A Bridge of Years (30 page)

He
cast a final glance down the empty tunnel, then switched on his
forensic programs.

He
was able to learn a great deal.

His
armor detected and memorized fingerprints from the cellar walls, skin
samples where the intruder had cut himself on a shard of glass
projecting from the rubble. The intruder was quite human, a male,
type 0+ blood. Back home, a competent laboratory might have been able
to put together a portrait of the man from a simple genome
projection, assuming the samples were more or less intact. But
Billy didn't have that capacity; he needed another means of tracking
his prey.

The
enormity of the task was daunting. It might be impossible—a
civilian joyriding from the future might be anywhere. Might have
jumped a plane to some familiar place. Invested money in the stock
market and set off on a tour of his own recent history.

But
the man had arrived here less than a month ago and Billy guessed he
would need more time than that to adjust. After all: his money was no
good, his knowledge was valuable but difficult to cash in on. He
might still be close by.

But
how to identify him?

Billy
ran a finger through the dust on the floor. Dust from his concussion
grenade, dust from the foundation of the building. He opened a pouch
in one of the elytra of his armor and withdrew the armor's headset, a
leathery black mask that covered his face entirely. He clipped an
optical cable between the headset and the armor's processors while
his forensics sampled the dust and announced its constituents to
Billy in a flickering eyepiece readout: limestone, sand, bedrock . .
. and microscopic fragments
of
the tunnel itself:
strange
long-chain molecules that fluoresced in dim light, absorbing
background radiation and leaking photons.

Billy
narrowed the bandwidth of his eyepiece to the frequency of
strongest emission, then clambered back into the dark chamber of the
basement.

With
his opticals adjusted, the dust was plainly luminescent.

He
stood in a starry blue limbo, very strange. The tip of his forefinger
radiated light like a small constellation.

How
much of this dust had the intruder carried out of the building? How
much would cling to him? To his shoes? To his clothes? For how long?

Interesting
questions.

He
stood in the tunnel a moment before he left.

He
took a step forward, his heart pounding. This was not a place, he
reminded himself. It was a time machine. Each step carried him a
measured distance forward: a week? a month? And what am I doing out
there? Take a step: February? March? Is it snowing? Am I out in the
snow? Am I hunting? Is the armor alive? Am I?

Suppose
he ran a hundred yards forward. 1963? 1964? Had the elytra failed?
The gland dried up?
Have
I convulsed and died somewhere?
Suppose
he went even farther. Suppose he stood in some sheltered part of this
tunnel where 1970 raged overhead, 1975, 1980: was Billy in his coffin
in some potter's field, buried a century before his own birth?

He
felt a sudden weightlessness, a kind of vertigo.

It
was better not to think about these things.

Home,
he showered away all the dust still clinging to him; then he washed
and shined the armor. He disliked taking the armor off. He hadn't
powered up entirely and the physical need was still urgent and
unsatisfied. The lancet had left a painful sore on the right side of
his abdomen; without the hormone drip he felt small, vulnerable, and
nervous. But he needed to sleep. And it would be wasteful to sleep in
his armor.

Tomorrow,
he promised himself. In the night.

He
dreamed of the Storm Zone, of armored combat, in the future, where he
had once lived; and then of Ohio, the fierce summers and cold,
snowless winters there. He dreamed of the bed he had slept in as a
child, with a heater he was allowed to switch on in January and
February; of bitter nights walking from the common store to the
housing plex, frost on the ground and a horned moon overhead.

He
dreamed these things with a clarity so absolute and a sadness so
piercing they could be sustained only in a dream. And then, finally,
he dreamed the face of Nathan, his father.

He
woke wanting the armor.

Even
in New York City—even in 1962, in a city that was the axis around
which much of the world revolved—the night was quieter than the
day.

Billy
chose the stillest hours of the night, between three
a.m
.
and dawn, to begin his search.

He
wore the armor snug to his body. He pulled on loose, filthy pants
over the leggings. Over the elytra and the halteres he wore a torn
athletic sweatshirt marked
NYU,
which
he had found in a bin at a secondhand shop. He pulled up the hood to
help disguise the headset; the headset was conspicuous but he
needed its eyepiece. Over the sweatshirt Billy wore a slate-gray,
threadbare coat that reached to his knees, the high collar turned up
at his throat.

Before
he left the apartment he looked at himself in the chipped bathroom
mirror.

The
black headset with its calibrated goggles projected from the hood of
his sweatshirt like the muzzle of an animal.

A
rat,
Billy
thought. He looked like some kind of leathery, robotic sewer rat
attempting to pass for human.
I
look like someone's nightmare.

The
thought was disquieting. It troubled him until he activated the
armor's lancet; then everything was simple, everything was
clear.

He
kept to the shadows.

He
tuned his eyepiece to the radiant frequency of the tunnel dust.
He was able to follow his own footprints—a faintly blue, faintly
luminous path—back to the building near Tompkins Square.

The
lobby of the building was alive, starry with ghostlight.

But
the intruder had come through here long ago and there was no clear
trail to follow. Well, Billy had expected that. There had been rain
since then; there had been wind, air pollution, foot traffic, a
thousand scatterings and adulterations.

