A Bridge of Years (39 page)

He
stared at Billy. "My God," he said finally. "What
are
you?

Billy
knew the question was involuntary and didn't require an answer. He
said, "Tell me your name." "Lawrence Millstein,"
the naked man said. "Do you work at a shop called Lindner's
Radio Supply?" "No."

This
was true. Billy heard its trueness in the quaver of the man's voice;
in the overtones of his terror. "Do you live here alone?"
"Yes."

This
was true, also.

"A
man came here from Lindner's," Billy said. "Do you know a
man who works at Lindner's?" "No," Lawrence Millstein
said.

But
this was a lie, and Billy responded to it instantly: he narrowed the
beam of his wrist weapon and used it to slice off the tip of Lawrence
Millstein's left-hand index finger at the top knuckle. Millstein
stood a moment in dumb incomprehension until the pain and the
stink of his own charred flesh registered in his brain. He looked
down at his wounded hand.

His
knees folded and he sank back to the ruined mattress. Billy said
reproachfully, "You know the man I mean."

"Yes,"
Millstein gasped.

"Tell
me about him," Billy said.

All
this reminded Billy of that time long ago, in the future, in Florida,
and of the woman who had died there.

Those
memories welled up in him while he extracted Lawrence Millstein
s confession.

Billy
remembered the shard of glass and the woman's name, Ann Heath, and
the way she had repeated it to herself,
Ann
Heath Ann Heath,
with
the blood on her face and throat and soaking the front of her shirt
like a bright red bib.

He
had come northwest from the ruins of Miami with his comrades Hallo
well and Piper, a fierce storm on their heels. Cut out of their
platoon in an ambush, they had retreated in the face of superior fire
through a maze of suburban plexes and windowless pillbox dwellings
whipped by a torrent of wild ocean air, the barometer low and
falling. The night was illuminated by arcs of lightning along the
eastern horizon, where a wall of cloud rotated around the fierce
vacuum of its core. They ran and didn't much speak. They had given up
hope of finding friendly territory—they wanted only some space
between themselves and the insurgency before they were driven to
shelter.

Billy
had grown used to the wind like a fist at his back by the time they
saw the house.

It
was a house much like all the other houses on this littered
empty street, a low bunker of the type advertised as "weatherproof"
after the first disasters in the Zone. Of course, it wasn't. But its
roof was intact and the walls seemed secure and defensible and it
must have survived a great many storms relatively intact. It was
whole; that was what drew Billy's attention.

Most
of these buildings were empty, but there was always the possibility
of squatters; so Brother Hallowell, a tall man and thick-chested
under his armor, vaulted a chain fence and circled to the back while
Billy and Brother Piper launched a concussion weapon through the
narrow watch slot next to the door. Billy grinned as the door
whooshed open and white smoke billowed out into the rain. He stepped
inside and felt his eyepiece adjust to the darkness; he pulled a
pocket extinguisher from his belt and doused the burning carpet.
Brother Piper said, "I'll do the back door for Brother
Hallowell," and started for the rear of the house while Billy
sealed the front against the gusting rain, thinking how good it would
be to be dry for a night . . . but then things turned strange very
quickly. Brother Piper began shouting something incomprehensible,
Brother Hallowell thumped at the rear door, while machine bugs came
pouring out of the walls, out of hiding places in the plasterboard,
from crates and boxes Billy had mistaken for squatters'
refuse—thousands of glistening jewel-like creatures Billy could
only dimly identity as mechanical. Brother Piper screamed as
they swarmed up his legs. Billy had heard of Brazilian weapons
imported by the insurgents, tiny poisonous robots the size of
centipedes, and he reached by instinct for the machine-killer on his
belt: a pulse bomb the size of a walnut, which he triggered and
tossed against the far wall; it exploded without much concussion
but with a burst of electromagnetic radiation strong enough to
overload anything close. Even Billy's armor, which was hardened
against such pulses, seemed to hesitate and grow heavy; his eyepiece
dimmed and read him nonsense numbers for a long second. When his
vision cleared the machine bugs were silent and motionless.
Brother Piper was shaking them off his leg in a wild dance. Then
Brother Hallowell, who was their CO, came through a doorway from
the back and said, "What the fuck? I had to dump two pulses just
to get in here and I put a third downstairs—this place has a big
cellar. Brother Billy, do you know what these little bugs are?"

Billy
was the youngest but he read a lot; Piper and Hallowell always
asked him questions like that. This time he was stumped. "Sir, I
don't," Billy said.

Brother
Hallowell shrugged and said, "Well, we walked into something
peculiar for sure. You know there's a lady in the next room?"

Billy
was reluctant to take a step forward; he didn't relish the sound of
the machine bugs crunching under his feet. "A lady?"

"That's
right," Brother Hallowell said, "but your concussion
grenade just about took her out, Brother Billy. She has a wedge of
plate glass in her head. She's not dead, and her eyes are open,
but—well, come look."

Billy
was dazed but his armor kept him functioning. Even Brother Piper was
beginning to calm down. The elytra came back up to full function and
Billy felt as if his blood had cooled by two or three degrees. Maybe
this place was a weapons dump; maybe they'd get a commendation
for discovering it. This was a pleasant idea but Billy disbelieved it
even as he thought it—the machine bugs were too strange a product
even for the Brazilian ordinance makers.

