A Bridge of Years

“Right! You knew Gram Peggy?”

“Waved to her once or twice. Delivered her paper when I was twelve years old.”

“She died in June … I came down to take care of business.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

He took a longer look around the room. Same room, same house, not much changed, at least this corner of it. He didn’t remember arriving here. The shoulder wound had gone from painful to incapacitating and he had crossed the last fifty yards of the tu

The shoulder felt better now … He didn’t check for blisters but the pain was gone.

He focused his attention on Catherine Simmons. “I guess this isn’t the business you meant to take care of.”

“Doug and I sort of stumbled into it.”

“I guess we all did.” He sat up. “Is Joyce around?”

“I think she’s watching TV. But you’ll need to talk to Ben, I think.”

He supposed he would. “The TV’s working?”

“Oh, Ben was very apologetic about that. He says the cybernetics managed to scare you without warning you off. They were dealing with a situation way outside their expertise; they went about it all wrong. He made them fix the TV for you.”

“That’s very thoughtful of Ben.”

“You’ll like him. He’s a nice guy.” She hesitated. “You slept a long time … Are you sure you’re all right?”

“My shoulder—but that’s better now.”

“You don’t seem too pleased to be back.”

“Friend of mine died,” Tom said.

Catherine Simmons nodded. “I know how that is. Gram Peggy was pretty important in my life. It leaves a vacuum, doesn’t it? Let me know if there’s something I can do.”

“You can bring me my clothes,” Tom said.

He reminded himself that he had climbed back out of the well of time and that this was the summer of 1989—the last hot summer of a hot decade, hovering on the brink of a future he couldn’t predict.

The house was a fortress, Archer had told him, and some of that showed in the living room: the furniture had been pushed back against the walls and the walls themselves were covered with a mass of gemlike machine bugs. It looked like a suburban outpost of Aladdin’s Cave.

Tom followed Catherine to the kitchen, where the machine bugs—a smaller mass of them—were dismantling the stove.

A man, evidently human, sat at the kitchen table. He stood up clumsily when Tom entered the room. “This is Ben,” Catherine said.

Ben the time traveler. Ben who had risen, like Lazarus, from the grave. Ben the custodian of this malfunctioning hole in the world.

He stood with one hand propped against a cane. His left leg was truncated, the denim tied shut between his knee and the place where his ankle should have been. He was pale and his hair was a faint, fine stubble over his scalp.

He offered his hand. Tom shook it.

“You’re the time traveler,” he said.

Ben Collier smiled. “Let’s sit down, shall we? This leg is still awkward. Tom, would you like a beer? There’s one in the refrigerator.”

Tom wasn’t thirsty. “You lived here ten years ago.”

“That’s right. Doug must have explained all that?”

“You were hurt and you were in that shed out in the woods. I think I owe you an apology. If I hadn’t gone haring off down the tu

“Nothing you’ve done or haven’t done is anybody’s fault. If everything had been working correctly the house would never have been for sale. You walked into a major debacle; you didn’t create it.”

“Doug said you were—he used the word ‘dead.’ Buried out there for some years.”

“Doug is more or less correct.”

“It’s hard to accept that.”

“Is it? You seem to be doing all right.”

“Well … I’ve swallowed a fair number of miracles since May; I suppose one more won’t choke me.”

He gave Ben a closer look. A ray of sunlight from the big back window had fallen across the time traveler and for a moment Tom imagined he saw the outline of the skull under the skin. An optical illusion. He hoped. “Maybe I’ll have that beer after all. You want one?”

“No, thank you,” Ben said.

Tom took a beer from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap. Welcome to the future: throw away that clumsy old bottle opener.

A stove grill clanked against the floor behind him and a brigade of machine bugs began hauling it toward the basement stairs.

Life, Tom thought, is very strange.

“They’re using the metal,” Ben explained. “Making more of themselves. It’s hard on the appliances, but we’re in fairly desperate straits at the moment.”

“They can do that? Duplicate themselves?”

“With enough raw material, certainly.”

“They’re from the future,” Tom said.

“Somewhat in advance of my own time, as a matter of fact. I found them a little repellent when I was introduced to the concept. But they’re extremely useful and they’re easy to conceal.”

“They can repair the tu

“They’re doing precisely that—among many other things.”

“But you said we were in ‘dire straits.’ So nothing is repaired yet and this so-called marauder—”

“Might choose to follow you here. That’s what we’re on guard against, yes.”

“But he hasn’t tried it yet. Maybe he won’t.”

“Maybe. I hope not. We do have to take precautions.”

Tom nodded; this was sensible. “How well protected are we?”

Ben seemed to ponder the question. “There’s no doubt we can stop him. What troubles me is that it might take too long.”

“I don’t understand.”

“From what I can reconstruct, the man is an armored conscript soldier, a renegade from the territorial wars at the end of the next century. In a sense, he isn’t really our enemy— the enemy is his armor.”

“I saw him in New York,” Tom said. “He didn’t look especially well armored.”

“It’s a kind of cybernetic armor, Tom. Thin, flexible, very sophisticated, very effective. It protects him from most conventional weapons and interacts with his body to improve his reflexes and focus his aggression. When he’s wearing the armor, killing is an almost sexual imperative. He wants it and he can’t help wanting it.”

“Ugly.”

“Much worse than ugly. But in a way, his strength is his weakness. Without the armor he’s more or less helpless; he might not even be inclined to do us harm. The fact that he took advantage of the tu

“Good,” Tom said. He pulled at the beer. “Can we?”

“Yes, we can, in a couple of ways. Primarily, we’ve been building specialized cybernetics—tiny ones, the size of a virus. They can infiltrate his bloodstream and attack the armor … dismantle and disco

“Why didn’t they do that in the first place?”

“These aren’t the units he was exposed to. They’ve been built expressly for the purpose. He had the advantage of surprise; he doesn’t have that anymore.”

“So if he shows up here,” Tom interpreted, “if he breathes the air—”

“The devices go to work instantly. But he won’t simply fall over and die. He’ll be functional, or partly functional, for some time.”

“How much time?”

“Unfortunately, it’s impossible to calculate. Ten minutes? Half an hour? Long enough to do a great deal of damage.”

Tom thought about it. “So we should leave the machine bugs and clear out of here. If he shows up, they can deal with him.”

“Tom, you’re welcome to do so if you like. I can’t; I have an obligation to protect the premises and direct the repair work. Also, we have weapons that might slow down the marauder while the cybernetics work on him. It’s important to keep him confined to the property. The machines inside him aren’t entirely autonomous. They need direction from outside, and if he moves beyond a certain radius they’ll lose the ability to communicate, might not be able to finish disarming him. He could cause a great deal of havoc if he wandered down to the highway.”