He
stood in the street outside the building. Faint blue light glimmered
here and there. A brush of it adhered to a lamppost. A scatter
of it stood like snow crystals along the filthy curb.

No
trail, only clues: dim, ambiguous.

He
looked up at the building, dark except for Mr. Shank's apartment.
Amos Shank chose that moment to pull back his blinds—awake in some
delirium of creativity—and Billy gazed up calmly at him. Mr. Shank
returned his look for one long breathless moment . . . then pulled
away from the window; and the blinds slashed down again.

Billy
smiled.

What
did you see, Mr. Shank? What do you think I am, out here in the
lonely dark?

Billy
imagined himself old and senile in 1962, lost in a dream of antiquity
and Napoleonic Europe, peering from his slum apartment into a
nighttime world inhabited by monstrosities.

Why,
Billy thought, I must look like Death.

Good
guess, Mr. Shank.

Billy
laughed quietly and turned away.

He
moved in a crude spiral away from the tunnel, avoiding Fifth Avenue
and the late-night crowds in the Village, hoping for some substantial
clue, an arrow of blue light, that would lead him to the intruder.

He
found none. He found traces of the dust here and there almost at
random—a big deposit clinging to an oil slick at Ninth and
University Place, a smaller one smudged into the yellow grass at the
foot of a bench in Washington Square Park. Billy lingered at the
bench a moment, but there was nothing coherent, only a suggestion
that his prey had passed this way. He frowned and decided to move
south, avoiding the west side of the park where a few hustlers and
homosexuals still lingered in the darkness. That part of the
park was a familiar hunting ground when his armor needed a killing—
like Times Square and Union Square at night, places where disposable
nonpersons gathered. Billy's armor wanted a killing
now;
but
there wasn't time and he suppressed the urge.

He
paused a moment, adjusted his opticals and gazed up at the sky.

Ordinarily
the city sky was featureless, but Billy's opticals showed him too
many stars to count. It was like an Ohio sky, Billy thought.

He
felt a sudden pang of longing, so intense it worried him. The armor
was pumping out complex neurochemicals to make him alert, to help him
hunt—to keep him alive. There shouldn't have been room for
nostalgia. Unless the elytra or the lancet or the strange, false
gland in the armor had begun to fail.

But
they hadn't, really; or if they had, the effect was purely transient.
Billy sat on a park bench until the pang of homesickness faded.
Then the sky was only the sky, clean and blank of meaning. He retuned
his opticals and crossed the empty space of Washington Square South
at Sullivan, hunting.

And
came up empty. And sweated through another day.

In
the early evening he went out without his armor to wander the busy
streets of the Village. He sat for a time on the terrace at the Cafe
Figaro, mistaken by its regulars for one more middle-aged tourist,
wondering whether the intruder had strolled past him in the
crowd or might even be sitting at the next table, smug with thirty
years' worth of cheap prescience. Or might after all have left the
city: that was still a real possibility. In which case Billy's prey
would be hopelessly beyond reach, no trace of him but a residue of
fading phosphorescence.

But
Billy hadn't given up yet.

He
went home, donned the armor, wandered toward mid-town in a ragged
pattern for three hours without result.

He
finished the night without killing anything—a profound
disappointment.

And
dreamed of blue light.

Three
nights later, ranging west along Eighth Street, he discovered a
smoky luminescence around the doorway and interior of a tiny
retail shop called Lindner's Radio Supply. Billy smiled to himself,
and went home, and slept.

He
woke in the heat of the afternoon.

He
put on his golden armor, activated the lancet, and dressed to conceal
himself. He didn't wear the headset; today he didn't need it.

He
felt a little strange, going outside in daylight.

He
walked to Lindner's in his overcoat, attracting a few stares but
nothing more. He paused on the sidewalk in front of the store and
pressed his face against the window.

It
wasn't a big store, but business seemed reasonably good. There was a
hi-fi set in the window bristling with vacuum tubes, a hand-lettered
card announcing the word
stereophonic
!
Beyond that, in the dimness, an old man stood patiently behind a
wooden counter. Billy felt a tinge of disappointment: was this
feeble thing his prey?

Maybe.
Maybe not. It was too soon to say.

He
crossed the street to a delicatessen, ordered a ham sandwich and
coffee, and occupied a table by the window.

Lindner's
was moderately busy. People came, people went. Any of them might be
the intruder. But Billy guessed from the smoky nimbus of the glow
last night that the man had come here often. The dust—by this time
a few motes still clinging to his shoes or cuffs—could only have
been deposited by repeated traffic. Probably he's an employee,
Billy thought. A deliveryman, say, or a sales assistant.

The
sandwich was very good. He hadn't eaten much for days. He bought a
second one, a second coffee. He ate slowly and watched the traffic in
and out of Lindner's.

He
counted fifteen individuals in and fifteen individuals out, all of
them customers, Billy guessed. Then a truck pulled up to the curb and
a sweating man in a blue shirt unloaded three cardboard boxes on a
dolly. Billy watched with heightened interest: here was a
possibility. There was no way to follow the truck, but he made a note
of the license number and the name of the distribution company.