He
followed Brother Hallowell to the next room, where the woman lay
slumped in a corner between two boxes. The concussion grenade had
slivered a glass dividing wall and driven one long green-tinted wedge
into the woman's head between her right ear and her right eye. There
was blood, but not as much as Billy had expected. The sight of this
young woman with the shank of plate glass projecting from her cranium
like a ghastly party hat took Billy strangely; he reached down to
touch the glass—a gesture of awe—and as he touched it the woman
blinked and gasped . . . not in pain, Billy thought, but as if the
tremor of his touch had ignited some pleasant memory, long forgotten.
She looked up at Billy with one eye, the left. The right eye,
bloodshot, gazed indifferently at some vision not physically present.

"What's
your name?" Billy asked.

"Ann
Heath," the woman said plainly.

"Back
off now." Billy stepped away as Brother Hallowell took a medical
package out of his pack and selected a cardiovascular unit. He
tore away the woman's shirt, then clamped the wound unit between her
breasts. When he switched it on Billy heard the hemotropic tubes
crunch into Ann Heath's body, a terrible sound. "Oh," she
said calmly, as the wound unit began to regulate her breathing. Now
she wouldn't die even if her heart and lungs gave out, though she
still might become comatose. Billy understood the purpose of this
maneuver: to keep her interrogatable for a little while longer.

Brother
Hallowell gave the machine a moment to stabilize, then bent down over
Ann Heath. "Ma'am," he said, "can you tell me exactly
what this place is?"

Ann
Heath responded obediently, as if the shard of glass had severed the
part of her brain governing caution and left only obedience:

"A
time machine," she said.

Brother
Hallowell looked almost comically perplexed. "A
what?"

"A
time machine," Ann Heath said. The cardiovascular machine put a
tremor in her voice, as if she had a bad case of the hiccups.

Brother
Hallowell sighed. "She's scrambled," he said.

"She's
brain dead." He straightened and flexed his back.

"Brother
Billy, will you interrogate the prisoner? See if you can get anything
coherent out of her. Meanwhile Brother Piper and I will reconnoiter
and try to get some power going.

Wind
rocked the building. Billy sat down next to the injured woman
and pretended not to see the wedge of green glass in her head. He
waited until Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper had left the room.

Ann
Heath didn't look like a liar to him. In her condition, Billy
thought, it might not be possible to tell a lie.

He
said, "Is this building really a time machine?" "There's
a tunnel in the basement," Ann Heath said, tonelessly, except
for the hiccupping. "Where does it go?" Billy asked. "The
future," she said. "Or the past."

"Tell
me about it," Billy said.

The
storm penned them in the house for two days. Ann Heath grew steadily
less intelligible; but in that time, while Brother Hallowell and
Brother Piper were cleaning their armor, or heating rations over
the building's thermopump, or playing card games, Billy did as he was
told: he interrogated the prisoner. He explained to Piper and
Hallowell that she was incoherent but he hoped she might still say
something useful. Piper and Hallowell didn't really care what she
said. They had swept aside the dead machine bugs and seemed to have
written them off as some Storm Zone aberration, something the
research corps might be interested in—later. Neither Piper nor
Hallowell enjoyed mysteries. Nor did Billy; but Billy believed what
Ann Heath told him.

What
Ann Heath told him was a catalogue of miracles. She told it without
passion and with great clarity, as if a door had come unlocked in her
head, the answers to Billy's questions spilling out like hoarded
treasure.

Late
on the third night of their occupation, while the storm plucked at
the edges of the house and Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper
dozed in the placid heat of their armor, Billy took Ann Heath
down to the basement. Ann Heath couldn't walk by herself, the left
side of her body curling out from under her as if the joints wouldn't
lock, so Billy put an arm around her and half carried her, getting
his hands all bloody on the mess of her shirt. He was disappointed by
the basement, because it was as plain a cell as the upstairs rooms
—no miracles here that he could see. Billy had retained the edge of
his skepticism throughout this interrogation and the basement seemed
to confirm all his doubts. But then she showed him the control panel
set into the blank wall, invisible until she spoke a word in a
language Billy didn't recognize; then he held his own hand
against the panel while she spoke more words until the panel knew
Billy's touch. She taught him which words to say to operate the
machine, and Billy and his armor memorized the peculiar sounds. Then
her head dropped and she started to drool and Billy put a pillow of
wadded rags behind her so she could sleep—if this was
sleeping—while the cardiovascular unit bumped steadily against her
breastbone. Billy opened the tunnel—it appeared at once, white and
miraculous, his final assurance that these miracles were genuine—then
he closed it again. Ann Heath had told him how she was getting ready
to close this tunnel forever, and Billy wondered what it would have
been like if he and Brother Piper and Brother Hallowell had passed by
this place and found some other shelter: he would never have guessed,
never imagined, lived out his life never knowing about tunnels
between time and time. He thought about this and about Ohio and about
the Infantry and how much he hated it. He thought about his armor;
then he powered his armor up and moved upstairs to the place where
Brother Piper and Brother Hallowell were sleeping, and he put his
gloved hand down close to Brother Piper's exposed head and beamed a
smoky corridor through Brother Piper's skull, then turned and did the
same to Brother Hallowell before he was altogether awake; then he ran
back downstairs, hurrying because he was afraid this peculiar,
mutinous courage might evaporate and leave him weeping.

He
paused to bend over Ann Heath. Ann Heath was awake again and followed
him with her one bright eye. Billy said, "Are you suffering?"
and she answered in her toneless, bleak voice, "Yes." Billy
said, "Would you rather be alive or dead?" And when she
answered, "Dead," he did her the way he'd done Piper and
Hallowell, but looking away, so he wouldn't see the wedge of bloody
glass fused into the new wound he'd made.