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Archer handed him a ray gun.
No doubt about it, Tom thought, this was a ray gun. It weighed about a pound. It was made of red and black polystyrene plastic and the words SPACE SOLDIER were stenciled on the side.
He looked at the gun, looked at Archer.
“We had to make ’em out of something,” Archer said. “I picked up a bunch of these at the K-mart at Pinetree Mall. The machine bugs worked them over.”
The trigger was made of what looked like stainless steel, and the business end featured a glassy protrusion too finely machined to match the rest of the toy. “You’re telling me this is functional?”
“It projects a focused pulse that might or might not slow down the gentleman’s armor a little bit. Use it but don’t depend on it. We all have one.”
“Jesus Christ, Doug, SPACE SOLDIER?”
Archer gri
Back upstairs, the sun was setting over the ocean and Catherine had turned on the living room lights.
Tom helped Archer collect the di
Archer hesitated a moment in the cooling air.
“Everything’s going to be different when this is over,” he said. “Suddenly we’re out of the picture. Bystanders. But we did something rare, didn’t we, Tom? Took a long stroll into the past. Imagine that. I stood on those streets, nineteen sixty-two, Jesus, I was a toddler down at Pine Balm Pre-School! Hey, Tom, you know what we did? We walked straight up to Father Time and we kicked that miserly SOB right in the family jewels.”
Tom opened the screen door and stepped back into the warmth of the kitchen. “Let’s hope he doesn’t return the favor.”
Archer and Catherine shared a mattress in the spare bedroom. Ben spent the night in the basement—slept there, if he slept at all.
Joyce had spent two nights on the living room sofa. She came into Tom’s bed tonight with what he took to be a mixture of gratitude and doubt.
When he rolled to face her she didn’t turn away.
It was a warm night in the summer of 1989, skies clear over most of the continent, oceans calm, the world on some brink, Tom thought, not yet explicit, a trembling of possibilities both dire and bright. Her skin was soft under his touch and she took his kiss with an eagerness that might have been greeting or farewell.
Midnight passed in the darkness, an hour and another.
They were asleep when the alarms went off.
Eighteen
Amos Shank, eighty-one years old, who had come from Pittsburgh to publish his poetry and who had lived for fifteen years amid the stained plaster and peeling wallpaper of this shabby apartment, rose from his bed in the deep of the night, still wrapped in dreams of Zeus and Napoleon, for the purpose of relieving his bladder.
He walked to the bathroom, past his desk, past reams of bond paper, sharpened pencils, leatherbound books, in the stark light of two sixty-watt floor lamps which he kept perpetually lit. The rattle of water in the porcelain bowl sounded hollow and sinister: the clarion call of mortality. Sighing, Amos hitched up his boxer shorts and headed back to his bed, which folded out of the sofa, convolution of night inside day. He paused at the window.
Once he had seen Death in the street outside. A sudden dread possessed him that if he looked he would see that apparition again. He had, in fact, kept vigil for several consecutive nights—ruining his sleep to no good effect. He was torn between temptations: oblivion, vision.
He slatted the blinds open and peered into the street.
Empty street.
Amos Shank pulled his desk chair to the window and nestled his bony rear end into it.
The older he got the more his bones seemed to protrude from his body. Everything uncomfortable. Nowhere to rest. He whistled out a long breath of midnight air and put his head on the windowsill, pillowed on his hands.
Without meaning to, he slept again …
And woke, aching and stiff. He moaned and peered into the street where—perhaps—the sound of footsteps had roused him: because here he was again, Death.
No mistaking him.
Amos felt his heart speed up.
Death walked down the empty sidewalk in a dirty gray overcoat; paused and smiled up at Amos.
Smiled through his leathery snout and the hood of his shirt.
Then Death did a remarkable thing: he began to undress.
He shrugged off the overcoat and dropped it in the gutter like a shed skin. Pulled the NYU sweatshirt over his head and threw it away. Stepped out of the pants.
Death was quite golden underneath.
Death shone very brightly under the streetlights.
“I know you!” Amos Shank said. He was only dimly aware that he had said it aloud. “I know you—!”
He had seen the picture. Which old book?
Wars of Antiquity. The Court of the Sun King. Campaigns of Napoleon. Some ancient soldier in bright armor and cheap lithography.
“Agamemnon,” Amos Shank breathed.
Agamemnon, Death, the soldier, masked and armored, entered the building, still smiling.
Ashamed, Amos Shank double-checked the lock on the door, extinguished the lights for the first time in a month, and hid under the blankets of his bed.
Nineteen
Billy entered the tu
He had lived too long with fear. He’d been ru
After he killed Lawrence Millstein, after a failed attempt on his legitimate prey, Billy had retired for two days to his apartment; had powered down, hidden his armor, retreated to the shadows. Two days had been enough. He didn’t feel safe. There was no security anymore, no anonymity … and the Need was deep and intense.
So he took the armor out of its box and wore it with all its armaments and accessories here, to the source of his trouble, this unpatrolled border with the future.
Where his prey had retreated—he knew that by the tangle of footprints amid the rubble.
Here we begin some reckoning, Billy thought. The begi
He stepped through fallen masonry into the bright and sourceless light of the time machine.
Fear had kept him out of this tu
The memory was vivid of that apparition, huge and luminous. It had moved slowly but Billy felt its capacity for speed; had seemed immaterial but Billy felt its power. He had escaped it by a hairbreadth and was left with the impression that it had allowed him to escape; that he had been evaluated and passed over by something as potent and irresistible as time itself.
Now—under the bravado of his armor, the courage pumped out by the artificial gland in the elytra—that fear remained fresh and intact.
Billy pressed on regardless. The corridor was empty. Here in the depth of it, both exits out of sight, he felt suspended in a pure geometry, a curvature without meaningful dimension.
Beyond these walls, Billy thought, years were tumbling like leaves in a windstorm. Age devoured youth, spines curved, eyes dimmed, coffins leapt into the earth. Wars flashed past, as brief and violent as thunderstorms. Here, Billy was sheltered from all that.
Wasn’t that all he had ever really wanted?
Shelter. A way home.
But these were vagrant, treasonous thoughts. Billy suppressed them and hurried ahead.
The cybernetics had entered the tu