A Bridge of Years (34 page)

The
front page had yellowed—but only a little.

"Check
out the notebook," Archer prompted.

She
leafed through it. The entries were brief scrawls and occupied the
first three pages; the rest of the book was blank.

Troubling
Questions,
it
said at the top.

You
could walk away from this,
it
said.

This
is dangerous, and you could walk away.

Everybody
else on the face of the earth is being dragged into the future an
hour at a time, but you can walk out. You found the back door.

Thirty
years ago,
she
read.
They
have the Bomb. Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They
have racism, ignorance, crime, starvation—

Are
you really so frightened of the future?

I'll
go back one more time. At least to look. To really be there. At least
once.

She
looked up at Doug Archer. "It's a sort of diary." "A
short one." "Tom Winter's?" "I'd bet on it."
"What did he do?"

"Walked
into a shitload of trouble, it looks like. But that remains to be
seen."

Only
later did the obvious next thought occur to Catherine: Maybe
we
walked
into a shitload of trouble, too.

Archer
slept on the sofa. In the morning he phoned the Belltower Realty
office and told them he was sick—"Death's door," he said
into the phone. "That's right. Yup. I know. I know. Yeah, I hope
so too. Thanks."

Catherine
said, "Won't you get into trouble?"

"Lose
some commissions, for sure."

"Is
that all right?"

"It's
all right with me. I have other business." He grinned —a
little wildly, in Catherine's opinion. "Hey, there are miracles
happening. Aren't you a little bit excited by that?"

She
allowed a guilty smile. "I guess I am."

Then
they drove down to the Safeway and bought five frozen T-bone steaks
for Ben, the time traveler.

_{□ □}

^{□ □}

Archer
visited the house every day for a week, sometimes with Catherine and
sometimes without her. He brought food, which the time traveler never
ate in his presence—maybe the machine bugs absorbed it and fed it
to him in some more direct fashion; he didn't care to know the
details.

Every
day, he exchanged some words with Ben.

It
was getting easier to think of him as "Ben," as something
human rather than monstrous. The bedclothes disguised most of his
deformities; and the white, sebaceous caul where his skull should
have been had acquired enough pigmentation, by the third day, to
pass for human skin. Archer had been scared at first by the machine
bugs all over the house, but they never approached him and never
presented any kind of threat. So Archer began to ask questions.

Simple
ones at first: "How long were you in the shed?"

"Ten
years, more or less."

"You
were injured all that time?"

"I
was dead most of that time."

"Clinically
dead?"

Ben
smiled. "At least." .

"What
happened to you?"

"I
was murdered."

"What
saved you?"

"They
did." The machine bugs.

Or
he asked about Tom Winter: "What happened to him?" "He
went somewhere he shouldn't have gone." This was ominous. "He
traveled in time?" "Yes."

"Is
he still alive?" "I don't know."

Brief
questions, brief answers. Archer let it rest at that. He was trying
to get a sense of who this person really was—how dangerous, how
trustworthy. And he sensed Ben making similar judgments about
him, perhaps in some more subtle or certain way.

Catherine
didn't seem surprised by this. She let Archer sleep in her living
room some nights; they ate dinner and breakfast together, talked
about these strange events sometimes and sometimes not. Like
Archer, she stopped by the Winter house every day or so. "We're
like church deacons," Archer said. "Visiting the sick."
And she answered, "That's what it feels like, doesn't it? How
strange."

It
was that, Archer thought. Very strange indeed. And the strangeness of
it bolstered his courage. He remembered telling Tom Winter about
this, his conviction that one day the clouds would open and rain
frogs and marigolds over Belltower. (Or something like that.) And
now, in a small way, that had happened, and it was a secret he shared
only with Catherine Simmons and perhaps Tom Winter, wherever Tom had
gone: absolute proof that the ordinary world wasn't ordinary at all .
. . that Belltower itself was a kind of mass hallucination, a
reassuring stage set erected over a wild, mutable landscape.

"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."