—and so on.”

“Like stepping stones,” Archer supplied.

“Essentially.”

“But recruited for what?”

“Primarily, as a caretaker. To live in this house. To maintain it and protect it.”

“Why?” Catherine asked, but he imagined she had already surmised the answer.

“Because this house is a sort of time machine.”

“So you’re not a real time traveler,” Archer said. “I mean, you come from the future … but you’re only a kind of employee.”

“I suppose that’s a good enough description.”

“The machine in this building isn’t working the way it’s supposed to—am I right?” He nodded.

“But if it was, and you were the custodian, who would come through here? Who are the real time travelers?”